3.25/5 (Collated Rating: Above Average)

The career of Kris Neville (1925-1980) can be divided broadly into two parts. In his most productive period (1949-1957), Neville’s SF appeared in all the major magazines of the day, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in particular. Afterwards, while he continued to publish short stories at a far reduced clip until his death, he wrote a handful of fix-up novels between 1964-1970. This trajectory neatly maps onto the restriction of magazine markets in the late 50s and the growing importance of the SF novel.

Fellow science fiction author (and Boaz favorite) Barry N. Malzberg (1939-) has positioned himself as an ardent Neville defender. They collaborated, but never met, on a few stories before Neville’s death in 1980 and corresponded regularly. Malzberg, in the preface to The Science Fiction of Kris Neville (1984), describes him as follows: “He liked wine, hated Nixon, deplored mass media, missed Tony Boucher […] had a deep suspicion of American industry and its products […] found conventions, finally, wearying and had a deep and abiding love for the science fiction community” (ix). Malzberg suggests that Neville, “if given half a chance [I assume, by editors],” would have been one of the best science fiction authors (x).

I’ve previously read and reviewed Neville’s best-known fix-up Bettyann (1970), “Cold War” (1949) for my critical accounts of space travel series, and one of his collabs with Malzberg, “Pacem Est” (1970). Often Neville’s fictions read as traditional pulp plots–time travel, strange alien animals, telepathy, colonies on alien worlds–before devolving into critical views of technology, nightmarish existential terror, violence, and decay. No wonder Malzberg found his fiction appealing!

While none of the stories in the collection are clear-cut masterpieces, I am fascinated enough to track down more. What are your favorite Neville fictions?

Note: Two of the stories in the collection were revised for the 1971 publication. I discuss the revisions in more detail below. If anyone has Internet Speculative Fiction Database administrative access, the original and revised short stories in the Neville listing should be compressed, with revision notes, into single entries.

“Mission: Manstop” (variant title: “Mission”) (1953, rev. 1971), 3.25/5 (Above Average): First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McCormas (April 1953). You can read the original version online here.

On the surface “Mission: Manstop” reads as a straight-laced time-travel short story. A 1928 model Ford appears on a highway outside Washington, D.C. The driver, Gene Martin, travelling imprecisely into the past, hopes it’s before 1940 but instead arrives years late. The reason for the trip? Humanity’s survival is at stake. Gene approaches a journalist, and friend, Ray Levos with an unbelievable story. The task? Convince Ray that he is an older version of his friend. But physical toll on Gene is immense. And there isn’t time. Levos struggles with the possibility of Gene’s delusion of saving the world: “are you a savior or a demagog?” (33). As the dust settles, a bleak indecision takes over. There will be further violence regardless of the choices they make.

Neville’s revision takes the form of historical references–LBJ’s presidency, the Vietnam War, etc. (24)–inserted into the narrative, a deeper sense of despair as the Cold War extended into the 70s, and a few literary touches here and there. There’s a heightened sense of desperation in the later version due to the continued post-WWII conflict in Vietnam that will subsume America: “You have no idea of the realignment of powers that will take place because of what happens in China” (26). The revisions effectively update the original.

“Mission: Manstop” complicates the narrative of the time-traveling hero who sets out to save the world with a bleak interior tableau performed by the damaged and dying. Somewhat recommended.

“Hunt the Hunter” (1951), 4/5 (Good): First appeared in Galaxy Science Fiction, ed. H. L. Gold (June 1951). You can read it online here.

Two wealthy businessmen, Ri and Mia, are drafted by a violent autocrat, Extrone to hunt an alien “farn beast” (37). Tensions thrive beneath the surface. Out of Extrone’s sight Mia mutters to Ri, “what hurts most, he pays us for it. I could buy half this planet, and he makes me his guide–at less than I pay my secretary” (38). Like a British aristocrat trekking into the Bushveld to slaughter a rare black rhino (Extrone reads as a Cecil Rhodes-esque figure), Extrone treats everyone around him as a tool for his own ambitions. He plays them off against each other, preying on their fears, twisting them like string on a finger, reveling in their terror, yearning for the kill. But someone else is playing a game–and it might be too late to escape.

The best story in the collection reads as a study on the mechanisms of power and control. In a few brief pages, Neville effectively paints Extrone as a truly horrifying figure able to infiltrate and subdue the minds of powerful men like Ri and Mia. Adding to the unease, Neville’s crafts a future that reeks of a second wave of colonial mentalities and actions and a deep inability to understand the new worlds we’ll encounter.

Recommended for fans of sinister 50s visions.

“Take Two Quiggies” (1950), 3/5 (Average): First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (December 1950). You can read it online here.

“Take Two Quiggies” places humans too eager to speak for others in a pickle of their own making. The Culture Team leverages a deal out of the people of Dobu despite an official quarantine, that threatens to ruin the planet, after the accidental destruction of the human spaceship Starflight. Of course, the deal allows humans to exploit the native people in violation of their own quarantine. But the cute yet awkward alien pets the humans want from the Dobu end up being far more than they asked for.

