The Will to Kill by Robert Bloch

"No, Kendall, you've been emotionalizing, not cerebrating, or you'd realize the facts.  Somebody dislikes you.  Somebody who has already managed to kill two women.  Until he is found and captured, you aren't good company for any young lady." 

We haven't read a novel since March 27, when we read Henry Kuttner's The Murder of Eleanor Pope, a 1956 murder mystery full of psychological discussion.  Well, today let's read Robert Bloch's 1954 novel The Will to Kill, a murder mystery with a generous serving of psychological goop, though only about half as generous as that in Kutter's.  Bloch's novel also has appetizing sides of sex and violence that make it more palatable than Kuttner's yarn.  However, it seems like The Will to Kill didn't set the world on fire--it does not appear to have been reprinted until it was included in the 1989 omnibus volume Screams.

Our narrator is Tom Kendall; Tom served in Korea and suffered a concussion, leaving him with an unfortunate chronic condition: he suffers periodic blackouts, and after waking up from them has no memory whatsoever of what he did during them.  Generally, it seems, he just walks around the town or rides mass transit, but one night Tom woke up from a blackout to find his wife Marie dead, her throat cut, a gory pair of scissors in his hand!  The authorities, after initially suspecting Tom, judges the death a suicide; maybe Marie killed herself because of the stress of putting up with Tom's blackout problem, and because she had recently learned she was pregnant.  Since then, Tom has always wondered if he really did murder his wife and his unborn child, either directly or indirectly.

All that Marie stuff we learn in flashbacks and exposition in the first half or so of The Will To Kill; as the narrative begins it is some time later, and Tom owns a store that sells second hand books and magazines, coin and stamp collections, and other used or antique items, like fancy knives (uh oh.)  One of the fun things about The Will to Kill, to me at least, is the references to Astounding, Galaxy, Planet Stories, and various collectible coins and stamps.  Working in the store is Tom's beautiful girlfriend Kit.  Tom and Kit are fighting because she wants to get married but Tom wants to wait until he has enough money to buy a house, and because Kit wants Tom to see more doctors about his condition and he is reluctant to do so.  She says "If you loved me as much as you say you do...."  This is a pretty realistic novel.

Early in the novel Kit leaves Tom, and then Tom's best friend Art seems to be abandoning him; both Kit and Art seem to be responding to something Tom said or did during his most recent blackout.  Then, at a bar, Tom gets mixed up in a fracas with a huge fat guy, a guy whom Tom has every reason to believe is a thief and an abuser of women--earlier fatso tried to sell Tom some stamps that Tom intuited were noy his own, and here in the bar he is treating his female companion pretty roughly.  One thing leads to another and Tom ends going back with fatso's girlfriend to her place; I guess they have sex, though this isn't explicitly stated.  Anyway, when Tom wakes up the girl has been murdered and it is not long before Tom is in jail under suspicion of having been the one who carved her up.

The middle section of the novel sees Kit and Art return to Tom's side, and the introduction of a new character; Kit introduces Tom to her former boyfriend a lawyer, and he takes up Tom's defense.  Bloch gives us reasons to suspect any and all of these people of not having Tom's best interests at heart, that some combination of them might be in cahoots in some way (e. g., Art seems to have had a crush on Marie and the lawyer's hobbies include collecting edged weapons and books on serial killers.)  Tom is released when another woman turns up dead and that fat guy becomes the cops' prime suspect, though the fuzz still have their eyes on our boy Tom.

In the final third of the novel (which is pretty short, like 100 pages of text here in Screams after you subtract all the blank space between the 18 chapters), Tom starts running around the town trying to solve the case himself.  Tom gets into fights with multiple malefactors.  Additional murders take place.  Eventually Tom figures out who the murderer is; I was surprised and a little disappointed by the identity of the killer, as it was some minor character I wasn't paying attention to, and I had been hoping it would be Kit and we'd have a downbeat ending.  In the event, we get a very happy ending; not only does Tom catch the killer and marry Kit and see his store turn a profit, but his blackouts are cured without his obeying Kit and seeing more doctors.  

As we expect of Bloch, in the final third of The Will to Kill we learn the ins and outs of the neuroses suffered by the various characters and the psychological trauma that made them act the way they have been, including Tom, who remembers the precise details of his trauma in Korea.  (While Tom's trauma is war-related, the psychological issues of the other neurotic characters revolve around sex.)  There is also a little social commentary, with Bloch/Tom describing how pathetic are the people on skid row (the "crum-bums") and reminding us that a little bad luck could find any one of us on skid row right there with them.  Sometimes Bloch overdoes the psychoanalysis and the social commentary, but this time he gets the proportions right.  

The Will to Kill is sort of pedestrian, but it doesn't commit any blunders; it moves along at a decent pace, the characters are easy to keep track of, there is enough gore and sex to keep you interested, the psychology jazz is believable and the humor doesn't wreck the mood.  The Will to Kill is low-key enjoyable, so I guess I am mildly recommending it.     

Robert Bloch: "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster," "Luck is No Lady" and "The Tempter"

We've been looking at a lot of 1958 magazines as we read stories published that year which Judith Merril thought noteworthy.  When we sought Charles E. Fritch's "Big, Wide, Wonderful World" in the March 1958 issue of F&SF, we stumbled upon a reprint in that issue of a Robert Bloch story from 1957.  Let's spend our valuable time today reading "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" and two other 1957 stories by the creator of Norman Bates--you can fold that laundry and wash those dishes tomorrow.

"How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster"

"How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" first appeared in the men's magazine Caper; I'll be reading it from the aforementioned 1958 issue of F&SF.  

This is a joke story full of lame puns (news flashes come from "The Dissociated Press") and topical jokes, including multiple derisive references to Elvis Presley, whose looks and singing voice Bloch apparently had little liking for.  As we expect with Bloch, one of the themes of the story is psychology, and one of the absurdist jokes is a therapist named Subconscious Sigmund who carries around a "portable couch" so he can offer "curb-service."

Our narrator is in a bar along with Subconscious Sigmund and a "pretty chick" named Estrellita Shapiro.  On the radio they here that a flying saucer has landed in Central Park, which is just two blocks away!  The nine-foot-tall tentacled monster that disembarks from the craft brushes aside the mayor's welcoming committee and proves immune to the fire of the police officers' guns.  Subconscious Sigmund runs out to try to provide therapy to the alien and thus calm it down, but is also ignored--he returns disheveled to the bar to say that the alien is knocking over buildings in an obvious search for something.  The creature busts into the bar.  The quick-thinking bar tender offers the monster money.  When he is ignored, he offers it booze.  Ignored again, he offers it Estrellita Shapiro.  When the monster shows no interest in her either, the barkeep realizes what a traveler on a long journey must really need, and leads the extra terrestrial to the bathroom, and peace is made between Terran and alien.

