Edgar Pangborn

Today is February 25, and that is the birthday of Edgar Pangborn (1909-1976). Pangborn was critically acclaimed during his lifetime, but he has faded into obscurity. Theodore Sturgeon was an admirer.

Pangborn was never prolific. He wrote only a handful of novels and a few dozen short stories. The most widely recognized novels are Davy and A Mirror for Observers.

I haven’t read Davy. I did read A Mirror for Observers back in college. I enjoyed the first half of it, then had an outpatient procedure. I finished hte book, but the rest of it was fuzzy due to still being under the influence of general anesthetic.

For his birthday, I read “The Good Neiighbors”. It was originally published in the June 1960 issue of Galaxy. It is available in the Edgar Pangborn Megapack.

This is a short tale, only a few pages, about a spaceship that visits Earth. It hovers outside the atmosphere. Then suddenly a large gaseous creature, much like a blimp, descends from the spacecraft and flies across the United States starting from Seattle and ending up over New York.

It is obviously a creature in distress.

sso, of course, the government shoots it down once it is over the Atlantic Ocean. Except that one pilot gets trigger happy and shoots it down over New York city.

I found this part of the story distasteful. No effot is made eto try and help the creature or contact the spaceship.

I’m not going to let  that stop me from reading more of Pangborn. I’ve read a little bit of his short fiction over the years and have enjoyued it. I have a copy of Davy and his novel West of the Sun, which looks promising.