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| My copy, which is in really good shape--I think I am first to read from it |
In their introduction to World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, Wollheim and Carr talk a little about the New Wave and the controversy surrounding it, suggesting that the changes in SF everybody was talking about represent more of an evolution than a revolution. I'll be reading one story each from my copy of World's Best Science Fiction Fourth Series by two authors often associated with the New Wave, Samuel R. Delany and Thomas Disch, and two by R. A. Lafferty, who, while not really a member of the New Wave, wrote in his own idiosyncratic style that defied or ignored convention and whose work certainly qualified as something new on the SF scene which was embraced by critics.
"Driftglass" by Samuel R. DelanyIt is the (nearish) future! Mankind is colonizing the Moon and Mars! And the ocean depths, where men work submarine mines and tend herds of whales and sea weed farms. Who performs this dangerous subaquatic labor? Men and women who, as children, received operations that gave them gills and webs between their fingers and toes, turning them into mermen and mermaids, or as they call them in the story, "amphimen." (One female amphiman is named Ariel, presumably Delany deliberately reminding us of mermaids.)
"Driftglass" is a first-person narrative; our narrator is Cal Svenson, a retired amphiman who was born in Denmark but now lives in a Brazilian fishing village where he did his undersea work before that work crippled him. Twenty years ago he was working a job in a nearby deep sea canyon, laying a power cable, when that project suffered a disaster, an avalanche that ended the operation and left Svenson with a long list of disabilities and scars that is the first thing we learn about him. Retired and living on his pension, he has become fully integrated into the local community, and much of the story is about his relationship with a local fisherman, Juao; Svenson is godfather and a sort of mentor to Juao's kids, who will soon become amphimen themselves.
The plot of "Driftglass" concerns the fact that the Aquatic Corp is going to try to lay a cable in that canyon again; the young man who is going to lay the cable seeks advice from Svenson, and Svenson attends a big beach party the night before the risky operation.
The driftglass of the title is a reference to pieces of broken bottles that the sea erodes down into smooth glass pebbles; Svenson explicitly explains the metaphor--those who make their living on and in the ocean are eroded and smoothed by the sea much like the glass is.
The tone of this story is sad, even tragic, but at the same time sort of mellow and at peace with the vagaries of fate--the characters accept that dangerous jobs must be done, and that no life is without risk. The disasters that befall some amphimen do not discourage Svenson or Juao from sending Juao's kids off to be turned into amphimen. The plot of the story reminds us of the kind of stuff Barry Malzberg says (technology and "progress" are chewing people up, forcing them to radically alter their very bodies and go on dangerous missions) but I think Delany is portraying future social and technological developments more ambiguously, suggesting they present opportunities as well as risks, just like social and technological changes always have, and that being an amphiman is a tough job but also a rewarding one, like tough jobs throughout human history. "Fishermen from this village have drowned," says Juao. "Still it is a village of fishermen."
A good story. "Driftglass" first appeared in If, and would go on to be widely anthologized and to serve as the title story of an oft-reprinted Delany collection.
"The Number You Have Reached" by Thomas M. DischWe just read Ray Bradbury's story about a guy who is the last man on Mars following a war on Earth and who torments himself over the phone, and here we have Thomas Disch's story about the last man on Earth who torments himself over the phone--he alone has survived because he was on a trip to Mars when a war broke out on Earth and neutron bombs destroyed (almost) all life on our big blue marble. The astronaut starts getting phone calls from a woman, but of course these must be hallucinations, the product of his guilty conscience and horrible horrible loneliness.
Why a guilty conscience? One of Disch's themes in the story is automation. The future depicted in the story is largely automated; for example, machines automatically clean the streets, so, when the astronaut returns to an Earth where everybody was suddenly killed, he sees very few dead bodies or car wrecks, as machines have cleaned most everything up. As a military man, and as a man who loves math and obsessively counts things, Disch likens the astronaut to an automatic machine; it is also suggested that he is cold (the story takes place in winter and the astronaut doesn't mind the cold and finds the snow-blanketed city beautiful) and emotionless, that he had a single-minded obsession--to see Mars--and married his wife not out of love but because her father was a big wig in the space program or the military or something and could help him get assigned to the Mars project. Anyway, as an automatic man, the astronaut is perhaps somehow part of the system that led to the catastrophe.
Another significant element of the story is that the astronaut contemplates and eventually commits suicide--a recurring theme in Disch's work and his life.
Not bad. Disch's style is smooth and straightforward, but full of clever little notes (like examples of what the astronaut finds so fascinating about numbers) and succinctly-described but still powerful images. Disch's work has economy, which I find admirable (and doubly so after all the Weird Tales stuff I have been reading, stuff which can be very wordy and repetitive.) Disch's stories are often biting and potentially offensive, and this is of course true of "The Number You Have Reached," with its suggestion that military men, math nerds, and ambitious people in general are amoral robots. "The Number You Have Reached," like so many of Disch's stories, makes you sit up and take notice, can stir you up.
"The Number You Have Reached" first appeared in British magazine SF Impulse, and went on to be included in the collections Under Compulsion and Fun with Your New Head.
"The Man Who Never Was" by R. A. LaffertyI'm counting "The Man Who Never Was" as a rare Lafferty story, because, according to isfdb, after it was first published in Robert A. W. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror, it has only ever reappeared in English here in Wollheim and Carr's anthology of 1967 stories. (The story did appear in a few European anthologies in translation, however.)
