SF: Author's Choice: Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, & Fritz Leiber

Recently I read L. Sprague de Camp's "Proposal" in my copy of Harry Harrison's 1968 anthology SF: Author's Choice.  SF: Author's Choice, which was published the same year in Britain in hardcover with the title Backdrop of Stars, consists of 13 stories, selected by their authors as ones they were pleased with and had written for some particular reason, though there were length restrictions and the stories were required to be unanthologized to that date, and Harrison had veto power over the authors' choices.  Harrison also expected the writers to pen a little essay or "personal statement" about their stories.  Today let's read the contributions by Grandmasters Brian Aldiss, Poul Anderson, and Fritz Leiber.  

"Judas Danced" by Brian Aldiss (1958)

"Judas Danced" first appeared as "Judas Dancing" in Fred Pohl's magazine Star Science Fiction, which lasted one issue.  The success of the Star Science Fiction Stories books Pohl edited apparently impressed Ballantine so much they decided to have Pohl do the thing he was doing in magazine form, but the mag didn't sell so Ballantine went back to putting out the anthologies.  You can see the sole issue of Star Science Fiction at the internet archive, and I recommend that fans of Richard Powers do so, as the magazine's pages offer like a dozen black and white decorations and illustrations by Powers in his distinctive and  evocative style.

"Judas Danced" is a sort of challenging literary story with an unreliable first-person narrator that is full of "word play" and wacky jokes and references to history and literature.  It depicts the strange world of several hundred years in the future, but not in a straightforward way--you have to be patient and wait for the end and work a little to figure everything out.  

In brief, our narrator is mentally ill, and one of the ways his insanity manifests itself is that he injures other people and has killed twice; crime is a rarity in the future depicted because of punishments that in one way are harsh, but another way quite lenient.  As the story progresses we learn that the society Aldiss has concocted for the story is the product of illiteracy and time travel.  Illiteracy is the result of the ubiquity of TV, computers and scanners; reading became a skill with little utility, so people stopped learning to read.  As the narrator theorizes (in fiction, insane people are often full of wisdom), Man needs Myth.  For many centuries, religion provided these myths.  Then, in the 19th century, when science crippled religion, Man's source of Myth was literature.  If people in the 23rd or 24th century can no longer read, where will they get their myths from?  This is where time travel comes in.

Time travel to the future is impossible, but time travel to the recent past, like the last week, is feasible, though so expensive only governments with access to the wallets of the taxpayers can swing it.  However, everybody can look back in time as far as around 2700 years ago, so you can observe the lives of Julius Caesar and Jesus Christ and William Shakespeare and so forth on a TV screen called a "timescreen."  Man finds his Myths in history now, in observable reality.

Time travel has also changed the justice system.  Because the government can send agents back in time a week they can generally rescue murder victims by going back in time and helping them avoid a murderer's assault.  They can also execute a murderer and then go back in time and save him from execution.  One of the nonsensical paradoxes Aldiss allows himself in this story is that if you get killed and then get rescued by time travelers you still remember the horrifying and painful experience of being killed in the original time line.  (Like in ancient Rome, the standard method of execution is strangulation.)  So, execution is a punishment which, physically, might leave a condemned felon unscathed, but scar him so deeply psychologically that he will never commit crime again.

Our narrator, the nut, is so crazy he was undeterred by being executed and has killed--the same guy!--a second time, and is about to be executed a second time.  He is so scary that his companions (who at the end of the story are revealed to be his parents), as he discovers late in the story, are petitioning the government to neglect to "resurrect" him after this second execution.

The other crazy thing about the future of this story has to do with dancing.  In the future depicted, people express themselves and work out their psychological problems via the dancing--dancing has taken on the role that sports, drama, and reading and writing had in the 20th century.  There are professional dancers, but everybody dances and the dances consist of people interpreting the history they have seen on the timescreens, playing the roles of people with whom they identify or whom fascinate them.  But our narrator cannot dance because he was born with a club foot.  And the role he wishes he could play, the person he in fact believes himself to be an incarnation of (as the spoily back cover of SF: Author's Choice tells us) is Jesus Christ, while his twin brother, who is the person the narrator keeps murdering, is one of the finest of dancers, a professional who dances as Judas. 

