Six more early '70s tales from New Jersey's own Barry Malzberg

After an interlude in which we travelled to the future, to the past, and to another planet to engage in brutal hand to hand combat with both man and beast, it's time to return to science fiction's master of pessimism, mental illness and sexual frustration, Barry N. Malzberg.  These six stories were found in my copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, a 1976 paperback from Pocket whose front bears a fine Robert Schulz cover illo and whose back trumpets the bold claim that:

"Introduction to the Second Edition" (1973)

In his intro to this piece Malzberg notes that the murder mystery genre is "crazier" and "dumber" than SF, but due to superior PR has a much higher class of reader.  When I was quite young my mother, who loves those old mystery stories like Rex Stout and Miss Marple, tried to get me to read one of her Agatha Christie paperbacks.  I couldn't get past a sentence without my eyes glazing over, and Mom was pretty disappointed. "You won't read anything that doesn't have a dragon on the cover, will you!!!???"

"Introduction to the Second Edition" is yet another of Malzberg's stories in which a guy receives psychiatric therapy via a hypnodream helmet which allows him to experience antisocial and illegal activities again and again.  (See "At the Institute," "On Ice," and "Tapping Out.")  In this story the narrator acts out a fantasy of murdering his mother ("My whole attitudes toward sex were entirely warped for thirty-eight years by your pointless moralizing" he tells her before using a knife to "part her like a fish") and being murdered by his father ("this is for ruining your mother's figure," says Dad before pulling the trigger.)  The narrator also plays out a scenario in which he murders a former girlfriend, but when he tries to rape the collapsed victim the attendants turn off the machine--he has not paid for that particular fantasy, they admonish him.

I think there are some
boobs in there somewhere 

As in other of these stories, the patient is not cured by this bizarre treatment; instead, he uses it as entertainment, and becomes addicted to it, and the therapists are as happy as your local crack dealer to take his money.

"Introduction to the Second Edition" presents some mysteries.  Whose idea was it to include so many of these hypnodream stories in one collection?  Secondly, the publication page in my copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg states that "Introduction to the Second Edition" first appeared in Nova 3, but isfdb lists the Malzberg story in Nova 3 as "Dreaming and Conversions: Two Rules by Which to Live."  Presumably a title change and perhaps a revision not recognized yet by isfdb.  Too bad neither I nor the Columbus Metropolitan Library own a copy of Nova 3. I'll have to keep an eye out for Nova 3 at the used bookstores so I can resolve this mystery the way the son of a Nero Wolfe fan should.  [UPDATE November 5, 2016:  Make sure to check out the comments below, where inspector ukjarry solves the mystery of Nova 3!]

"The Trial of the Blood" (1974)

In his intro to this baby (one of the reasons The Best of Barry N. Malzberg is a must buy for us Malz-heads is that every story has a long digressive intro) Malzberg tells us this story, which first appeared in the anthology The Berserkers, is meant to be something like Count Dracula's diary.  The character who narrates the tale is really not much like the Transylvanian vampire we all know and love--he doesn't seem to have any supernatural powers or vulnerabilities, for example--but the story is still a pretty good piece of horror fiction, the diary of a maniac who kills women and children and is driven  not only by a lust to drink human blood, but by a desire to be understood by a callous world.  Unlike so many of Malzberg's stories, this one succeeds when judged by conventional measures of what readers expect out of fiction: plot, character, human feeling, etc.  This success is reflected in the fact that, as the author himself reports, it is one of the few of Malzberg's works about which Publishers Weekly ("a journal which has not seen eyeball-to-eyeball with me on many occasions") had something nice to say.

"Getting Around" (1973)

"Getting Around" first appeared in Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives under the K. M. O'Donnell pseudonym.  Malzberg relates that editor Roger Elwood requested "the ultimate story about perverse sexuality" and Barry delivered this tale, which, through the medium of letters, recorded conversations, and outline notes for an academic lecture, describes a society in which the government discourages monogamy and compels participation in regular group sex sessions organized by government officials.  This system of sexual relations, called "Intermix," is a response to the high productivity of late 20th century Western society; in the past world of scarcity people admired self-denial, and romanticized the exclusive love of two individuals for each other.  To make modern society run smoothly, the authorities believe, both indiscriminate consumerism on the part of the plebs and systemic control from above are necessary.

The meat of the story is unsent love letters and a suicide note written by a man who has broken the new society's taboos by falling in love with a woman and suffers the forbidden vice of jealousy. "Going Around" also includes a joke dialogue sequence about a man who is mostly, or perhaps entirely, artificial:

...You mean you were born without arms, legs and vocal cords?
--Yes.
--You must have had a very unhappy childhood.
--Oh, no.  You see, I didn't have a brain, either.
--Now I'm excited.  I'm really excited.
--Let's go to the bedroom.  

Malzberg used the same sort of idea in "Culture Lock," which appeared in Roger Elwood's Future City, but in that story the government was pushing homosexuality; the tyranny in "Getting Around" experimented with homosexuality and bestiality, then settled on enforcing strict heterosexual norms.  It also reminded me of 1984, in which the government tries to crush normal sex drives and the institution of the family, seeing love and loyalty to other individuals as a rival to love and loyalty to state.

I like this one; I am a sucker for unrequited love stories and stories about radical governments trying to reshape human nature and society.

Intro to "Track Two"

I read "Track Two" back in early 2015 in an old copy of Fantastic and wrote about it then.  I now realize that "Track Two" is sort of like "Trial of the Blood": both are journals of immortal figures famed for having supernatural powers, but in Barry's version of their stories they have no such powers and are beset by many doubts, doubts which are not part of the canonical accounts of their lives.

