P. Schuyler Miller (1912–1974)

In the pre-Internet past of the 1960's, I had three sources of information on published science fiction: the local library (mostly older books, very random), the local drugstore (a few paperbacks, even more random), and P Schuyler Miller's book reviews in Analog. It was Miller who said I should seek out Samuel Delaney and Cordwainer Smith, among many other post-golden age authors. So when I came across this collection of his own fiction from the 30's and 40's, I was curious to see what his show more roots were. To be honest, I expected a much weaker collection than this, considering the times in which he wrote and his current obscurity.

Meriting three stars: "Old Man Mulligan" -- A space patrol unit, looking for the kidnapped daughter of the governor of Venus, raid a seedy bar where a sloshed Old Man Mulligan is holding forth. Within 3 elliptical pages, they wake up naked on a tiny island, soon to be covered by high tide, surrounded by carnivorous sea creatures. Their survival depends on OMM, whose songs about the days of Moses are far more literal than it first appears. And when they finally find the daughter? Well, she's way more capable than anyone you'd expect to find in a tale this old. "Spawn" -- A horror tale from 1939 that reads like R A Lafferty. A portion of the ocean gels into a carnivorous blob. A Stalinesque ruler's dead corpse rises and rules again -- though still clearly dead. A South American gold mine transforms into a walking giant leading a revolution against the white powers. The only downside is the unnecessary denouement that attempts to explain all this. "Forgotten" from 1933 is a compelling survival tale of a man abandoned on Mars by his mining partners, and what follows. It could've easily appeared 2 decades later.

Two-and-half stars: "The Titan" Written in 1934, too racy (though not erotic) for publication, incompletely serialized, rewritten from the original manuscript for this collection. This has many of flaws of 30's SF, in weak characterization and shakey plot development, but it manages an interesting displacement at the halfway point that most authors would have used for a trick ending. It makes an interesting pair with "Forgotten."

Two stars: "As Never Was" is an OK time paradox story -- much in keeping with other stories the early 40's exploring that vein. "In the Good Old Summertime" likewise is a readable but unmemorable tale of evil undone by arrogance and ignorance.

One star: "Gleeps" is just silly and not very amusing any more, with one of those far-fetched theories at the end to explain otherwise inexplicable events on a spaceship. "The Arrhenius Horror" is one of two stories using Arrhenius' spore theory of interstellar life transmission -- if you've seen The Monolith Monsters, you get the idea. show less

Genus Homo belongs to a subgenre of SF where a group of average people is suddenly thrown into a completely novel environment. Two others in this subgenre I've read in the past few years are Leinster's The Wailing Asteroid (filmed in1967 with the wildly misleadingly title The Terrornauts) and Baxter's Manifold: Origin. Genus Homo, first published in 1941 with internal references to 1939, has some connections to both. There are human / primate interactions, as in Baxter, and 1950's sexism, as show more in Leinster. The uncredited Richard Powers cover with humans in cages suggests The Planet of the Apes, though this edition predates that book by two years. The scene illustrated occurs -- minus the odd E=H2O formula -- but occupies just one one short chapter.

P. Schuyler Miller is pretty much forgotten today, except for old-timers who remember his monthly book review column for Astounding and Analog. L. Sprague de Camp is somewhat better remembered for novels that mixed history and SF or fantasy. That element comes into play primarily in the less-convincing second half of the novel. That may seem surprising since in the first half you have to accept that a bus full of men and women could be trapped in a collapsed tunnel for a million years, saved because one passenger was a scientist with a canister of an experimental suspended animation gas. Ironically, this passenger did not survive. But given that premise, what follows for half the book is how the group organizes and survives, with missteps along the way. Sexist, of course, but otherwise not bad for the time.

In the second half, you have to accept that the humans can learn the gorilla's language and the gorillas learn English, in what appears to be a week or two, after which point there is only difference between the two groups is governmental structure. This second half eventually moves into a major military campaign between the gorillas and baboons (or perhaps mandrills), with curious bits of lame humor.

If you have fond memories of golden-age pulp SF, you could do worse. show less