"Judas Danced" is the kind of story which isn't exactly fun when you are wrestling with it but which you admire for its daring originality and elaborate structure when you are done with it.  It is easy to recommend to fans of literary SF but people who read to relax or be entertained maybe will find it a chore or a bore.  Maybe I need to add "respectable" to the menu of words I use to rate these stories.

In his commentary Aldiss writes about how important the writing of "Judas Danced," and how important its acceptance by Pohl, were for his career, and gives some interesting analysis on the course of the SF field.  Aldiss comes across as being a little full of himself, but not too badly.    

"Judas Danced" has been reprinted in numerous Aldiss collections and Robert Silverberg included it in two anthologies, one of which, Alpha 4, I own.   

"The Last of the Deliverers" by Poul Anderson (1958)

In "The Last of the Deliverers" Anderson paints a picture of what looks like a future utopia of small town individualism.  In America, the development of cheap solar energy collectors and batteries that can be owned and maintained by a single individual or family, as well as efficient small scale agriculture, allowed people to live quite independently and flee the crushing taxation and regulation of the cities.  People lost interest in fashionable trends and mass produced consumer items, wearing the same clothes and driving the same vehicles year after year, causing a collapse of big business and big labor, and when people didn't need high incomes to keep up with the Joneses, the tax base also collapsed, leading to a shrinking of the government.  The same technological changes led to the demise of the communist government in the Soviet Union.  The 20th century of big institutions and intrusive national governments, of radical change and horrendous tyranny and monstrous war has been followed by a 21st century of small independent towns in which everybody gets along and does romantic small town stuff like hunting rabbits and making their own furniture, a time period in which nothing changes.

Two old men meet in one of these idyllic towns in Ohio.  One is the last Republican, the town crank, who misses the days of big business and economic growth and big national projects and refuses to forget that his father died in the Korean War when he was a baby.  The other shuffling geezer is a Communist, the last resident of Pittsburgh, whose mother's heart was broken by the fall of the USSR and who, having left Pittsburgh after the death of his wife, travels the countryside preaching the Marxist faith to deaf ears.  These two old timers have arguments the people of the town, who have been enjoying this static peaceful small town existence their entire lives, can't even understand.  The two old men comes to blows and kill each other when their impotent wrestling leads them to fall in a river.

The twist ending is that this 21st-century world in which people don't understand the ideological struggles of the 20th century is about to be embroiled in a war over ideological differences we 20th century readers can't understand.

This is one of those stories that is more about ideas than character or drama, though the twist ending, which is subtly but effectively foreshadowed, does inject some drama at the end by casting a new and unflattering light on what came before that undercuts much of the utopian feeling of the bulk of the story.  The caricatured political speeches and lectures about fictional history get a little boring while you are reading them, though.

Acceptable.

In his personal statement Anderson stresses that we must remember our ideological opponents are human, and complains that too much of the politics in SF is simple and naïve and doesn't reflect the fact that all systems represent trade offs and are vulnerable to the reality of fallible human nature, and he admits that he himself is not exempt from such criticism.  He also points out that the future is truly unknowable.

"The Last of the Deliverers" first appeared in F&SF and would go on to be recognized by Martin H. Greenberg as representative of the better stories of the 1950s in two different anthologies, one he did with Joseph Olander and another with Isaac Asimov.  The story was also included in The Best of Poul Anderson, which I see has an introduction by our beloved Barry N. Malzberg!  I am intrigued by what Malzberg could possibly have to say about Anderson--aren't these two dudes who are on totally different wavelengths?  (Of course, I would have thought the same of Malzberg and David Drake, but in 2015 Malzberg wrote that Drake was one of his closest friends.) I am feeling the need to rush out to try to find this 1976 collection at the local used bookstores to see what our pal Barry has to say about Anderson's (pre-1976) career.  