In the intro to this appearance of "Track Two" Malzberg praises down market magazines like Fantastic, Amazing, Thrilling Wonder and Startling for publishing more innovative and exciting work than more prestigious, more popular and better-paying periodicals.  He claims that the stories he was offered when editing Amazing (in 1968 and 1969) were better than stories published in that period in Analog and Playboy.  This reminded me of Michael Moorcock's assertion, in his essay on Leigh Brackett, "Queen of the Martian Mysteries," that the sort of SF stories he liked were more likely to appear in Planet Stories and Startling Stories than Astounding.  It is fun, and useful, to see major figures in the field go against the conventional wisdom this way--it endorses the natural inclinations of the lowly individual reader to follow his own inclinations, to think for himself.  (Though, of course, today's rebels almost inevitably found the stifling orthodoxy of tomorrow.)

"The Battered-Earth Syndrome" (1973)

Barry tells us that Virginia Kidd asked him to fashion a story out of this title.  I guess Kidd liked these kinds of goofy pun titles--she once wrote a story about aliens that look like kangaroos and titled it "Kangaroo Court."  ("Kangaroo Court" was later reprinted under the title "The Flowering Season.")  Malzberg tells us Kidd is a good agent, writer and editor, but I have to admit that, when I read  "The Flowering Season" and another Kidd story, "Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside," I found them quite poor.  Malzberg always seems generous with praise for his editors, and in fact dedicated this volume to them:

Anyway, "The Battered Earth Syndrome" appeared in an anthology of environmentalist stories edited by Kidd and Roger Elwood and entitled Saving Worlds in hardcover and The Wounded Planet in paperback.  (Maybe this is another Kidd hallmark, changing titles of her productions to try to snare the unwary.)  Ecological hysteria is probably my least favorite subgenre of SF, so I was nodding along when Barry admitted that he "cannot imagine how" a book of stories and poems "written with that grim earnestness characteristic of science fiction when it is determined to Save the World" could "be commercially viable."

I spent the first twenty-something years of my life in Northern New Jersey, and so spent many hours in automobiles on Route 46, riding east to Nana's or New York City or west to Hackettstown, and so when I found that 46 was prominently featured in this story (Malzberg has lived in Northern New Jersey himself for decades) it was like meeting an old friend!  Then when I realized this was yet another of Malzberg's hypnohelmet dream therapy stories it was like running into an acquaintance who tells you the same old anecdotes every time you see him.

Actually, Malzberg mixes it up a little this time, to suit the environmentalist topic of Kidd's anthology.  Two men, the narrator and his buddy Nick, are repeatedly put into dream simulations of driving around New Jersey and New York City, getting into car accidents, seeing the Hudson River choked with trash, shooting guard dogs at an abandoned site whose sign promises urban renewal.  It is space aliens, we learn, who are providing Nick and our hero this therapy, in hopes that these Earthmen will face up to how mankind's incorrect attitudes despoiled their planet.  ("Don't you realize? The environment is not discreet; it is bound to you.....You are your world.")  Nick and the narrator resist this indoctrination (the protagonist calls it "babbling") and the aliens eliminate Nick, and we have to assume the narrator's days are numbered.  On the last page of the story it is suggested that Nick and the narrator are not quite real, that they are just simulations or resurrected consciousnesses or something like that.

(This story reminded me of A. E. van Vogt's 1948 "Resurrection," AKA "The Monster," in which aliens come to a desolated Earth and resurrect a human in hopes of learning about the disaster which befell our world.  In Van's story the human outwits the aliens and goes on to conquer the universe--van Vogt has the kind of optimism which many critics see Malzberg's career as a response to and/or a refutation of.)

So, "The Battered Earth Syndrome" is one of those SF stories about how the human race is a basket of irredeemable deplorables and we would be better off if some irresistible nannies from outer space arrived to push us around or maybe just get rid of us. This is another subgenre of SF which I don't favor, and I will admit to cheering for Nick and our narrator when they refused to knuckle under to the "enlightenment" offered by the aliens.  As far as I am concerned, the ambiguity of Malzberg's story, its brevity, and the fact that it has served me as an excuse to reminisce about my NJ-NYC life, put it in the upper ranks of green stories and anti-human/pro-alien stories.

Intro to "Network"

I read "Network" in an old issue of Fantastic back in late 2014, along with a bunch of other stories from that magazine, which was edited by Ted White, author of  The Spawn of the Death Machine.   

In his intro to "Network" for The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, Malzberg talks about the bright side of the "so-called energy crunch."  Malzberg suggests that high fuel prices will end the flight of the middle classes from urban centers, will keep kids from wasting time "cruising" and neglecting their studies, and will give people who don't like their extended families an excuse for not driving over to visit.

Perhaps more intriguingly, Malzberg tells us "Network" is, in part, a tribute to Harlan Ellison, whom he calls a "remarkable (if remarkably uneven) writer."  This set off a bell in my head: when I read it, I thought "Network" had a stronger traditional plot and more adventure elements than most of Malzberg's work, and am now wondering if perhaps "Network" should be compared to Ellison's famous 1969 "A Boy and His Dog."

"A Delightful Comedic Premise" (1974)

In the intro to "A Delightful Comedic Premise" Malzberg strongly recommends a writer I never heard of (I spent a long period of my life watching TV and playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, so when it comes to high culture I am an ignoramus), Wilfrid Sheed, telling us Sheed's The Hack, one of the "most valuable works of the decade," served as inspiration for Malzberg's own Herovit's World.  I haven't read Herovit's World myself, but Joachim Boaz has.  

This one has been more widely published than many of Malzberg's stories, first appearing in F&SF and most recently being included in 2006's This is My Funniest: Leading Science Fiction Writers Present Their Funniest Stories Ever.  It was also included in 1994's The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, Space Mail II, and Antigrav: Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters; these titles provide us clues as to what to expect.  

This has to be one of the most recursive or "meta" SF stories of all time, consisting of letters between Malzberg and editor Ed Ferman that mention Jack Finney and Ron Walotsky, all real people.  Ferman asks Malzberg to write a humorous story instead of his usual heavy depressing stuff, and Malzberg responds with story outlines and ideas that Ferman is forced to reject because they are, in fact, also quite depressing, and he has plenty of dark pessimistic stories already from Malzberg and others.  ("We are heavily inventoried, as I have already said, on the despairing stuff....")   The rejected ideas are actually not bad--a guy can time travel as a spectator (not a participant) to the 1950s, and even bring people along with him, but can only witness unhappy events, not pleasant ones; and, a guy can read the minds of race horses, but finds there is no correlation between a horse's mood and whether it will be successful in a race or not.  (Shades of Underlay, Malzberg's laugh-out-loud masterpiece!)

