Super-Science Fiction, Feb 1958: Koller Ernst, Robert Silverberg, & Robert F. Young

Back when we read 1958 stories by "E" authors recommended by Judith Merril, I was curious about Koller Ernt's "The Red Singing Sands" but I couldn't find a text anywhere.  One of my valuable commenters who owns the issue of Super-Science Fiction that printed the story read "The Red Singing Sands" and described it in the comments, and it sounded pretty interesting!  So I overcame my inveterate stinginess and ordered a copy for 15 bucks on e-bay.  I wouldn't have done so if I had known what would arrive in my mailbox the very same day as my copy of the February 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction--a ticket from the government (such as it is) of Washington, D.C. for $200 for driving 40 in a 25 on K street.  Oy.  

Well, that's all water under the bridge; mourning my lost 200 bucks won't bring them back, but maybe reading about people being crucified, being murdered by Martians, and being forced to stay awake the rest of their lives will help us forget our loss and maybe even look on the bright side.  Yes, these wonders and more await us in four stories from the Feb '58 ish of Super-Science Fiction,  a magazine edited by W. W. Scott that endured from 1956 to 1959 and which wikipedia helpfully tells us "is not highly regarded by critics," reminding us again that life is a series of tragedies and that expecting other people to appreciate anything you do is a mistake.

"The Red, Singing Sands" by Koller Ernst

Ernst has only three credits at isfdb, but at least we can say that fully a third of Ernst's output was recommended by tastemaker Judith Merril.  "The Red, Singing Sands" is an OK little story, but we have to ask why Merril included it in her list of honorable mentions at the back of SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume, because it is not really any big deal.  One possibility is that the story's main character, the hero who saves the day, is a woman. 

Another possibility is that Merril was impressed by the central role of sex in the story; one of the standard gripes of the New Wavers, of whom Merril was a leading advocate, is that SF didn't talk enough about sex or didn't take sex seriously.  "The Red, Singing Sands" is a sort of lascivious story.  Ernst refers to the female protagonist's breasts repeatedly--the wind presses against her breasts, sweat trickles between her breasts, that sort of thing--and the threat of rape hangs over her head throughout the tale.  The female lead's husband hasn't had sex with her in weeks, and so she suspects he is cheating on her with Martian women, and the fact of his celibacy is also a foreshadowing of the fact that he is an imposter, not her husband at all.

Merril might also have liked the somewhat subversive nature of parts of "The Red, Singing Sands," the way it parodies SF and questions patriotism and the space program.  If we can go back to our main interest in life--sex--one element of the twist ending of "The Red, Singing Sands" points out the absurdity of one of the outlandish ways sex is often portrayed in SF, the way people from Earth are always having sexual relationships and children with alien species.  All through the story we are encouraged to imagine Martians having sex with either the male or female lead, with or without the humans' consent, but in the last column of the story these ideas are revealed to be ridiculous--the Martians in the story do not even have sexual intercourse; like some Earth fish, the female Martian lays eggs and then the male Martian fertilizes them.  More broadly subversive of our entire society, we have the female lead's dialogue early in the story in which she expresses skepticism of patriotism and the wisdom of the very idea of exploring space, the kind of thing that might appeal to a leftist like Merril.    

The plot:  It is the late 1990s and mankind's first space ship has landed on Mars.  Back on Earth a married couple, Will and Mary, and two additional men boarded the vessel, but as the story begins the two unattached men are dead, apparently killed by a monster, and the married couple have been living living in a sort of plastic igloo separate from the ship for weeks; not only is the ship malfunctioning, but Will has (he says) captured the murderous Martian monster and sealed it inside the ship.  Every day Will puts on his space suit and goes to the ship to try to repair it, while Mary stays in the igloo.  Going outside is too dangerous for her, because the monster is hypnotic and perhaps telepathic, and the windblown sands of the ice-cold Martian desert are calling Mary's name, beckoning her.  Will tells Mary the monster is the last of its kind and it hopes to use Mary to propagate its species, and that it is a shape-shifter that has taken on the guise of Will himself.

Mary has some pretty radical thoughts which we readers suspect may be the result of Martian hypnotism, but may just be the product of the stress she is under operating on her feminine mind.  Right there on the second page of the story she blurts out that it was stupid to come to Mars, that she was a fool to believe all that patriotic guff when the government was just using her and her husband as guinea pigs.  More bizarrely, she fears Will is not going to the ship to repair it and that he is lying about the monster and that the call of the sands is just some kind of trick--maybe Will and the other two men are having the time of their lives having sex parties with Martian girls.  After all, Will hasn't had sex with her in weeks.  Eventually Mary dons her own spacesuit and sneaks out to the ship while Will is away.  The crisis of the story is when Mary has to decide which of the two Wills she encounters at the ship--the emaciated Will locked in the brig or the healthy-looking but uncharacteristically celibate Will in the space suit--is her husband and which is the monster.