1) They must have really thought Malzberg's name was a draw to put it on the cover, even though
he just contributes a 4-page essay
2) The covers of these books entice customers with promises of high-tech mechanized warfare, but how
many of the stories in them are actually about fighting or dangerous adventure?

"Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me" by Fritz Leiber (1963)

A lot of classic SF writers love Norse Mythology and incorporate that love into their writings.  (I've always preferred Greek and Roman literature myself--I mean, c'mon man, the Greeks and Romans had a sophisticated, artistic, sensitive urban civilization; weren't the Vikings just a bunch of barbarians who lived in dirt huts or something?)  Leiber is one of those guys, and "Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me," which weighs in at six pages here in SF: Author's Choice, is simply an expression of fascination with the tales of Thor, Odin, Ragnarok, and all that, conjoined with people's fear of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

An old man is interrogated by his clever great-granddaughter; she wants him to explain elements of Norse myth to her.  Everything he rattles off she suggests has an analogue in modern life, the Aesir and their territories represent the United States, the Frost Giants represent the USSR, etc.  She implies that Norse myth is a prophecy that predicts a coming cataclysmic war between the liberal West and the communist East, and if they can figure out who Loki is in our world then maybe the world can be preserved.  The text hints that the old man or his great-granddaughter, or both, may be time travelers from the future who wrote Norse myth to serve as a warning to the people of the 20th century but their mission is in jeopardy because they have forgotten key details or something.  Then all this business with the old man and the great-granddaughter is revealed to be a dream, so who the hell knows?

To me this is a gimmicky trifle that relies on readers being as enthralled with Norse myth as Leiber is and on people finding the relationship of an old man with his precocious great-granddaughter charming.  Barely acceptable. 

In his personal statement Leiber describes his infatuation with Norse myth, saying it strikes a chord with him that "harsh, sand-blown biblical stories" and "the bright, limited perfection and lush sexuality of classical legend" do not.  He also describes in some detail the inspirations behind, and entire process of conceiving, "Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me."   

"Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me" is another piece that made its initial appearance in F&SF.  It would reappear in the Leiber collection The Worlds of Fritz Leiber and some foreign anthologies.

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When I blogged about de Camp's "Proposal," I expressed surprise that he and Harrison had chosen a silly joke story to represent his work, and I have to admit I feel that Anderson and Leiber's choices are comparably odd, and to me disappointing.  Both stories offer banal observations (fanatical ideological commitments can blind us to our common humanity and nuclear war would be bad) and tired reader-friendly "hooks" (idyllic small town life and precocious kiddies) as their main attractions.  Anderson takes a stab at speculations about how technological developments might affect our lives and at introducing drama with his effective twist ending, and so "Last of the Deliverers" has a leg up on "Myths My Great-Granddaughter Taught Me," which is nothing but gimmicks and has a twist ending which adds nothing to the story.  Neither Anderson's nor Leiber's story is fun or exciting or enlightening, and neither of them is representative of what makes its author's work worth engaging with.

In contrast, it is obvious why Aldiss chose "Judas Danced" for the anthology.  It is complex on a literary level and full of well thought out but quite original and quite crazy speculations--Aldiss worked hard on this ambitious thing and he came up with something surprising, and there is nothing cozy or cliched or tired about it, he doesn't use any shortcuts to win over or comfort readers, instead he challenges readers.  And it really represents something important about Aldiss's career, his willingness to take risks and do things that are new, to experiment. 

We may return to SF: Author's Choice, and I am sort of curious about later books in the series which include stories and commentaries by writers we are interested in here at MPorcius Fiction Log like A. E. van Vogt, James H. Schmitz, Larry Niven, Barry Malzberg, Jack Vance, Thomas Disch, and the list goes on.  Also, it seems that Aldiss some how managed to get a story in each volume, and I would want to check that out.  (Books to add to my shopping list?)  But next time I'll be sampling a different anthology.  Stay tuned!