"A Delightful Comedic Premise" is one of Malzberg's better stories.  I can heartily recommend it to general SF readers as well as Malzberg's fans, who will get extra enjoyment out of how the story plays off Malzberg's reputation.

"Geraniums" (1973) (with Valerie King)

"Geraniums" first appeared in the anthology Omega (another Roger Elwood production--I get the feeling Malzberg and Elwood were essential buttresses of each other's careers) and was co-written with a Valerie King; Malzberg says the story is mostly King's own work and is the best piece in Omega.  Malzberg compares her to Dory Previn, a songwriter I've never heard of.  King has only one other credit at isfdb.

This is a very literary, mainstream story, with all kinds of symbolism ("The world was a greenhouse") and criticism of the Catholic Church uttered by someone outside that tradition (a character who is presumably Orthodox and/or very secular); the reader is not sure how seriously to take his criticism, which seems pretty hyperbolic and smacks of ingratitude.  The critic is a Russian, Dmitri, who is working as a gardener at a Catholic Church (in North America, I assume) and is very annoyed at how passersby will reach between the bars of the fence to steal geraniums.  He has cultivated a beautiful rose, The Empress of Russia.  He also has dreams of fat women in black dresses who provide incomprehensible advice.  In an effort to drown a gopher he rams a hose into a hole and turns it on full blast (a sex metaphor?)  When a "small dark thing" comes out of the hole, he faints...I think maybe he dies.

It is difficult to find any of this amusing or interesting.  It didn't generate the level of interest required for me to try to figure out if King is trying to say something about parenthood or religion or the Russian Revolution.  Gotta give this one a "no" vote.        

**********

I'm making real progress in my journey through The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and really enjoyed this leg of the trip.  We'll be taking a break from our pal Barry in our next episode, however, for what I hope will be some action-packed SF adventures.

Messenger of Zhuvastou by Andrew J. Offutt

All he had was a better-than-average set of reflexes and a fair ability at fencing, and what that Earthside shrink had called a born leadership ability.  And a tremendous knowledge of history--mostly wrong, since it came from movies.

Alright, here's one with a title I can't even pronounce. I'm sure the boys down in marketing loved this one. "Andy, would it kill you to call this one Messenger to Planet Z or Messenger from the Galactic Empire?" At least it has a terrific Jeff Jones cover, an heroic celebration of the human body and man's unquenchable desire to climb up the most dangerous precipice he can find while wearing as little clothing as possible.  A brassiere?  That shit would cramp our style!  A rope?  You have got to be kidding!  You can wear a metal circlet thing in your hair so you are looking your best when those creeptastic birds attack us, but that is where I draw the line!

(As we saw with The Yngling, Jones' evocative cover has nothing to do with the actual characters, setting or story of the book which it adorns.)

The people at Berkley presented Andrew J. Offutt's Messenger of Zhuvastou to the sword and planet community in 1973.  This one is long, 286 pages, and the print seems small--two randomly selected pages each have 45 lines on them, while similarly chosen pages in The Shores of Kansas have only 35 lines, and pages of The Yngling weigh in at 35 and 37.  The contents page lists 40 chapters, and they all have titles that refer, perhaps jocularly, to classic literature, history, or conventional phrases. I have a feeling this is going to be a long and crazy ride.  (This feeling was reinforced when I found that the very first word of the text included a typo!  In fact, this book is full of typos.  Shame on you, Berkley!)

Moris Keniston, a minor celebrity as not only the wealthy son of a Senator of the Galactic Empire centered on Earth but also a talented athlete, wants to prove to himself that he has what it takes to succeed on his own without Daddy's money and connections. He finds just the place to prove his prowess: Hellene, a planet whose more or less human natives, a violent, hedonistic and even sadistic lot, live a sort of ancient/medieval lifestyle, with fortified towns, mail armor, crossbows, etc.  Ostensibly, Keniston is going to Hellene in pursuit of his fiancee, Elaine Dixon, who has flown the coop. (I followed the love of my life from New York City to Iowa, so maybe following a chick from Earth to a death world isn't all that unbelievable.)

Years ago I read a bunch of L. Sprague de Camp's tepid sword and planet tales set in his Viagens Interplanetarias universe.  (I thought de Camp's efforts to make a John Carter story more "realistic" drained much of the fun out of the whole business.)  The title and opening scenes of Messenger of Zhuvastou lead me to believe that Offutt was writing this novel as a sort of homage to de Camp--like de Camp's Viagens tales, Hellene is characterized by the pervasive use of "Z" proper nouns, and, just like the protagonists of de Camp's books, Keniston has to have an interview with an official of the Earth imperial administration before setting foot on Hellene.  The authorities confiscate all Keniston's high tech equipment (lest it fall into the hands of the bellicose natives) and provide him an elaborate disguise so he can pass for a native.  This disguise involves invasive cosmetic surgery--the Hellenes have blue hair, manila folder-colored skin, and very wide mouths, and our hero has to go under the needle and the knife in order to get the look that won't get too many looks.  (People get similarly extensive disguises in the Viagens books.) Keniston's cover is as a royal messenger in the employ of the emperor of Zhuvastou; a role which will render Keniston's wealth and extensive travels less suspicious.

Offutt seems to have also taken up de Camp's mission of making the planetary romance more realistic.  Keniston doesn't fight off dozens of foes single-handed like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Howard heroes sometimes do, and Offutt reminds us again and again how unlike a fictional hero Keniston is, how scared he is during fights, for example.  When Keniston kills a man for the first time, he vomits, a reaction the sadomasochistic natives find surprising. (The novel's most memorable scene is when a Hellene woman is sexually aroused by this victory of Keniston's and begs the fatigued Earthman to take her violently, to hurt her, her "dirty talk" consisting of a wound by wound recounting of the gory fight.)