I actually laughed at the portable couch gag and some of the other jokes, so I will rate this story acceptable filler.   

"How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" also appeared in the French (1958) and Japanese (1960) editions of F&SF; you have to wonder if the joke title worked at all in Japanese, if How Green Was My Valley was famous over there and if the title they used for the Bloch story similarly mirrored the local translation of the title of the 1939 British novel about Welsh miners and its 1941 American film adaptation.  (The French just renamed the story "My Barman and His Monster.")   In 1985, "How Bug-Eyed Was My Monster" was included in a French Bloch collection and in 2005 an American one. 

"Luck is No Lady" 

This one made its initial appearance in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine and would be reprinted in 1979 in Alfred Hitchcock's Tales to Send Chills Down Your Spine.  It has also been reprinted in various Bloch collections including where I am reading it, Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of, a 1979 paperback with a pretty terrible cover (I took exception to Del Rey/Ballantine's unbelievably weak Horror logo back in 2022 when I first laid disbelieving eyes on Such Stuff as Screams Are Made Of.)  

Frankie had work as a coremaker months or years ago, but nowadays he is a drunk, a bum, who spends his time hanging out on a park bench or in a bar.  A regular they call the Professor is at the bar today, talking about how he lost his job on the faculty due to bad luck, and blabs on and on about Tyche AKA Fortuna, the goddess of luck, about how our lives are ruled by fickle Fate.

Frankie has been so drunk lately he hasn't even been thinking of women, but today a woman walks in the bar who is so hot he can't help but follow her.  This black-haired, black-eyed statuesque figure in a red dress goes to the back room where the roulette tables and crap tables are.  She doesn't talk, and the other men in the bar don't seem to notice her, but by her gestures she indicates to Frankie how he can win three thousand bucks at the roulette table.  When she leaves, the now wealthy Frankie follows her; out on the street she again she directs him without uttering a word, and he ends up foiling a robbery and securing a job at a foundry.

Frankie's good luck does not last, perhaps because he starts pursuing a blonde woman, arousing the jealousy of Fortuna, perhaps because (as has been kept from the reader) his genuine character is that of an anti-social man of violence.  The story ends back in the bar, and just before the police arrive to arrest Frankie for murdering that blonde, Frankie sees the Professor talking to somebody who isn't there--no doubt Fortuna has found a new beneficiary...or is it victim?

I am willing to judge this an acceptable filler story, but it has a problem that is nagging at me, the inconsistency in Frankie's character.  At the very start of the story we are told Frankie has always been a bum, but in the middle of the story we learn Frankie used to have a union job as a skilled laborer, and then that he is an ex-con and at the end of the story we see him assault a woman from behind and drag her by the hair into an alley.  Is this guy a loser, an ordinary guy, or a monster?  It doesn't feel like Bloch is springing cleverly crafted surprises on the reader with these changes, but doing something cheap and lazy, or, even worse, just making mistakes.  Oh, well.  We'll say "Luck is No Lady" is on the low end of acceptable.

"The Tempter" 

 

Here we have a Robert Bloch deep cut, a story never reprinted in English (as far as isfdb knows.)  "The Tempter" appeared in a copy of Satellite with a fun, bright and sharp realistic space program cover by Alex Schomburg, and resurfaced in 1976 in the Netherlands in a horror anthology.

Our protagonist is a corrupt psychoanalyst who not only makes money stringing along his patients and not really curing them but by owning apartment buildings.  This joker smokes cigars and wears a goatee so he looks as much like Freud as possible.  In the evenings he goes to a brothel.

A new patient arrives, a guy named John Smith who claims the Devil is trying to take over his body!  At night he has dreams of Hell, and is growing increasingly comfortable--at home!--in the fiery furnace.  Obviously the shrink doesn't believe in the supernatural, and thinks this guy is just nuts.  A member of the working class, John Smith doesn't have enough money to make treating him worthwhile, but the analyst decides to see him three or four times a week anyway, thinking Smith an odd enough specimen that he could write lectures around his case.

A month and a half later, John Smith is claiming he is the Devil, that he has taken over the Smith body.  When the shrink asks why, if he is the Devil, he keeps coming to therapy, Smith/Satan says it is because he is trying to tempt the shrink to such evil behavior that he will end up in Hell.  Is all of this Devil jazz true?  Can the Devil really tempt the protagonist into committing a sin that will condemn him to eternal punishment?     

This is a better than average Devil story because it takes Hell and sin seriously.  I also like the story's attack on psychoanalysis and its practitioners.  Most importantly, the story is also a smooth read, the right length and pace, never boring you with unnecessary info or repetitive scenes.  "The Tempter" is the best of today's stories.

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I am often disappointed in Bloch, but all three of today's stories work, so bravo to him.  Maybe we'll hang around with Bloch some more.

Merril-approved 1958 stories: C G Finney, C L Fontenay, D Franson, C E Fritch

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are running down an alphabetical list titled "Honorable Mentions" compiled by Judith Merril and printed in the back of her 1959 book SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  We select specimens from this list of 1958 stories, read them, and then transmit our opinions about them to the world at large.  Today we address the stories on the list by people whose names begin with the ever-popular letter "F."

"The Iowan's Curse" by Charles G. Finney

Finney is the author of The Circus of Dr. Lao, a sort of famous novel.  As a kid I saw the movie based on this novel, but found it to be a total bore, though that is far from dispositive--as a kid I thought any movie that wasn't monsters and/or violence from start to finish was a bore.  

"The Iowan's Curse" debuted in Harper's, and a year later made its way into F&SF.  In 1964 it reappeared in the Finney collection The Ghosts of Manacle; isfdb informs us that "The Iowan's Curse" is the first of three Manacle stories.