Ernst offers enough clues so that the answer to the riddle doesn't feel cheap--the Martian masquerading as Will mixes up the names of the two dead men, for example--but there are some other plot elements I didn't quite get and suspect may represent superfluities or errors on the part of Ernst.  What is up with the sands that are calling Mary out of the igloo?  I guess the telepathic monster is generating these calls, but doesn't he want her to stay in the igloo?  It is hinted that the monster is using reverse psychology, that the Martian has the voices beckon Mary because they will scare her into not coming out of the igloo, but this seems overly clever and more a device of the author to trick the reader than a device of the villain to trick the heroine.  I'm also not sure why the Martian killed the other men but kept Will alive for weeks; I guess to learn from him?  If so, the scheme was an absolute failure, as reading Mary and Will's minds for weeks didn't help the Martian learn how to operate the ship nor did it provide him the knowledge that there was no way Mary could help him create a new generation of Martians.             

I'm grading "The Red, Singing Sands" acceptable.  21st-century feminists, I'm afraid, are not going to be thrilled with this story even though it centers a woman who figures out the puzzle and saves the day, because the force driving her to resolve the plot is need of her husband--the primary personality traits Ernst gives Mary are jealousy over and sexual desire for Will.  (I'm not even sure what Mary is supposed to be doing on Mars--if Ernst tells us she is some kind of scientist or engineer, I missed it.)  Will and Mary also seem to be Christians, which I doubt would endear the story to the kind of people who proctor those Birkendorf tests. 

isfdb does not list any reprintings of "The Red, Singing Sands," but, when I googled around to see if maybe "Koller Ernst" was somebody's pen name, I came upon a Fiction House Press webpage advertising a somewhat amateurish-looking anthology of stories about Mars that includes "The Red, Singing Sands" that is named after an Edmond Hamilton story I haven't read yet, "Lost Treasure of Mars."

"Prison Planet" by Robert Silverberg

Here's a story by the famous Grandmaster that appears to never have been reprinted.  "Prison Planet" is a decent little story; it actually reminds me of something you might find in Astounding, an adventure piece that dramatizes technological advance and romanticizes the engineer who solves the plot through quick thinking and trickery, and a story that speculates on genetics and political science.

By the year 2300, the human race had colonized the galaxy, having discovered many habitable planets.  One such planet was set aside as a penal colony, and for a century the galaxy-wide civilization dumped its worst criminals, a total of 158 million malefactors, onto Bardin's Fall.  By 2412 new technological developments had almost eliminated crime throughout human space, so the policy of exiling criminals there was ended and Bardin's Fall was cut off from civilization for over 400 years.  

By pure chance, in 2841, a clue fell into the laps of the authorities that suggested the people of Bardin's Fall were on the cusp of independently developing space flight.  Four centuries of peace has made the human race soft, and it is feared that the race of violent thugs that must inhabit Bardin's Fall could with ease conquer the galaxy if they were able to escape the gravity well of their world.  Decadent human civilization needs time to develop a defense infrastructure!  So, one of the few rough and tough men among the Galactics, space officer Hale Ridgely, is tasked with sneaking onto Bardin's Fall and sabotaging the space program there.

On the planet, Ridgely finds an approximately 20th-century level of technology--they have skyscrapers and internal combustion engine automobiles--and a sort of medieval political organization, with competing city-states ruled by hereditary monarchs to whom the citizens swear an oath of fealty.  Ridgely does not hide his Galactic origin; he claims to be shipwrecked and he offers to help native space programs so he can get back to his wife and kids on Earth.  (In reality he has no such family.)  He starts his campaign of sabotage, but in the twist ending realizes he, as one of the few Galactic men of action who is willing to take risks, has more in common with the people of Bardin's Fall than of mainline civilization, and decides he really will help the natives to build space ships.  After all, the people of Bardin's Fall don't seem to be the remorseless criminals or warmongers bent on conquest he expected to find, and the leaders of the two leading city states, Chago and Yawk (a joke, I guess) assure Ridgely that the goal of their space programs is to reunite peacefully with the rest of the human race.  Silverberg sets up a parallel between how the Bardin's Fallers should accept Ridgely the saboteur spy's change of heart and Galactic civilization should accept the repentance of the descendants of the criminals exiled to BF.  

