Friday, May 29, 2026

Introduction and story index

Welcome to the Chrononauts blogspot page, where we'll be posting obscure science fiction works in the public domain that either have not been digitized in plaintext, or have not been translated into English. It should be noted that all translations are amateur fan translations and should not meant to be taken as definitive, but we hope we can at least produce something readable that resembles the spirit of the original. 

We will also be posting transcriptions of our episodes here.

Discussions of these works can be found on our podcast - works that have not yet been discussed that are posted here will be discussed some point in the future.

We welcome feedback, comments, corrections, etc. You can contact us at chrononautspodcast@gmail.com

Translations:

Russian Empire/Soviet Union:

Latin America and Spain:

pre-pulp era:
from Los Cuentos Fantasticos:
from Más Allá:
Italy:
Germany:
Previously undigitized texts:
Bibliography and other features
Episode transcriptions and links to online stories

Below is a list of stories we've covered in podcast order. Transcripts will be posted when available and links to the stories, when available online, will be posted. We'll be posting links to stories from upcoming episodes when we announce them so you can read them before we discuss them. While we'll be transcribing future episodes going forward, we're pausing on regular transcribing the backlog of earlier episodes for now, but will be happy to generate one on request, so if there is any episode you are particularly interested in seeing a transcription of, please email us. These were edited from the OpenAI transcription software, Whisper, so some of these may contain transcription errors that we missed during the editing process. 

If you would like to see an index of stories we've covered by author last name, scroll down to the bottom of this page.

Regular content episodes:
Bonus episodes:

