(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 Most of it’s unpublished, though, including a novel.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)
