Tag: Galaxy

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse

Posted on by Paul Fraser 1 Comment on Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse

Brightside Crossing by Alan E. Nourse (Galaxy, January 1956)1 opens in James Baron’s club, with him meeting an unknown man who asks if he is planning a Brightside Crossing. We learn in fairly short order that (a) Baron’s crossing will be across the sunward facing side of Mercury2 when it is at its closest point to the sun (perihelion) and (b) the stranger is Peter Claney, the only survivor of an earlier failed attempt. Claney insists that Baron has no chance of making a successful crossing, and proceeds to tell Baron about his team’s failed attempt.
In the central part of the story we learn how Claney was approached by a Major Tom Mikuta to join the expedition and how they were later joined by two other men, Jack Stone and Ted McIvers. The latter man, an adventurer described by Claney as a “kind of a daredevil”, arrives late at their start point—a lab in the twilight zone—presaging problems that will arise later in the story.
After they depart the base station, McIvers’ restlessness soon manifests itself and, after swapping roles with Stone and driving one of the flanking scout vehicles rather than the supply sledge at the back, he is soon asking to replace Claney as point, wanting to go five or ten miles ahead of the rest of the team to reconnoitre their route. Mikuta refuses, stating that they need to stay together, but McIver becomes ever more wayward and, during one of his side trips, he finds the wreckage and bodies of a previous expedition. Tensions increase as the story continues to unfold—the physical conditions are gruelling, Stone is becoming increasingly scared, and they are arguing about falling behind schedule. This all comes to a climax when Claney baulks at crossing a shelf he considers unsafe, and McIver charges ahead:

I started edging back down the ledge. I heard Mclvers swear; then I saw his Bug start to creep outward on the shelf. Not fast or reckless this time, but slowly, churning up dust in a gentle cloud behind him.
I just stared and felt the blood rushing in my head. It seemed so hot I could hardly breathe as he edged out beyond me, farther and farther—I think I felt it snap before I saw it. My own machine gave a sickening lurch and a long black crack appeared across the shelf—and widened. Then the ledge began to upend. I heard a scream as Mclvers’ Bug rose up and up and then crashed down into the crevasse in a thundering slide of rock and shattered metal.

They learn that McIvers isn’t dead but has smashed his vehicle and broken his leg. Mikuta and Stone descend into the crevasse to save him but (spoiler) are killed in a subsequent quake. Claney turns back.
The last part of the story, like the first, takes place in Baron’s club, and sees Baron (and probably most readers) observe that McIvers was the wrong kind of person to have in the team. Claney rebuts that, suggesting that McIvers was right to do what he did as they needed to keep to their schedule or they all would have died. Finally, after Claney makes an impassioned last attempt to talk Baron out of continuing his expedition, he asks him, “When do you leave, Baron? I want you to take me along.”
Although this story superficially looks like hard SF, it is really a character study about the type of men who are explorers, and how they are driven to do what they do.
This is a pretty good piece which is further improved by its closing line.
**** (Very Good). 7,850 words. Story link.

1. This story was a finalist for the 1956 Hugo Award for Best Novelette.

2. At the time the story was published it was thought that Mercury was tidally locked and that only one side of the planet faced the sun (i.e. Mercury rotated once for every orbit around the sun). Subsequently, Mercury was discovered to rotate three times for every two orbits, so all parts of the planet receive sunlight at some point.

Hunting Problem by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Hunting Problem by Robert Sheckley (Galaxy, September 1955) opens with Drog arriving late at a meeting of Soaring Falcon Patrol (Drog “hurtles down from the ten thousand foot level”). Drog is chastised by his Patrol Leader, who then recites the Scouter Creed to the assembled scouts:

“We, the Young Scouters of the planet Elbonai, pledge to perpetuate the skills and virtues of our pioneering ancestors. For that purpose, we Scouters adopt the shape our forebears were born to when they conquered the virgin wilderness of Elbonai. We hereby resolve—”
Scouter Drog adjusted his hearing receptors to amplify the Leader’s soft voice. The Creed always thrilled him. It was hard to believe that his ancestors had once been earthbound. Today the Elbonai were aerial beings, maintaining only the minimum of body, fueling by cosmic radiation at the twenty thousand-foot level, sensing by direct perception, coming down only for sentimental or sacramental purposes. They had come a long way since the Age of Pioneering. The modern world had begun with the Age of Submolecular Control, which was followed by the present age of Direct Control.
“. . . honesty and fair play,” the Leader was saying. “And we further resolve to drink liquids, as they did, and to eat solid food, and to increase our skill in their tools and methods.”  p. 36

Drog is then told by his Patrol Leader that, if he wants to get his first-class scouter award before a forthcoming Jamboree (Drog is the only second-class scout in the patrol), he needs to bring back the pelt of a Mirash, a “large and ferocious animal”. The Patrol Leader states that three of these previously thought extinct animals have been spotted to the north. The story point of view then switches to three human prospectors who have recently landed on the planet—they are the Mirash that are going to be hunted by Drog.
The next part of the story sees Drog stalking the humans, a task which does not begin well when one of the prospectors tells his colleague that he saw a tree move—and one of them subsequently blasts it:

Slowly Drog returned to consciousness. The Mirash’s flaming weapon had caught him in camouflage, almost completely unshielded. He still couldn’t understand how it had happened. There had been no premonitory fear-scent, no snorting, no snarling, no warning whatsoever. The Mirash had attacked with blind suddenness, without waiting to see whether he was friend or foe.
At last Drog understood the nature of the beast he was up against.1  p. 40

There are a couple more conventional efforts by Drog to trap the humans (these include a steak dinner waiting when they arrive back at camp—they avoid the tangle-grass and rising disc of earth—and then the sounds of a damsel in distress—which they ignore). Drog (spoiler) finally catches one of the humans by using “ilitorcy” (the use of a thick mist, essentially). The story then closes with both first-class scout Drog flying the pelt of a Mirash at the Jamboree and all three humans escaping alive in their spaceship. The pelt turns out to be an environmental suit that one of the men was wearing.
I suppose this is a moderately enjoyable, if slight, YA piece. The ending may provide more of an uplift to others than it did for me.
** (Average). 3,950 words. Story link.

1. Robert Sheckley’s stories often have mordant asides about the nature of humanity, e.g. his description of humans as “pushers” in the superior Specialist (Galaxy, May 1953)—if you want a piece that has a YA feel but which also works for adults (and has a great sense of wonder ending), I’d read that instead.

Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night by Algis Budrys

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night by Algis Budrys (Galaxy, December 1961) opens with Sollenar, a media mogul, receiving an unexpected victor from the Special Relations Office of the International Associations of Broadcasters. The visitor, a man called Ermine, tells Sollenar that a competitor called Cortwright Burr may be about to threaten his broadcast monopoly by introducing a device (created by Martian scientists) that will render Sollenar’s technology—which creates “complete emotional rapport between the viewer and subject matter”—obsolescent.
After this rather technical and business-heavy (or data-dump) beginning, the second chapter changes pace completely, and sees Sollenar enter into a bizarre life and death struggle with Burr. This begins with Sollenar in a helium-filled plastic drifter (invisible to radar) gliding down towards the roof of Burr’s tower block. Sollenar breaks in and finds Burr, who has a sphere of orange-gold metal in his hands. Sollenar shoots Burr, but when he goes over to his body he sees Burr is still alive and holding onto the ball. Sollenar fires again and again, but he can’t seem to kill Burr and—even when Sollenar flees and returns to the balcony of his own tower block—he is just in time to see Burr climbing over the edge of the parapet. Sollenar beats at Burr’s hands, and he finally falls into the water far below. Even after this Burr isn’t finished though, and Sollenar meets him at a TV ball where Burr reveals a cadaverous body beneath his costume.
Also at the ball is Erimine, who demonstrates his incorruptibility to Sollenar when the latter tries to bribe him:

Ermine bared his left arm and sank his teeth into it. He displayed the arm.
There was no quiver of pain in voice or stance. “It’s not a legend, Mr. Sollenar.
It’s quite true. We of our office must spend a year, after the nerve surgery, learning to walk without the feel of our feet, to handle objects without crushing them or letting them slip or damaging ourselves. Our mundane pleasures are auditory, olfactory and visual. Easily gratified at little expense. Our dreams are totally interior, Mr. Sollenar. The operation is irreversible. What would you buy for me with your money?”

Sollenar quickly leaves the Ball and gets on a flight to Mars, but Ermine appears and points to Burr a few seats away. Then, when they land, Sollenar stuns Ermine and flees. At this point (spoiler) Ermine phones Earth and confirms what will already be obvious to most readers about the fantastic events that have occurred so far:

“Sollenar is en route to the Martian city. He wants a duplicate of Burr’s device, of course, since he smashed the original when he killed Burr. I’ll follow and make final disposition. The disorientation I reported previously is progressing rapidly. Almost all his responses now are inappropriate. On the flight out, he seemed to be staring at something in an empty seat. Quite often when spoken to he obviously hears something else entirely. I expect to catch one of the next few flights back.”

Then, when Sollenar finds the Martian engineers’ quarters, he too realises that he has been living a storyline generated by Burr’s device. However, when he sees Ermine outside with a rifle, he gets the Martian engineers to build another of the devices.
The story concludes with Sollenar going out to confront Ermine, and is apparently shot. The last scene has Ermine pick up the device that Sollenar has had manufactured—at which point he realises that he can feel again. Ermine is delighted but, when he later gashes his foot, he doesn’t seem to be aware of it. At this point the reader realises that Ermine is also experiencing his own reality.
This is a bizarre and tricksy piece that is interesting more than it is successful. Some of the setup is contrived (Ermin’s lack of senses to make him incorruptible), and I was unsure whether Sollenar is actually killed at the end of the piece. It is also one of those reality-shifting stories that, after you have finished, you want to go back and read again to find out exactly what was going on. A story I found impressive or notable more than I liked, perhaps.
On reflection, this struck me as the kind of thing you would expect from Philip K. Dick (and I’d be interested to know if this predates Dick’s use of multiple reality states). Also, in some respects, it feels like a proto-New Wave story, with its unrealiable narrators and/or protagonists, and its focus on the “inner space” of its characters (that said, it has the form of a pulp adventure). I also note in passing that the very powerful man setup at the beginning recalls his 1976 novel, Michaelmas (if I remember correctly from my reading of it over 40 years ago).
*** (Good). 7,650 words. Story link.

Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Unready to Wear by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.1 (Galaxy, April 1953) is set in a future where many humans are now “amphibious”, i.e. incorporeal, and when they need a human body they borrow one:

My old body, which [my wife] claims she loved for a third of a century, had black hair, and was short and paunchy, too, there toward the last. I’m human and I couldn’t help being hurt when they scrapped it after I’d left it, instead of putting it in storage. It was a good, homey, comfortable body; nothing fast and flashy, but reliable. But there isn’t much call for that kind of body at the centers, I guess. I never ask for one, at any rate.

Then the narrator later recalls the time he got conned into borrowing Konigwasser’s body (the inventor of the amphibious process) to lead the annual Pioneers’ Day Parade:

Like a plain damn fool, I believed them.
They’ll have a tough time getting me into that thing again—ever. Taking that wreck out certainly made it plain why Konigswasser discovered how people could do without their bodies. That old one of his practically drives you out. Ulcers, headaches, arthritis, fallen arches—a nose like a pruning hook, piggy little eyes and a complexion like a used steamer trunk. He was and still is the sweetest person you’d ever want to know, but, back when he was stuck with that body, nobody got close enough to find out.
We tried to get Konigswasser back into his old body to lead us when we first started having the Pioneers’ Day parades, but he wouldn’t have anything to do with it, so we always have to flatter some poor boob into taking on the job. Konigswasser marches, all right, but as a six-foot cowboy who can bend beer cans double between his thumb and middle finger.

This last passage basically summarises the thrust of the story, which is that most human bodies are unsuitable for the minds that inhabit them—an idea which is examined in a quirky way during the first part of the story (along with the advantages of not having a body, and how Konigwasser discovered the process).
The second part of the story then introduces the “enemy”, the people who have stayed behind in physical form:

Usually, the enemy is talking about old-style reproduction, which is the clumsiest, most comical, most inconvenient thing anyone could imagine, compared with what the amphibians have in that line. If they aren’t talking about that, then they’re talking about food, the gobs of chemicals they have to stuff into their bodies. Or they’ll talk about fear, which we used to call politics— job politics, social politics, government politics.

The enemy manage to trap the narrator and Madge in two bodies that they have taken from the storage centre, and the pair are subsequently tried for desertion. After some witty back and forth between the two sides at the trial, the narrator manages to bluff their way out.
This piece is more quirk and wit than story, but it has an interesting—and sometimes Laffertyesque—perspective on the subject.
*** (Good). 5,400 words. Story link.

1. There was some speculation about the Unready to Wear title when we did the group read of this in one of my Facebook groups: a composite suggestion is that the title is a play on “ready to wear”, and that either humans are either not ready (or willing) to wear bodies, or the bodies themselves are not ready for human use.
The “amphibious” description comes from a reference at the very end of the story about the lack of interest among the young for the bodies available at the storage centres:

So I guess maybe that’ll be the next step in evolution—to break clean like those first amphibians who crawled out of the mud into the sunshine, and who never did go back to the sea.

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Or All the Seas with Oysters by Avram Davidson (Galaxy May 1958) opens with a Mr Whatney visiting a bicycle shop run by Oscar. Mr Whatney asks where Ferd (the other owner) is, and Oscar tells Whatney he is now on his own. The story of why begins with a habit of Oscar’s that irritated Ferd:

The shop was located near the park; it did a big trade in renting bicycles to picnickers. If a woman was barely old enough to be called a woman and not quite old enough to be called an old woman, or if she was anywhere in between, and if she was alone, Oscar would ask, “How does that machine feel to you? All right?”
“Why . . . I guess so.”
Taking another bicycle, Oscar would say, “Well, I’ll just ride along a little bit with you, to make sure. Be right back, Ferd.” Ferd always nodded gloomily.
He knew that Oscar would not be right back. Later, Oscar would say, “Hope you made out in the shop as good as I did in the park.”
“Leaving me all alone here all that time,” Ferd grumbled.

The rest of the story sees various other elements introduced, beginning with a couple with a baby visiting the shop in need of a replacement safety pin for the child’s nappy. Neither Oscar nor Ferd can find one in the shop, but later on Ferd finds a drawer full. Ferd wonders why this kind of thing happens, along with other phenomena like wardrobes suddenly filling up with coat hangers.
Running in parallel with these events is Ferd’s restoration of a red French racing bike, which he angrily smashes up after Oscar takes it to chase a female cyclist. When the bike later regenerates itself (and draws blood when Ferd tries to ride it) it leads him to speculate that there may be mimetic life on Earth:

“Maybe they’re a different kind of life form. Maybe they get their nourishment out of the elements in the air. You know what safety pins are— these other kinds of them? Oscar, the safety pins are the pupa forms and then they, like, hatch. Into the larval forms. Which look just like coat hangers. They feel like them, even, but they’re not. Oscar, they’re not, not really, not really, not . . .”

The story closes (spoiler) with Oscar telling Whatney he is now in a relationship with Norma (the female cyclist), breeding American and French racing bikes, and that Ferd “had been found in his own closet with an unraveled coat hanger coiled tightly around his neck.”
This is an enjoyable and amusing read but the ending didn’t work for me, probably because I thought that the safety pin/coat hanger lifecycle would extend to the bikes (maybe it did and I just missed it) and (b) I didn’t really get why the coat hangers would kill Ferd (unless, again, they are the previous life stage of the bikes).
I assume this story mostly got a Hugo Award for its quirk (the observational humour about safety pins and coat hangers) and its (for the time) perhaps risqué suggestion that Oscar is having sex with a succession of young women in the woods.
** (Average). 3,650 words. Story link.

Shape by Robert Sheckley

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Shape by Robert Sheckley (first published as Keep Your Shape, Galaxy, November 19531) sees a spaceship of shape-shifting Glom arrive in Earth orbit; they are on a mission to place a displacer in one of Earth’s atomic reactors to open up a wormhole for an invasion. Previous expeditions have failed.
Before they descend to the surface, the commander of the ship, Pid, addresses his crewmates Ger and Ilg:

“A lot of hopes are resting on this expedition,” he began slowly. “We’re a long way from home now.”
Ger the detector nodded. Ilg the radioman flowed out of his prescribed shape and molded himself comfortably to a wall.
“However,” Pid said sternly, “distance is no excuse for promiscuous shapelessness.”
Ilg flowed hastily back into proper radioman’s shape.
“Exotic shapes will undoubtedly be called for,” Pid went on. “And for that we have a special dispensation. But remember—any shape not assumed strictly in the line of duty is a device of The Shapeless One!”
Ger’s body surfaces abruptly stopped flowing.

This sets up the story’s conflict, which is that, although the aliens on Glom can assume any shape they want, there are strict caste rules which determine those they are allowed to adopt in society—and Pid has learned before his departure that his two crewmates may not be reliable in this respect:

“Ger, your detector, is suspected of harboring alterationist tendencies. He was once fined for assuming a quasi-hunter shape. Ilg has never had any definite charge brought against him. But I hear that he remains immobile for suspiciously long periods of time. Possibly, he fancies himself a thinker.”
“But sir,” Pid protested, “if they are even slightly tainted with alterationism or shapelessness, why send them on this expedition?”
The chief hesitated before answering. “There are plenty of Glom I could trust,” he said slowly. “But those two have certain qualities of resourcefulness and imagination that will be needed on this expedition.” He sighed. “I really don’t understand why those qualities are usually linked with shapelessness.”

After the three of them land on Earth they dissolve the ship (spoiler), and it isn’t long (there are some episodes that play out beside the reactor) before Ilg and Ger disappear. Pid later discovers that Ilg has become a tree and a thinker, and Ger a dog and hunter. Worse, Pid learns that another dog Ger was chasing earlier is a member of a previous Glom expedition.
The final section sees Pid eventually manage to get inside the reactor building, where the alarm is raised and he is pursued by guards. Then, plagued by thoughts about freedom of shape, and just as he is almost able to activate the displacer, he looks out a nearby window:

It was really true! He hadn’t fully understood what Ger had meant when he said that there were species on this planet to satisfy every need. Every need! Even his!
Here he could satisfy a longing of the pilot caste that went even deeper than piloting.
He looked again, then smashed the displacer to the floor. The door burst open, and in the same instant he flung himself through the window.
The men raced to the window and stared out. But they were unable to understand what they saw.
There was only a great white bird out there, flapping awkwardly but with increasing strength, trying to overtake a flight of birds in the distance.

This is a great finish to a good story, and puts this on my list of Sheckley’s best stories (Specialist, Pilgrimage to Earth, etc.).
One of the things that particularly struck me about this piece was how concisely and clearly written it is and, although there is a message here about social conformity, we aren’t continually bludgeoned with it (I shudder to think what a modern day, MFA’d version of this story would look like).
**** (Very Good). 4,550 words. Story links (see footnote 1).

1. The version of the story I read was in The Arbor House Book of Modern Science Fiction, but the original version in Galaxy magazine (as Keep Your Shape) is longer (5,900 words) and has a completely different ending (and one that makes it a much weaker and more pedestrian story).
In the latter version (the story changes from “He studied himself for a moment, bared his teeth at Ger, and loped toward the gate.” on p. 16 of Galaxy, section break bottom right/p. 67 of the Arbor House anthology) Pid first turns into a dog, and then a man, but can’t stand either shape, so eventually changes into a sparrow. As Pid flies towards the reactor building he is attacked by a hawk and, after slipping through its grasp, changes into a bigger hawk and scares it away. Then Pid drops the displacer and flies after the attacking hawk to find how it hovered in the air.
Theodore Sturgeon used to say something along the lines of, “Horace Gold could turn an average story into a good story, and an excellent story into a good story”. One wonders if this is an example.
Story link (Shape, Arbor House, recommended version).
Story link (Keep Your Shape, Galaxy).

Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Angel’s Egg by Edgar Pangborn (Galaxy, June 19511) opens with an exchange of letters between the FBI and local police about the death of a Dr Bannerman—and which also discusses his diary, an unsettling (or possibly crazed) account of the days and months before his death: this opens with a brief mention of a possible flying saucer sighting before reporting on the annual nesting activities of Bannerman’s favourite hen, Camilla:

This year she stole a nest successfully in a tangle of blackberry. By the time I located it, I estimated I was about two weeks too late. I had to outwit her by watching from a window—she is far too acute to be openly trailed from feeding ground to nest. When I had bled and pruned my way to her hideout she was sitting on nine eggs and hating my guts. They could not be fertile, since I keep no rooster, and I was about to rob her when I saw the ninth egg was nothing of hers. It was a deep blue and transparent, with flecks of inner light that made me think of the first stars in a clear evening. It was the same size as Camilla’s own. There was an embryo, but I could make nothing of it. I returned the egg to Camilla’s bare and fevered breastbone and went back to the house for a long, cool drink.

Later the egg hatches to reveal an “angel”, a tiny female humanoid covered in down and with wing stubs on her shoulders. Bannerman brings the angel inside that evening and, over the next few days, Bannerman discovers that it can communicate mentally with him while they are touching (when he holds her in his hands, etc.). To begin with this is takes the form of vague feelings, but she is soon sending him images of her home world and then, days later, more complex information:

It was difficult. Pictures come through with relative ease, but now she was transmitting an abstraction of a complex kind: my clumsy brain really suffered in the effort to receive. Something did come across. I have only the crudest way of passing it on. Imagine an equilateral triangle; place the following words one at each corner—“recruiting,” “collecting,” “saving.” The meaning she wanted to convey ought to be near the center of the triangle.
I had also the sense that her message provided a partial explanation of her errand in this lovable and damnable world.

Later (in amongst material that provides more background information about her people, how they travelled through space, their biology, and much more), she reveals that there are others like her on Earth (including her dying father). We eventually learn (in an oblique narrative) that they are here on Earth to help steer mankind away from self-destruction.
The second part of the story (spoiler) sees the angel’s father die and, when Bannerman asks what she is going to do next, she presents two choices: she can stay with Bannerman, and teach and counsel him (and, when the angels learn more about human biology, possibly greatly improve his health—Bannerman has a spinal deformity2). Or he can have his life memories recorded and stored by her, and used by the angels to better understand and help humankind:

It seems they have developed a technique by means of which any unresisting living subject whose brain is capable of memory at all can experience a total recall. It is a by-product, I understand, of their silent speech, and a very recent one. They have practiced it for only a few thousand years, and since their own understanding of the phenomenon is very incomplete, they classify it among their experimental techniques. In a general way, it may somewhat resemble that reliving of the past that psychoanalysis can sometimes bring about in a limited way for therapeutic purposes; but you must imagine that sort of thing tremendously magnified and clarified, capable of including every detail that has ever registered on the subject’s brain; and the end result is very different. The purpose is not therapeutic, as we would understand it: quite the opposite. The end result is death. Whatever is recalled by this process is transmitted to the receiving mind, which can retain it and record any or all of it if such a record is desired; but to the subject who recalls it, it is a flowing away, without return. Thus it is not a true “remembering” but a giving. The mind is swept clear, naked of all its past, and along with memory, life withdraws also. Very quietly. At the end, I suppose it must be like standing without resistance in the engulfment of a flood time, until finally the waters close over.

Bannerman chooses to have his life “saved” (a term puzzlingly used by the angel to describe Camilla the hen when she dies earlier in the story), and the last part of the story see his memories stripped away over a three week period (during which Bannerman’s old dog Judy is also “saved”):

For it seems that this process of recall is painful to an advanced intellect (she, without condescension, calls us very advanced) because, while all pretense and self-delusion are stripped away, there remains conscience, still functioning by whatever standards of good and bad the individual has developed in his lifetime. Our present knowledge of our own motives is such a pathetically small beginning!—hardly stronger than an infant’s first effort to focus his eyes. I am merely wondering how much of my life (if I choose this way) will seem to me altogether hideous. Certainly plenty of the “good deeds” that I still cherish in memory like so many well-behaved cherubs will turn up with the leering aspect of greed or petty vanity or worse.

In Bannerman’s last moments the other angels visit and let him “see” (a vivid memory of the father if I recall correctly) the two moon night on their planet; then Bannerman gives up his final memories and dies.
Overall, this is a noteworthy piece, but the first half of this story has its problems: the angel material is, at times, a little on the fey side (occasionally the angel seems more like a fantasy fairy) or it is just plain clunky (we get a lot of genre detail about the angel’s world and biology—space travel while encysted, etc.—than we really need) and, around the midway point, it starts becoming dull. That said, it picks up again when the angel’s father dies and Bannerman is presented with the two choices, and the ending is very strong—a long and reflective section, profound even, on the shortcomings of humans individually and as a society.
I’d note that, even given all the genre elements in the piece, this feels like more of a mainstream piece (it is quite descriptive and introspective), certainly when compared with other SF stories of the period. I’d also note that there is also a noticeable religious subtext to the story (angels, sacrifice, saviours, the flood, etc.).
***+ (Good to Very Good). 15,300 words. Story link.
 
1. Damon Knight made these comments about the first publication of the story in his essay, Knight Piece, in Hell’s Cartographers, edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss:

Gold had an incurable habit of overediting stories: as Lester once said, he turned mediocre stories into good ones, and excellent stories into good ones. He bought Edgar Pangborn’s beautiful ‘Angel’s Egg’ and showed it to several writers in manuscript, then rewrote some of its best phrases. He changed the description of the ‘angel’ (a visitor from another planet) riding on the back of a hawk ‘with her speaking hands on his terrible head’ to ‘with her telepathic hands on his predatory head’. According to Ted Sturgeon, when the issue came out and the story was read in the printed version, three pairs of heels hit the floor at that point and three people tried to phone Gold to curse him for a meddler. Sturgeon got in the habit of marking out certain phrases in his manuscripts and writing them in again above the line in ink. Gold asked him why he did that, pointing out that it made it difficult for him to write in corrections. ‘That’s why I do it,’ Sturgeon replied.  p. 132

I read what looks like the non-Gold version in The Arbor House Modern Treasury of Science Fiction.

2. I wonder if Bannerman—which can also mean “standard bearer”—is a metaphor for humanity, and whether his twisted nature (the spinal deformity) is a metaphor for the human condition.

La Befana by Gene Wolfe

Posted on by Paul Fraser

La Befana by Gene Wolfe (Galaxy, January-February 1973) opens with an alien called Zozz arriving at a human settler’s household on Christmas Eve. There Zozz waits for the man of the family, John “Bananas” Bannano, to come home.
Once Bannano arrives there are several conversations that run in parallel about (a) the family’s emigration to Zozz’s planet (b) the mother-in-law, who goes into the room next door to avoid Zozz, and (c) a story about a witch eternally dammed to look for the baby Jesus/Messiah.
The last line draws this together somewhat with (spoiler) the mother-in-law saying she’ll only have to search until tomorrow night.
This is either a simple idea complicated by the various lines of conversation (in one or two places it’s hard to work out who is talking to who), or I missed the point. Either way, I suspect it is a slight piece.
* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellsion

Posted on by Paul Fraser

“Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellsion (Galaxy, December 1965)1 starts off with a quote by Thoreau for those who “need points sharply made” (e.g. me):

The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailors, constables, posse comitatus, etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.

This ad hominem attack (“lump of dirt”, etc.) goes on to criticize a few other groups, before going on to suggest that only a few (“heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense”) serve the state with their consciences and/or resist it, but are commonly treated as enemies.
The story itself eventually starts (after a few opaque opening paragraphs) by introducing its two characters, the Harlequin—an atavistic, trouble-making personality in a future world of exact timekeeping—and the Ticktockman, the Master Timekeeper:

And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes. And so it goes goes goes goes goes tick tock tick tock tick tock and one day we no longer let time serve us, we serve time and we are slaves of the schedule, worshippers of the sun’s passing, bound into a life predicated on restrictions because the system will not function if we don’t keep the schedule tight.
Until it becomes more than a minor inconvenience to be late. It becomes a sin. Then a crime. Then a crime punishable by this:

EFFECTIVE 15 JULY 2389 12:00:00 midnight, the office of the Master Timekeeper will require all citizens to submit their time cards and cardioplates for processing. In accordance with Statute 555-7-SGH-999 governing the revocation of time per capita, all cardioplates will be keyed to the individual holder and—