Manacle is the name of a town in southern Arizona to which people from other states retire because the climate is said to be healthy.  (Fiction written before I was born is full of people who move some place because the doctor tells them to.)  Our narrator and his wife have so retired, to a house with ten acres of desert property a few miles outside of town.  They meet a man who retired to the area from Iowa years ago.  The Iowan says there is something wrong with Manacle, that the local populace, indeed the whole place, is ungrateful and even spiteful, that when his wife and he moved in they were neighborly and did people favors, but only suffered thereby.  So, says the Iowan, he put a curse on Manacle.  And sure enough, the town soon received a devastating blow when its largest employer, a defense plant, closed and much of the population left so the roads and housing stock began to decay.

Finney then relates a series of incidents in which the narrator and his wife do favors and bad things happen to them in consequence.  Two examples: 1) they stop to pick up what appear to be distressed motorists, but it is a trap--the people pantomiming a need for help are in fact violent criminals who tie our retirees up and steal their Cadillac; 2) the narrator accidentally shifts a rock and finds a scorpion under it--he spares the little creature, but later in the day it stings him and he requires medical attention.  The couple even suffers when they do favors for people while visiting Mexico, which I am considering a plot hole, or maybe an indication that the whole thing is just a coincidence.  There is also a sort of accessory phenomena in which people who do bad things to the protagonists end up getting their comeuppance via circumstances having nothing to do with our retirees (e.g., the car thieves are tried and convicted of other crimes in California) but this doesn't extend to some people who rob them in Mexico, presenting another inconsistency that suggests the whole story is a strong of coincidences.  Finally I will note that many of the bad things that happen to people in the story seem to happen because they are drinking--maybe the point of the story is that people get what they deserve, are the authors of their own fates, but tend to blame inexplicable forces.  

Eventually there is a catastrophic flood and the retirees' house and their new Cadillac (bought with the insurance money received after the thieves burned the first Caddy) are destroyed and the couple moves away.  

I'm not a fan of these stories in which the same thing happens again and again for comedic effect, but I guess this story isn't offensively bad.  Acceptable. 

"A Summer Afternoon" by Charles L. Fontenay  

A year ago I read Charles L. Fontenay's "The Silk and the Song" and liked it a lot, so let's hope we can repeat that positive experience.  "A Summer Afternoon" first saw print in F&SF alongside the well-received Poul Anderson story "Last of the Deliverers," which we read in 2021.  It looks like "A Summer Afternoon" has not been anthologized, nor even reprinted in America, but it was included in the French version of F&SF in 1959 and a French Fontenay collection in 1999, part of what isfdb calls a series "devoted to macabre fiction," "Le Cabinet Noir."

This is a well-written horror story that ably and economically integrates very realistic family dynamics into a weird supernatural tale with strong eerie images.  It is also one of those stories which doesn't really explain what is going on; Fontenay may be drawing on standard fantastical tropes like the vampire, the werewolf, and the wizard, but not in a slavish or comprehensive way.

Peter is ten years old and lives on a farm with Mom and Dad.  Uncle Theo, Dad's brother, a huge powerful man whom Peter admires greatly, has come to stay; Theo acts in a strange fashion, going away for days at a time and then returning with little gifts for Peter, and Dad obviously wishes Theo wasn't there but doesn't really know how to get rid of him.  One day Theo returns gravely wounded, shot in the stomach, carrying a revolver which has been fired.  Dad wants to get a doctor, but Theo resists this course.  Peter is alone in the room with Theo when his uncle dies, after touching Peter, and Peter has some bizarre experiences immediately after Theo's death which had me wondering if Theo had passed some kind of esoteric power or curse onto his nephew.  Mom and Dad are temporarily frozen or paralyzed, and the usual animal cries and insect sounds of the farm are silenced.  Peter, himself still able to walk around, goes outside and spots four little beings, like withered goblins or mummified gremlins, enter the house; when they come out they are carrying what looks like a struggling white moth of unusual size--we have to assume this is Theo's soul. 

The weird creatures leave, the farm returns to normal, Mom and Dad not even having noticed the queer episode of their paralysis.  Peter is cured of his wish to emulate Theo, but we readers have to wonder if this choice has already been taken from him.

Good!  You won't catch me eating snails or frogs any time soon, but I have to admit that sometimes the French know what they are talking about.  Maybe I should hunt down the English originals of the stories in La soie et la chanson, I already having enjoyed the title story and this one today.

"The New Science of Astronomy" by Donald Franson

This is a clever story, a popular scientific paper published on Venus and written by a native.  The people of Venus just recently developed rockets that provide them a view of the universe beyond the clouds that shroud their world, and this document summarizes their many discoveries and speculations about the planets and stars which they never knew were out there as well as their old traditional ways of thinking that have been exploded by a glimpse of space.  Eventually the reader realizes that the people of Venus are plant people, and look upon animals with contempt and fear.

I can moderately recommend this story; there is little by way of plot and character, but Franson makes fun use of his gimmick.  "The New Science of Astronomy" appeared in Future Science Fiction, edited by Robert A. W. Lowndes, who also provides a lengthy analysis of science fiction stories and magazines from 1928 in his "Yesterday's World of Tomorrow" column.  Merril and I like it, but it seems that "The New Science of Astronomy" has not been reprinted in English; our friends in France included it in a 1961 issue of the magazine Satellite, however. 

Franson has over a dozen fiction credits at isfdb and five non-fiction credits for things with titles like A Key to the Terminology of Science-Fiction Fandom and A History of the Huge, Nebula and International Fantasy Awards, Listing Nominees and Winners, 1951-1970 and was apparently very active in SF fan circles.  Maybe we'll read some more fiction by him in the future.

"Big, Wide, Wonderful World" by Charles E. Fritch

This three-page story has been more successful than most of the other pieces we are reading today, seeing reprint in three or four anthologies as well as the Fritch collection Crazy Mixed-Up Planet.  "Big, Wide, Wonderful World" debuted in F&SF alongside another Merril fave we read recently, Poul Anderson's "Backwardness," and a Robert Bloch story which I will probably read someday even though it has a joke title.

"Big, Wide, Wonderful World" is kind of like Fontenay's "A Summer Afternoon," a story that doesn't give you a lot of answers, just describes a weird event and leaves you to contemplate what is going on.  I like it.

In the future or an alternate universe or whatever, people have to regularly take a drug or they will have nightmares that will drive them insane, even kill them.  Four friends, to prove their bravery to each other, decide to hold off taking their injections, and they experience terrible pain and visions of the world around them that are horrifying--the buildings are ruins, the trees are mere blackened stumps, they see each other as disfigured and scarred.