Index of stories covered, by author last name:
  1. Abbott Edwin Abbott - "Flatland" (1884): 19
  2. Adolph, Anna - "Arqtiq: A Story of the Marvels at the North Pole" (1899): 22
  3. Aligheri, Dante - "Divine Comedy" (1308-20): 1 
  4. Andersen, Hans Christian - "In a Thousand Years" (1852): 16
  5. Anderson, Poul - "The Man Who Came Early" (1956): 34
  6. Anonymous - "Arabian Nights" (800-1300):1
  7. Anonymous - "Urashima Tarō" (8th - 15th c folklore): 6
  8. Anonymous/authorship disputed - "Symzonia: A Voyage of Discovery" (1820): 8
  9. Arelsky, Graal - "Tales of Mars" (1925): 37
  10. Asimov, Isaac - "Trends" (1939): 40
  11. Asimov, Isaac - "Nightfall" (1941): 47 
  12. Asquini, Abel (pseud. of Oscar Varsavsky) - "Protonickel" (The Crimes of the LIO #1) (1953): 54
  13. Asquini, Abel (pseud. of Oscar Varsavsky) - "Nemobius Fasciatus" (The Crimes of the LIO #2) (1953): 54
  14. Asquini, Abel (pseud. of Oscar Varsavsky) - "Nyctalopes" (The Crimes of the LIO #3) (1954): 54
  15. Bacon, Francis - "New Atlantis" (1628): 1
  16. Balzac, Honoré de - "Gambara" (1837): 4
  17. Balzac, Honoré de - "Ursule Mirouët" (1841): 11
  18. Barnard, Charles - "Kate - An Electro-mechanical Romance" (1877): 20
  19. Barkova, Anna - "A Steel Husband" (1926): 43
  20. Bates, Harry - "Alas, All Thinking!" (1935): 38
  21. Baltzer, Francisco - "Summer Vacation" (1955): 54 
  22. Bellamy, Elizabeth W. - "Ely's Automatic Housemaid" (1899): 35
  23. Belsky, S. - "Under the Comet" (1910): 47
  24. Belyaev, Alexander - "Professor Dowell's Head" (1925): 29
  25. Bergerac, Cyrano de - "Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon" (1657): 1
  26. Bergerac, Cyrano de - "The States and Empires of the Sun" (1662): 1 
  27. Berman, Ruth - "Star Drek" (1968): 39
  28. Blackwood, Algernon - "The Pikestaffe Case" (1924): 27
  29. Blish, James - "Pursuit into Nowhere: Adopted from the Annals of Space Patrol" (1936): 39
  30. Bond, Nelson S. - "Lightship, Ho!" (1939): 40
  31. Bose, Jagadish Chandra - "Runaway Cyclone" (1896/1921): 15
  32. Brackett, Leigh - "Enchantress of Venus" (1949): 50
  33. Brackett, Leigh - "No Man's Land in Space" (1941): 31
  34. Bulgakov, Mikhail - "A Dog's Heart" (1925): 28
  35. Bulwer-Lytton, Edward - "The Coming Race" (1871): 8
  36. Burroughs, Edgar Rice - "A Princess of Mars" (1912): 50
  37. Burroughs, Edgar Rice - "At the Earth's Core" (1912): 9
  38. Butler, Octavia E. - "Kindred" (1979): 32
  39. Butler, Samuel - "Erewhon" (1872): 35
  40. Campbell, John W. - "Who Goes There?" (1938): 38
  41. Cavendish, Margaret - "The Description of a New World, Called The Blazing-World" (1666): 10
  42. Čapek, Karel - "Rossum's Universal Robots" (1920): 36
  43. Čapek, Karel - "War with the Newts" (1936): 51
  44. Chambers, Robert W. - "The Repairer of Reputations" (1895): 15
  45. Chesney, George Tomkyns - "The Battle of Dorking" (1871): 25
  46. Chiang, Ted - "Story of Your Life" (1998): 48 
  47. Clarín - "Future Story" (1892): 15
  48. Clarín - "Goodbye, Lamb!" (1893): 20
  49. Corelli, Marie - "A Romance of Two Worlds" (1886): 12
  50. Cozzi, Luigi - "Rainy Day Revolution No. 39" (1965): 54 
  51. Cridge, Annie Denton - "Man's Rights; Or, How Would You Like It?" (1870): 10
  52. De Camp, L. Sprague - "Lest Darkness Fall" (1939): 34
  53. Defontenay, C.I. - "Star ou Psi de Cassiopée" (1854): 3
  54. Delany, Samuel - "Babel-17" (1966): 48
  55. Dick, Philip K. - "The Last of the Masters" (1954): 47
  56. Dodd, Anna Bowman - "The Republic of the Future: or, Socialism a Reality" (1887): 10
  57. Doyle, Arthur Conan - "The Captain of the Pole-Star" (1890): 22
  58. Doyle, Arthur Conan - "The Parasite" (1894): 11
  59. Doyle, Arthur Conan - "The Maracot Deep" (1928-29): 18
  60. Duane, Diane - "The Wounded Sky" (1983): 41
  61. Du Bois, W.E.B. - "The Comet" (1920): 47
  62. Dutt, Kylas Chunder - "A Journal of 48 Hours In The Year 1945" (1835): 46
  63. Dyachkov, Semyon - "A Trip to the Moon in a Wonderful Machine With a Description of the Countries There, Customs and Various Rarities" (1844): 4
  64. Dyalhis, Nictzin - "When the Green Star Waned" (1925): 15
  65. Dyalhis, Nictzin - "The Sea-Witch" (1937): 24
  66. Elgin, Suzette Haden - "Native Tongue" (1984): 52
  67. Ellis, Edward S. - "The Steam Man of the Prairies" (1868): 7
  68. Ellis, Sophie Wenzel - "Creatures of the Light" (1930): 38
  69. Ellison, Harlan - "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (1967): 46
  70. Epheyre, Charles - "Professor Bakermann's Microbe" (1890): 15
  71. Fabra, Nilo María - "Teitan the Proud - Tale of Things to Come" (1895): 15
  72. Farley, Ralph Milne - "The Rexmel" (1935): 39
  73. Forster, E.M. - "The Machine Stops" (1909): 36
  74. Forster, E.M. - "Little Imber" (1961): 44
  75. Fuller, Alice W. - "A Wife Manufactured to Order" (1895): 35
  76. Gallun, Raymond Z. - "Old Faithful" (1934): 38
  77. Garin-Mikhailovskii, Nikolai Georgievich - "The Genius" (1901): 19
  78. Gaspar y Rimbau, Enrique Lucio Eugenio - "El Anacronópete" (1887): 6
  79. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins - "Herland" (1915): 10
  80. Godwin, Francis - "The Man in the Moone" (1638): 1
  81. Gorriti, Juana Manuela - "He Who Listens May Hear — To His Regret: Confidence of a Confidence" (1865): 11
  82. Gorriti, Juana Manuela - "Herbs and Pins" (1876): 11
  83. Griffith, George - "The Angel of the Revolution" (1893): 17
  84. Griffith, Mary - "Three Hundred Years Hence" (1836): 10
  85. Grunert, Carl - "Mr. Vivacius Style" (1908): 29
  86. Grunert, Carl - "The Martian Spy" (1908): 26
  87. Hamm, George - Cluck Rogers in Astounding (1936): 39
  88. Hansen, Lucile Taylor - "The Undersea Tube" (1929): 31
  89. Harris, Clare Winger - "A Runaway World" (1926): 25
  90. Harris, Clare Winger - "The Fate of the Poseidonia" (1927): 26
  91. Hawthorne, Nathaniel - "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" (1837): 4
  92. Hawthorne, Nathaniel - "Rappacini's Daughter" (1844): 4
  93. Henderson, Zenna - "Something Bright" (1960): 53 
  94. Hering, Henry A. - "Silas P. Cornu's Dry Calculator" (1898): 19
  95. Hinton, Charles H. - "An Unfinished Communication" (1885): 27
  96. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Voice in the Night" (1907): 23
  97. Hodgson, William Hope - "The House on the Borderland" (1908): 27
  98. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Horse of the Invisible" (1910): 30
  99. Hodgson, William Hope - "The House Among the Laurels" (1910): 30
  100. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Searcher of the End House" (1910): 30
  101. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Whistling Room" (1910): 30
  102. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Gateway of the Monster" (1910): 30
  103. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Thing Invisible" (1912): 30
  104. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Derelict" (1912): 23
  105. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Haunted Jarvee" (1929): 30
  106. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Find" (1947): 30
  107. Hodgson, William Hope - "The Hog" (1947): 30
  108. Hoevenbergh, Henry Van - "Into the Jaws of Death, A Telegraph Operator's Story" (1877): 20
  109. Hoffmann, E.T.A - "The Automata" (1814): 7
  110. Hoffmann, E.T.A. - "The Sandman" (1816): 4
  111. Holberg, Ludvig - "Niels Klim's Journey Under the Ground" (1741): 8
  112. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao - "Horacio Kalibang or the Automata" (1879): 7
  113. Holmberg, Eduardo Ladislao - "The Marvelous Voyage of Mr. Nic-Nac" (1875-76): 12
  114. Hossain, Rokeya Sakhawat - "Sultana's Dream" (1905): 10
  115. Irving, Minna - "The Moon Woman" (1929): 31
  116. James, Henry - "In the Cage" (1898): 20
  117. James, P.D. - "Children of Men" (1992): 44
  118. Jarry, Alfred - "Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician" (1898): 19
  119. Kardynalovska, Yelyzaveta - "Death of the Happy City" (1926): 43
  120. Keller, David, MD - "Unto us a Child is Born" (1933): 44
  121. Kepler, Johannes - "Somnium" (1608): 1 
  122. Kersh, Gerald - "The Brighton Monster" (1948): 46
  123. Kipling, Rudyard - "Wireless" (1902): 20
  124. Kipling, Rudyard - "With the Night Mail" (1905): 17
  125. Kipling, Rudyard - "As Easy as A.B.C." (1912): 17
  126. Komatsu, Sakyo - "The Savage Mouth" (1979): 46
  127. Kornbluth, C.M. - "The Marching Morons" (1951): 53 
  128. Kuppord, Skelton - "A Fortune From the Sky" (1903): 25
  129. Lafferty, R.A. - "Rainbird" (1961): 53 
  130. Lang, Herrmann - "The Air Battle" (1859): 16
  131. Latimer, Elizabeth Wormeley - "The Sirdar's Chess-Board" (1885): 19
  132. Le Guin, Ursula K. - ""Author of the Acacia Seeds" (1974): 48 
  133. Leiber, Fritz - "The Big Time" (1958): 42 
  134. Leiber, Fritz - "Try and Change the Past" (1958): 42
  135. Leiber, Fritz - "A Deskful of Girls" (1958): 42
  136. Leiber, Fritz - "Damnation Morning" (1959): 42
  137. Leiber, Fritz - "The Oldest Soldier" (1960): 42
  138. Leiber, Fritz - "No Great Magic" (1963): 42
  139. Leiber, Fritz - "Knight to Move" (1965): 42
  140. Leinster, Murray - "Sidewise in Time" (1934): 38
  141. Lewis, C.S. - "Out of the Silent Planet" (1938): 14
  142. Lindsay, David - "A Voyage to Arcturus" (1920): 13
  143. Locke, Richard - "The Great Moon Hoax" (1835): 5
  144. Long, Amelia Reynolds - "When the Half Gods Go" (1939): 40
  145. Long, Frank Belknap - "The Hounds of Tindalos" (1929): 24
  146. Lovecraft, H.P. - "Dagon" (1917): 24
  147. Lovecraft, H.P. - "Herbert West - Reanimator" (1922): 29
  148. Lucian - "A True Story" (~150): 1
  149. Lugones, Leopoldo - "An Inexplicable Phenomenon" (1906): 12
  150. Lugones, Leopoldo - "The Omega Force" (1906): 25
  151. Lugones, Leopoldo - "The Psychon" (1906): 12
  152. MacInnes, Helen - "Above Suspicion" (1941): 26
  153. MacLean, Katherine - "Contagion" (1950): 53 
  154. Martinson, Harry - "Aniara" (1956): 37
  155. McLandburgh, Florence - "The Automaton Ear" (1876): 7
  156. Meade, L. T. and Eustace, Robert - "Where the Air Quivered" (1898): 15
  157. Meek, Captain S. P. - "The Cave of Horror" (1930): 38
  158. Merrill, Judith - "That Only a Mother" (1948): 44
  159. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Tachypomp" (1873): 19
  160. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Inside of the Earth: A Big Hole through the Planet from Pole to Pole" (1876): 9
  161. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Man Without a Body" (1877): 45
  162. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Ablest Man in the World" (1879): 36
  163. Mitchell, Edward Page - "The Clock that Went Backward" (1881): 6
  164. Mitchell, Edward Page - "Old Squids and Little Speller" (1885): 28
  165. Moore, C.L. - "Shambleau" (1933): 50
  166. Moore, C. L. - "Greater Than Gods" (1939): 40
  167. Moore, C. L. and Henry Kuttner - "Vintage Season" (1946): 34
  168. Morrison, Arthur - "The Case of the Dixon Torpedo" (1894): 26
  169. Morrow, W.C. - "The Monster Maker" (1887): 45
  170. Mortimore, Jim - "The Eye of Heaven" (1998): 41
  171. Moskowitz, Sam - "Why Doesn't Our Ship Move" (1937): 39
  172. Nervo, Amado - "The Soul Giver" (1899): 28
  173. Nervo, Amado - "The Last War"(~1906): 47
  174. Nichols, Joel Martin, Jr. - "The Devil-Ray" (1926): 25
  175. O'Brien, Fitz-James - "The Diamond Lens" (1858): 4
  176. O'Brien, Fitz-James - "The Wondersmith" (1859): 36
  177. Odoevsky, Vladimir - "The Year 4338: The Petersburg Letters" (1835): 4
  178. Orlovsky, Vladimir - "Steckerite" (1929): 43 
  179. Oesterheld, Héctor Germán - "Beware of the Dog" (1953): 54
  180. Oesterheld, Jorge and Héctor Germán - "Boomerang" (1953): 54 
  181. Peake, Richard Brinsley - "Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein" (1823): 2 
  182. Penrose, Margaret - "The Radio Girls of Roselawn; or, A Strange Message from the Air" (1922): 20
  183. Pestriniero, Renato - "A Night of 21 Hours" (1960): 37
  184. Poe, Edgar Allan - "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall" (1835): 5
  185. Poe, Edgar Allan - "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" (1838): 22
  186. Poe, Edgar Allan - "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844): 11
  187. Poe, Edgar Allan - "Tale of the Ragged Mountains" (1844): 11
  188. Poe, Edgar Allan - "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" (1845): 11
  189. Pohl, Frederik - "We Purchased People" (1974): 46
  190. Pope, Ralph - "$1,000 Reward — My Foot Race with a Telegram" (1877): 20
  191. Ray, Jean - "The Mainz Psalter" (1930): 24
  192. Reade, Philip - "Tom Edison, jr.'s Electric Sea Spider; or, the Wizard of the Submarine World" (1892): 21
  193. Rocklynne, Ross - "The Moth" (1939): 40
  194. Rosny, J.-H. - "Tornadres" (1888): 15
  195. Ross, Ronald - "The Vivisector Vivisected" (1882): 45
  196. Sandrelli, Sandro - "The Prototype" (1961): 54 
  197. Schachner, Nat - "City of the Cosmic Rays" (1939): 40
  198. Scheerbart, Paul - "Malvu the Helmsman: A Story of Vesta" (1912): 27
  199. Schuyler, George - "The Beast of Bradhurst Avenue" (1934): 28
  200. Senarens, Luis - "Frank Reade Jr., and His New Steam Man, or the Young Inventor's Trip to the Far West" (1892?): 21
  201. Serviss, Garrett - "Edison's Conquest of Mars" (1898): 21
  202. Shelley, Mary - "Frankenstein" (1818): 2
  203. Shelley, Mary - "The Last Man" (1826): 2
  204. Shelley, Percy - "The Magnetic Lady to Her Patient" (1822): 11
  205. Shunrō, Oshikawa - "The Undersea Warship" (1900): 18
  206. Sigov, Dmitry - "Journey to the Sun and the Planet Mercury and All the Visible and Invisible Worlds" (1832): 4
  207. Sigov, Dmitry - "The Talk of Moscow Citizens about the Comet of 1832" (1832): 4
  208. Smith, Clark Ashton - "The Primal City" (1934): 39
  209. Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott - "The Ray of Displacement" (1903): 15
  210. Spofford, Harriet Elizabeth Prescott - "The Moonstone Mass" (1868): 22
  211. Stapledon, Olaf - "Sirius" (1944): 29
  212. St. Clair, Margaret - "Roberta" (1962): 53  
  213. Stevens, Francis - "Claimed!" (1920): 24
  214. Stone, Leslie F. - "Out of the Void" (1929): 31
  215. Strobl, Karl Hans - "The Triumph of Mechanics" (1907): 35
  216. Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris - "Roadside Picnic" (1972): 49 
  217. Strugatsky, Arkady and Boris - "Wanderers and Travellers" (1963): 54 
  218. Sturgeon, Theodore - "Ether Breather" (1939): 20
  219. Sturgeon, Theodore - "Slow Sculpture" (1970): 53 
  220. Tiptree, James, jr. - "The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973): 46
  221. Toombs, Robert - "Electric Bob's Big Black Ostrich; or, Lost on the Desert" (1893): 21
  222. Tsiolkovsky, Konstantin - "On the Moon" (1893): 5
  223. Twain, Mark - "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" (1889): 33
  224. Two Women of the West - "Unveiling a Parallel: A Romance" (1893): 10
  225. Unamuno, Miguel de - "Mechanopolis" (1913): 15
  226. Vance, Jack - "The Languages of Pao" (1958): 48
  227. van Vogt, A. E.  - "Black Destroyer" (1939): 40
  228. Verne, Jules - "Journey to the Center of the Earth" (1864): 9
  229. Verne, Jules - "From the Earth to the Moon" (1865): 5
  230. Verne, Jules - "Around the Moon" (1869): 5
  231. Verne, Jules - "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas: A World Tour Underwater" (1869-70): 18
  232. Verne, Jules - "The Sphinx of the Ice Realm" (1897): 22
  233. Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Jean-Marie-Mathias-Philippe-Auguste, comte de - "Tomorrow's Eve" (1886): 7
  234. Visiak, E.H. - "Medusa" (1929): 23
  235. Vladko, Volodymyr - "The Defeat of Jonathan Govers" (1929): 36
  236. Volkov, Alexey Matveyevich  - "Aliens" (1928): 43
  237. Voltaire - "Micromegas" (1752): 1
  238. Webb, Jane - "The Mummy! A Tale of the Twenty-Second Century" (1827): 3
  239. Wells, H.G. - "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888): 6
  240. Wells, H.G. - "The Time Machine" (1895): 6
  241. Wells, H.G. - "The Island of Doctor Moreau" (1896): 45
  242. Wells, H.G. - "Under the Knife" (1896): 45
  243. Wells, H.G. - "The First Men in the Moon" (1901): 5
  244. Wells, H.G. - "The New Accelerator" (1901): 31
  245. Wells, H.G. - "The War in the Air" (1908): 16
  246. Whelpley, James Davenport - "The Atoms of Chladni" (1860): 4
  247. Wilkins, Mary E. - "An Old Arithmetician" (1885): 19
  248. Williamson, Jack - "The Prince of Space" (1931): 31
  249. Zuev-Ordynets, Mikhail - "The Lord of Sound" (1926): 43

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Episode 54.6 transcription - Francisco Baltzer - "Summer Vacation" (1955)

(listen to episode on Spotify) 

(music: interstellar phasing)

JM:

Hello, this is Chrononauts, the Science Fiction Literature History Podcast. I am JM, and I am here with Gretchen and Nate, my perpetual co-hosts.