Silverberg in this story seems to be be trying to thread a needle or to have his cake and eat it too, seemingly suggesting that bravery and a willingness to take risks are heritable, and separating all criminals from the human race has led the race to decadence and that interbreeding the Bardin's Fallers with the rest of the human race will reverse that decadence, but at the same time arguing that criminality is not heritable--the authorities that sent Ridgely to the former penal colony figured that the descendants of criminals would also be criminals, but Ridgely has found that Bardin's Fall is not in fact particularly crime-ridden.  Color me skeptical, but it doesn't kill the story.

Acceptable.

"The Happy Sleepers" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin M. Knox)

Silverberg was famously prolific and often had two stories in a single magazine, one of them under a pen name like Calvin M. Knox, and that is the case here.  Like "Prison Planet," "The Happy Sleepers" has not been reprinted, and it is easy to see why, as the story is half-baked and doesn't make much sense.

It is the future--the late 1980s!  Mankind's first rocket to Mars blasted off just three weeks ago, and on that same day emerged the first signs that the Earth was stricken by a bizarre new plague.  Victims of the inexplicable disease cannot be woken up, and must be fed intravenously, and more victims turn up everyday, crowding the hospitals with these catatonic individuals.  Strangely, the sleepers all have smiles on their faces, and when subjected to an EEG scan the results match those of a normal healthy person who is awake!  The main characters--doctors who are treating these patients--speculate about what is going on, and what it has to do with the Mars mission.

Silverberg's resolution of the mystery is not satisfying.  The main characters start catching the disease, and the last of them to stay awake conducts a risky experiment to discover if there is anything to the theory that the sleepers' consciousnesses have been transported to another universe; he sets up an apparatus that will awake him with loud noises and flashing lights mere moments after falling asleep, before he is deeply asleep.  In this way he enters the other dimension for an instant, takes a peek, and then wakes up back on our Earth.

The main character glimpses his comrades standing over a bed in which he lies asleep, and somehow intuits that our universe and another universe are mirror images.  In this universe, everybody is going to ger the sleeping sickness, except one man--him.  In the other universe, only one man has the sleeping sickness--again, him.  Silverberg never connects Mars with the plague.  Silverberg also doesn't explain why the sleepers are smiling if they just have the ordinary lives in the other universe that they had here, nor what will happen to these people when their bodies here die from dehydration.  Why has the lead character been singled out as the only person who will not have an ordinary life in the other universe should he join every other person in succumbing to the disease?  Silverberg floats the idea that his job is to keep the sleepers alive, but obviously this is stupid--one man alone can't maintain the population of the entire Earth, especially if he can't get a good night's sleep!  Frustratingly, though the phrase "mirror image" is used, the two universes are not naturally mirror images of each other--in the other universe the main character is singular because he is the only sick person, but in this universe he is not special, being liable to fall asleep just like everybody else and only kept from falling asleep by the super dooper alarm clock that he invented.

Thumbs down!

"Time Travel Inc." by Robert F. Young

Here we have some lame filler that has never been reprinted.

It is the future--the late 1970s!  A business has discovered that human beings have the latent ability to cast their consciousnesses back in time to inhabit the bodies of individuals who share the same basic personality type, and will help you take such a trip for a fee.  Our two main characters are a successful car dealer and a successful "real estate man" who want to be sent back in time.  (People don't like car dealers and "real estate men" so we assume something bad is going to happen to them.)  They are warned that they won't be able to choose when to return to the 20th century; they have to decide ahead of time how long to spend in the past.  This is important, because if you are inhabiting the body of a guy who dies you also die.

The two businessmen want to witness the Crucifixion (Young doesn't say so, but I guess the time travel firm can also direct you to a location as well as a time) to settle a bet over whether Mary herself was present at the Crucifixion, I guess Young appealing to science fiction readers' sense that religious people are hypocrites.  Appealing to the reader's resentment of the guy who sold him his car and the guy who owns the apartment he rents, when the two businessmen reappear in ancient Judea they are in the bodies of the two thieves about to be crucified alongside Jesus and realize paying for a 24 hour trip was a mistake.

A groaner!

**********   

Four rare 1958 SF stories, two that are bad and two that are OK.  Fifteen dollars well spent?  As the characters in all these stories might tell you, exploration inevitably entails cost and risk.