Robert Bloch (1917-1994) started out as a protégé of H.P. Lovecraft. Bloch had an extraordinary ability to come up with cleverly twisted plots with nasty stings in the tail and to combine them with black comedy.
In these stories he turns his hand to science fiction and the paranormal.
There’s also quite a bit of satire, mostly directed at the 1950s obsession with consumerism.
Try This For Psis is a lighthearted tale of the paranormal. Dr Angus Welk is a crusty scientist who has no patience at all with nonsense like ESP and telekinesis and he has a daughter named Nora. He also has a bitter scientific rival, a Professor Seine, who works in the field of ESP and psionics. Professor Seine has a student named Frank Tallent who is a brilliant psychic sensitive with just about every paranormal power you can name. As luck would have it Nora and Frank fall in love and want to get married. Obviously Dr Welk is likely to oppose the match very bitterly indeed. To make things worse Professor Seine intends to use Frank to prove to Dr Welk that psychic powers are real. That’s certain to provoke a storm.
It’s actually a very amusing story.
Comfort Me, My Robot starts with a man named Henson who is suffering from stress. He goes to see the Adjustor. This is the 22nd century and adjustors are like psychiatrists but with much more effective treatment methods at their disposal. Henson tells the Adjustor that he wants to murder his wife. The Adjustor tells him it’s no problem and that he will make the necessary arrangements. After all murder is recognised as a valuable therapeutic tool.
This is the 22nd century of course and completely human-looking robots are everywhere. This is a delightfully twisted little tale, one of the best in this collection.
Talent is about a foundling. Andrew Benson grows up in an orphanage and develops an extraordinary talent for mimicry. He can copy a person’s every gesture and every characteristic of a person’s speech. He also learns to copy characters he sees at the movies. It’s almost as if he becomes the character. Which goes a long way to explaining certain subsequent events.
The Professor Plays It Square is about a couple of card sharps whose fondest dreams are about to come true when the biggest sucker of all time wanders into the dive where they hang out. Professor Glockenspiel has plenty of money. Bugsy and his pal intend to relieve him of all of it. The way they play poker it’s not a game of chance, it’s a sure thing. Or is it? Another amusing little tale.
Block That Metaphor is another example of Bloch’s dark sense of humour. It concerns a robot from another planet, visiting Earth on a diplomatic mission. Although he’s not quite a robot. He has an organic brain but a mechanical body. His way of thinking is however rather mechanical. He is thoughtful and polite but he takes everything literally. Very literally. With disastrous consequences.
In You Could Be Wrong Harry Jessup returns from the war, gets a job, marries his sweetheart and everything is fine until one day Harry starts to suspect that everything is fake. Not just the usual things that really are fake, like movies and television. Harry starts to doubt absolutely everything. Maybe nothing at all is real. But where does that leave him? How could he prove it? Another pretty solid story.
Try This For Psis is a lighthearted tale of the paranormal. Dr Angus Welk is a crusty scientist who has no patience at all with nonsense like ESP and telekinesis and he has a daughter named Nora. He also has a bitter scientific rival, a Professor Seine, who works in the field of ESP and psionics. Professor Seine has a student named Frank Tallent who is a brilliant psychic sensitive with just about every paranormal power you can name. As luck would have it Nora and Frank fall in love and want to get married. Obviously Dr Welk is likely to oppose the match very bitterly indeed. To make things worse Professor Seine intends to use Frank to prove to Dr Welk that psychic powers are real. That’s certain to provoke a storm.
It’s actually a very amusing story.
Comfort Me, My Robot starts with a man named Henson who is suffering from stress. He goes to see the Adjustor. This is the 22nd century and adjustors are like psychiatrists but with much more effective treatment methods at their disposal. Henson tells the Adjustor that he wants to murder his wife. The Adjustor tells him it’s no problem and that he will make the necessary arrangements. After all murder is recognised as a valuable therapeutic tool.
This is the 22nd century of course and completely human-looking robots are everywhere. This is a delightfully twisted little tale, one of the best in this collection.
Talent is about a foundling. Andrew Benson grows up in an orphanage and develops an extraordinary talent for mimicry. He can copy a person’s every gesture and every characteristic of a person’s speech. He also learns to copy characters he sees at the movies. It’s almost as if he becomes the character. Which goes a long way to explaining certain subsequent events.
The Professor Plays It Square is about a couple of card sharps whose fondest dreams are about to come true when the biggest sucker of all time wanders into the dive where they hang out. Professor Glockenspiel has plenty of money. Bugsy and his pal intend to relieve him of all of it. The way they play poker it’s not a game of chance, it’s a sure thing. Or is it? Another amusing little tale.
Block That Metaphor is another example of Bloch’s dark sense of humour. It concerns a robot from another planet, visiting Earth on a diplomatic mission. Although he’s not quite a robot. He has an organic brain but a mechanical body. His way of thinking is however rather mechanical. He is thoughtful and polite but he takes everything literally. Very literally. With disastrous consequences.
Wheel and Deal is a throwaway humorous tale of a used female dealer - he sells late-model used sexbots.
You Got To Have Brains is about a funny little guy who rents a loft so he can build a spaceship. He has a theory that what you need to power a spaceship is to harness mental energy. You have to have brains to do something like that. It has the typical Bloch humorous/grotesque sting in the tail. Not a bad story.
Egghead is an attempt at political satire, written in 1955 at the height of the Red Scare. Radical extremists are undermining the country and they’re promoting some wacky and dangerous ideas. These crazies are suggesting that maybe consumerism isn’t the very foundation of civilisation and some of them even want people to be able to study subversive subjects like English Literature. It’s an amusing enough story.
Dead-End Doctor is about Dr Howard Anson, the last psychiatrist on Earth. This is a world in which nobody is crazy any more so psychiatrists aren’t needed. He has never had a patient. It’s also a world in which robots have replaced humans in most jobs. Dr Howard Anson faces a grim future but fate is about to step in and give him hope. An amusing story.
Change of Heart is a very creepy little tale about a brilliant watchmaker who can fix any watch. One of the best stories in the collection with a punch-in-the-guts ending.
Edifice Complex has a rather nasty punchline as well. Wayne and Nora (a girl he picked up in a bar in a space-port) land their spaceship on the planet Vergis IV. Wayne wanted to go there because there are diamonds there, lots of them, and he knows how to get them. The sozzled old miner Luke told him all about it before dying. All they have to do is find the hut Luke described to him. Not a bad story.
Constant Reader is more overtly science fictional. A routine reconnaissance mission to the planet 68/5 finds no life, but they do find intelligence. Or rather it finds them. One member of the crew has a strange hobby. He reads books. Which could turn out to be disastrous. A clever and ambitious story.
It’s a very uneven collection with some stories being essentially just extended jokes while others are intelligent sophisticated (if rather dark) tales with very satisfying payoffs. Some of the stories are very much of the 1950s while others are uncomfortably relevant today. Bloch’s morbid sense of humour shines through. Atoms and Evil is recommended if you like your science fiction offbeat.
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