Erotica by SF authors R Silverberg, B N Malzberg, R Campbell & S R Delany

1994 edition

If you type "Barry Malzberg" into the search field at the indispensable internet archive one of the things that comes up is The Mammoth Book of Erotica, edited by Maxim Jakubowski and published in 1994.  New Jersey's own Barry, a special favorite here at MPorcius Fiction Log, is not the only member of the speculative fiction community who is represented in this "glorious celebration of sensual love;" there are also offerings from Anne Rice and Clive Barker, in whom I have little interest, and Robert Silverberg, Ramsey Campbell, and Samuel R. Delany, writers whose work does interest me and about which I have written several times at this little old website of mine.  So put the kids to bed and let's check out a perhaps unexpected dimension of the oeuvres of Messieurs Silverberg, Malzberg, Campbell and Delany, whom the back cover text of The Mammoth Book of Erotica suggest are among "love's finest scribes."

"Two at Once" by Robert Silverberg (1992)

"Two at Once" was the cover story of the June 1992 issue of Penthouse Letters, and is a sort of celebration of the 1970s, set in Los Angeles.  "[T]he glorious seventies, when everyone was doing everything to everyone, in every imaginable combination....  What a nice decade that was!"  The narrator, who writes scripts for Saturday morning cartoons, has a female friend, Louise, with whom he has a weekly date to hit the nude beach and then return to her apartment for showers and sex; neither of these free spirits of the Me Decade has any interest in marriage.  His big aspiration is to have sex with two women at once, and Louise hopes to makes his dream come true, inviting her friend Dana, a woman recently arrived from New York, to join them at dinner on Saturday night.  Bespectacled Dana's "whole vibe was New York: alert, intelligent, fearless."  At the restaurant Dana recognizes their waitress as a friend from her Bronx high school days, Judy.  The narrator is in luck--Dana invites Judy to join the threesome, making it a foursome!

But was it good luck, really?  The narrator had long dreamed of having sex with two women at once, and finds three a little too much to handle--he enjoys it, but it is a lot of work to keep all three of these women satisfied.  Soon after this escapade Louise meets a guy and moves out of L.A., Dana returns to New York, and Judy disappears, and the narrator never has an opportunity to achieve his dream of two at once.

Silverberg tries to liven up this banal material with L.A. and NYC local color and period details--mentions of inflation and the oil shock and ubiquitous marijuana smoking--to evoke the spirit of the 1970s, but "Two at Once" is bland, flat, and lame.  A waste of time.

Oracle of the Thousand Hands [excerpt] (1968)

Olympia Press published multiple novels by our man Barry, and Oracle of the Thousand Hands was one of them.  Jakubowski includes an excerpt here in The Mammoth Book of Erotica that runs to 22 pages.

Oracle of the Thousand Hands (or at least part of this excerpt) is a parody of histories and biographies of great men.  Its author is a man in a mental institution, who has taken up the task of writing a study of the sexual exploits of his late friend Justin D'Arcy, a man he calls "the quintessence of heterosexuality," a hero who was perfectly suited to halting the decline of Western society into masturbation and homosexuality that characterized the 1960s.  The narrator addresses all the issues faced by scholars of the liberal arts, describing to us his sterling credentials and generous access to primary sources (he claims to have interviewed many of D'Arcy's lovers), his theory of history and his biases; we incidentally learn about his challenging relationships with the other inmates in the loony bin and with the medical authorities who run this booby hatch in which he has found himself.

The excerpt begins with a profile of D'Arcy that informs us that his genitals were of above average size, that he had no homosexual tendencies whatsoever, and that he was a master at satisfying women.  Then comes the aforementioned spoof of self-important scholarly writing that lays out why D'Arcy matters and why our narrator is the man to tell his story.  The last 16 or so pages of the excerpt consists of explicit first-person descriptions of a man's sexual experiences at college--are these D'Arcy's experiences or the narrator's?  Malzberg gives us every reason to believe that there is no D'Arcy, that D'Arcy is the narrator's ideal vision of himself, a fantasy figure in whom he has come to believe.  (You'll remember that Malzberg pulled this kind of gag in Herovit's World.)  These collegiate sexual experiences are all awkward and strange, the narrator showing no respect for women and evincing a preference for masturbating while looking at magazines over sex with a real live woman.  He thinks about the magazines while he is having intercourse with women, and in one episode, while performing with one young woman in his dorm room bed, he even listens to the magazines shift on the shelf above with each of his thrusts and fantasizes about how the slick pages of the magazines would feel on his bare ass should they tumble off the shelf and cascade over the rutting lovers.

When I read Malzberg's sex novel Everything Happened to Susan I suspected it was an attack on the sexual revolution, and today as I read this excerpt from Oracle of the Thousand Hands I am lead to suspect it is a piece of pornography that is attacking pornography; could it be that Oracle of the Thousand Hands, the kind of book that would offend so many feminists and social conservatives, is actually in agreement with their diagnosis of the baleful effects of pornography on society and on individuals?

Clever, funny, thought-provoking and a little disturbing--a good slice of Malzberg.

"Merry May" by Ramsey Campbell (1987)

In 1987 an entire collection of stories by Ramsey Campbell about sex and death was published under the title Scared Stiff.  Most of the stories included were reprints of 1970s material, but it seems that "Merry May" was original to the collection.