There is a long tradition of SF stories about homo superior, and homo superior's fraught relationship with us poor homo sapiens, and in "The Man Who Never Was" Lafferty takes a whack at this traditional subject. The story's first paragraph reads:
"I'm a future kind of man," Lado said one day. "And I believe there are other men appearing with new powers. The world will have to accept us for what we are."The story's second para reads:
"Bet it don't" said Runkis.Mihai Lado is famed as the best liar in his small rural town, the luckiest gambler and the savviest businessman (his business is selling cattle.) One day a neighbor, Raymond Runkis, is denouncing his lies, among them such claims as owning a horse that can recite Homer and a cow that gives four different types of booze from its teats instead of milk. Lado declares that, as "a future kind of man" with "new powers," he can prove that his outrageous lies are not lies at all. Runkis takes him up on this challenge, daring him to prove his claim that he can make a man disappear. Thinking such a feat impossible, so many townspeople place bets with Lado that if Lado should succeed in making a man disappear he will own half the town!
And Lado does succeed--a quiet, simple-minded man, Jessie Pidd, over the course of a few days, gradually vanishes, first becoming transparent and then gradually fading until he is literally gone.
Many Lafferty stories contain chilling violence which is played, in part at least, for comic effect, and we also get some of that in this tale.
Lado is too clever for his own good; the townspeople consider his making Jessie Pidd disappear to be murder. Lado insists that he hasn't murdered anybody--Pidd never existed, Lado created him, even implanting into the townspeople's minds a belief in Pidd; Pidd was an illusion all the time, and making an illusion disappear is no murder! Lado is dragged into court, but he cannot be convicted of murder as there is no physical evidence of the alleged homicide. Perhaps because they fear the great power of homo superior, perhaps because they don't want to pay up, the townspeople get together and lynch Lado, and then hide the body and go through their records, erasing all evidence that Lado ever existed. Mihai Lado has been disappeared as thoroughly as was Jessie Pidd.
I like it.
"Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" by R. A. LaffertyHere we have a famous Lafferty story which has appeared in several Lafferty collections and a bunch of anthologies since its debut in Galaxy.
"Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" takes on the traditional SF concepts of time travel, alternate history and "time streams." A bunch of scientists and their super computer (the computer actually seems like the leader of the group) decide to send back in time an Avatar, which we are told is "partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction," to kill a person and thus change history. The cabal sits high in a building, and will judge whether history has been changed by looking out the window to see if their city has changed, and by looking at a history book that lies open before them--surely if history changes, the text of the book will change.
The somewhat obvious central joke of the story is that the experiment is a success, but the eggheads and their machine don't realize it: history changes and the city and books in turn change, but the computer and scientists are themselves, of course, different, and thus don't notice the changes that to we readers are very pronounced.
Many SF alternate history stories are meant to be taken as serious speculation on what life might be like if the Confederacy achieved independence from Washington or if Nazi Germany had conquered the United Kingdom or whatever, but Lafferty here seems to just be kidding around, or even making fun of the whole project of alternate history, maybe arguing that we can't even really understand what happened in the past and its effect on us, so still grander speculations are futile or even ludicrous. A clue to Lafferty's attitude is in the name of the historian whose book the scientists watch for changes: Hilarius.
In case the medievalists in the audience (I know you are out there) are curious, Lafferty's story suggests that Charlemagne might have a maintained a good relationship with the Islamic world were it not for a traitor who caused the Battle of Roncevaux Pass; the Avatar kills this traitor, and the resulting encouragement of intellectual intercourse between the Christian and Muslim civilizations leads to an earlier Renaissance and superior technology and more vibrant art in the present. The scientists, thinking their experiment has failed, send back in time a second Avatar; this one is to act in such a manner that the philosopher William of Ockham--he of the famous razor in our universe (a fact which gives Lafferty an opportunity to make some jokes about cutting throats)--will have greater influence. In the universe in which Charlemagne has good relations with the Islamic world, Ockham seems to have unsuccessfully played the sort of role played with success by Martin Luther in our own universe; Ockham seems to have argued for pure materialist intellectualism and against spirituality, but to have lost the argument with other philosophers and failed to spark the sort of major reform movement Luther sparked in real life.
I think we can see "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" as a criticism of science, or at least a suggestion that many people hold science and/or scientists in too high a regard, see science and scientists the way people once saw magic and wizards, pagan religion and pagan priests. The triumph of Ockhamite thought severely retards or even reverses technological and cultural development--after the second Avatar succeeds in its mission in the past, the world changes in such a way that the scientists are reduced to stone-age primitivism. From the beginning of the story, when we are told the supercomputer chooses to represent itself as a dragon and that the Avatar is half-robot, half-ghost, Lafferty equates science and magic, and the scientists in the world that resulted from Ockhamism look for wisdom not to a supercomputer, but a fetish mask they all pretend can talk. Is the computer the 20th-century equivalent of a pagan oracle, manipulated by the 20th-century version of a witch doctor?
Another brisk, fun, and provocative piece from Lafferty that serves up lots of silly names and odd jokes alongside its thought-provoking ideas.
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| I wrote about the Kuttner story in Transformations: Understanding World History Through Science Fiction, "Absalom," a homo superior story, back in 2014 |
All four of these stories are good--each addresses some typical SF trope and is well-written and entertaining, and in each one the author makes an artistic decision or makes some sort of claim about the world that gives the reader pause and makes him think. Commendable selections by Wollheim and Carr.
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| For some reason one British edition of World's Best Science Fiction 1968 was entitled World's Best S.F.1 |
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