This block, we’re talking about International Science Fiction. Last block, we were talking about the American magazine Galaxy, and now we’re talking about some of the sort of offshoots, but also independent publications. We talked about Galaxy International. We did a story from the Strugatsky brothers. We talked about Luigi Cozzi’s story. We talked about Sandro Sandrelli. And we’ve actually moved into talking about stories from Más Allá, which is an Argentine magazine.

We’ve covered a few things from there so far. We’ve covered Oesterheld, a pretty popular, writer of the fantastic from Argentina. We’ve talked about Abel Asquini and his three stories of murder and mayhem in a scientific laboratory. And now it’s time to talk about “Summer Vacation.” You can find all these stories on our Blogspot. If you’re curious, I think you will also find a link there to actual magazine scans, where you can look at the illustrations and stuff like that, or read in Spanish if you want to.

So I’ve got my work cut out for me today, because we know absolutely nothing about Francisco Baltzer. This is going to be quite a contrast to the last time I took the head mic, where I think we spent more time talking about Luigi Cozzi’s background and the movie “Starcrash” than the actual story. I think that was fine. There’s more story here, certainly. And this one holds together pretty well as a story. It’s quite, quite silly, but it’s cool and fun.

So just briefly, like I said, we don’t know anything about this person. But he seems to have lived from 1927 to 2005, so quite a longer life than our last couple of writers, certainly. It seems like he did write some other things. Most of it’s unpublished, though, including a novel. He did write one other story, “The Factory Ship,” that was published in this magazine. But the one we’re talking about came out in the January 1955 issue of Más Allá.

Out of all the stories we’re doing this block, this one probably has the most forward momentum and action, I guess. This is kind of a different type of story. It definitely felt of its time, but not in a way that was negative, I would say. I think something about the bare way it was written made me think—I don’t know if cinematic would be the right word—but I can definitely picture this as a TV episode of some anthology series or something like that. It would be pretty good as that. We always say “The Twilight Zone”-esque; I don’t know about that, just any kind of weird science fiction series from the ’60s or something. I think this would have been right at home.

Gretchen:

I could see it as a sort of one of the more comedic episodes of “The Outer Limits.”

Yeah, they did a couple of those ones.

JM:

Right, right. Yeah, I guess we’ll get into it pretty quickly and just fill in what happens. But yeah, any other general thoughts about this rollicking yarn?

Nate:

Yeah, I definitely liked it. It does have a comedic tone for most of it. But there are some definitely sinister elements that underpin it, especially how it ends. And you know, we’ll talk about how it ends when we get there. But I really like how he’s able to balance the two.

This one definitely comes together a lot better as a story than his other contribution to Más Allá, which is just kind of, I don’t know, all over the place and isn’t really that satisfying, even though it does have probably the greatest amount of crazy, overt science-fiction elements of all the stories that were published in the magazine. Whereas this one is definitely more grounded on Earth.

And it has a couple elements of other stories that I’ve read both before and after this. “Vintage Season” is obviously a comparative point, where we have astral tourists looking at what’s going on in a different environment. It’s obviously a bit different in how the story is set up there. But a story that was written and published after this one, that I just read for the second time, “Gonna Roll the Bones” by Fritz Leiber, also deals with gambling in a very, very different way. But it’s not a subject that you see, or at least that I’ve seen personally, discussed in a science-fiction context a lot like this one has.

JM:

Yeah, I didn’t quite know how to feel about this. It seems like the aliens are kind of doing sinister stuff, but at the same time, it’s very lighthearted. And in the end, I was thinking it was going to go in a certain direction. I won’t say until we get there, but I was like, oh, I’m pretty sure I know where this is going to end up, right? I don’t know if you guys saw the same thing. But in the end, I don’t know if it was more or less sinister than what I was imagining. Certainly more existentially unnerving, maybe. I don’t know.

But again, it just doesn’t feel like he took that aspect of it very seriously. It just seems like he’s having fun with the idea of these aliens among us and alien abductions and stuff like that. It felt like that undercut the horror a little bit, but it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. It just leaves it ambiguous whether you think maybe the ending is good. Maybe it’s a happy ending, right? I don’t know. It seems kind of like it might be. I don’t know. We’ll ask that question again at the end.

But yeah, why don’t I just say what happens? 

Basically, hanging out in the bars and dives of Mar del Plata are some alien mimics, and they hunt humans and enjoy mixing with less advanced cultures. Although some of them are better at this than others. Most of them have to resort to using funny accents because they can’t speak the local language, and so they don’t really communicate with people very well. But others put in quite a lot of work into this.

They’re an insect species, telepathic, and have a pretty handy gadget that can replicate anything, as well as operate in a reverse mode that disintegrates stuff. And a notable individual among them named Limo is one of the best astral travelers. He’s been watching this fellow named Chango Demartino, his target. And Limo has figured out that casinos are a great place to observe and hunt humans. Yeah, I would tend to understand that. Maybe that means some of the best places to contact aliens might be places like Las Vegas and Monte Carlo. I don’t know. It makes sense to me, right?

Yeah, that’s probably where they’d hang out.

Right? That’s where humans are morally most lax. I’m not quite sure what this absolutely has to do with the hunting, but there you go. I guess I can kind of see it because somebody who’s morally set up for destruction might find themselves in a certain position. And again, maybe this points to it being not very sinister, and easy to see as rather friendly aliens, actually. But I guess succumbing to temptation and all that.

Nate:

Right. Yeah, they’re exploiting the desperation that people feel when they’re thousands of dollars in the hole in gambling debt, or have been drinking heavily, or things like that. They can more easily be exploited than somebody who’s in their right mind.

JM:

But these aliens are more than powerful enough to just take whoever they want. I guess they like playing with them. At least this guy does.

Chango Demartino has a definite gambling problem, and it’s caused him to neglect his wife and also lose all his money. So tonight he’s been playing a game called Punto Banco, which is apparently a simplified baccarat. And that’s pretty cool. I remember that used to feature prominently in the James Bond books. Somewhere along in the movies, they changed it to poker and stuff because apparently the people making the movies just decided that nobody plays baccarat anymore, so they wouldn’t understand anything. But, you know, it’s the 1950s, and yeah, it fits.

All he has left is his Buick automobile. From reading his mind, Limo knows he desperately wants money to continue playing and recoup his losses. Limo doesn’t actually have money, but he acts quickly and methodically, exchanging a precious-looking ring for a 1,000-peso note, which he then copies eighty times. And Demartino has this crazy idea that he can get money for the Buick, which is parked in the garage.

So Limo introduces himself as Cacho and smoothly provides exactly what Chango needs. I don’t know if there’s something funny because of the spelling, I guess, but I didn’t think anglicizing it would probably be correct: "change-o and cash-o".

But Limo communicates with his base twenty-four light-years away. And a message gets put on tape: "Heliton 3", which is what they call Earth — "hunt No. 53. Register male biped under No. LQ-374, Chango Demartino in local dialect. First contact positive. All rights reserved. Signed: Limo, unique document No. 59421-471.”

Then it’s back to the table Chango goes. And we get a pretty cool description of the operation of the game of Punto Banco, and all the emotions that go along with the gambling and such. This definitely reminded me of a lot of “The Twilight Zone” episodes I’ve seen recently, including the one I watched today, which was the one about the two guys who own the cafe who go to Vegas, and one of them is telekinetic. The other one kind of uses his buddy’s powers to win lots of money, until the buddy’s like, okay, this has gone far enough, and he pretends to not have his power anymore so that he can get his friend back and stop him being greedy.

Anyway, there are all the people around the table, and Chango now seems to be doing pretty well. All of a sudden, neither he nor Limo realizes that the scene is being observed by two other astral travelers. These two are a lot less experienced than Limo and have already bungled around quite a bit. They argue a lot over whether gambling is a cult or a vice. And they’re sharp enough to notice something Limo apparently hasn’t taken into account: Chango has all the hallmarks of being married, but his wife isn’t with him. Humans normally share their most joyous experiences and moments with their significant others, and Chango sure is happy right now. So therefore, this is a vice, and he has lost himself, is, I guess, morally susceptible. Moreover, so must his wife be.

So I’m not quite sure how they do it, but they’re actually able to telepathically lock on to Laura, Chango’s wife, as well. She’s in a club having a great time dancing. And we get our mandatory, from every cool, swanky 1960s little film, nightclub scene. And she’s complaining to her partner about her husband.

Over in the garage, Limo makes a duplicate of the car while the attendant is occupied. Limo’s annoyed because now Chango is winning big, and he was expecting he would just lose again. So it’s time for a bit of mental manipulation, which does happen. Chango suddenly gets all confused and starts making bad choices.

It seems like the making of synthetic cars is pretty routine. Limo can control them remotely, and he can even create light reflections that make it seem like someone’s sitting behind the wheel of the car. The synthetic car drives to an esplanade and parks itself.

And after walking several blocks, the two alien goofs, Runo and Cotal, are thirsty. So they manage to mistakenly order aguardiente (brandy) instead of water. And we have another instance of, well, I’m not sure if it’s drunkenness saves the day exactly. But yeah, it wasn’t quite as fun as the—oh no, what was the name of that story?