I am toying with the idea that the nightmare visions are reality and the government makes people use the drug to hide the terrible truth from the citizens, but that doesn't really make sense.

Back in 2022 we read the stories in The Fiend in You by Bradbury, Matheson,
Nolan, Beaumont, Leiber, and Bloch 

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Merril has proven a wise guide through the "F"s of 1958, directing us to entertaining and thought-provoking stories and introducing us to new authors.  Stay tuned to see if Merril's 1958 "G"s are as enjoyable.

Merril-approved 1958 stories by C Einstein, G P Elliott, & H Ellison

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading selected stories from the Honorable Mentions list Judith Merrill included in her SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  In our last episode we finished up the "D"s with Gordon R. Dickson, so today is brought to you by the letter "E."  I had hoped to read all of the "E" stories recommended by Merril here in the 1958-centric volume of her much-heralded anthology series, but I can't find a text of Koller Ernst's "The Red Singing Sands," which appeared in the February issue of Super-Science Fiction.  Too bad.

"The Short Snorter" by Charles Einstein

Einstein has one novel (apparently about New York suffering a drought) and five short stories listed at isfdb, and wikipedia is telling me he is the half brother of Super-Dave Osborne, whom I saw many times on TV in my youth.  (Before I moved to New York I watched TV like ten hours a day, and while as an adult TV annoys me, I have to admit I loved TV back then.)  "Short Snorter" debuted in If and has not been reprinted as far as I can tell.

This is a dumb joke story and I am giving it a thumbs down but at least it is educational--I had never heard of "short snorters" before, but apparently this is a well-known phenomenon involving armed service members and air crews signing dollar bills as souvenirs for each other.

A couple is staying at a hotel.  They spot a flying saucer partly hidden in the woods on the hotel grounds.  The hotel manager is well aware of the space craft, and introduces the couple to the machine's pilot, a Venusian who looks just like an Earthman.  One of the story's two main jokes is that the government and academia have been alerted to the presence of the alien but think it is just a hoax.  The other big joke is that the Venusian trades short snorters with everybody--he gives natives a bank note of Venus currency and gets US currency in exchange; in this way the alien is making money, and perhaps we readers are supposed to think that the guy is just an Earthman perpetrating a profitable fraud--after all, the Venus notes have English words and Arabic numerals on them.

The "point" of "The Short Snorter," which is voiced explicitly, seems to be that everybody is obsessed with money, and maybe this jocular attack on American greed is why Merril, a commie of some sort (the wikipedia page on The Futurians identifies Merril as a Trotskyist), likes the story.  This point is banal, the jokes are not funny, and there is nothing more to this little filler piece, so thumbs down for "The Short Snorter."  

"Among the Dangs" by George P. Elliott

Way back in 2015 I read Elliott's "Sandra" and thought it very good.  "Among the Dangs" made its debut in an issue of Esquire featuring hubba hubba photos of Iowa-born actress and Black Panthers devotee Jean Seberg and was reprinted in F&SF in 1960; it serves as the title story to a 1961 Elliott collection. 

As F&SF editor Robert P. Mills admits, "Among the Dangs" isn't really a science fiction or fantasy story.  Rather, it is a sort of adventure slash psychological mainstream story, though it certainly has some of the elements of wish fulfillment and world-building that we often find in SF, and it has a point of view about science (a skeptical one.)  Merril of course felt that genre categories were essentially bogus and boundaries between genres should be knocked over and so liked to promote as SF stories that appeared in mainstream publications.

Our narrator is an African-American academic, and this story is his memoir of how, after earning a bachelor's in history in the late 1930s he switched to anthropology and built a career in that field (in which he is not all that comfortable), earning advanced degrees and prestigious positions by embarking on dangerous research trips to the Amazon.

The most famous faculty member of the narrator's university, while living among an Amazonian tribe of headhunters who regard him as a god for teaching them some basic agricultural techniques, has learned about a neighboring stone-age tribe, the Dangs, whose religion revolves around trances, prophecies, and human sacrifice.  This prof recruits and trains the narrator for the mission of infiltrating the Dangs so he can study them from the inside.  The mission is a success; the Dangs accept the narrator, he has sex with various fifteen-year old girls of the tribe and marries one, and works his way into the Dang priesthood, in part by impressing them with his prophecies, which he delivers while in a drug induced trance.  He can't remember the substance of the prophecies he has propounded once he has woken up from the trance, but later realizes he has been relating to the Indians the life of Jesus; among the themes of Elliott's story is the power of the Gospels, which the narrator calls "the best story," even if you don't believe them, even if they are not true, and the propriety of preaching the Gospels if you don't yourself believe them.

The plot follows the narrator as he rises in Dang society, surviving, through skill and luck, various episodes that have the potential to see him killed in a fight or sacrificed to the Dang gods.  Eventually he leaves the Dangs, and back in the United States our hero reflects that he only narrowly escaped actually becoming permanently embedded among the Dangs, dead or alive.  "Thinking about it afterward, I did not understand or want to understand what I was drifting toward, but I knew that it was something that I feared.  And I got out of there as soon as I was physically able."  One of the themes of "Among the Dangs" is identity and belonging, the extent to which we choose the community in which we make our lives, and to what extent circumstances drive us into communities.  

Advertised on F&SF's cover as a novelet, "Among the Dangs" is pretty long and it does feel long, the style being flat and long-winded, the pace slow, and the plot a little repetitive.  The story also felt unpleasantly claustrophobic; the narrator is always trapped in some place, physically or psychologically

One reason "Among the Dangs" feels repetitive is that the narrator makes three separate trips to the Dang village, returning to America for years at a time to continue his academic career.  The course of the narrator's lives in the United States and in the Amazon parallel each other; in both places he marries, and in both places he moves up the ranks of his profession, one might see the ceremonies at which he prophesies among the Dang and wins renown as being like oral exams or depositing major papers.  Elliott's story offers a pretty dim view of academia (a professor publishes the narrator's work under his own name, for example) and science in general, and anthropology in particular.  The narrator faces mortal danger in the Amazon but outside it as well, serving in World War II and losing a hand; the mechanical claw he wears in place of his lost hand makes a big impression on the Dangs.  

There are plenty of subtle deadpan jokes in "Among the Dangs," and while they don't make you laugh out loud, they are not bad.  Some of these jokes people might find offensive; on the first page the narrator explains why he took a class in anthropology: "In idle curiosity I had taken a course in anthro, to see what I would have been like had history not catapulted my people a couple of centuries ago up into civilization...."  