Offutt doesn't just nod to de Camp in the book; Messenger of Zhuvastou comes off as a celebration of dozens of his other favorite books and movies--hardly a page goes by that doesn't refer directly or subtly to somebody like Ian Fleming, L. Frank Baum, Mark Twain, Cecil B. DeMille, Charlton Heston, W. C. Fields, or Alexandre Dumas, and the list goes on and on. 

Messenger of Zhuvastou's plot is episodic and picaresque--Keniston travels from walled town to walled town, spending lots of time in inns, making friends and tarrying with women, learning about Hellene society and getting mixed up in capers.  He befriends a member of an ethnic minority (these people have grey skin) and preaches against racism.  He uses his wits or his fencing skills to survive drunken brawls, confrontations with the police, and assassination attempts.  He helps a woman escape servitude in one town to join her lover in another.  He crosses a swamp full of monsters and an arid desert haunted by bandits, nearly dying of thirst in the process. He falls in love with a woman (she turns out to be a princess in disguise) and has to rescue her from a dungeon torture chamber before they can get married.

There's a lot of sex in this book, though not any really explicit sex scenes.  There are prostitutes and harem girls everywhere, and Offutt obsessively describes women's secondary sexual characteristics and skimpy attire.  Offutt, who is pretty hard on Christianity (he follows the line that Christianity caused the "Dark Ages" and retarded European development for centuries), reminds us repeatedly that the Hellenes don't have an "antisex" religion that stifles their urges, so everybody on the planet is promiscuous and nobody associates marriage or deep meaningful love relationships with monogamy; men share their girlfriends with each other, for example.  

Gender roles, and relations between the sexes, are a big theme of the book, and Offutt comes down firmly on the side of traditional gender roles.  In the last third or so of the book Keniston arrives at Zhavalanko, a fortified city which has undergone a feminist revolution.  A cunning woman, using high tech devices like radios and firearms smuggled onto Hellene despite the precautions of the Galactic authorities, has murdered the king and taken over, ruling as a dictator at the head of an all-female army and an all-female priesthood.  This tyrant is Elaine Dixon of Earth, whom we learn was not Keniston's fiance after all, but his brother's: Dixon murdered Keniston's brother and escaped from a prison planet, and Keniston's true mission to Hellene is one of revenge.

Even though Offutt (and Keniston) admit women on Hellene are second class citizens, they have no sympathy with Dixon's revolution, calling it "unnatural" and comparing her ruling party to the Nazis and the Communists.  Offutt makes clear his belief that men and women have natural roles and it is folly to tamper with this natural order, he even describes the sight of a city street full of women who have taken up bourgeois professions like banker and merchant as a "nightmare."  Psychologically healthy women, he believes, naturally desire a man to be in charge of them and take care of them, and members of Elaine Dixon's all female army prove eager to desert and join the counter revolution once they find it is lead by strong competent men like Keniston and his friends.  Keniston's counterrevolutionary army overthrows Dixon and returns men and women to their rightful places in society, and in the end of the book Keniston decides to stay on Hellene as the ruler of Zhavalanko.  

These Edgar Rice Burroughs/Robert Howard style stories often ask the question, "Is it better to live as a civilized man or a barbarian?" To me this seems like what the kids call "a no-brainer"; of course it is better to sit in an air conditioned art museum across the street from a skyscraper and read a novel than it is to sit in a tree in a steaming jungle gnawing on a raw baby allosaurus leg while bugs gnaw on you and Momma Allosaurus waits at the bottom of the tree, ready to serve up some harsh justice. Somehow, John Carter, Tarzan, Conan, and the guy from Almuric have trouble with this easy question and have to do lots of field research, living in both the civilized town and the hellish wilderness gathering evidence, and somehow they always come to the wrong conclusion, that a life of danger and savagery is to be preferred to a life of leisure and sophistication.

Offutt and his hero Keniston follow in the august footsteps of their predecessors; despite all the fear and danger, Keniston comes to prefer life on Hellene where people are constantly trying to beat him up, stab him or shoot him.  Halfway through the book we are told that he

liked the weight of the sword at his side, the long cloak flapping at his heels, the short unencumbering kilt.  This, he had begun to believe, was the way life should be lived, not existing on Clement Keniston's bequest and trying to run his business empire...

By the end of the book Hellene's bloodthirsty mores have begun to rub off on him, and he is declaring that Moris Keniston is dead and that his cover name is his true name, his true identity.  Hellene, for all its dangers, gives him the opportunity to be who he really is, a natural leader and man of action; life in cushy Galactic society wouldn't bring out his true potential.

But just as John Carter, who abandoned Earth to go native on Barsoom, worked to reform Martian culture and religion, Keniston, uncomfortable with the racism and the power of the priests on Hellene, works to diminish these characteristics of Hellene culture.  And he doesn't fully embrace Hellene's sadomasochism or the way women are relegated to second class status.  The woman Keniston falls in love with and marries is well-educated, a brave fighter, and a skilled rider, and Offutt presents multiple incidents in which her resourcefulness saves Keniston's life.  Keniston also refuses to beat her, even as she enviously admires the bruises proudly borne by other wives.  (Like so many exploitation writers, and the producers of such ubiquitous TV programs as Law and Order: Perverts Division, Offutt has his cake and eats it, too, titillating the audience with talk of denigrating sex and wife beating but maintaining membership in decent society by denouncing such unsavoury practices.)

So, is this long novel which baldly presents Christians and feminists with innumerable reasons to find it enraging any good?  The plot is not bad; fighting monsters and bandits, climbing mountains and crossing deserts and swamps, falling in love and rescuing gorgeous women, and overthrowing tyrants is what we more or less expect from these books.  And the plot is well structured, Offutt offering the reader mysteries to unravel, foreshadowing later developments, and showing how Keniston's actions early in the book make possible his triumph at its end.  But there are lots of problems. The tone and the characters are very bland, and the style is flat; I didn't care who got killed or who had sex with who.  Offutt includes many jokes, and they are all mild, neither funny nor offensively bad, but they help to defuse any sense of drama or terror; we are told Keniston suffers terrible hardships and fears, but the reader never suffers along with him, just watches, detached, knowing another joke is coming along in the next paragraph.          

