Six late '60s stories from Barry Malzberg's Final War and Other Fantasies

An Italian edition of Final War
and Other Fantasies

I recently looked through my copy of the 1969 Ace Double with Barry Malzberg's Final War and Other Fantasies and John T. Phillifent's Treasure of Tau Ceti to see which stories in the Malzberg collection I had read and which I had not.  Today I read the six brief pieces I have heretofore neglected, some of Malzberg's earliest published SF work.  First I reread the intro, in which Malzberg says he "fell into" writing science fiction because he found the "mislabeled mainstream" markets for literary fiction impenetrable and then claims that the "literary market" is "exhausted, desiccated, killed by imitation, irrelevance, and the very possible mining out of all the basic approaches...."  Malzberg admits he loved SF in his youth, and asserts he knows it "very well as a historian," and claims that today--1969--science fiction is not exhausted, that there is still much SF material to be mined and that the future of literature lies with SF.  People interested in the New Wave may find it noteworthy that Malzberg asserts that Alfred Bester, C. L. Moore, Cordwainer Smith, and some others proved "years and years before a new wave that serious work could be done in this form to equal the best of serious work done anywhere."

I'm reading the stories in the order they appear in the book, not in chronological order.

"Oaten" (1968)

"Oaten" first appeared in Fantastic, when it was edited by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat fame.  Harrison is one of the people to whom Malzberg dedicated Final War and Other Fantasies.  In his intro to the story here in Final War, Malzberg suggests, without specifically naming Campbell or Analog, and perhaps not sincerely, that he wrote this story specifically to appeal to John W. Campbell, Jr. in hopes it would be published in Analog.  A friend, Mazlberg tells us, later told Barry that "Oaten" was the funniest parody of an Analog story he had ever read.

Like a number of Malzberg's stories, "Oaten" comes to us as a series of messages between an explorer or agent and his HQ.  In this case, the guy writing messages back to HQ is a scout, conducting "sociotherapy" among some primitive natives with scaly skin, the Grabalzi.  Sociotherapy is a technique in which a human integrates himself into an alien culture in order to learn about it and produce a documentary to serve as entertainment for other humans.  The messages back and forth are a little vague and confusing, but it seems that the scout was sent down in a one-man scout ship from an orbiting mother ship to do this sociotherapy among the Grabalzi people.  The Grabalzi have dangerous powers, a fact kept from the scout and much of the crew by the commander of the mission, who sent the scout down there for his own reasons.  The crew of the orbiting mothership depose the leader and try to get a message to the scout in time to alert him to the risks he is running, but too late--the scout has been hypnotized by the natives and will soon be treated as a slave or a head of cattle or something of that nature.

The humor of the piece comes from little jokes like the name of the natives, slapstick as the scout flees from Grabnalzi ceremonies which are humiliating and scary, and then is ordered to go back to them by the mission commander to be further humiliated, and by the fact that sociotherapy requires the scout to be credulous, to more or less believe the absurd tenets of alien cultures--those selected to be scouts are  thus generally neurotic and somewhat stupid.  There is also the element of parody of standard features found in stories by Astounding/Analog authors, like new forms of science (e. g., Asimov's Psychohistory or van Vogt's Nexialism or Hubbard's Dianetics) and the use of anthropological ideas (like in all those Chad Oliver stories.)

Acceptable; even if the story isn't actually funny, it is interesting to see what somebody like Malzberg, a SF expert and practitioner who doesn't write in the Astounding/Analog tradition, thinks of Astounding/Analog-style material.     

"The Ascension" (1969)

In his little intro to "The Ascension" here in Final War Malzberg warns us this is one of his many stories about political assassinations.

"The Ascension" is a sort of rambling semi-coherent mess, I guess the stream-of-consciousness of a fictional 46th president of the United States in a future America in which the presidency changes hands quickly due to a rapid succession of coups and revolutions and assassinations.  This kind of story gets its emotional oomph by exploiting what the writer assumes to be the reader's feelings about the murder of JFK and the social upheaval of the 1960s; fragmentary and vague, the story doesn't do the work of generating feelings in the reader by drawing believable characters or situations that one might relate to or understand, it tries to jolt your own memories of recent events and your own feelings about current events.  Since I wasn't alive in the 1960s I don't have the kind of feelings Malzberg is trying to leverage--JFK and the Vietnam War are no more moving to me than Julius Caesar and Antony's War on Parthia--so this story, which may well have been powerful for readers in 1969, to me in 2020 feels like a self-indulgent waste of time.

Based on conventional criteria, this story is bad--it doesn't make a point or generate feeling or entertain.  But I guess one might be interested in it as a sort of specimen of what people like Malzberg were thinking in the late 1960s (Malzberg tells us he wrote it in November 1967 and sold it in December 1967.)

"The Ascension" made its debut in Fantastic when Ted White was editing the magazine.  Malzberg himself edited Fantastic for like two issues before White's tenure, and, even though White's name is on the masthead of this issue, the introduction to "The Ascension" in Fantastic is written in Malzberg's voice ("K. M. O'Donnell is the pseudonym under which the editor frequently writes and occasionally publishes science fiction...upon a close rereading [it] strikes me as so conservative--perhaps the word is reactionary--that I am surprised I could have written it") in such a way that one might be lead to believe that White wrote this story.  Strange.

The issue of Fantastic with "The Ascension" includes another story by Malzberg--this one under the pen name Robin Schaeffer--which I will have to get around to reading someday, and a story by William Pronzini, a regular collaborator of Malzberg's, called "How Now Purple Cow" which I graded harshly when I read it some years ago.     

"The Major Incitement to Riot" (1969)

In his intro to "The Major Incitement to Riot" here in this collection, Malzberg says "the basic image" of the story came to him "in the midst of a 103 degree fever," the result of cutting himself while shaving.

Maybe Malzberg should cut himself more often, because I don't think of him as a writer who regularly presents powerful images, but "The Major Incitement to Riot" has one.  In the alternate universe or future world or whatever of this story, a replica death mask of tremendous size of the murdered chief executive is constructed (it takes five men five weeks to fashion it) and hung high above the town square.  On a windy day the mask breaks free of its moorings and floats down towards the crowd that has come to pay homage to it--it is so huge that it could trap hundreds of people and a stampede and riot ensues that kills many.

The story (of six pages) has five sections or chapters; after the initial part which describes the fall of the mask and the resulting riot the succeeding sections go backwards or forwards in time, describing the assassination of the chief executive, the aftermath of his murder and the long term results of the riot that starts the story.  All these accounts are presented as biased and self-serving documents written by people with some sort of stake in politics in this future or fantasy milieu, which, like that in "The Ascension," is a polity where liberal republican forms (like elections) are still more or less observed, but in which true power is in the hands of men of violence, secret police and terrorists and the like.

While its subject matter is similar to "The Ascension," "The Major Incitement to Riot" is actually compelling, containing real characters and real images, like a traditional story might.  In my opinion, Malzberg is at his best when his modernistic techniques are wedded to such traditional elements as a plot and characters, and I wish more of his stories were like this.  Thumbs up!

"The Major Incitement to Riot" is another piece that first appeared in Fantastic, in an issue edited by Malzberg himself.

"We're Coming Through the Window" (1967)

In his little intro to "We're Coming Through the Window" Malzberg says he wrote it in an hour during "the blackest despair I have ever experienced."  Malzberg's first SF sale, it made its debut in Galaxy and has since appeared in two different anthologies of first stories by "science fiction masters."

This is a gimmicky joke story about a down and out guy who builds a time machine in his Manhattan apartment.  The device has many limitations--it only allows him to travel a few months to the past or a few minutes to the future, and he has to stay within five feet of the machine--and a disaster is occurring as duplicates of himself increase in number and are all crammed together in the apartment.  This is a "meta" or recursive story--the story is in the form of a letter written by the inventor to Frederik Pohl, editor of Galaxy, offering to sell rights to his story to Galaxy.

I have a limited tolerance for these things.  Barely acceptable, I guess. 

"The Market in Aliens" (1968)

This is a brief (4 pages) and inoffensive story about little tentacled aliens that are practically helpless and totally unable to communicate that keep landing on Earth.  Humans capture the harmless creatures and auction them off, and then the people who win the auctions sell them in turn; the narrator of this tale is one of the middlemen who get the aliens at auction and then sell them to a retailer.  The aliens end up in zoos or laboratories.  At the time of the story public opinion seems to be turning against the buying and selling of the aliens, as suspicions grow that they are not simply animals but intelligent beings, and prices are dropping.

To me this feels like an allegory about European slavery of Africans, but in his intro to the story Malzberg suggests it is a metaphor for the relationship between writers and their agents, but Barry makes this suggestion in a backhanded way that shirks responsibility: he says a friend pointed out to him that it must be such a metaphor, and Malzberg admits that this is an accurate analysis, but claims that such was not his intention, that it was the result of his subconscious expressing itself.  To my mind, this analysis cheapens the story, and makes much less sense than my slavery of Africans theory--writers are not aliens to literary agents, in fact they are quite similar; writers don't have trouble communicating, in fact they are experts at communicating; writers are not owned by agents, in fact writers hire and fire agents, etc. 

Not bad.  After its debut in Galaxy, "The Market in Aliens" was included in an anthology of stories by "the greatest SF writers of today" entitled First Step Outward. 

"By Right of Succession" (1969)

This is another assassination story; you might call it a story explicitly about the murder of JFK, except that it doesn't mention Kennedy's or Oswald's or Johnson's names.

The protagonist, a guy named Carson (maybe a reference to Johnny Carson?), reenacts the shooting of Kennedy, first as the shooter Lee Harvey Oswald, who fires down at the motorcade, hitting the unnamed target, and then climbs down the depository--and then as LBJ--he is escorted by cops to a hospital to meet the widow of the man he just shot and then is put on an airplane, on which he is inaugurated.  The cops, we are told, are robots, and it is strongly suggested that this is all a ritual that all presidents now go through, play acting the murder of their predecessors, or maybe actually killing their predecessors after they have lost an election or been impeached and convicted or something.  Anyway, the last paragraph of the five-page story seems to indicate that the ritual was not real, but a sort of dream therapy induced by drugs and hypnosis that all presidents go through once or twice a week, I guess mandated by Congress to induce guilt and fear and keep the president in line.

I'll call this one acceptable.  "By Right of Succession" made its initial appearance in If.

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Lots of Malzberg stories are about the murder of JFK and political assassinations in general, and lots of Malzberg stories have the hypnotherapy angle we saw in "By Right of Succession," and lots of Malzberg stories are about the difficult life of writers as (apparently) are "The Market in Aliens" and "We're Coming Through the Window."  Malzberg's huge body of work includes lots of overlap, redundancy, cannibalization, variations on themes, and plain old repetition.  A better program for reading Final War and Other Fantasies than reading six stories in one day may have been to read one story every week, so they would feel less repetitious.

In our next episode we'll sample a different facet of Malzberg's career.