I think we might ask why Elliott decided to make his protagonist black.  The (comedic) in-story reason is that the professor who recruits him for the task of joining the Dang tribe figures the Dangs will be more welcoming of a dark-skinned person, even though the narrator can hardly pass as a Dang, his hair, skin color and facial features being quite distinct from that of the Amazonians.  One literary reason, I suspect, is to emphasize the narrator's position as an alien--he's an historian who becomes an anthropologist who doesn't really believe in the science of anthropology; he's an academic who becomes a high priest of the Dang by preaching the Christian gospel, even though he doesn't believe in either religion; when in the Amazon he's a modern American among stone-age Indians, and, to cap it all off, in the U.S. he's a black person in the white institution of the university.

"Among the Dangs" is a serious piece of work worthy of respect with a good plot, but I'm not loving it, for the various stylistic reasons I have mentioned; here we have a borderline case between acceptable and mildly recommendable.  Definitely worth your time, however, if you are interested in late Fifties fictional portrayals of academia--anthropology in particular--or depictions of non-whites by white authors; the wikipedia page on Elliott suggests that the inadequacies of academia and the condition of black Americans were topics he wrote about repeatedly.           

"The Last Day" AKA "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" by Harlan Ellison

It's our old pal Harlan!  Merril actually includes two stories by Ellison on her 1958 Honorable Mentions list; "My Brother Paulie" we read way back in 2018, but "The Last Day," later published as "The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is new to us.  The story first appeared in Rogue, and under its new name it was included in six or seven different Ellison collections.  I can't find the Rogue text that impressed Merril, and I could read the story in my paperback copy (signed by the author!) of Alone Against Tomorrow, but I am going to read the version in the 1984 version of Ellison Wonderland because a note in the beginning of that book (the cover of which includes a blurb saying Ellison is "like an angry Woody Allen") suggests it contains a revised text.

"The Very Last Day of a Good Woman" is an acceptable melodramatic filler story suitable for the men's magazine in which it debuted.  A man lived with his mother until he was like 38, and after her death lived alone in the same house for six more years; during that period he inexplicably developed a clairvoyant ability--he can see glimpses of the future.  Mostly he sees quotidian things, but when he is 44 he gets unmistakable visions that indicate that the world is going to end soon in a blaze of fire!  

The psyker has never had sex, and becomes consumed with the need to have sex with a woman before he dies along with all of life on Earth.  Having spent all his time with his mother, and then living alone, he has no idea how to meet and charm women, so his efforts to date end in humiliation.  He finds himself unable to commit rape.  Finally, on the last day of the human race, he meets a prostitute in a bar, overcomes his fears, manages to get her back to the house.  When the flash comes and they are both reduced to ash, the psyker is happy, having had sex, and the hooker is happy, holding in her hands his life savings, $4,000.  

As with Einstein's story, I am going to assume Merril was attracted to "The Last Day" for its "love of money" aspect.  She might also have been impressed by the way sex is the central theme of Ellison's story; Merril was a leading architect and cheerleader of the New Wave, and one of the standard claims of the New Wavers was that SF didn't discuss sex, or didn't do so in the direct or mature manner of mainstream literature.

"...like an angry Woody Allen."

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So there we have the 1958 "E"s.  On to the "F"s!

Merril-approved 1958 stories by Gordon R. Dickson

In our last episode I condemned a story Judith Merril claimed was one of the greatest of 1962.  Today we shift back in time four years to look at three stories from 1958 which Merril thought worthy of her recommendation, all three of them by Gordon R. Dickson, a writer to whom I have paid limited attention.  In 2014, I read Dickson's contribution to Five Fates and said I liked his themes of individualism and exploration but found his story ruinously slow and poorly written.  Last year I read "Flat Tiger" and called it a "dopey waste of time."  In those long past days before R.M.S. MPorcius Fiction Log set sail for its inevitable rendezvous with an iceberg, I read a few things by Dickson and I recall finding them mediocre.  Dickson and I haven't clicked, but maybe my distaste for his work is an artifact of small sample size, maybe among today's three stories there will be one or more pieces that will show Dickson at his best or see him doing things which coincide with my own tastes.  Cross your fingers!

"The Christmas Present"

I hate Christmas.  I hate all the holidays!  Wracking my brain trying to find the right present, then the agony upon giving somebody the wrong present ("Why would you think I wanted this?  It's like you don't even know me!")  Pretending to like the presents I receive that will just take up room and collect dust.  Taking down the pictures and vases I actually like to replace them with geegaws in the shape of pumpkins, turkeys, Santa Claus, pine trees, snowmen, hearts--whatever the calendar decrees--and then spending hours lugging all that stuff up and down the treacherous basement stairs (after the hours spent trying to find the stuff packed away down there 10 months ago.) 

Well, that's neither here nor there; we are not here to listen to me vent, but to talk about Gordon R. Dickson's "The Christmas Present," a story that debuted in the same issue of F&SF as Brian Aldiss' "The New Father Christmas" (we read it in 2018), Richard Matheson's "Lemmings" (we read it last month) and Theodore Sturgeon's "A Touch of Strange," which we will read when we get to Merril's 1958 "S"s.  People seem to like "The Christmas Present;" it has been reprinted in at least four different anthologies and two different Dickson collections.

This is a very sappy sentimental story, like a children's Christmas TV special.  A small boy and his parents have emigrated to a new planet and live on their farm by a swampy river.  The boy has made friends with a native, a sort of intelligent jellyfish the size of a housecat that lives in the water near the farmhouse.  This is the colonists' first Christmas on the new planet, and the little boy is sad when he sees that their Christmas tree is decorated with odds and ends and not with nice ornaments like the tree he saw last year on the colony ship.  But Mom explains that Christmas is about love and so the tree is beautiful anyway because it represents their love.

The little boy and his mother explain Christmas to the jellyfish, and the little boy gives the jellyfish a gift, one of the toy spacemen his parents made him from clay and paint, the astrogator.  The jellyfish wants to give a gift in return.  The father of the little human family is away, travelling via boat, and due to return tomorrow.  Mom is worried that a river monster will attack her husband.  The jellyfish swims away to kill the river monster it knows is lurking along Dad's route--this is his gift.  The jellyfish can generate electricity and so is able to kill the monster, which is like the size of a hippo or elephant or something, but is himself killed in the fight.  Dickson doesn't come out and say it, but the jellyfish has sacrificed himself for others, like Jesus Christ did.  The final paragraph of the story seems to be describing the jellyfish ascending into heaven, guided by the toy astrogator it clutches in its dead tentacles--the human colonists have saved the jellyfish's soul by bringing to him the good news about Jesus.