Nate:

“Saturnino Fernández, Hero.”?

JM:

Oh, that one. But I was thinking of the Fitz-James O’Brien story.

Nate:

Oh, yeah, “The Wondersmith.”

JM:

Yeah, that one too, though. So yeah, there is another Argentine story that we haven’t covered tonight where drunkenness definitely does save the day.

Nate:

Right. Yeah, we’ll be talking about that one in a couple months’ time.

JM:

Oh, yes. Okay. Yeah. So the aliens find that they’re intoxicated, and they can no longer control their forms. They don’t have any money either, and they’re starting to look more and more like the insects that they are. So they cause a disturbance, which results in a singer getting electrocuted by a shorting mic, and they end up being chased into the bathroom, where they hide and almost die from alcohol poisoning. So that’s good.

Gretchen:

I would also like to mention the illustration that is in here. They draw the two, Runo and Cotal, in the bathroom, and they look like very cartoonish ants in just very baggy clothes. This imagery, and also the hijinks of these two, undercut the more sinister implications. There are definitely some ominous things going on with Limo, but these two just kind of look cute.

They look very cute.

JM:

Yeah, definitely. 

Nate:

It is a fun B-plot of the two bumbling aliens, and pure comic story here, where he could have easily had the B-plot be something more dark and sinister, but he chose to make it lighter, and I think that is a nice touch.

Gretchen:

The contrast between Limo hunting humans, and then just the hijinks of these other two alien travelers here.

JM:

Yeah, this is where I felt like—I mean, not this specific section, but with stuff like this—that the story did fall short a little, just because I think if there had been a little more dialogue and character discussion of how these people were doing and how they’re feeling, it might have been stronger. There’s a lot of telling, not showing, going on in the story. And I do feel like a second pass and a little more care maybe could have made this a little better to read.

But I did enjoy it as it is. I just kind of felt like I was being told a lot of stuff sort of after it happened. Even now, as I’m summarizing, I’m kind of realizing, well, it’s not exactly written like that in the story, because you don’t really actually find out what happened to these two until afterwards, right? And it would have been nice, not just with them, but also with all the other characters, to get a little more internal thought processes and stuff like that.

And I realize this is already one of the longer stories. I don’t know. Maybe. I mean, a couple of the stories in the magazine do have more of that. Some that we’ll probably talk about next time we cover Más Allá. But yeah, I don’t know. I wanted to see not more action, but just more conversation. The conversation that the two bungling aliens have at the beginning is pretty fun, and I wanted to see more of that. More of them interacting, and more Chango thinking about, like, oh, how is he going to do this? What about his wife and all this stuff? What is his wife doing?

They do seem to care for each other, and she complains about him. What does he think about her? What is he saying? He doesn’t say much, really. But it’s okay. It’s okay. It is what it is. Sometimes you can be a little harsh on some of these stories, I guess, because people tend to say anyway that a lot of science-fiction stories from the so-called "Golden Age" and stuff don’t have a lot of character development. And sometimes that’s fair. Sometimes maybe it’s a little not fair. And then sometimes I feel like some of the writers do try. But yeah, I don’t know.

But meanwhile, there’s a lot of trouble at the Casino. Counting the winnings, it’s been noted that some of the bills are counterfeits: the best counterfeits that have ever been made. And this actually did remind me of a couple of other stories, one where aliens attempt to screw up America by counterfeiting money. I thought it was kind of bad. That’s in one of those massive Halcyon Classics “Golden Age of Science Fiction” anthologies that I’ve talked about before, where they just cram a whole bunch of disparate stuff into this massive e-book. You can download these and get them for pretty cheap, and they’re just like—I don’t know how many of them there are, probably several dozen—and they’re thousands of pages of random stories from the magazines and stuff.

But also odd things every now and then thrown in, like an H. G. Wells parody from the late 1890s or something like that. It’s really interesting and random. But some of the stories are really not good. They don’t seem to put these things together based on quality. It’s kind of irritating because the collections don’t even list the publication dates or anything of the stories. You have to kind of look all that up yourself.

But anyway, there was that, and there’s also a really good story by Edgar Pangborn, “The Good Neighbors,” in one of those short-short anthologies that I mentioned the other day, where there’s this alien UFO-type thing over the Earth, and this giant creature falls out of the UFO. It’s flying through the sky towards the Earth, and it’s an absolutely massive thing. It’s obviously in great distress, but it’s absolutely huge, and nobody can stop it. It crashes into New York and causes a ton of damage.

At the end of the story, they get a message from the aliens, and basically the message amounts to: yeah, sorry, one of our kids was fooling around, and our pet escaped our ship. We know that it did some damage, so we’re really sorry. Here’s some compensation for the damage. And they give them a five-dollar American bill. They get a five-dollar bill, and they’re like, well, we can’t even use it because it’s counterfeit.

And yeah, I really like Edgar Pangborn, and that’s definitely somebody we’ll be talking about on the podcast, given my choice, at some point in the future. Maybe in quite a distant future. I have lots of ideas for host choice, and we’ll be coming to that very shortly, actually.

But anyway, counting the winnings. Yeah, so these counterfeit bills are really something. You can’t damage them, and of course they have the same serial number exactly, which is the dead giveaway that they’re counterfeits. Chango, though, ended up losing big time again, and this time Limo is waiting for him on the stairs. But Chango is now in lots of trouble, so Limo has to distract a security guard to duplicate him inside a phone booth. And the duplicates also have synthetic brains, of course, and they seem to be controlled.

Chango is getting interrogated about the counterfeit money, and they’re going to turn the case over to the regular police. Inspector Chirriaga gets a call, and they take Chango to a truck for transportation to lockup. And it’s there that the fake guard pulls the gun and hijacks the transport. A Buick pulls up beside the truck, and Chango and the fake guard jump in, and away they go.

Chango is pretty angry with Limo, and Limo just calmly says, "yeah, you’re right. It’s my fault. But I’ll fix it". And that’s exactly what he plans to do. Basically, he’s saying, I’m going to give you an offer you can’t refuse: a free stay at an awesome resort that some partners and I have invested in, for you and your wife, and lots of money too.

And Limo does take the time to rescue Laura. Also, they run into Cotal and Runo, who have bungled things really badly. Limo introduces the two as his partners, and says they’ve been having a little too much fun in the city.

So meanwhile, there’s a chase between the police and the Buick, which of course is being driven by a replica of Chango now. There’s a massive collision and fireball, because every great SF story needs explosions. And now Laura and Chango are believed dead, and the case can be closed.

Laura and Chango have apparently made up by the end, and Laura is excited about going to this resort place. They’re driving really fast on the highway, and suddenly a ball of light hurtles toward them. Laura screams, and then they’ve been abducted by aliens.

And this is where I thought—so I assumed that they were actually going to eat them. That’s what I thought this was going to be. Yeah, sorry, we just abducted you; humans are our delicacy on our planet, and we’re going to make you a great feast. But nothing like that. Everything does seem fine. And they arrive at their beautiful destination.

It’s like some kind of—you know when you get a random call from this automated number, and it’s like, you won a trip to Barbados or something like that, press nine to claim your offer? It’s like that, but actually real. Though I guess it’s some kind of zoo. And so what they do is they capture specimens, and they have some kind of wish synchronizer that basically looks into their minds, figures out what they want most, and just gives it to them. It’s beautiful beaches, trees, perfect weather, you name it. And Laura gushes that she could stay there forever. And it’s looking like exactly that’s what will happen.

I guess they’re happy. And we get a little discussion between Limo and some of his alien friends. They talk about taking away the travel licenses of the two poor, cute bunglers, who didn’t really do that much damage, all things considered, and they didn’t actually kidnap anybody. So there’s that, right? I think they’d actually be not as harmful to have around as somebody who kidnaps gamblers.

But they talk about all the other kinds of creatures they have. They’re hunting a lot of things. They recently made contact with the four-dimensional civilization, and they have plans to go exploring there as well. And I don’t know. It’s weird. They just seem to be having fun, all around.

So I’m not quite sure. I guess they capture the couples. They like couples because they like that they can reproduce, so they can potentially have more humans. What do they do with them? I don’t know. They just look at them. But I mean, since they seem to like exploring the cultures of these people anyway, I don’t know, maybe there’s a class system. Maybe only certain people can afford to travel to Heliton 3. We’re not told. If you can’t go see cute bears or something like that in the forest, you can go see them in the zoo. Or go see a tiger at the zoo instead of going on safari, right?

Yeah, this is fun. Nothing too profound, I guess, but it’s an enjoyable read, despite my misgivings about there not quite being enough. I can’t help but feel like somebody could have injected this with a lot of pathos or something like that, and made you really feel the story. Maybe the question of whether it’s a happy ending for these characters could have actually been taken seriously, right? Like, are they actually better off where they are? I mean, Chango is going to be sought by the police all the time now, I guess, if he’d stayed behind. I don’t know. We don’t really know how Laura feels. She says she can stay there forever. I guess she will. So they’d better be made up, I guess. They’ll be there a long time.

Nate:

Yeah, well, it’s certainly better for them than being thousands and thousands of pesos in debt with the police after them. But, you know, at the same time, they are being exhibited in a zoo, even if they don’t realize it. Which I guess does make it a little bit more sinister, because the zoo is just so good, where the humans don’t know they’re being kept captive, unlike some of the other humans in a zoos.

JM:

How do we know we’re not in a world like that right now?

Gretchen:

Well, yeah, right. Yeah. Thinking back to this perhaps being adapted into some “Twilight Zone” episode or something like that, obviously the parallel that I think of is “People Are Alike All Over.” 

JM:

There’s a famous one with Roddy McDowall, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah, yeah.

Obviously, in that one, it’s about Roddy McDowall’s character realizing that he’s just there to be observed by these aliens, and he’s just stuck in the zoo. The question is, is that worse? Is that better than what happened here?

JM:

Yeah. Isn’t that part of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” too? Kind of, sort of, the alien zoo, right? 