Jack Kilbride, a professor of music in Manchester, is having a mid-life crisis!  He is coming to believe his career has amounted to nothing, that the music he has written is no good, and the student he has been having sex with, Heather, has given him up--they would arrange their assignations via coded personals in the newspaper, and there have been no messages from her for weeks.  Kilbride tries to relieve the tension by availing himself of the services of a prostitute, but when this woman recognizes his desire for schoolgirls he is shamed and flees her.

Kilbride recalls a personals ad he saw while looking in vain for a message from Heather: "Alone and desperate?  Call us now before you do anything else."  He calls, and a woman answers, offers an invitation, and that Saturday, April 30th, he drives out to a rural Lancashire village to meet her.  Campbell draws sharp contrasts between the polluted industrial city and the beautiful spring countryside.

In the little village to which he has been invited Kilbride is asked to chop all the branches off a felled tree to fashion this year's maypole, and then to choose the May Queen from among a squad of 13- and 14-year-old girls whose beauty gives him an erection.  He has dinner with the woman he spoke with on the phone, Sadie Thomas, her taciturn husband Bob, and their daughter, Margery, whom Kilbride elected May Queen before realizing whose child she was.  Bob Thomas complains bitterly about a nearby factory, now abandoned, where the village's menfolk worked for years, and which poisoned them in some undefined way.

Kilbride stays the night in the village.  A few clues indicate to him that factory's poison has inflicted some manner of sexual dysfunction on the men--there are no young children in the village, and the men seem unable to perform sexually; one might say the factory emasculated the men of the village.  The next day there are elaborate festivities, with the girls dancing around the maypole and some of the men, in costume, doing a Morris dance; Kildere and Margery sit on rude thrones and are fed cakes that turn out to be drugged--with an aphrodisiac!  Kildere and Margery are led into the church where they have sex.  Then the men of the village beat Kildere up and, as the story ends, it is suggested that they are going to cut off his genitals and imprison him for use as a sex slave "...comes Old May Day [May 11]," says Bob Thomas, "we'll have our own Queen of the May."  It is not 100% clear, but I guess they are going to use the semen from his testicles to impregnate their wives and/or daughters, and then, because they are unable to perform with their wives due to anxiety over their sterility, they are going to relieve their frustrations by anally raping the overeducated man from Manchester, who represents to them the modern world of industry which has robbed them of their manhood.

This is a better than average Campbell story; often I find Campbell's verbose descriptions of settings and his metaphors to be a superfluous distraction, but this time he doesn't overdo it.  The tension between old and new, between the city and the country, and between the rural working-class men and their middle-class city slicker victim make the story compelling, and Kildere's midlife crisis and attraction to underage girls make him an ambiguous figure with whom the reader is not quite sure he should identify.  The heterosexual sex scenes are actually sexy, unlike the lame sex scene in Silverberg's story and the intentionally sad sex scenes in Malzberg's, but of course Kildere's thrilling coupling with beautiful 13-year old Margery is just the set up for the horror of emasculation and homosexual rape that lies in Kildere's future, a fate to which Kildere would prefer death.

Equinox (excerpt) by Samuel R. Delany (1973)

1994 edition

Wikipedia tells us that Delany's novel Equinox was first published under the title The Tides of Lust, the publisher not liking Delany's title.  Jakubowski presents here a 12-page excerpt of the controversial novel, which Wikipedia says is full of gay sex, underage sex, sex involving urine, and characters with over-the-top symbolic names like "Bull," "Nazi" and "Nig," and was actually banned by the government of the United Kingdom in 1980.

The excerpt of Equinox included here in The Mammoth Book of Erotic is a sex scene apparently calculated to appeal to as wide a range of fetishes and offend as large a number of people as possible, written in short sentences full of euphemisms.  A black sea captain has sex with a blonde white woman whom he calls "little white pig" and "little monkey" and then with her young brother; as he does so he counts off each of his orgasms, having bragged at the start of this session that he would achieve seven.  All the while a second woman watches the performance through a porthole.  The captain's dog Niger is not left out of the festivities, eagerly licking the genitals of each of the three human participants.  The sex depicted is rough, the captain manhandling, spanking and kicking his lovers, and there is a lot of good-natured banter about how earlier in the day the brother and sister had sex with each other and how the boy sometimes has sex with Niger the dog.

I suppose we can consider Equinox, or at least this excerpt, as a sort of experiment in pushing the envelope, a challenge to taboos and (perhaps incidentally) to our notions of consent.  When the book was written over 40 years ago many people no doubt thought interracial sex and/or homosexual sex, which today we are expected to find perfectly acceptable and even laudable, disgusting and immoral.  I believe people nowadays reading the book would likely find the incest, sex with an underaged person, and bestiality to be reprehensible and offensive, but can we be confident those taboos will endure the next 40 years?

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2000 edition

The Malzberg and Campbell productions are creditable and characteristic of their authors' bodies of work.  (Ironically enough, the revised 2000 edition of The Mammoth Book of Erotica does not include Malzberg and Campbell's contributions--I hope it is because they demanded more money or something.)  The Silverberg story is such a lame piece of hack work I am surprised that Silverberg put his own name on it and that Jakubowski wanted to reprint it.  The Delany is remarkable, but not necessarily in a fun or pleasant way, though I guess it can elicit nervous laughter in the way the famous "The Aristocrats" joke does.