It is remarkable to see such an audaciously Christian story in a science fiction magazine--while it is true that some of the most innovative, talented and critically acclaimed SF writers, like Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty, are committed Christians, most SF writers (and editors!) are either commies or libertarians who think religion is a scam that shackles people and think that missionaries are not saving the natives by teaching them about Christianity but corrupting them.  "The Christmas Present" is too sappy for me, but it is well-structured and well-paced and all that, it achieves its goals, and I can't help but admire its commitment, so we'll call it acceptable.

"The Question"

This story is reasonably well-written and entertaining, and I guess it has some point to make about individualism, diversity  and human resiliency, but the point is a little opaque, perhaps intentionally so.

Humans and humanoid aliens are engaged in a ground war over some planet, a war in which infantry men fire rifles and machine guns and throw grenades at each other perhaps reminiscent of  the war underway during Dickson's own US Army service in the 1940s.  It looks like the humans are doomed to be defeated and lose the planet.  

As "The Question" begins, we are in an office with some high ranking aliens.  The subordinate alien plays a film for his superior--the film was taken by secret cameras in a bunker or pillbox in which four human soldiers, retreating from a larger enemy force, took shelter.  Most of Dickson's story describes the last stand of these humans in the redoubt, shooting out the loopholes at the attacking aliens, husbanding their resources, arguing amongst themselves, treating wounds, and their final defeat and deaths.  In the end of the story it is explicitly stated that the aliens lack individuality ("Each, unlike our own race" says one of the aliens, "has his own personal philosophy") and Dickson, in the dialogue of the four humans, highlights how each man has his own personality, opinions and ways of looking at the world that are radically different from those of his fellows.  One guy is a Christian and prays, while another, an atheist, curses him out for praying.  One guy has a racist hatred of the aliens, calling them "animals" and objecting when another soldier offhandedly refers to them as "men," while a more open-minded soldier feels guilty over shooting down aliens and wishes he could learn more about them and their culture.  At the end of the story we learn that the aliens took the film to try to figure out why humans fight so hard, despite the overwhelming odds facing them, as the aliens are contemplating trying to take over other parts of the galaxy under human control, but that the film has not given them a clear answer.

The account of the fighting is pretty entertaining, and Dickson's dialogue here is fine, so the story is a smooth read.  But what is the point of "The Question"'--does Dickson suggest an answer to the aliens' questions of why humans fight so hard even when there is little hope?  Maybe the point of the story is that human behavior is inexplicable, but maybe Dickson is suggesting that human beings are both individualistic and communal, that men will risk their lives and make sacrifices for other men despite religious or political differences.  We might also see a Christian bias to the story, and perhaps some jibes at conventional liberal sensibilities--the Christian soldier is self-sacrificing, while the atheist soldier is the racist one and is the least effective as a fighting man and the least psychologically stable.  

I can give "The Question" a mild recommendation.  It hasn't been anthologized, but is included in two Dickson collections.

"Gifts"

This is a philosophical story about the justness of charity that you could extrapolate to related topics like the welfare state and socialism.  When you give handouts to people, are you really helping them, or are you robbing them of the experience of achievement, perhaps robbing their lives of meaning?  "Gifts" comes down on the side of those skeptical of or hostile to handouts.

A suburban father in mid-century America works at a pharmacy; he has a pretty wife as well as a son and a pet cocker spaniel.  He hopes to one day buy the pharmacy from the boss.  Aliens that more or less look like humans pay him a visit.  These aliens say their civilization is much like ours, but further along in its development.  They have solved many of the problems to be found on 20th-century Earth, disease and famine and so on, and they can solve ours for us if we ask them to.  The junior pharmacist has been chosen at random from among the responsible people of Earth to choose whether Earth will accept or reject this alien charity.  The aliens perform astonishing feats to prove they can do what they say--these feats take the form of making wishes of the pharmacist and his wife come true.

The pharmacist is given time to decide whether or not to accept the charity.  He talks to his wife.  He sits in his home office and thinks about the changes that will occur if the Earth suddenly receives all kinds of super technology.  He takes a walk and looks at the sky and at flowers.  He has dreams and nightmares.  Finally he decides to reject the alien gift and tells the aliens that he feels that "we ought to get it for ourselves."  

"Gifts" is competent, but not thrilling or moving or anything, partly because you assume all along that the protagonist is going to reject the charity; it feels like a filler story.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Gifts" would go on to be reprinted in the Dickson collection In Iron Years and the volume of Isaac Asimov's Magical Worlds of Fantasy on wishes.

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These stories aren't bad--they are better than the Dickson stuff I've read in the past--but I'm not in love with them, either.  I won't avoid Dickson in the future, but I don't think I'll be seeking him out particularly, either.

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We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are reading selected stories from the list headed "Honorable Mentions" at the back of Judith Merril's 1959 SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  The list is organized alphabetically by author name and, having today finished up the "D"s, next time we do this we'll look at some "E"s.

Harry Harrison: "The Ghoul Squad," "Toy Shop" and "You Men of Violence"

German editions of Prime Number

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading a British paperback edition of Prime Number, a collection of stories by Harry Harrison first printed in the period 1962-70.  Sometimes I like Harrison's stories, but ofttimes I don't, so this is like gambling.  Gambling is fun, right?

"The Ghoul Squad" (1969)

It looks like this story first appeared in print in Four for the Future, an anthology edited by Harrison himself that has a cover that reminds me of what I heard about that movie I never saw called The Human Centipede.  Four for the Future is a theme anthology that presents stories by four authors, Harrison, Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson and James Blish, on two themes, "sacrifice" and "redemption."  (Maybe I'll read this anthology in the future; it seems kind of interesting.)  Later that same year "The Ghoul Squad" appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s  Analog, and a note in Four for the Future recognizing that Conde Nast owned the copyright to "The Ghoul Squad" suggests the story was sold to Analog back in '68.

The first part of "The Ghoul Squad" takes place in the late 1970s.  A police patrolman is at the scene of an automobile accident.  We learn that the federal government has passed a law and created an agency so that trained medical professionals arrive quickly at every accident to seize dead bodies so their still usable parts can be collected and put in storage for use in transplants.  Some people object to this practice; they call the new federal agency "The Ghoul Squad" and wear medallions that indicate they do not want their bodies turned into spare parts, and the federal agents are bound by law to not harvest from these people.  The patrolman is one of those objectors.