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

I don’t know. And, you know, then you could get things happening like them doing experiments and being like, well, maybe keeping them happy all the time isn’t the best solution. Maybe we should introduce some hooks and twists into their lives that make things more interesting. Yeah, I don’t know.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I’m thinking of another story that I read recently from “The Weird,” “Sandkings” by George R. R. Martin, which is about a man with pets that he doesn’t treat too well, and eventually has his pets fighting others to see which one will win. And I can’t help but think that, if these other alien beings maybe want to make something more interesting, yeah, maybe it’s just boring to sit and watch them be happy all the time. Maybe they want to see some more action.

Nate:

Certainly, if they can read their minds with the wish synchronizer, they can easily find out what they dislike in addition to knowing what they like. So if they wanted to push those buttons, I think it would be very, very easy for them to do so. Certainly, zoos are not known for their ethical treatment of animals a lot of times.

JM:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I guess, you know, being telepaths, this is a little different from the aliens, right? Because they can kind of read people’s minds. There’s a lot of speculation about that in science fiction, and how much that would make you identify with other life, right? Or even just if it’s humans, you know, other people. It’s like, what would really happen if you were telepathic? Could you learn to separate yourself from everybody else?

And it seems like, again, in this society, there’s maybe a little bit of a class thing. I kind of feel like the bungling tourists maybe were, I don’t know, a little less informed and maybe a little more prone to losing themselves. Whereas Limo is this suave, high-class kind of figure. I did mention Bond earlier. Even though his role is nothing like Bond, exactly, I imagine him adopting that kind of personality to just deal with stuff on Heliton 3, and just being like, yeah, who can resist this guy, right? He can do anything he wants, and he knows it.

Whereas the other two can barely even keep track of their replicating things at one point. Yeah, one of the alcohol-poisoned aliens almost cuts his own leg off. These guys have no idea what they’re doing, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I get the sense that the two bumbling aliens were more like the tourists going on the safari and making fools of themselves, rather than the actual poacher and hunter trying to procure the specimens for the zoo.

JM:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, again, I think he could have gone in some different directions with this. As well as the character stuff I mentioned, there are really funny bits in this story. You could play up the comedy just a little bit. I don’t know. I had fun with this. I won’t be forgetting it. It’s cool. Again, I think we just sort of said, we may be seeing variations of this that are a little more effective. But again, they’re not normally played quite so lightheartedly.

Yeah, there’s a bit of an advantage to this. Although, yeah, I mean, I do wonder what’s going to happen in the future. And I guess I wouldn’t mind seeing more stories about the astral tourists and what happens and how things go. It’s funny with these magazine stories sometimes, because you start thinking to yourself, well, which of these stories deserves a sequel or something like that?

And sometimes we don’t even realize—I mean, usually we try to do a bit of research on Chrononauts, obviously—but there are times when I think most people, because they see these stories in anthologies now, if they’re published outside of the magazines, don’t realize that there’s more than just that one story. For example, “Old Faithful” by Raymond Z. Gallun has two sequels, and they’re not really available nearly as much as “Old Faithful.” From what I read, “Old Faithful” does seem to be the best of the three. But the other two sound pretty interesting, right? So if you like one story, you probably should read the others. And I don’t necessarily think that posterity has always captured that so well.

Anyway, this one, I’m guessing—I mean, well, yeah, because we know Baltzer doesn’t have any other stories except that other one that you mentioned, Nate.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, from what I can tell, after he died, Abraham and the zine that he ran got in touch with his heirs or something, and they unearthed those unpublished stories.

JM:

Yeah, I’d be wondering if somebody would put out a posthumous collection or something like that.

Nate:

They did publish them in an Argentine fanzine, but I wasn’t able to track it down. And I tried emailing Abraham, and I don’t know if the email address I found was still good, because I was trying to track down more information on Baltzer. But the sense that I got from Abraham’s book anyway is that he basically just left no trace in his life. Even his family didn’t know why he didn’t continue pursuing science fiction, trying to get his stories published, because he had a fair amount left behind that was written over a period of like twenty years or so. I think he started writing his stories in the ’40s. That’s when his earliest unpublished work dates from.

JM:

A lot of young writers of genre fiction did do that. They just sort of stopped. But a contemporary of Gallun’s, Laurence Manning, is somebody whose name I came across a lot. People say he had a ton of promise, and he was doing some really cool things. And then one day, he was at university and one of his professors or something sat him down. He’s like, these stories you’re writing, man, you’ve got to stop this. It’s ridiculous, and you’re punishing your own reputation. And he was so ashamed that he never wrote any science fiction after that. And, you know, it’s sad.

Nate:

But yeah, Abraham doesn’t speak to the quality of any of the unpublished stories. I mean, I thought this one was fun, and I like this one overall, whereas “The Factory Ship,” I don’t know, has some interesting ideas, but it just doesn’t really come together as a story. So I’m not sure if the other ones were better, if they were worse, if Más Allá just wasn’t interested in them.

Because out of all the original stories published in the magazine, these two are definitely two of the three longest stories that appeared in the magazine. The only one that’s longer than these two is the—I don’t know if it’s quite novella length, but it’s close to—"Rino’s Fantasies" story by Portas.

JM:

So it’d be actually quite interesting. I mean, when we talk about something like “Astounding,” or even “Galaxy” or “Amazing,” or other ones that we don’t talk about as much, like “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction,” we know what their editorial staff was like. We know what their policies were, kind of. We know what kind of stories maybe they liked and what kind of stories they wanted to publish, and whether they would have told an author to change something, especially somebody like Campbell.

After reading so much about that, I feel I know exactly what Campbell probably liked and what he would have wanted to change and so on. We don’t really get a sense with this. So I’m just kind of wondering. They didn’t publish a lot of longer stuff in the magazine. It could be that Baltzer wrote this story in this specific way because he knew that the magazine would accept it best like this. And if he tried to do something a little different, maybe he would have to work into the story changes he didn’t want to do, and stuff like that. So he knew what he was doing, and they published it that way. I don’t know, right? We don’t know. We don’t have any rejection letters or anything like that.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, it’s a bit different with a magazine like this, where they were mostly publishing translations of American science fiction, and the local authors that were natively writing in Spanish almost seem like an afterthought. A lot of the readership did feel that these were lesser than the American stories.

I don’t have a complete list in front of me of what they published in translation, though I did read some of the major ones at the beginning of the Oesterheld segment, when we were talking about the history of the magazine. And I’m sure not everything that they published was on par with “The Demolished Man,” or “The Caves of Steel,” or some of the works that are still recognized as science-fiction classics now. I’m sure they published translations of some of the lesser-known stories that weren’t considered as great as those. And I can definitely see some of these being on par with some of those.

I don’t think any of these are particular masterpieces, but I think several of them are at least pretty good. And I’m sure if we mined the depths of “Galaxy” to try to find the worst story that was published in American “Galaxy” or whatever, we could probably find a handful that are worse, or at least lower than the vast majority of these stories.

So it is kind of unfortunate that a lot of the Argentine readers kind of wrote these off as filler, or lesser than what was being published in the American stories. But that just might be several biases creeping through. And then we’re obviously looking at this from a completely different lens, nearly seventy-five years later for a lot of these stories, in a different cultural context than they were when they were first being published.

JM:

Yeah, I think it’s really interesting that we went down this hole in particular, because it is a little different than the American magazines. Although we have less context, we can still make some interesting guesses and suppositions.

I think we mostly finished talking about this, unless somebody has something else to add. But I just thought for a little fun, because we haven’t done this in a while: does anybody want to take a stab at rating the stories that we did? I would suggest we mention Asquini as one story, as we kind of lumped them together earlier. So I think that makes for six total, if we include both Oesterhelds as separate stories.

Nate:

Yeah, I would say so. So I’d probably put the Strugatskys at the top, then the Oesterhelds, then the Baltzer, then I don’t know what I would put after that. Maybe the Asquini, and then the Sandrelli and the Cozzi at the bottom. Though, I don’t know, I’m not really firm on the order of those last three. I think they all have their ups and their downs, but they’re definitely weaker than, I think, the Baltzer, the Oesterheld, and the Strugatskys.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I have a very similar list to that. I think I definitely agree with the Strugatsky and Oesterheld stories being at the top. Those, I think, were definitely my favorites. And yeah, I think the Baltzer being after those makes sense. But after that, yeah, I think they all have flaws and really interesting prose as well. Even the Cozzi, which, as we had mentioned, is a little bit less cohesive as a narrative. I did think that the imagery and the hints of the concepts that we get in there are really interesting stuff, and it works maybe as a bit of just a scene. I think it works really interestingly.

JM:

Yeah, I was kind of hoping for some blood and some conflict, but we’ve didn't get that, and I think we’re kind of on the same page with everything. And it’s kind of fun to realize also, after doing this podcast for quite a long time now, that actually we kind of usually are, which is cool. I mean, I don’t want to just fight, obviously, but it’s just kind of fun sometimes when people disagree on stuff.

Nate:

Yeah. And I think when we do disagree, we’re able to keep it civil. I don’t think we’ve ever had moments where any of us stormed off the podcast because—

Gretchen:

Yeah, actually, Cozzi was my favorite, and now I’m going to log off for the night.

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah. I think that occasionally we run into something where somebody is more willing to let certain things slide than others. But usually by the end of these, we’re kind of sounding like we’re in agreement on how we feel about something, which is just interesting. It’s interesting.

Nate:

Yeah, well, this has definitely been a fun block. I had a lot of fun doing these translations and posting them and getting them out there. And as I mentioned before, this is not the end of the Más Allá stories. We’re going to be returning to these in a couple months’ time, where we’re going to take a look at some of the more rapid-fire, shorter works. A lot of those are a lot of fun too. So there’s still more good stuff to come, as well as other stuff from Mexico, which you can again read on our Blogspot. So definitely check out all these stories. None of them are really too long, and I think we’re going to dig into some more really, really interesting stuff, even if we’re probably going to have, like with the Baltzer, maybe not a lot to say about the authors themselves.

JM:

Yeah. So that being said, let’s talk about our next episode, then. It’s my turn to actually pick a topic, a theme, or works. And we’re sticking with shorter stories for the most part. Some of them are a little longer, but are basically similar length to the kind of stories we’ve been doing this block. Actually, there’s a little more on them, though, so we’re going to take a little bit of a different approach to doing this.

We’re not going to talk about every single story in detail, but we’re going to pick out a bunch. And then maybe, you know, we’ll talk about the rest of them in a general sense. But we are going to be talking about the famous “Dangerous Visions” anthology, edited by Harlan Ellison.

This is a very famous anthology in science fiction, kind of epitomizing, I guess, not just the New Wave era, but Ellison’s own desire to sort of push boundaries and kind of break people a little bit, I guess. Basically trying not only to break taboos, but also maybe taboos within the science-fiction genre itself, and also social taboos and things like that.

So it’s going to get a little dark. It’s going to get a little weird, maybe a little uncomfortable at times. But I think we can handle it. And some of the stories are really good. Some are maybe not so good. There’s a wide swath of authors, from science-fiction genre staples to people who don’t really get associated with science fiction, usually. I think he really did an interesting job of soliciting contributions from authors that people would know, but also ones that maybe they wouldn’t know so well. Ellison himself seems like one of those people who knew a lot of individuals from his various—not just fiction work, but also working in film and television and stuff like that especially. So we’re going to see some of those authors, and some mystery writers, and some other kinds of writers, but a lot of well-known science-fiction authors as well.

We’ll be seeing some writers that are familiar to us from Chrononauts and elsewhere, including Robert Silverberg, Frederik Pohl, Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Harlan Ellison himself, R. A. Lafferty, Samuel R. Delany, David R. Bunch, and many more.

So there will be some authors we’ve talked about before. We’ll have a lot to discuss, and it’ll be really interesting. I think you guys have both already read a few stories in this, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I’m about a third of the way through. I just finished “Gonna Roll the Bones” again. This was my second time reading it, which is probably about the 33% mark, ish, or so. Definitely enjoyed some stories, definitely some stories that I enjoyed less. But I’m looking forward to getting through the rest of the anthology. I was definitely reminded of the TV Tropes article “Darker and Edgier.” And sometimes it’s like, okay, Harlan, you know. But yeah, definitely enjoying them.

I think we’ll definitely have a lot to talk about. And we’ll certainly have to figure out how we’re going to do this, because this anthology is pretty huge, and there are a ton of short stories. I don’t think we’re going to be able to give each one the Chrononauts treatment, or else we’d be here for the rest of the year. But yeah, it’ll be exciting. There’s some really, really good stuff so far, and I’m looking forward to some of the other stuff that’s coming up in the anthology that I haven’t read.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I was able to read a little bit during my break time at work today. So I actually just reached Ellison’s story in the collection. And yeah, it seems like there’ll be a bit of a mix of different quality of some stories, and a little bit of varying comfort levels and messages. But I think it’ll be a really interesting discussion about whichever stories we pick. And even if we can’t go into full length about all of them, I think just being able to mention some of the highlights of it will be really fun.

JM:

Yeah, so what I’m going to suggest that we actually do is we each pick three stories. And we come to each other before we record, and we basically say what we picked. I guess we’ll see if we have any duplicates. I’m guessing we probably will have some, but probably not all three. And if we do have duplicates, we’ll have to pick a backup. So I guess that’s fine.

But yeah, basically, we pick three stories each. I think we’ll start by just talking about the reasoning behind the anthology and some of the comments made about it. Then we’ll talk about our nine picks, and afterwards we’ll just sort of run down some of our other feelings about some of the other stories, and how we feel about how the anthology is shaping up.

So I’m looking forward to it a lot. It sounds like we’re all really a bit keyed up about it. So it’s going to be awesome.

In the meantime, though, I think you all should remember to keep your insect legs tucked away and make sure you sit on the right bar stools. Also, keep your replicator close to your person at all times, and don’t hit the switch by accident, because you might run into problems. Oh, yeah, and beware of subway trains too, because those blades could get you. We don’t want that. We want you to be able to listen to the next installment of Chrononauts, after all.

We are Chrononauts. This has been a great exploration, and we’ll see you next time.

Bibliography:

Abraham, Carlos - "Las revistas argentinas de ciencia ficción" (2018)

at No comments:

Episode 54.5 transcription - Oscar Varsavsky - "The Crimes of the LIO" (1953-54)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: spacecraft takeoff)

Varsavsky background, non-spoiler discussion

Nate:

Good evening and welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Nate, and I'm joined by my co-hosts, JM and Gretchen.

This month we're talking about Galaxy magazine's international reach. In particular, in this segment, we are discussing the Argentine magazine Más Allá, or Beyond, which was kind of an affiliate of Galaxy—not exactly a direct Spanish translation of Galaxy, but definitely close enough that it justifies heavy inclusion in this episode.

For our previous segments in this episode, we discussed the American magazine International Science Fiction, which was run by Galaxy Publishing House and imported science fiction stories from all over the world to the American market. We also talked about a couple of stories from the Italian magazine Galassia. One of those appeared in International Science Fiction, and one is an original translation, which you can read on our Blogspot at chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com.

Our last segment that we posted deals with the background of the magazine Más Allá, as well as two stories written by Héctor Germán Oesterheld, one of which was co-written by his brother Jorge. So definitely check those out if you are interested in more historical background on what we've been talking about so far.

But this segment will focus on Oscar Varsavsky, aka Abel Asquini, who wrote three stories for Más Allá. Varsavsky was a pretty interesting figure. He was born in Buenos Aires on January 18, 1920, to a Jewish immigrant family from Ukraine. Though his surname would indicate that the family was at one point from Warsaw—the Polish name for Warsaw being Warszawa (pronounced "Varshava")—I'm not sure why the English language doesn't make any effort to pronounce cities the way they're actually pronounced in their own native languages and just kind of makes stuff up. But that's what the English language does, so that's what we have to work with.

In 1943, he worked at the Philips Radio-Technical Research Laboratory in Argentina. At Philips, he worked with a multinational team, including a French engineer, Laverne; an Italian physicist, Levialdi; and an Argentine mathematician, Alberto González Domínguez, and a radiotechnical engineer Ciancallini, I would imagine some of these people get directly satirized in tonight's stoires. 

Varsavsky received a doctorate in chemical sciences from the University of Buenos Aires in 1949 and started teaching there the following year. In 1955, he briefly worked at the Institute of Mathematics of the Department of Scientific Research (DIC) of the University of Cuyo, and in 1956 and 1957 participates in the creation of the university of Bahia Blanca's Institute of Mathematics.

He returned to the University of Buenos Aires in 1958, and aside from a brief stint in Venezuela in 1959, he remained at the university until 1966, where he directed a team of researchers formulating the first economic models for Argentina and published algebra textbooks for secondary schools. After the 1966 Argentine Revolution, where the president was overthrown by the military, the military began intervening in the education sector, and there were mass resignations, including Varsavsky's.

Varsavsky lived in exile in Venezuela from 1966 to 1968, where he worked at the Center for Development Studies, or CENDES, at the Central University of Venezuela. On his return to Argentina in 1968, he founded the Center for Mathematical Planning, and around this time began to author his main works on scientific education and policy, which he is chiefly remembered for today.

Varsavsky rejected the idea that science happens in a vacuum and argued that science is inherently linked to politics and culture. In the book “Towards a National Science Policy,” published in 1972, he rejects the idea that Argentina becoming a scientifically advanced nation means that it is just emulating what the Americans are doing, and instead argues for a separate, independent way of structuring scientific development.

In this book, he argues "that contemporary world science is ideological in the same way as technology, production, and education, and that each type of society requires its own style of science, differing in content, priority problems, research methods, and practical criteria of truth, as well as in the sociological characteristics of the group of researchers." He argues that "our universities, in their not very successful following of Northern trends, are incapable of understanding the techno-scientific needs of that social transformation and end up as mere instruments of cultural colonization."

He goes on to conclude that "today the university teaches a science, a technology—physical and social—a concept of the professional role, and an attitude toward society that are imitations of what is done in the Northern Hemisphere. This cultural followership reinforces our economic dependence and hinders every attempt to reorganize our society on fair foundations and with more human, less reifying criteria."

He had a brief period in Peru, where he worked at the Center for the Study of Popular Participation in Lima from 1972 to 1973, and died in Buenos Aires in 1976, his health having been failing for quite some time at that point. So while he died around the same time as Oesterheld and Rodolfo Walsh and other left-wing figures who were murdered by the regime at the time, his health gave out before he was caught up in all that stuff, despite having been forced out of the country by the previous coup in the late 1960s.

In addition to his writings on science education policy, he was extremely prolific in writing mathematics and science publications, having around fifty published works throughout his career. His early work was on physics, logic, and mathematics, and the bulk of his bibliography is on mathematical economics, simulation, planning, and modeling from the early 1960s onward until his death.

It's definitely beyond the scope of the podcast to analyze his technical output and his writings on science education and policy, and we'll link to several books in the description that do just that. But we're of course here to look at his fiction output, which is pretty much ignored by most of this secondary sourcing.

We mentioned previously that he answered the letters that appeared in Más Allá in the letters column, but he also had three fiction pieces that appeared between the November 1953 and January 1954 issues of Más Allá, or Beyond, while he was still at the University of Buenos Aires. These stories are clearly heavily based on his time at Philips. Rather than publishing these under his own name, he used the pseudonym Abel Asquini. I guess the Spanish pronunciation would be Abel "Askini", but it sounds to me more like he's trying to do an Italian name type of thing. So I'm not sure how he would have actually pronounced it, using the Italian or Spanish pronunciation, but that was the name he used.

It would appear that these are the only pieces of fiction that he ever wrote, which I think is too bad as well. These three stories are more or less the same story written three times. They're all pretty fun and definitely have a certain charm to them. And since they're all more or less the same story, unlike when we did the Arelsky “Tales of Mars” series of three connected stories, I think it makes sense, when we do the plot summary, to just run through all three as a set in a row.

Then I guess before we get into the plot summary, we can discuss how we feel about them in a non-spoiler section, and afterwards discuss how we feel about all three of them as a set. I guess, with that said, what do you guys think about “Protonickel,” “Nemobius Fasciatus,” and “Nyctalopes”?

JM:

I don't know. It was fun. I mean, I don't know. It doesn't seem like a great place to work, does it? Everybody hates each other. 

Gretchen:

A lot of vindictiveness and pettiness.

Yeah, I think they're really fun. As you mentioned, they do follow very similar plot structures, so they all feel like the same story being told three times. But it is still a really fun read. You can see where the story goes, but there's still a fun little twist at the end. I thought it was nice to read.

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know too much about Philips in particular and the characters involved there, but certainly at other research laboratories there was no shortage of huge egos in the mix. Probably the most famous example is William Shockley, who was one of the co-inventors of the transistor, and who founded his own company after leaving Bell Labs. A whole bunch of people left, whom he referred to as the “traitorous eight,” and they went on to found Fairchild Semiconductor.

JM:

But he didn't try to kill anybody, did he?

Nate:

No, no, but he poured the fame and prestige and money he had into funding eugenics research in the latter half of his life, and was apparently a huge, notorious asshole with a really abrasive personality. And while he didn't try to directly murder anybody, you could see that just pushing it a little bit further, you might be able to get there. So, I mean, this is obviously satirizing some of the egos.

JM:

Rock-star scientists, basically.

Nate:

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

JM:

It's funny, I've been listening to a lot of YouTube channels where they talk about that kind of stuff, and the reason why bands break up, and stuff that I never really realized about some of the bands I listened to and the turmoil behind the scenes. And yeah, you would think that a bunch of scientists would be a lot more cool and collected, but I don't know. It seems like maybe Varsavsky is speaking from a little bit of experience here. 

Gretchen:

I guess anyone can be susceptible to office politics, even very extreme ones like we see in the story.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, my day job puts me in contact with a lot of people who have been basically working in those exact same facilities for years and years and have advanced PhDs, and some are major award winners. Not to name any names or say what I do, but some of them are, let's just say, less down to earth than others, for sure. So it's definitely not a problem that is unique to the 40s and 50s, and I think it is very much continuing to this day.

Certainly the trap that some people with PhDs fall into is that when you get your PhD, you become basically the world's foremost expert on a particular niche subject when you write your dissertation. That gives people the idea sometimes that, well, if they're the expert on this in the world, they're also an expert on literally everything else, and it can lead to some really unbearable ego issues. Yeah, it just makes dealing with some of those things difficult sometimes.

JM:

You should start writing your own stories, man.

Gretchen:

Yes. 

JM:

Just replace all the names and institutions. Everything will be fine.

Gretchen:

Yeah, write it under a pseudonym, you know.

Nate:

Yeah, right. I guess that's what Varsavsky did. I don't think he was ever directly mentioned in the pages of the magazine, either in terms of his fiction output or in writing the letters column. A lot of that stuff was elaborated on by Carlos Abraham's amazing work and some of the other scholars who have looked at this stuff before him. But yeah, Abraham, as we mentioned in the last episode, did an incredible amount of work digging into this.

But yeah, I think if you combine maybe the Varsavsky stories with the bureaucratic existential horror of the “Gormenghast” series, you might have a pretty good description of what the modern scientific and engineering research and development world looks like. Which is, I don't know, maybe less fortunate than it could be.

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah. I do kind of wish he had just told one story and made it more tight and awesome, and maybe a little longer. But yeah, I mean, it's fine the way it is. I guess in a magazine, it's a little different. It's not like he probably imagined that these stories would ever be put into some kind of book back-to-back or anything like that.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I can imagine it works a little better having it broken up by the other stories in each issue. Obviously, the way I read them is that I did just sit down and read them all back-to-back in one sitting, which, when you do that, obviously the similarities really pop out—probably more than they were intended to.

Nate:

Yeah, and in the magazine form, they're all really, really short. I think the pages in the magazine fit a larger word count than the pages of Galaxy, despite the fact that they're the same physical size. They have a smaller font, so they put more words on the page. But these are all two or three pages in the magazine, bookended by a bunch of 25-to-50-page novellas, novelettes, and other very short stories. So they're definitely among the shortest pieces that fit in the magazine here.

JM:

The way he set up the background and everything really made me think of a scientific detective story, right? I've always been kind of fascinated by the idea of science fiction detective stories, like this idea that in the future we might have something like that. I don't know. I appreciated that aspect. It's just, yeah, they were over when they practically began, right?

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

It's fine. I'm glad he told these stories, but I just, yeah, it's sort of the same thing that I sometimes have, even as a fan of really short stories, with a couple of these. I wouldn't say, oh, this, you know, just pick something and stick with it, and maybe add a little more depth to it or something. I can't even pick right now, and I thought about this, and I can't even pick which one I liked more than the others, really. Maybe the third one, just because it's the last one I read. I don't know.

“Nyctalopes.” I keep forgetting that, but that's also the name of a French weird supervillain-type novel series, “The Nyctalope.” Anyway, yeah, I can't even remember exactly if any of them stood out more than the others. I guess by the time I read the third one, I was kind of used to the format. So I knew it was pretty easygoing, just because I expected something like this. And there's always a bit of a twist at the end, but it's not really a twist, because you know something like this is going to happen, right? So yeah, I don't know. It was cool, though. 

Gretchen:

They do kind of blend together when you read them all in a row like this.

It does remind me a bit of thinking of when you said, Nate, that this would be bookended by a lot of longer works, a lot more of a variety of works in the magazines. Almost similar to certain magazines that might have a comic or something in there that would just be a running gag or a theme that goes through a different magazine.

I will say that even though they all do follow the same structure, it is interesting that all three of them tackle a different field of science, or, you know, a little bit of a change in which scientific area of the crimes that we will get to. They all kind of differ in their own ways, which is pretty fun as well.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, a lot of those research labs were literally working on everything. Again, I'm more familiar with Bell Labs in the 40s and 50s, and they had their fingers in pretty much every emerging technology at the time. And I'm sure Philips was the same way, because they were a Dutch company and they had a foothold in Argentina. It's just kind of crazy how some of those corporations were able to spiral out in an international way relatively early on.

(music: echoey scratches)

spoiler summary and discussion

Nate:

So, all right, let's take a look at what actually happens in these stories. Like I said, I'm just going to run through all three at once, and afterwards we can just talk about them.

The first one up is “Protonickel,” which is the first of the “Crimes of the LIO” series, and appeared in the November 1953 issue of Más Allá, or issue number six. It opens with our antihero Caldero, the Spanish word for cauldron. And I think it's the only punny last name I didn't note in the text, as it is an actual Spanish last name, unlike the other ones.

Mr. Caldero is fed up with all the pranks the neighborhood youths are playing on him, the “mad wizard.” He furiously kicks a wallet tied to a string, which normally would be pulled like a fishing line by these youths, but today he almost takes off one of their fingers by kicking it, exerting an incredible amount of force on it, causing a bit of injury to one of the kids on the other end of the line.

He hasn't gotten wise to their pranks, but is incredibly angry at the snub he got at his workplace, the LIO, or the Laboratory of Investigation, Orselec. Lío in Spanish means something like mess, disorder, or tangle, which prompted a whole bunch of giggles from the locals in Buenos Aires, as it was a foreign acronym coming from New York. And again, I would imagine that something like this probably happened when the Philips organization had something that they named internally from the Netherlands that probably did not translate well into Spanish.

One week ago, Caldero had presented his boss, Nogler, with the plans to develop protonickel, which Nogler scoffs at and hands over to El Petiso Trapisóndez, who finds several flaws with the plan. This is another one of our punny names, where petiso means short and trapisonda is a synonym of lío, like mess or disorder. Naturally, El Petiso has to die.

The idea is that since an atom's nucleus occupies a volume that's billions of times smaller than the volume of the entire atom, if you were able to scrub off the electrons that are rotating around the nucleus, you could fill all that empty space with other nuclei to create a superdense material: in effect, the first successful nuclear polymerization.

At home, his housemaid's iron is shorted out, one of the tricks played on him by Sebo, the wallet fisherman from the beginning. Caldero ignores this and goes to his laboratory, where he's already fabricated protonickel and will use it to kill Trapisóndez. In creating a superdense sphere, he'll only need a little of it to suspend over Trapisóndez's head via magnetic coil. And when the power is cut, the sphere will fall, its superdensity piercing the skull like a bullet. But since it's so small, it will leave no trace: the perfect crime.

Not so fast, however. As Sebo continues to play his tricks on Caldero, shorting out his cook's iron again, this causes the power in the apartment to trip, thus causing the protonickel sphere to fall through Caldero's skull, killing him without explanation. The doctors rule the cause of death as a stroke. So yeah, that's the end of “Protonickel,” with Caldero accidentally killing himself through an accident. Or actually, I guess in a way he killed himself, even though the cause was exerted by Sebo, not an intentional prank.

This brings us to our next story, “Nemobius Fasciatus,” appearing in the next issue, from December 1953, where we get a similar setup. Flaco Puntualini—the punny name of flaco meaning skinny, and Puntualini being some kind of Italian construction of punctual—is perpetually late to work, and thus he's being reorganized to work under El Petiso Trapisóndez. This won't do, so now he'll also have to kill El Petiso, and musing it over, arrives at Pavlov's conditioning.

So what he does is train a giant dog to respond to an ultrasonic tone, one that the dog can hear but humans can't, and attack a dummy. Poor Fusible, the dog, is shocked with electrodes to get the training, but eventually he tears up a human-sized object when the tone is produced.

Unfortunately for Flaco, the field cricket, scientific name Nemobius fasciatus, produces the same sound. So when one nearby makes this ultrasonic chirping, Fusible the dog sees the nearest human-shaped object, which just so happens to be Flaco, and tears him limb from limb.

And then our last story, “Nyctalopes,” appears in the next issue, from January 1954, opening up with Nogler posting a cryptic job posting in a local newspaper. And I would say out of all the translation work I've done, this was probably the biggest puzzle I had to work with. While I had to bend it a little bit to get it into English, I'm satisfied with how it worked out.

So basically, it's been made into very cryptic shorthand. The posting is “A. f. res. l., e. k. elec., req. CV to LIO,” which he intends to say, “Assistant for research laboratory, extensive knowledge of electronics required. Send CV to LIO.”

JM:

Oh yeah, I bet this was a lot of fun, right?

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

Yeah, yeah. Just trying to figure out how to do this. 

Nate:

It definitely was, and again, not 100% literal from the original. So if you want to check out how the original is versus my translation, we link to the scan of the original magazine in the Blogspot posting. But yeah, it's fun to have these interesting linguistic puzzles here.