A somewhat sinister yet whimsical satire of colonialism and commercialism told in Neville’s curt and punchy style. Regardless of their staying power, I always find stories written during the explosive growth of post-colonial movements after WWII interesting for what they say about the mechanisms of empire and views of “the other.” The story funniest moments concern the media deluge required to sell the Quiggies to Americans as the next hot “must have” product.

I’m not sure I will remember this story for long but it has its humorous moments.

“Underground Movement” (1952), 3.25/5 (Above Average): First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas (June 1952). You can read it online here.

Telepathy! Wait, we’re reading a Neville story. Telepathy, with a horrible catch…. Howard Wilson, a mutant cursed with a cancerous growth taking over his head that grants telepathy, works for a government agency tracking down other mutants. He craves a vacation in a place far from those who speak his language, at least he won’t entirely understand the thoughts around him. The “emblem of a telepath” on his forehead would “destroy him, eating inward to his mind and shooting malignant cells into his blood for impartial distribution to lungs and stomach and bones” (90). The origin of the mutation isn’t clear. Wilson doesn’t believe it came from the bomb. A deeper conspiratorial tone dominates the proceedings.

A new form of fear lances through Wilson. For he, and the “two dozen other telepaths,” will soon experience death in the near future in a way unlike any other human (90). They will hear each other’s thoughts. He worries for humanity caught up in the hysteria that he will unleash when news gets out of new mutations. He feels kinship with the non-telepathic humanity as well. But even the telepaths can’t divine what is to come.

Conspiracies and paranoia. Telepathy as an inevitable danse macabre. What a sinister story!

“Experimental Station” (variant title: “The First”) (1950, rev. 1971), 3.25/5 (Above Average): First appeared in Super Science Stories, ed. Ejler Jakobsson (September 1950). You can read it online here.

A cursory comparison between the 1971 revised edition and the original reveals superficial additions and subtractions. The one substantial addition is the added final sentence that adds a deeper sense of emotional crisis to the narrative.

Sam escapes from his room. But it is not an ordinary room. It’s an observation chamber under a dome on an alien world. Sam feels the pull of the external world: “often he looked out from behind his barrier and felt the patch call to him, call to him in a silent voice that made his blood tingle, call to him, say, You belong here, say, Tis is your home, your place is here, away from them” (106). Who are they? Sam views his observers as abnormal “ugly” things “with only two arms and only two legs and only two eyes” (107).

I found this story the most effective use of Neville’s punchy and curt prose style. And, as with most of the stories in the collection, the landscape of the future lacks basic morality. It repeats the horrors and culture of secrecy of Neville’s own day. Future exploration will be an extension of the hatreds of the Cold War present, not the arrival of a new beginning. And the new generation will be unable to navigate the paths left for them.

“Marginal Error” (1953), 3/5 (Average): First appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories, ed. Samuel Mines (June 1953). You can read it online here.

Ralph McCord spends his days inputting speeches into a supercomputer. Multiple information gathering departments add to the collated and storied knowledge of the Machine on Knob Hill. The Machine calculates whether you will become radical and turn on its looming ever-accumulating existence. It also calculates who will commit suicide and who would die of natural causes by sixty-five (125). At home Ralph’s wife Ivy grows bored with life and blots out the experiences and counsel of those around her. She begins to believe the words of an anti-Machine radical named Chinwell and his fellow prophets who argue against the further mechanization of life.

And Ralph isn’t immune from Chinwell’s views either. The Machine audits his work for input errors and grows increasingly suspicious. Ivy suggests that “the Machine is beginning to get you, too!” (138). Neville doesn’t create a neat ending. The Machine becomes a new object of devotion and it mechanical intent marches inexorably on through the minds of its followers.

I can imagine a young Barry N. Mazlberg, who would craft his own dire nightmares of an increasingly technological age, salivating over “Marginal Error” (1953). According to Neville, abdicating responsibility and decisions to a machine creates a new religion in the place of the old, and removes our ability to think critically along the way.

“The Toy” (1952), 3.5/5 (Good): First appeared in Imagination, ed. William L. Hamling (December 1952). You can read it online here.

On a planet colonized by humans, a group of natives attempt to liberate humanity from their destructive machines. The dead bodies of their compatriots litter the human encampments. The survivors recount their attack to their Chieftain and ruminate on the nature of the conquerors: “there was something about the new gods who had come down from the sky; but they brought a demon with them. The howling demon uprooted and stripped trees in a way not to be believed” (153). The natives resolve to continue their crusade: “we must kill the demon and free the god-men from its evil power” (155) for which they believe they will be thanked by humanity. But there’s a twist!

The twist adds another fascinating layer. First, the natives are far from “primitive.” Second, they have chosen to free themselves from the machines of their ancestors. “The Toy” reads as an effective early environmental-themed SF story about the exploitation of colonial worlds that breaks down simplistic dichotomies of primitive vs. civilized.

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