The second part of the story takes place in 1999; that patrolman is now sheriff of his county, and he is locally famous for how much he hates the feds who harvest human parts from accidents.  A huge cruise liner hovercraft that regularly carries tourists over the land of the American South and the sea in the Caribbean suffers a catastrophic malfunction while crossing the main character's county; there are many casualties and some fatalities.  The sheriff rushes out to help organize the emergency response effort.  He tries to obstruct the Ghoul Squad detachment sent to the site of the disaster, and gets into an argument with some state troopers--the law, after all, is on the side of the Ghouls.  The sheriff has a heart attack, because he has refused to get a replacement for the weak heart he was born with.  As he dies, we learn why he is so averse to transplants, and then we get the twist--the sheriff, in his hurry to get to the site of the hover liner disaster, forgot to put on his medallion, so his organs will be harvested by the feds.

This story is merely competent, lacking in drama and human feeling.  Harrison tries to be fair to everybody, not going out of his way to paint the sheriff as a ridiculous religious fanatic nor the Feds as cold-hearted and heavy-handed utilitarians, but perhaps this evenhandedness is one reason the story feels a little flat.

"Toy Shop" (1962)

Here we have another Analog story, one that was selected by Judith Merril for inclusion in her famous Year's Best anthology series.  

This is one of those SF stories that justifies and even glamorizes a small minority of brainiacs tricking and manipulating the populace; there are a lot of SF stories like this, the Foundation stories and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being among them, and they always rub me the wrong way--I don't doubt that Harry Harrison, John W. Campbell, Jr., Judith Merril, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein are smarter than the average person, but seeing them indulge their fantasies of humiliating ordinary people and/or leading them by the nose for their own good I find embarrassing and even repellant.  A little humility and generosity on the part of those with special skills or resources is to be preferred to showboating, arrogance, and a flaunting of superiority, especially when that arrogance is expressed in self-serving wish-fulfillment fantasies.

"Toy Shop" is particularly irritating as it is a waste of time with its convoluted and totally unconvincing plot.

Most of Harrison's story consists of a long and detailed description of guys demonstrating the use of a toy rocket ship.  This is a fraud, presented as a magic trick--during his act the salesperson says the toy is able to fly due to the exploitation of magnetic waves, but he later reveals that the ship is suspended from a string attached to the ceiling and moves because he holds the other end of the string.  

The twist is that while it is a string that lifts the toy rocket, the toy actually does contain a device that has anti-grav properties and reduces the weight of the toy rocket.  If the battery-operated anti-grav device is not switched on the rocket is too heavy for the string to lift and the string will break.  The makers of the toy rocket, the inventors of the anti-grav device, were unable to get people interested in their invention because everybody is so close-minded and rigid in their thinking; their current plan is to sell the toys to adult hobbyists in hopes one of these nerds will stumble on the anti-grav properties of the toy and then improve the device and eventually mass-produce anti-grav equipment; the inventors will reap a financial benefit because they have patents on the device.

The plot is not credible, and I don't enjoy the elitist theme of how the masses and the establishment are dopes so the true cognitive elite have to trick them if society is to progress, so thumbs down to "Toy Shop."   

"You Men of Violence" (1967)

This is a decent adventure story that is also a pacifist/vegetarian wish fulfillment story in which violence doesn't accomplish goals but instead backfires on the violent so that some day the meek will inherit the galaxy.  

A huge powerful man, Raver, is an expert in electronics.  He has been arrested for his activism on the part of the Pacifist Party on his planet and has been sent to work in the slave mines on a wilderness planet where many different entities have mines; one of the mines is the property of people from a planet where the Pacifist Party is in power.  Raver tricks the captain of the slave ship into beating him up, creating a distraction so he can steal the electronic components he needs to escape his cell and make his way across the barren airless landscape to the Pacifist Party mine--he'll be safe if he can get there because the Pacifists' planet is a more powerful planet than the slave planet and the slavers can't risk attacking them.  In the course of his escape the Pacifist hulk/genius repeatedly outwits and outfights his pursuers while being careful to never actually physically harm them--he's a pacifist, after all.  In a final showdown with the smartest and most resourceful of his pursuers, Raver tries to convince his pursuer to join the Pacifist Party; multiple times he warns this officer that "he who lives by the sword dies by it," that the killer kills himself.  The officer remains loyal to the slave power and by pulling the trigger of his rifle manifests the pacifist's metaphor--the pacifist has sabotaged the rifle and it kills the officer, not Raver.

"You Men of Violence" is vulnerable to many criticisms.  The plot elements are pretty contrived, with every little factor set up by the author so things will work out in a way that supports the pacifist line he is selling; but of course adventure stories are often contrived and unbelievable, with everything falling the hero's way in a way that challenges the reader's ability to suspend disbelief.  I often complain about stories that denounce human violence and I often complain about utopian stories (Theodore Sturgeon comes to mind here with stories like "The Skills of Xandadu.")  But Harrison's attack on humanity in "You Men of Violence" is more convincing and more palatable than most; he doesn't come up with an unbelievable race of alien goody-two-shoes or robots to serve as a foil for humanity and suggest that we'd be better off if we were conquered or replaced by these flawless cardboard characters--Harrison here is more hopeful and less misanthropic, suggesting that humanity can evolve genetically or culturally to overcome its addiction to violence.  And Harrison's utopia is more believable and less simple-minded than most and seems to be produced via hard work and not something cheap like the magic belt Sturgeon introduces in "The Skills of Xanadu."

Most importantly, "You Men of Violence" is actually a good adventure story, well-written and well-paced, a story that doesn't just propagandize or hector you, but entertains with suspense and excitement.  So I can give a moderate recommendation to "You Men of Violence."       

"You Men of Violence" debuted in the same issue of Galaxy as Kris Neville's "Ballenger's People," which we read back in 2015.  The story would be reprinted in 50 in 50.

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As with our last look at Prime Number, we've got one good story out of three, though "The Ghoul Squad" isn't exactly bad.  We'll be reading more 1960s stories by Harrison as we continue our exploration of this collection in the near future, but first a foray into the 1950s.