The biggest problem is perhaps the length and pacing of the novel.  We often praise economy here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and this is a quality Offutt's novel severely lacks; considering how much actually happens in the novel, it is very very long, and the pace is quite slow. The text is repetitive, with Offutt providing a superfluity of incidents that demonstrate each character's personality traits. Offutt also spends a lot of time describing clothes and people's physical appearances, but in a way that fails to add to their characterization.  Offutt's verbosity does not really add to the atmosphere of the book or make its world more vivid or memorable; it just makes the book longer. Typographical errors, the use of esoteric words (maybe if I had gotten my degree at Princeton instead of Rutgers I'd have recognized words like "vermiform," "muliebrity" and "cruor") and of words Offutt has simply made up (the names of Hellene animals, for example) also serve to slow down the reader.  (It is hard to explain exactly why, but when Tom Disch in Camp Concentration or Gene Wolfe in Book of the New Sun hurls some word nobody knows at you it deepens the book's atmosphere, tells you something about the character and his environment, but in Messenger of Zhuvastou the hard words are just obstacles that make the story more vague or opaque.)

Because I am interested in the whole sword fighting on an alien planet genre, and I find Offutt's odd career interesting, I found Messenger of Zhuvastou worthwhile, but only just barely.  I can only recommend the novel to the sword and planet completist or the Offutt collector, and even then, it suffers in comparison to the classics of the genre or Offutt's own better work. Even for its target audience, Messenger of Zhuvastou is merely acceptable.

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The marketing boys at Berkley got their way when it came to advertising.  Bound into the spine of the book was a color ad; the ad in mine was torn out by a previous owner, so I don't know what it was shilling; often such ads are for booze or tobacco products. There are also two pages of ads at the very end of the novel, promoting Berkeley SF titles by authors more famous and critically renowned than Offutt hmself:

The boys down in marketing get their final revenge on the back cover, with a mysterious ad for Dream Power which lists no author or description for the volume, just the promise that "IT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE."  Both Offutt and I may have our gripes with the 21st century, but at least nowadays we have google to solve these mysteries in a matter of seconds.  Dream Power, it turns out, was a top-selling self help (or shall we say, "self-awareness?") book by Dr. Ann Farady, who advises us that our dreams contain vital messages.  If Dr. Farady is to be believed (and hey, when was the last time a doctor made a mistake?) my recent dreams are telling me to move back to New York because Jerry Seinfeld is eager to be my friend and to stop driving because I will soon be in a terrible automobile accident.  Hopefully my next dream will explain an easy way to finance these oh so welcome life changes.

The Shores of Kansas by Robert Chilson

He studied the skyline around his house, looking hard at everything: Were things where and how he had left them?  Or had he introduced some small, slight change, 130 million years ago, a change that had made a different world?

I purchased Robert Chilson's 1976 novel Shores of Kansas because of its creepy waterbound dinosaur and axe man cover, the work of Mark Mariano.  (When I see a painting in which the feet are hidden I always wonder if it is because feet are so hard to draw--it's not every dauber who can grace the world with depictions of feet as convincing and charming as those of Edward Burne-Jones or William-Adolphe Bouguereau.)  Then I read Chilson's short story "People Reviews" and was impressed by how original and clever it was, which gave me high hopes for this novel.

It is the late 20th century.  It has been discovered that a tiny minority of people (about sixty in the whole world, we are told) have the ability to travel back in time!  Grant Ryal is the only one of these people who can travel back to pre-human times, and he has become rich and famous by bringing back film and specimens from the Mesozoic Era.  Instead of moving to New York and enjoying a life of lavish leisure (that is how I would play this scenario), Missouri country boy Grant has sunk all his wealth into starting the Chronographic Institute, an entity devoted to educating the public about life in the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Years ago I read Algis Budrys' famous Rogue Moon, and was disappointed that very little of the book focused on exploring the alien death labyrinth on Luna--most of the text was a lot of psychological relationship drama revolving around a guy trying to prove he was a real man or whatever.  Somewhat similarly, after that first thrilling battle scene, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is mostly philosophical discussion (though I found Heinlein's philosophical talk far more interesting than Budrys' soap opera.)  Like those celebrated SF classics, The Shores of Kansas spends more time on relatively mundane dialogue and human relationship scenes than the life and death struggles on distant landscapes which attract most readers to these books in the first place.  Of the book's 13 chapters, only three and a half, that is, about 60 of its 220 pages, are spent in the Mesozoic.  Fortunately for us adventure-fiction-loving types, as with Starship Troopers, the adventure sequences are very good.

The bulk The Shores of Kansas is concerned with Grant's relationships with the management and employees at the Institute.  Chilson really harps on the fact that Grant is an honest country boy who sees things differently from the self-serving and manipulative executives and scientists whom he has had to hire to operate the Institute; they are obsessed with PR and office politics, while all Grant wants to do is educate the public about the past.  Much of Shores of Kansas reads like a mainstream novel about a self-made tycoon or a talented artist trying to maintain control of the enterprise he built with his own sweat, blood and genius, hounded by people riding his coattails.  There are lots of scenes about how, while Grant was in the prehistoric past collecting specimens and shooting film, Business Manager Martin, Institute Director Dr. Shackelford, and Director Dr. Adrian have been ignoring his orders, allocating more resources to PR than research, and doing elitist stuff like reserving parking spaces for the executive staff (Grant orders the names painted over but then has to do it himself) and moving the copy machine out of the conference room because it looked "vulgar" in there (Grant has it moved back.)  And lots of scenes about how the Institute needs money, and so pure research has to take a backseat to schemes to raise revenue.

