But now I have a week at a cottage and am committed to getting back on the reading train. I almost put this book aside (it's four longish short stories) but glad I stuck with it as the last two stories really took it home. I also started to get his idiom and structure which made them easier to read. The content of these stories is as advertised, really imaginative, intelligent large-scale space epics with super high-tech and competent female protagonists (most astonishing for sci-fi stories writting in the late 40s and early 50s). They are short stories centered around the advanced earth civilization of the Vegan Confederacy, who are kind of like technocratic Jedi whose job is to police the universe and protect civilizations from threats ranging the minor like space pirates to major like a recurrent interdimensional invasion. They also plant themselves in secret on developing planets to guide them into their network. You only get hints of how it all works and suggestions of the various opponents (military, political and economic) of the Confederacy. At least in these 4 stories, it always involves a cool badass space spy with awesome toys and some independence to achieve their manager's goals.
CityTV (one of the 7 channels I get via antenna) for some reason shows Twilight Zone episodes late at night a couple nights a week. I was so psyched to discover this (such a contrast to today's hyper-packaged media) but disappointed to find that I don't actually love the Twilight Zone. I only saw a few episodes as a kid and was way into them at the time, but sadly they don't hold up for me. They feel a lot more like thoughtful, dialogue-driven stage plays exploring social themes of the late 50s rather than mind-blowing excursions into fantastic weirdness. This is no critique of the show, as it holds up in the writing and acting and ideas. It's just that with the budgets and production technology of the time, you have to do a lot of telling and not much showing. There is a lot of talking in these shows!
I realized as I was struggling to get through the first two stories in this collection (Agent of Vega, The Illusionists) that their writing style reminded me of the Twilight Zone. Even though it is written fiction, so production values are not an issue, it still feels like Schmitz's vision wasn't capable (or wasn't inclined) of showing at this time. A lot of the "action" in these stories is one person telling another (often a manager talking to an agent or to fellow managers within the Vegan bureaucracy) what happened. And the few times there actually is real action, it is elided, with Schmitz just describing the results. It made it hard for me to connect with the characters and narrative. On top of that, stylistically for sci fi of this period, his sentences are somewhat complex and indirect. He also jumps from perspective to perspective with subtle openings to the next character and the formatting in the book didn't always make this obvious. It also makes it hard to figure out what the main plot is until you are way into the story, juggling a bunch of characters and locaitons. So I spent a lot of time going back and re-reading sentences and paragraphs as my mind drifted off. I ended up putting the book down for a couple weeks, reading the amazing tables of spell results in DCC's crazy magic system before going to bed at night.
Fortunately, the third story, The Truth about Cushgar, though equally indirect and all over the place, had a clear revenge plot that I cottoned onto quickly and was able to ingest more consistently. I think at this point, I also started to get the world Schmitz is creating and better interpret his style. The last one The Second Night of Summer about the friendship of a young boy in a rural village with an old caravanning gypsy-type woman as these floating light balls appear out of nowhere was really human and satisfying, just a great little story with cool characters that ends with promise of much more adventure. One of the neat things about Schmitz' universe is that it is done in disconnected short stories and novellas, but characters appear briefly in other stories, so you get a subtle sense of the greater world-building. His world is about competence and optimism in the face of chaos and evil and I hope to be able to approach is more directly and satisfyingly in the other books I have on deck.