Harry Harrison: "The Greatest Car in the World," "The Final Battle" and "The Powers of Observation"

Today we are surfing on over to the internet archive to read three stories from the 1983 printing of the 1970 Harry Harrison collection Prime Number, which has a great Peter Elson cover that looks like it belongs on Starship Troopers.  Some of these stories might be broad satires or lame jokes--the titles sound pretty sarcastic, after all--but Harrison is actually good at writing adventure stories, so maybe we'll get some thrills and chills as well as tired and boring attacks on religion or consumerism or American jingoism or environmental degradation or overpopulation or whatever.  (I'm actually not immune to Harrison's humor, as evidenced by my laughing at "The Fairly Civil Service" just a few days ago, so maybe these stories will wangle some laughs out of me whether I want them to or not.)   

"Mute Milton" (1966)

We read the first story in Prime Number back in 2018, a story about a black genius who could save the world but was murdered by a racist cop and member of the KKK.  I called it "heavy-handed" and likened it to a "homily for a child."      

"The Greatest Car in the World" (1966)

This is, I guess, a spoof on melodramas and the romanticization of the automobile and also an attack on modern mass-production techniques and American culture.

An American automobile enthusiast comes to the castle in which lives an aged Italian master craftsman and car designer, Bellini.  The old guy is in a wheelchair and his sexy granddaughter and his butler try to keep the Yankee away because the doctors have told grandpa that he must have no excitement.  Our guy gets through to gramps anyway, and the two hit it off over a shared love of automobiles.  The American tells the absurd story of how Bellini inspired his own love of cars.  The Yankee's father loved cars and came to Europe to see a car race in which one of Bellini's cars was in an accident caused by the driver of a competing vehicle--a flying radiator cap from the Bellini hit Dad in the noggin and Dad brought it home to America and displayed it prominently in the house, where it fired our hero's imagination.  

Bellini shows his visitor a car he has hand built, a one-of-a-kind prototype full of amazing innovations from the brakes to the motor to the battery to the beautiful shape of the body.  It is the most lovely, most efficient, most agile, most everything car in the world!  Bellini's last act is to give the car to our hero so he can reproduce it and share Bellini's genius with the world.

The central joke of the story, beyond the silly mock-melodrama plot, which is buttressed by ridiculous metaphors ("holding his note disdainfully by the edge, as though it were a soiled Kleenex") and goofy exaggerations ("Zero to one hundred miles an hour took four seconds because he was not yet used to the divine machine and was hesitant with the gas") is the twist ending, which isn't foreshadowed and sort of comes out of nowhere.  Our American protagonist, who says he worships Bellini and in whom Bellini on his death bed has put his trust, is going to betray Bellini--American capitalism is too greedy and American taste is too vulgar for Americans to appreciate or manufacture this super duper car--the car the protagonist will produce in Bellini's name will be a shoddy and cheap imitation no different than the mass-produced lowest-common-denominator junk already coming off the line in Detroit.  

Thumbs down.  "The Greatest Car in the World" debuted in the same issue of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds that featured Charles Platt's The Garbage World (we read the book version back in 2019) and a cover girl fashioned by Keith Roberts upon whom I have had an enduring crush.  Besides in Prime Number, "The Greatest Car in the World" has been reprinted in the 1979 anthology Car Sinister and the 2001 Harrison collection 50 in 50.

"The Final Battle" (1970)  

This is an eye-rollingly lame short-short, two pages.  The narrator says he lives in the era after a cataclysmic war, and that as a kid his father would often tell the story of that terrible war.  The text leads you to believe that this is a futuristic tale about life after some history-defining war between the liberal West and the socialist East, but then comes the punchline which I guess the author hopes is profound: Dad says that the last war was ended by the use of a terrible capital-"U" Ultimate capital-"W" Weapon that has made war too horrible to contemplate, so that mankind must now live in peace--that weapon is the bow!  The narrator and his father are cave men!  Presumably Harrison is telling us that mankind has always been monstrously violent and will never get better so we should expect to be nuked any day now!  O, will man never learn the folly of war?!?!1!11  

This pretentious waste of time debuted here in Prime Number, and Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg liked it enough to include it in their Microcosmic Tales collection of short-shorts, and a 1989 calendar that offered readers a short-short for each month. 

"The Powers of Observation" (1968)

It seems like my fears that Prime Number is chock a block with dreadful joke stories are being realized...but wait, perhaps here we have a glimmer of hope.  "The Powers of Observation" first appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Analog, in the same issue as the first installment of the James H. Schmitz serial "The Tuvela" (we read the book version of "The Tuvela," Demon Breed, back in 2020.)  Can we count on towering figure Campbell, who has a reputation as a guy who thought science fiction should portray man as a problem-solving animal capable of ferreting out the universe's secrets and thereby dominating that universe and as a right-winger who would say any provocative thing to shake people up, to ensure that Harrison isn't foisting another groaner on us?  Campbell didn't just think of "The Powers of Observation" as filler--he included it in Analog 8.  (It also showed up in a "Best of" Analog volume fourteen years after Campbell's death.)

The narrator of "The Powers of Observation" is an American spy in Yugoslavia who demonstrates the virtues we expect to find in a character in Astounding/Analog--he overcomes obstacles through his vast knowledge, through careful attention to detail, and through quick thinking, like the platonic ideal of the scientist or engineer.  The narrator's knowledge and skill are so exemplary, even over the top, that I have to suspect Harrison is sort of poking fun at tales of supercompetent heroes, but it is gentle fun and the story still has some of the thrills of a good action-espionage tale, and the twist ending makes the super spy's super abilities and super memory more believable.

The story includes good action scenes, including a compelling car chase which includes lots of local color (did Harrison drive in Yugoslavia himself or lift these details from a book?), and other stuff you expect in a spy story, like, you know, bribing foreigners and getting betrayed by foreigners.  Then we have the twist ending.  From the beginning we readers have suspected the Soviet agent the narrator is pursuing is a robot.  But in the final scenes we learn the triumphant American narrator is also a robot!  Harrison draws similarities between the space race and the robot race between the West and East, and gives a pithy summary and assessment of the differences between Soviet and American design strategies.

This is a fun story, displaying Harrison's ability to produce an adventure story with humor elements that don't render the story silly and undermine the action-suspense elements.  Thumbs up!

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"The Powers of Observation" saved this blog post from being a litany of distaste and derision, and has convinced me to keep reading Prime Number.  Stay tuned for more 1960s Harry Harrison short stories.