And if the applicant isn't smart enough to figure it out, well, they don't want them anyway. Instead, they get hundreds of applicants thinking it says, “Apartment for residential living, enormous kitchen, electric, send required credit verification to LIO.”

JM:

Yeah, this was funny, actually.

Nate:

Yeah. It is a pretty good joke. And I think this one, the third one, has the most jokes in it.

JM:

Yeah, for sure. That's probably why I liked it best, right? Because it's more memorable.

Nate:

Yeah. Applicant number 261 comes in from a certain Cupídez, with help from Gladys, the LIO secretary. Cupídez, living up to his name, is in love with every woman he sees, including Gladys. And during his interview, he's impressively expounding on noctovisor technology while simultaneously fixated on Gladys and sighing frequently in her direction.

This thoroughly embarrasses El Petiso Trapisóndez, who decides he must kill Cupídez. Nogler assigns the two of them to work on the noctovisor technology, but El Petiso wants all the credit for himself. He rigs up an elaborate scheme, which is basically like an elaborate “Road Runner” cartoon, where he's going to have the night-vision visors make it seem like the road is flat and straight, but in reality, it's a dangerous curve going over a cliff.

Unfortunately for him, Cupídez has the exact same idea and beats him to the punch, which El Petiso realizes at the last second before his car careens off a cliff.

And I do want to comment on the illustrations on this piece, as they are illustrated by Luis Ángel Domínguez, credited as just Domínguez, as opposed to the previous two pieces illustrated by Pedro Olmos, credited as just Olmos. Both Gladys and the scientists are depicted with darker skin and features that clearly show them as not being Americans, unlike most of the other illustrations in the magazine. This somewhat ties into Varsavsky's anti-colonial themes, which he would address later in his nonfiction writing.

These are very much depicted as people living in Argentina, not generic Northern Hemisphere European-American types that you would see in a lot of the pulp science fiction. So it's interesting to see that cultural element come out in the illustrations for this story, probably more so than any of the other stories that appeared in it.

JM:

That's interesting, yeah.

Nate:

So yeah, that's our three stories, where we get basically three scientists trying to kill somebody, and only our Cupídez is successful.

JM:

This one had some futuristic car technology, though. That was cool.

Nate:

Yeah, it was. 

JM:

Yeah. It made me think of, like, yeah, a lot of people have screens on their dashboards now, right? It's a different idea about how to use stuff. It's not like a computer or anything like that, but it's, yeah, I don't know. It was kind of neat.

And yeah, I enjoyed the little double-meaning joke at the beginning there. It reminds me of something I listened to a while ago, where a guy was talking about the band The Shaggs, and he was like, “Well, even the name is a mystery, right?” And he's like, “Well, is it a bird? To an ornithologist, sure. Is it a type of tobacco? Yeah, to a smoker. And to a prog rock fan, it's a remote glimmer of a possibility.” Yeah, I don't know. Like, yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I also do like the added detail that Cupídez does end up filling the ad only because he had a clue from the secretary, rather than actually understanding what the ad was.

JM:

Yeah, yeah. Somebody needs to point out to the egghead that it's not what he thinks it is, right?

Yeah, and then you've got your applicant, who's actually a really good scientist and is like the wonder kid, right? And all the office staff are into him, apparently. And he's making sighing noises while he's rattling off formulas. Like, okay, he's okay. I wasn't sure exactly what was happening there, but it was funny.

Yeah, yeah. It was like, what is he doing? He's just looking at them.

Nate:

Yeah, just flirting with Gladys the entire time while he's doing this interview on night-vision technology, while talking about capacitors and the latest innovations from the North American research labs at the same time. Quite the ladies' man, it would seem.

JM:

Yeah, so naturally his rival, you know, is consumed with jealousy and wants to make sure that he gets all the credit for the invention and stuff like that.

Yeah. Will the rivalries and murders at the laboratory ever end? Who knows, who knows? 

Nate:

It doesn't seem so, because presumably if there had been a fourth one, there would be more murders to go around.

It would be cool if he did different crimes in each of the stories. I mean, as you were saying, Gretchen, I do like the idea of him focusing on different technologies in each of the stories, but if he just came up with another idea of crimes that these evil bastard scientists could be doing, I think it would have made them stronger.

JM:

Yeah, they could even have the story take place after the crime, and have somebody come in and try to figure out exactly what happened. That might have been fun.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

Gretchen:

Because I feel like the potential to have more than just murder at this giant laboratory, you know, there are all sorts of fraud and thefts that you could do as well. But mostly murder. “The Murders of the LIO” I think perhaps is a bit more apt.

Nate:

Yeah, yeah, definitely.

Gretchen:

Although I will say, now knowing a little bit more from the background, I think it's really interesting that there is that emphasis on LIO being a joke name because it came from somewhere in New York. The North American offices made this decision, and it kind of ties into this idea that, oh, this is a South American country trying to do what North America is doing and taking in that colonial mindset, and just backfiring and making it just another joke in this work.

Nate:

Yeah, exactly. And his writings on science policy, and I guess the anti-colonial themes that come out in his views on what Argentina should be doing as far as science education and national research and development, all that kind of stuff, were way later than these. These were pretty early in his career, written in the early 50s, while he was writing that stuff in the late 60s and early 70s.

But I mean, there's clearly an anti-colonial theme that runs throughout here, even though it's not in the forefront. We, I guess, see the joke from the New York office as well as, I guess, a kind of international cast of characters, which is kind of hard to say with Argentina, as Argentina has a lot of immigrants from all over the world, really.

JM:

Yeah, and even just the names of our characters and the authors, we see quite a variety of potential influences, you know, Varsavsky being Ukrainian/Polish, right?

Nate:

Yeah. 

Gretchen:

And I think it's interesting too that a lot of the puns, as you were saying, you had to add notes about, because they're very culturally specific to Argentina, to the language being spoken, which is always the case with wordplay. But I think the fact that he chose to write in this style and have all of those puns also speaks to him wanting to put that Argentine identity into his work.

Nate:

And I definitely wanted to keep that in the translation and spell it out with notes, rather than just translating the words themselves, like International Science Fiction magazine did with the Luigi Cozzi story. I didn't read that in the original Italian, but you had the last names of, like, “I'm a Believer” translated into English. So I don't know if he kept that in English, from the Monkees song, or if he actually wrote it in Italian.

But there are a lot of times in other stories where they will translate the puns and things like that. I think it just strips the cultural identity from the original stories when you do that. So I wanted to keep that in the story as much as possible, even though I don't know, I sometimes feel like I annotate the stories too much. But I would rather have more annotations than too few annotations, I guess, because I really do want to keep the cultural identity of these stories as much as possible.

JM:

Yeah, and it is good when you get a really good copy of a classic work translated from whatever language, and there are some annotations explaining a lot of things. And sometimes, yeah, maybe some of the notes are unnecessary because you might already have some basic knowledge, right? But you can't really assume that the readers are going to be conversant with a lot of stuff.

So the Pevear and Volokhonsky translations of Russian classics all have extensive annotations that explain everything from geography to what was going on in the newspapers at certain times, and social trends and stuff like that. They take the time to try to explain all that, if people want to read those. So I think that's a nice feature to have in a translated work, or even a classic work or something like that.

And yeah, these stories may be, from a certain perspective, minor works, but this is the first time anybody's really looked at them like this, in this fashion. So it's good to do that.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. And I guess one of the reasons that we're doing this is that we want to make this stuff accessible to more people. I mean, there have been a couple analyses of these stories in English, but Rachel Haywood Ferreira doesn't go over these stories, and I think they only get a cursory mention in the fanzine history of Argentine science fiction that was published. The Carlos Abraham book is still only in Spanish. So I mean, yeah, the English-language material that talks about these stories is pretty scant.

And these stories have never been published anywhere in English before, though they did get a minor republication in Spanish when the Spanish magazine Nueva Dimensión published them in the magazine. But they've never been collected in book form or anything like that. I think possibly the only stories that you can get outside of the magazines, that have been republished elsewhere, are the Oesterheld stories, which were collected in an anthology of his fiction. 

JM:

He seems to be the most well-known as a writer.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. 

JM:

As a fiction writer, I should say.

Nate:

Yeah. 

JM:

I don't know if any of the people that we were talking about, besides the Strugatsky brothers, are as important as Oesterheld is in Argentine fantastic literature, right? If only because of “El Eternauta.” But Asquini/Varsavsky is obviously more known for his scientific works. So yeah, again, maybe a well-known name in certain circles, at least his real name.

When he was answering the letters, what name would he use?

Nate:

I think there was just no name used in the letters. I think it was just like how they would do it in Galaxy, where they would publish the letters and then publish a response.

JM:

Right, right.

Nate:

Where it's like kind of snarky.

JM:

Yeah, all the magazines did that.

Nate:

Exactly, yeah. And I mean, it's cool that they had their own letters forum because, like I mentioned in the last episode, it allowed fans from not just Argentina, but all over Latin America and Spain, to now come into contact with one another through this new forum of science fiction. It really was the first magazine in the Spanish-speaking world to have that broad impact and influence. Although there were other magazines that appeared before, they had very limited distribution and reach, and didn't have the U.S. influence that this had. This was really the one to open up the floodgates, if you will. Certainly a bunch of other magazines followed in its footsteps after the magazine closed down after the four years it was operating.

But yeah, cool little pieces. Varsavsky's an interesting figure, and certainly his nonfiction work has been analyzed a whole bunch. And again, we'll link to all those sources in the description. But I guess now are we ready to go on to an author who's not really known for anything?

Gretchen:

Sounds good.

Bibliography:

Abraham, Carlos - "Las revistas argentinas de ciencia ficción" (2018)

Rietti, Sara (ed) "Oscar Varsavsky: Una Lectura Postergada" (2007)

Schoijet, Mauricio - "Ultra-left science policy and anti-modernization in Argentina: Oscar Varsavsky", Science and Policy, Feb 2002

Varsavsky - "Hacia Una Politica Cientifica Nacional" (1972)

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Introduction and story index

Welcome to the Chrononauts blogspot page, where we'll be posting obscure science fiction works in the public domain that either have not...