Orbit 9: K Neville, R Thurston, J Sallis, V Vinge & R A Lafferty

Let's take another paperback off the SF anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  Today: Orbit 9, edited by Damon Knight and first published in 1971.  (My paperback was printed in 1972.)  I've already read a couple of stories from Orbit 9, and blogged about one of them, