No Life of Their Own and Other Stories: The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak, Volume Five

A few weak entries, but excellent overall
No Life of Their Own and Other Stories, published in 2016, is the fifth volume in the projected 14-volume The Complete Short Fiction of Clifford D. Simak series from Open Road Media. This is the tenth book I’ve read in the series so far (I’m not reading them in order, since order doesn’t really matter), and Volume Five is neither the best nor the worst of those ten. Like every volume in this consistently outstanding series, this collection of stories and novellas is well worth the cover price and your reading time. Even so, the title cut, “No Life of Their Own,” is surprisingly disappointing. Set in a future world in which Earth is home to extraterrestrial immigrants, a farming community serves as a metaphor for the multiethnic American frontier. Though an interesting premise, the story is a bit goofy (perhaps intentionally) and veers too far away from science fiction into the realm of fantasy.

Simak’s first writings from the 1930s and early ‘40s tend to be somewhat formulaic and sensationalist compared to his later, more mature work. Often such stories begin as future tales of solar system colonization and mining and end up with a monster attack or laser-gun battle. “The Space-Beasts” from 1940, included here, is one example. Another, 1939’s “Message from Mars,” feels like a half-baked preliminary sketch of Simak’s 1965 novel All Flesh Is Grass. Though these early works usually stick to the conventions of pulp fiction adventure storytelling, they often contain inklings of great ideas. “The Loot of Time,” for instance, is an ingenious time travel tale that’s very entertaining, and its hokey pulpiness only contributes to the fun. In addition to the science fiction for which Simak is known, this volume, like others in the series, contains one western, “Cactus Colts,” which is pretty good, and also a World War II combat story, “A Hero Must Not Die,” easily the volume’s worst selection.

Three stories included here really stand out as exceptional and are among Simak’s best. 1944’s “Huddling Place” is one of the stories that would eventually end up as part of his 1952 novel City. It is an integral chapter to that epic narrative of man, dogs, robots, and Martians, but also an ingenious short story in its own right. In “Party Line,” a team of humans on Earth communicates telepathically with other intelligent beings throughout the universe in an attempt to gather scientific and philosophical knowledge for the benefit of mankind. This near-perfect story is so chock full of brilliant ideas it could easily have been expanded into a great novel. Another excellent selection, “The Whistling Well,” is about a writer who is commissioned by an elderly relative to research his family’s history. To do so, he must visit the family’s ancestral homestead, which sits on a patch of land shrouded in mystery and creepy rumors. Excellently paced and very subtle and patient in its building of suspense, the story begins as another one of Simak’s moving tributes to rural life, but then morphs into a chilling horror tale.

The remaining selections, “Spaceship in a Flask,” “To Walk a City’s Street,” and “Contraption,” are all strong stories too, but each Simak collection presents such an embarrassment of riches it is impossible to adequately praise them all. Volume Five collects 12 stories, which is the most that’s ever been packed into one of these volumes. High quantity allows for great variety, but at times you wish the shorter stories could have been longer because they are just so good. Volume Five proves once again that you really can’t go wrong with buying any of the volumes in this series.

Stories in this collection

No Life of Their Own 

Spaceship in a Flask 

The Loot of Time

Huddling Place 

To Walk a City’s Street 

Cactus Colts 

Message from Mars 

Party Line 

A Hero Must Not Die 

The Space-Beasts 

Contraption 

The Whistling Well

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The Book of Jack London, Volume 1 by Charmian Kittredge London

Tedious rehash of stories better told elsewhere
The Book of Jack London is a biography of the great American author and adventurer. Published in 1921, five years after his death, it was written by London’s widow Charmian Kittredge London. Not surprisingly, the book is a rather biased account of Jack’s life, prone to hero worship and often sugar-coating any unseemly details. To cite one example, Charmian passes Jack’s stepfather off as his biological father, thus concealing the sketchy details of his birth, which may or may not have been out of wedlock. Despite such inaccuracies, the book is packed with a sufficient amount of detail that just about every subsequent London biographer has used it as a primary source.

Charmian’s account of Jack’s life was lengthy enough to be published in two volumes, with Volume 1 ending around 1905. This results in much of the content of the first volume having taken place before Jack and Charmian met. Thus, much of what’s related in the first volume is second-hand information. In fact, those familiar with London’s work will recognize most of the anecdotes from his own published writings. Charmian lifts heavily from London’s autobiographical works, most notably from his memoir John Barleycorn, with bits and pieces of The Road, The People of the Abyss, and various nonfiction articles thrown in.

As one of the great practitioners of American literary naturalism, London often wrote his novels in a stark and almost brutal prose that evoked the harsh wilderness landscapes in which his stories took place. In some of his lesser known works, however, there were times when he felt the need to prove himself a poet and would indulge in overly romantic, flowery language. Unfortunately, Charmian’s writing falls squarely into the latter camp. Her pretentious, thesaurus-wringing prose is a constant annoyance throughout the book and renders previously exciting stories an ordeal to read. What you get for most of the book is a rehash of John Barleycorn, retold in this god-awfully verbose and convoluted syntax.

About two-thirds of the way through, even Charmian seems to realize that this has grown tiresome, so she starts to reprint Jack’s correspondence to two friends: Cloudesley Johns, a fellow struggling writer and lifelong penpal; and Anna Strunsky, a close friend and authoress with whom Jack collaborated upon the novel The Kempton-Wace Letters. Charmian reproduces these letters verbatim, with very little editing. While they shed a little light on Jack’s personality, most of their content deals with the submission of manuscripts and payments from publishers. This correspondence may provide some welcome detail for researchers, but feels out of place in a book devoted to London’s life story. If you wanted to read unedited letters, you could do so to your heart’s content in the three-volume The Letters of Jack London. Charmian also reproduces some of London’s personal notebooks of his tramping days, as well as some letters from his time covering the Russo-Japanese War. Though penned in choppy, abbreviated prose, they still yield some insight into his travels.

In the final few chapters of Volume 1, it begins to become clear that Jack and Charmian have become more than friends, though that’s not stated explicitly because he’s not yet divorced from his first wife. Hopefully Volume 2 will contain more first-hand information from Charmian’s perspective. As far as Volume 1 is concerned, diehard London fans will find little here that they weren’t already aware of. For those who just want a good biography of London, Earle Labor’s excellent 2013 book Jack London: An American Life is likely the best there is.
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Historical Novels of the Ancient World

“Epic” doesn’t always mean good

Historical novels are a favorite genre here at Old Books by Dead Guys, and ancient civilizations are also a preferred area of interest, but it is rare that the two come together to make a great book. Below is a recap of some novels of the ancient world that have been reviewed here at this blog, including books set in ancient Greece, Rome, Egypt, and Carthage. Click on the titles below to read the full-length reviews. While there are a couple masterpieces included in this list, sometimes even great authors set out to craft an ancient epic and end up delivering a dud.  

Acté by Alexandre Dumas (1838) - 2.5 stars
This was the first historical novel by Dumas, who would go on to write dozens of them, if not hundreds. The story takes place around AD 54. Acté was a Corinthian woman who became the favored lover of Roman Emperor Nero. The romantic storyline, however, gets lost in a morass of non-fictional detail that chronicles Nero’s career and climaxes with his downfall. From the author of such classics as The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, this is a surprisingly dull affair, though it does feature a riveting chapter about a gladiatorial exhibition. Acté served as the inspiration for Quo Vadis (see below), a much better book.

Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert (1856) - 4 stars
After achieving fame and success with Madame Bovary, Flaubert did a literary 180 with this romantic epic set in ancient Carthage (in present-day Tunisia). During the First Punic War of the third century BC, Carthage hired many mercenaries to help them fight the Romans. Failing to pay those mercenaries, however, Carthage then suffered the revolt of its hired warriors. Salammb̂ô, the daughter of one of Carthage’s chief military commanders, becomes the object of desire for the leader of these mercenaries. The story takes a backseat to its opulent window dressing, as Flaubert loving describes the clothing, furniture, and decor of each scene as if he were writing a Carthaginian Sears catalog. To its benefit, the novel is also loaded with gore galore. Salammbô is a flawed novel, but a good read nonetheless.

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace (1880) - 3 stars

According to some sources, this is the best-selling novel of the 19th century, but today’s readers will likely find this book inferior to its film adaptation of 1959. Judah Ben-Hur is the son of a wealthy aristocratic Jewish family in Jerusalem who, through misfortune and foul play, is condemned to a life of slavery. The lethargic pacing of the plot is far slower than the Charlton Heston movie, and the action scenes are comparatively anticlimactic. The story is a discordant mix of minute archaeological detail and supernatural mumbo jumbo, and author Wallace, a former Civil War general, too often settles for merely paraphrasing the New Testament. After much heavy-handed preaching, the book ultimately leaves the reader with mixed moral messages.

Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1895) - 4.5 stars
Inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s Act́é (see above), Quo Vadis (the title is Latin for “Whither goest thou?”) also depicts the reign of Emperor Nero, a ruler known for his insanity and brutality. Marcus Vinicius, a Roman patrician and military tribune in Nero’s court, falls in love with Lygia, the beautiful daughter of a foreign king. In the process of pursuing her, Vinicius discovers that she is a member of a new and mysterious religious sect, the Christians. Nobel laureate Sienkiewicz exquisitely captures the minute details of Roman life, whether he’s depicting an orgy, a gladiatorial battle, a crucifixion, or Nero’s burning of Rome. Though Sienkiewicz, a devout Catholic, implanted the novel with a strong religious message, the book is great reading for theist or atheist alike. As far as ancient epics published in the 19th century go, Quo Vadis may be the gold standard.

The Pharaoh and the Priest by Boleslaw Prus (1895) - 2.5 stars
Another ancient epic from Poland, published in the same year as Quo Vadis, but Prus has a much more realistic style than the hyper-romantic Sienkiewicz. The Pharaoh and the Priest is set in ancient Egypt in the year 1087 BC. Young Ramses XIII, heir to the throne of Egypt, has just reached the age to begin learning the intricacies of his nation’s administration. His father, Pharaoh Ramses XII, sends him on a mission to investigate the cause of Egypt’s declining revenue, diminishing population, and loss of arable land. Young Ramses learns that the priestly bureaucracy is undermining the Pharaoh’s authority for its own financial and political gain. What follows is a lesson in ancient Egyptian government that suffers from slow pacing and tedious detail. Prus wrote better novels set in his native Poland, including The Returning Wave (1880).

Creation by Gore Vidal (1981) - 5 stars

This is one of my all-time favorite novels. Set in the 5th century BC, Creation chronicles the adventures of Cyrus Spitama, a Persian ambassador who travels the known world rubbing elbows and matching wits with historical figures like Socrates, Lao Tzu, the Buddha, Confucius, Themistocles, Pericles, and several rulers of ancient kingdoms in present-day India and China. All the while Cyrus engages in his own personal philosophical quest for the meaning of life. Rarely will you find a work that’s both as entertaining and as intellectually stimulating as Creation. Vidal also wrote a very good novel set in ancient Rome, Julian (1964), about the emperor of the same name, but I haven’t read it in many years and have not reviewed it.

The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller (2011) - 3.5 stars
This isn’t so much a historical as a mythological novel. One of the characters, for example, is a centaur, and it occasionally goes into full-on Clash of the Titans mode. Mostly the story focuses on a homosexual relationship between Achilles and Patroclus, his dear friend from the Iliad. The latter serves as the novel’s narrator. Miller freshens the ancient Greek tales for a modern audience by making the mythical heroes less idealized, adding psychological depth to the characters, and staging scenes that vividly recreate life in the ancient world. I found the supernatural content rather annoying and wasn’t crazy about the way the story of the Trojan War is overpowered by the romance, but the book improves greatly in its second half when the Greeks finally sail for Troy. While this novel is no substitute for the Iliad, it is an admirable supplement to it.

What about the Aztecs, Inca, and Maya?
I wish I could include some great novels about the ancient Americas, but unfortunately I haven’t found one. I gave a mediocre review to Leonide Martin’s book The Visionary Maya Queen: Yohl Ik’nal of Palenque (2013) and a bad review to Graham Hancock’s novel of the ancient Mexica (a.k.a. the Aztecs), War God: Nights of the Witch (2013). Both are the first books in series I chose not to follow. The history of these great empires isn’t interesting enough, apparently, because the authors felt the need to resort to supernatural embellishment. Eduardo Galleano’s Genesis (1982) is a much better book, but it only touches on ancient myths before focusing on the Western colonization of the Americas. I’m still looking for a good epic of ancient Mexico or Mesoamerica that takes place before the arrival of the Europeans.

The Mad Scientist Megapack, edited by John Gregory Betancourt

One big bad apple spoils the bunch
The Mad Scientist Megapack, published in 2014, is one of many inexpensive ebook fiction collections compiled by Wildside Press. Like many of the books in Wildside’s Megapack series, this one is a mixed bag of classic literature, vintage pulp fiction, and more recent contributions from contemporary science fiction writers. The Megapacks often mix short stories and novellas with full-length novels, a strategy which doesn’t always pay off. This volume, for example, consists of a single novel that takes up a whopping 35% of the ebook file, followed by 22 pieces of short fiction. If you’re going to devote so much space to one work, the novel in question better be a pretty good one, but unfortunately David V. Reed’s Myshkin is not. This 1953 book is about an inventor who creates a device strikingly similar to today’s 3D printers, but then uses it for unethical purposes, the results of which ultimately come back to haunt him. While the premise is interesting, the book is a tedious and nonsensical string of poorly written dialogue and bad jokes, and I greatly regret the time I spent reading it. By contrast, Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a classic mad scientist tale well worth reading, is the second-longest selection in the book but still less than a third the length of the interminable Myshkin.

These megapacks are so cheap there’s hardly any point asking whether they’re worth the money, but is this one worth your time? For most of the stories here, the answer is probably no. This is not one of Wildside’s better compilations. About a third of the selections, however, are good enough to make this collection worth checking out. “Food for Thought” by Jack Dolphin, for example, is an excellent story told in the form of transcripts from an inquiry investigating the disappearance of an oceanological expedition. It delivers great sci-fi suspense that calls to mind the ‘80s horror movie The Thing. Matthew Johnson’s “Public Safety” is a delighfully innovative murder mystery that takes place in New Orleans. This New Orleans, however, exists in an alternate world where the French Revolutionary government of 1793 never ended and apparently the U.S. never bought the Louisiana Purchase. What a fascinating concept and a pleasant surprise!

Of the older authors, H.P. Lovecraft’s novella “Herbert West—Reanimator” is a great horror story that really pushes the boundaries of creepiness for 1922. Hugh B. Cave’s “The Corpse on the Grating” is another fine horror tale similar in style and subject matter to Lovecraft’s entry. Clark Ashton Smith also delivers a diabolical yarn, “Devotee of Evil,” about a mysterious modern-day alchemist attempting to distill the pure essence of evil. In Edmond Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved,” a mad doctor discovers how to accelarate human evolution. Meanwhile, on the kitschy side, “Dr. Varsag’s Experiment” by Craig Ellis is exactly the kind of enjoyably dumb, corny weirdness one might expect to encounter in a volume of this title.

Another selection worth mentioning is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1843 story “The Birthmark,” but despite the author’s reputation it’s a pretty mediocre and predictable affair. All in all, there’s a fair amount of drivel in this anthology, but if you like pulpy sci-fi the selections mentioned above are sure to satisfy. As for the rest, you might be thinking, well, as long as I’ve bought the thing I might as well read it all. While that’s an admirable attitude, for god’s sake skip Myshkin.

Stories in this collection
(Some novel-length works have been reviewed individually. Click on titles below.)

Myshkin by David V. Reed

A Light That Shamed the Sun by C.J. Henderson 

Incomplete Data by H.B. Fyfe

The Corpse on the Grating by Hugh B. Cave 

The Cosmic Teletype by Carl Jacobi 

Monster Kidnaps Girl at Mad Scientist’s Command by Lawrence Wyatt-Evans 

Great Minds by Edward M. Lerner 

The Man Who Evolved by Edmond Hamilton 

No Guts, No Glory by Edward M. Lerner 

The Devotee of Evil by Clark Ashton Smith 

Song of Death by Ed Earl Repp 

Status: Complete by Leslie J. Furlong 

Food for Thought by Jack Dolphin 

Dr. Varsag’s Experiment by Craig Ellis 

Public Safety by Matthew Johnson 

The World in a Box by Carl Jacobi 

Machine Record by Theodore Cogswell

The Birthmark by Nathaniel Hawthorne 

Herbert West—Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft

Zapt’s Repulsive Paste by J.U. Giesy 

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson

The Man Who Stopped the Earth by Henry J. Kostkos 

Sympathy for Mad Scientists by John Gregory Betancourt
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The Pharaoh and the Priest by Boleslaw Prus

(About as much fun as) an ancient Egyptian civics lesson
The Pharaoh and the Priest, a novel by Polish author Boleslaw Prus, was originally serialized in the Polish magazine Illustrated Weekly (Tygodnik Ilustrowany) from 1895 to 1896 before being published in book form in 1897. It was first published as Pharaoh, but Jeremiah Curtin, ubiquitous translator of 19th-century Polish literature, modified the title for the English edition of 1902. Set in ancient Egypt, the story takes place from 1087 to 1085 BC and focuses on the life of Ramses XIII, beginning with his adolescence under his father Ramses XII’s reign and proceeding to his own rise and fall as Pharaoh of Egypt. Coincidentally, it was published in the same year as another Polish ancient epic, the better known Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz. The two books are drastically different in style, however, as Sienkiewicz’s work is operatically romantic while Prus writes in a more naturalistic style with an emphasis on historical accuracy and realistic detail. Essentially a copiously researched political novel about the fall of Egypt’s Twentieth Dynasty, The Pharaoh and the Priest may suffer from too much authenticity in that it reads like an arduously long and tediously slow-moving Egyptian civics lesson.

The story begins as Ramses XIII reaches manhood and is just beginning to assume a leadership role in his father’s administration. After the son has proven himself an able military commander, the father sends young Ramses on an important state mission: to solve the mystery of why once-glorious Egypt is now suffering from shrinking revenue, a loss of arable land, and a declining population. Over the course of his investigation, Ramses finds himself continually butting heads with a priestly bureaucracy that secretly undermines the Pharaoh’s authority for its own financial and political gain. As he becomes more and more familiar with the workings of state power, Ramses resolves that when he takes over his father’s position as Pharaoh, he will bend the priesthood to his will.

Whatever Prus has to say about the mechanisms of power, he develops his case in a painfully slow manner. Never at any time did I finish one of the book’s 67 chapters feeling compelled to begin another. In each chapter Ramses learns a little lesson about the government, but both the author and his protagonist fail to really capitalize on this incremental knowledge. Prus occasionally undercuts his own attention to historical detail with hints of fantasy such as an unnavigable labyrinth full of treasure and an evil doppelganger for Ramses. For me, some of the more interesting passages in the book concerned Ramses’s relationships with women, but these threads were often only partially developed before being abandoned.

As a political study, it’s difficult to see how this book was intended to apply to the modern era. Prus may have envisioned the novel as a metaphor for the fall of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which took place about a century before the book’s publication. Though its depiction of an evil priesthood would seem to imply an antireligious stance, the real target of the book appears to be the aristocracy or governmental bureaucracy. If anything, Prus argues in favor of a strong central authoritarian rule, which may explain why this was one of Joseph Stalin’s favorite books.

As a literary epic of the ancient world, The Pharaoh and the Priest doesn’t measure up to Quo Vadis, Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô, or even Lew Wallace’s rather dull Ben-Hur. Prus is a writer worth reading, but I much prefer his writing when he focuses on his native Poland, as in his excellent 1880 novel The Returning Wave (Powracajaca Fala).
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Myshkin by David V. Reed

Lame and tedious mad scientist tale

Originally published in the April 1953 issue of Other Worlds Science Fiction, Myshkin is a science fiction novel by David V. Reed, who is perhaps best known as a writer of Batman comics in the ‘50s. In this mad scientist tale, the narrator, Lieutenant Henry Bannerman, returns from service in World War II and looks up his former roommate, a man known only as Myshkin. Bannerman finds that his old friend has gone somewhat off his rocker by devoting all his time and energy to the creation of a new invention. Remarkably, the machine that Myshkin has created is, for all intents and purposes, a 3D printer. It scans any object placed within its “cage” and creates a miniature duplicate composed of whatever raw material is fed into the machine. Myshkin goes beyond mere replication, however, pushing the envelope of what this 3D printer can do, until one of his creations gets out of hand and becomes dangerous.

While the basic premise of the novel is fine, Reed takes the story in directions that are merely frustrating and annoying. The book is incredibly poorly written, consisting almost entirely of dialogue in the form of convoluted, pun-riddled Who’s-on-First? routines that go nowhere and aren’t the least bit funny. All the action takes place in two apartments, where a series of unlikable, unfunny characters are constantly and pointlessly entering and exiting, to the extent where it’s difficult to keep track of who is where and what’s actually happening in the story. The cast includes two female characters whose sole purpose is to be sexy and stupid. A large portion of the narrative is given up to a Sherlock Holmes-style locked-room mystery revolving around how and why a bundle of clothes has been moved. Everyone eventually ends up fighting over a chemical compound, the value of which is unclear.

Science is almost entirely absent from this science fiction. The series of events that takes place is nonsensical and asinine. Never is any attempt made to offer an explanation for the fantastical happenings until the very end, where Reed provides a brisk and half-baked wrap-up. Myshkin is a tedious ordeal to read, neither intelligent nor entertaining. Though it was a respect for vintage pulp fiction that led me to read the novel in the first place, Myshkin represents the nadir of the sci-fi produced in the pulp era, a reminder that this was a time when newsstands were crammed with so many fiction magazines that just about anything could get published.