What they had done was devise a method of curtailing the amount of life a person could have. If he was ten minutes late, he lost ten minutes of his life. An hour was proportionately worth more revocation. If someone was consistently tardy, he might find himself, on a Sunday night, receiving a communiqué from the Master Timekeeper that his time had run out, and he would be “turned off” at high noon on Monday, please straighten your affairs, sir, madame, or bisex.
And so, by this simple scientific expedient (utilizing a scientific process held dearly secret by the Ticktockman’s office) the System was maintained. It was the only expedient thing to do. It was, after all, patriotic. The schedules had to be met. After all, there was a war on!
But, wasn’t there always?

After several of the Harlequin’s disruptive escapades (jelly beans scattered on rolling roads that are very similar to those in Heinlein’s story, making speeches on the top of construction projects, etc.) he is (spoiler) eventually captured. Although he initially resists, he is broken and brainwashed and repents on TV. Then he is destroyed . . . but, in the closing sentences, the Ticktockman is three minutes late on his schedule.
The Harlequin’s sacrifice has presumably altered/affected the system.
It’s tempting, because of the heavyweight opening quote, to analyse this story’s political message in some depth2 but, on reflection, I think it’s probably just a bit of clever froth meant to pander to the anti-authoritarian crowd of the mid-1960s.
*** (Good). 4,350 words.

1. The introduction to the story in the Vandermeers’ The Big Book of Science Fiction states:

Ellison wrote it in six hours in order to present it the next day at the Milford Writer’s Workshop, run by Damon Knight.

And, in some parts, it reads like a story written in six hours (see my comments about the opening paragraphs—you can almost see the writer’s coffee begin to kick in).

2. The story generated a lot of comment in a recent (closed) group read, partly because people were tempted to see more in it than is actually there (when I say people, I mostly mean me).

Handicap by Larry Niven

Posted on by Paul Fraser 2 Comments on Handicap by Larry Niven

Handicap by Larry Niven (Galaxy, December 1967) is set in his ‘Known Space’ universe, and opens with Garvey the narrator and his guide Jilson flying over the red desert of the planet Grit in their skycycles, en route to see a Grog, one of the species of aliens that live there:

We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh.
The Grog showed just five features.
Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floor-length skirt. A few inches up, two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair. They were the size and shape of a Great Dane’s forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the comers. No eyes. The cone looked like some stone-age carved idol, or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal monk.  p. 268 (World’s Best Science Fiction 1968, edited by Donald A. Wollheim & Terry Carr)

We also learn that, despite the size of their brains, they never move, don’t use tools, and have never communicated with humanity. Garvey, who searches the universe for intelligent species, feels he has wasted his time.
The next section sees the two men together in a bar, where Garvey reveals he is the heir to Garvey Limited, a company that builds “Dolphins Hands”, prosthetics that allow animals such as dolphins and the alien Bandersnatch to manipulate objects, which lets them fully use their intelligence.
Later on the pair visit a Dr Fuller, a research scientist working on the question of whether or not the Grogs are intelligent. During the visit Garvey learns more about their odd life cycle: brains large enough to support intelligence; mobile while young, sessile—non-mobile—when mature; no observations of the adults eating in captivity, etc.
As the story progresses, we see Garvey slowly unravel the mystery of the Grogs, beginning with his next visit to the desert when (spoiler) he realises the creatures have devolved from a more advanced race. Then, when Garvey sees them psychically compel their prey to run into their mouths, he realises that they are descendants of the Slavers, a long dead and feared race.
The remainder of the story sees the creatures mentally communicate with Garvey and his subsequent response, which involves (a) giving them a keyboard to communicate with him rather than invading his mind, and then (b) letting them know that if they ever attempt to mentally control humanity, a running STL ramship will land on the planet and destroy it. By the end of the story, the Grogs are usefully employed in several roles.
This story has a good start, but it pivots too much on the narrator’s realisation of what has happened to the Grogs, as well as him being the first human they decide to communicate with.
Entertaining enough but minor.
*** (Good.) 8,650 words.