There are also scenes with Grant's family--fiercely independent Missouri hillbillies--that give us an idea of where he came from, and lots of discussion of his relationships with women.  Now that he is famous women are always throwing themselves at him ("Before he became famous, he had never been popular; now even the wives of his best friends propositioned him...."); Grant is not comfortable with the "legend of the ax-wielding superstud" which has grown up around him.  He also resents an up and coming female time traveller, Marian Gilmore, whom Shackelford and Adrian are grooming with the hope that she will become the second person capable of traveling back to the Mesozoic and, as Grant's partner, double the Institute's production.

The main theme of the book is that Grant is an outsider; the only human being ever to have seen the Mesozoic, a hillbilly among college graduates, a rural MidWesterner forced to attend parties in New York and Washington and hobnob with the idle rich and the politically powerful.  In one chapter he finds himself the only white person among a community of blacks when he rematerializes in an African-American neighborhood after one of his trips back in time.  (The blacks prove more eager to help and more competent than any of the whites in the novel.)  This theme is most starkly reflected in Grant's fears that his expeditions are changing history (like in Ray Bradbury's immortal classic of dino-lit, "The Sound of Thunder"), that the 20th century he returns to is not the one he left. Upon returning he carefully scrutinizes the stars, road signs, the hills on the horizon, searching for little differences that might indicate he has returned to an altered future, a similar but alien world.  This is probably my favorite element of the book, Grant's feeling that he perhaps is in a world where he doesn't belong, not merely due accidents of birth, but because of his own choices.  This is a feeling I can identify with; I have paid but little attention to current pop culture for over a decade, and when I have to spend time in doctor's offices or grocery stores, or with my family or inlaws, and see 21st century TV shows or hear 21st century music and talk about sports or politics, I feel like I am an alien in a strange and unpleasant world.

(Early in the novel Chilson gives us a clue that indicates that Grant's world is not our own: he suggests that Theodore Roosevelt was assassinated.  In real life, Teddy survived an assassination attempt and died years later in his sleep.  This brief passage added a sense of unease to the whole novel, as, in the same way Grant scanned the landscape for clues he was in the wrong 20th century, I kept expecting to discover a second clue indicating what was different between my real world and Grant's.  A cool move by Chilson.)  

British hardcover edition

I was sort of expecting a sad or defiant ending, in which Grant died or elected to remain in the Mesozoic because he hated the 20th century.  Instead, in the last 35 pages of the book we learn all about Grant's secret sorrow (a failed relationship with a woman, Nona Schiereck) and he has a psychological breakthrough after getting seriously wounded.  He makes his peace with the 20th century, and starts an intimate relationship with Marian Gilmore, taking her back with him to share with her the pure natural life of the Mesozoic; we are lead to believe that they will live happily ever after, shuttling between both time periods.

I liked Shores of Kansas; it is probably about as good as we can expect a book about a dude fighting dinosaurs with an axe to be.  All the Mesozoic stuff (though I guess nowadays all the science would be considered wrong) is entertaining and the 20th century human drama isn't bad.  However, as they say, your mileage may vary: I perhaps need to include some trigger warnings for anyone considering reading this novel.  The novel's depiction of women (I guess based on crude Freudianism) is not exactly complimentary--they all want to have sex with Grant because he is famous, and are fascinated by the axe he carries with him because it is a phallic symbol.  There is also Grant's exasperated complaint about the way the news media covers women--our hero reads a newspaper article about Marian Gilmore and finds:

...a lengthy parenthesis here about how this would advance the attitudes of women towards themselves, etc., etc., the obligatory refrain over any woman who did anything.

If women's sexual desires are portrayed as shallow and simple, so are Grant's: it feels like he fell in love with Nona Schiereck and then Marian Gilmore simply because they have red hair.  (If I was Chilson's editor I would have suggested focusing a little less on the Institute's finances and a little more on Grant's love life.)  Also noteworthy is how Grant's standoffish attitude towards women leads to rumors he is gay--in a New York lavatory a homosexual wearing makeup and perfume makes aggressive advances, and Grant uses force to dissuade this ardent fan.

All in all, an enjoyable addition to the dino SF canon.  Seven out of ten pilfered sauropod eggs.  If I didn't already own way way too many books I haven't read yet, I would be interested in reading more of Chilson's work.

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The page after the last page of text in my copy of Popular Library's The Shores of Kansas was torn out by a previous owner--jagged little remnants of it peek out at me from the gutter.  Though I would certainly like to see what sort of advertising was on this page, I think this vandalism is a sign of a life well-lived.  Maybe some SF fan ordered more books, using the page as a handy coupon.  Perhaps he or she tore it out to use as a shopping list on his or her next expedition to the local bookstore.  Or maybe the page was called into service as a makeshift notepad, and bore an address or phone number that opened the door to a new career or relationship for the book's owner.  Let's look on the bright side for once!    

The Yngling by John Dalmas

"You're a scoundrel, barbarian....But allowances must be made for barbarians, at least for those who are giants and great swordsmen who can look into the minds of others and speak across half a world and heal dirty wounds in three days."

Kelly Freas' interpretations of the Yngling character

In April I purchased a 1971 Pyramid printing of The Yngling by John Dalmas at a West Virginia flea market because I loved the Jeff Jones cover--the lithe limbs of the combatants and the moody colors spoke to me.  I even got into a conversation with the seller about Jones and Frank Frazetta.

The Yngling, a look at isfdb revealed, was first unleashed on the public as a serial, spread over two issues of Analog in 1969.  I have to admit I groaned when I saw the Kelly Freas covers for the novel's Analog and 1992 Baen appearances--is this novel some kind of a joke?  Based on Jones' painting I had signed up for a tragic tale of eldritch magic and brooding swordsmen driven by a black fate, not the playful romp promised by Freas' covers!  Well, let's see what The Yngling is really all about.

My copy, cover by Jeff Jones

It is several centuries in the future, and a plague ("the Great Death of 2105") has reduced humankind to a medieval culture and technology.  (I hate when that happens!  And if the fiction I talk about on this blog is any guide, this kind of thing happens all the time!)  Nils, a young man, is a member of a tribe of "neovikings" in Sweden, a trained warrior who has yet to see real combat. When he kills a man with his bare hands in a brawl he is exiled from Sweden and takes up a life of wandering.  Down in Denmark, where Nils finds they have a feudal aristocracy, our hero get arrested for poaching, but in recognition of his martial prowess (war is brewing), instead of being summarily executed Nils is mustered into the local lord's army.

The Yngling is a more or less traditional sword and sorcery story, but, perhaps to fit in at the hard-SF-focused Analog, and/or to appeal to editor John W. Campbell, who was famously obsessed with psychic phenomena, psionic powers stand in for the sorcery elements you'd find in a Conan story.  Nils turns out to not only be the strongest man and best swordsman in the land, but to have superior psychic powers; he is the first specimen of homo superior.  His powers first manifest themselves as prophetic dreams and a unique resistance to the mental attack of a marauding monster, and draw the attention of the secret network of "psis" who, like in a classic SF story by Van Vogt or Asimov, constitute a clandestine intellectual elite who pull strings from behind the scenes, manipulating European society so it evolves in what they consider the right direction.

The local lord's telepathic advisor trains Nils in how to use his mind powers, and then sends him on a mission: to kill the evil wizard--I mean the imperialistic psychic dictator--whose army and psi agents are expanding his power from his home base in the Middle East across Europe by the sword and by subterfuge.

Two of the 26 chapters of The Yngling are encyclopedia entries written long after the adventure story we are reading; one describes the neovikings and the other is a brief biography of the psionic dictator, Kazi the Undying, who was born in 2064 and is still around making trouble in Nils' own 29th century.  A genius scientist with no conscience, back in the 21st century Kazi invented a method to move his consciousness (Dalmas uses the word "ego") from one body to another, and then in the 22nd century he developed a means to put himself in a state of suspended animation.  For the last few centuries Kazi has been breeding people to provide perfect bodies for his ego to inhabit, as well as breeding an army of people he calls "orcs," a name he lifted from J. R. R. Tolkien.  (Meta!)

(Dalmas' mentioning of Tolkien's name led me to wonder if other elements of his novel were influenced by Lord of the Rings.  Nils, like Gandalf, is a guy with special abilities who travels around the West, trying to drum up resistance to a threat from the South and East, in the process confronting an important ruler's evil counsellor vaguely similar to Grima Wormtongue.  There is also the novel's structure; instead of wrapping things up fast after the climactic scenes that resolve the main plot, both The Yngling and Lord of the Rings have long denouements.)

Back cover of my copy

Nils makes his way into Kazi's court, where he witnesses the genius's extravagant cruelties, which include throwing people into the arena.  (If you are going to be an SF fan you have to accept that people are regularly going to get thrown into the arena, just as a matter of course.)  Instead of executing Nils out of hand, Kazi keeps the Swedish hero around, fascinated by his unique psychic powers and hoping to make use of his exemplary genes in his breeding programs.

Nils escapes, and helps unite the people of the snowy North and the steppes of Eastern Europe against the army of Kazi; the Scandinavians have a King Arthur-style prophecy about a "young one" ("The Yngling") from the past who will return in time of need and who must be obeyed, and Nils fits the bill.  Dalmas' 20-page description of the war between the Europeans and Kazi's orcs and Middle Eastern mercenaries is boring, little more than repetitive orders of battle ("The Danes and Frisians together had already started out with seventeen hundred knights....The next day Kuusta Suomalainen arrived with four hundred volunteers") and casualty figures.  The fighting is described in a distant, antiseptic way, totally devoid of drama; it's like a Wikipedia article about some war you never heard of and don't care about.  

After the Europeans have defeated the invading army the book has some 40 pages to go (my copy of The Yngling is 224 pages); this anticlimactic section chronicles Nils' rescue of his girlfriend from Turkish stragglers.  Feminists will be happy to hear that said girlfriend, herself a member of the psychic friends network, participates in her own rescue, hypnotizing a guard and decapitating him while he sleeps.  In the last paragraph of the novel she tells Nils of her premonition that humans who left the Earth on starships before the Great Death will return and wage war on the neovikings. Bummer!      

As I think my little summary makes clear, The Yngling is composed of all kinds of elements--post-apocalyptic world, the barbarian who is superior to the civilized man, psychic homo superior, secret elite societies, the arena, a prophecy--we have seen before.  A bigger problem is that the story lacks character, spirit, and style; it isn't full of broad jokes like Freas made me fear, but neither is it moody and grim like Jones lead me to hope.  It is pedestrian and bland; the villain, with his big ideas and abominable crimes, is the only thing in the book that pulses with life, but he has little screen time.  The Yngling isn't bad, but it is merely acceptable.  I don't regret the time I spent reading about Nils and Kazi, but neither do I have much interest in reading any of The Yngling's three sequels.
 
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My copy of The Yngling has bound within it a green advertisement for the Science Fiction Book Club.  In 1971 new members would receive A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, edited by Anthony Boucher, for only a dime.  Readers with eidetic memories may recall that I myself purchased the two volumes at a library book sale in April of 2015 for a dollar a piece.  (Inflation!)  From the pages of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction I have read over half a dozen short stories, including two by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, as well as John Wyndham's Re-Birth (alternate title: The Chrysalids.)  A bargain even at the painful $6.00 publisher's price!

      

Six more from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

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I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.   

Three stories from Far-Out People: Kris Neville, William F. Nolan & Michael Fayette

The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, which I started talking about in my last blog post, contains page after page of very interesting SF criticism from Malzberg, an expert on SF history.  In the book he recommends Kris Neville's 1971 version of "The Price of Simeryl," which was printed in the anthology The Far-Out People.  I decided to read "The Price of Simeryl," and, while I was at it, two other stories from The Far-Out People, one by William F. Nolan and one by Michael Fayette.

"The Price of Simeryl" by Kris Neville (original publication date 1966, this revision 1971)

I've read (I think) seven Neville stories in the past, and generally have had a positive reaction.  Let's see how I feel about this one, which first appeared in Analog.  According to The Far-Out People's publication page, the version I am reading is a revision.

Planet Elanth was colonized by humans less than 100 years ago, and they got problems!  A "Third Secretary in State," Raleigh, is sent from the administrative center of the vast space Federation to Elanth to investigate.  We follow his investigation, as well as the efforts of the human leadership of Elanth to convince Raleigh to approve a loan and arms sale to Elanth, and to keep certain facts a secret from Raleigh.

Most of this 41-page story consists of conversations during which politicians and bureaucrats all are trying to put something over on each other and the public.  I guess the story is largely an attack on imperialism and colonialism and racism as well as government callousness and ineptitude; the fact that the human colonists on Elanth call the native Elanthians "gooks" is presumably supposed to make you think of the Vietnam War, while the plot element mentioned in the title, the drug Simeryl, I guess is meant to remind you of the Opium Wars.  The native Elanthians are mysterious; they have a stone age culture and technology, and "live in harmony with the environment," as so many natives in SF stories do.  Their religion or philosophy or whatever compels them to help others, and so they have become an indispensible part of the human colonists' economy, volunteering to do heavy labor on farms and building roads.  Decades of human influence has messed up the Elanthian ecology, leading to fewer volunteers, and efforts to repair the environment and keep the Elanthians on the farm by addicting them to Simeryl have only made things worse. When Raleigh arrives things have reached the point where the human colonials are suffering painful price rises due to inflation and seeking weapons to defend themselves from an expected native revolt.

When Raleigh gets back to the administrative center of the Federation of Star Systems he tells the First Secretary in State to send neither money nor weapons to Elanth, to just let the human colonists all die.  The colonists, he says, have been driven insane by contact with the superior culture of the Elanth natives.  The taxpayers' money should be used instead to help the natives recover from the malign effect of contact with the human race!

Neville structures the story like a whodunit, so we get 40 pages of chatter with vague clues and then on the last page Raleigh issues his harsh verdict and diagnosis, that the human colonists "...bumped into a superior culture in the Elanthians and this gave them a horrible inferiority complex...."  The text doesn't really make it that all that clear that the colonists are insane or that the natives are so superior.  I'm not sure whether we are supposed to see Raleigh as a kind of Sherlock Holmes genius who perfectly reads all the clues and agree with his opinions and policies, or suspect he and the First Secretary are just as callous and insane as the thousands of colonists they are consigning to death.

I find these noble savage stories, and stories in which we are supposed to side with the aliens against the humans, a little hard to take.  In this one we barely even get to see the natives and assess how great they are; Raleigh only has a single brief interview with one of them.  (It is hinted that the Elanthians once had an urban technological civilization and abandoned it; maybe that is our signal that they are awesome. I must to say, I had to abandon the urban civilization called Manhattan for the Middle West and I don't feel very awesome about it.)  After some thought, I'm deciding that "The Price of Simeryl"'s ambiguity and mysteriousness make it better than the more straightforward pro-alien/anti-human stories you get from a guy like Chad Oliver, king of the anthropologist-goes-native-among-primitive-tribes story.  I am judging "The Price of Simeryl" acceptable, but I think it is worse, and less thought-provoking, than other Neville stories I have read.

"Papa's Planet" by William F. Nolan (1968)

In early 2015 I read four stories by Nolan and didn't think they were a very big deal. Maybe this one, first printed in Playboy, will put me firmly in the pro- (or anti-?) Nolan camp.

Or maybe not.  This is a four page gimmick story.  A pair of newlyweds goes to a planet dedicated to memorializing the life of Ernest Hemingway.  All the famous sites of Hemingway's adventures, Paris and Pamplona and all that, are reproduced and inhabited by robots.  The wife falls in love with an F. Scott Fitzgerald robot and abandons her husband.

This is exactly the sort of story a cynical person would expect to see in Playboy, the kind of story which tells the reader "You're not just a creep who bought this magazine to look at girls' boobs, you are an educated sophisticate who recognizes the names 'Ernest Hemingway' and 'F. Scott Fitzgerald' and bought this magazine to look at girls' boobs."   Acceptable, I guess.

"Savior Sole" by Michael Fayette (original publication date 1970, this revision 1971)

Fayette has only three credits on isfdb.  This story first appeared in Robert Hoskins' anthology Infinity One.  A year later Hoskins included it (in a revised version) in The Far-Out People.  Reduce, reuse, recycle.

I am totally loving this Steranko cover.

This is one of those stories in which half the stuff that happens is probably just the main character's hallucinations.  (Am I crazy, or do I read lots of stories like this?) It is also one of those New Agey stories which includes lots of poetry-like repetition and a dictionary definition (of  "lonely") in the text.

What I think happens is this: in order to preserve the human race against a catastrophe the U. S. government puts three hundred and fifty people in suspended animation in an underground bunker.  Also in the bunker is an Air Force chaplain; he is to reanimate everybody if he sees a red alarm light come on.  This will only happen if the entire human race on the surface is exterminated.

After living five years alone in the bunker the chaplain goes insane.  He starts thinking the corpsicles are up and about, having parties.  He falls in love with a young woman and deactivates her suspended animation equipment so he can grope her naked body.  This tampering with the equipment causes her to die (Fayette graphically describes how she bloats up and decays and so forth.)  In the end of the story the red light turns on...or does it?

This story just kind of sits there, neither offensively bad nor memorable or interesting, mere filler.  At least it is short, nine pages.  Barely acceptable.

***********

Three lukewarm stories: the fully formed but mediocre Neville and then two pointless, half-baked, gimmicky pieces.  It is more fun to read stories that are really good (obviously), and more fun to write about stories that are truly bad that give me a chance to enumerate problems and vent my frustration than to deal with these kinds of blah stories.  Well, that's life, I guess.

In our next episode we'll tackle more material from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg; no doubt Barry will inspire more excitement than did today's three writers.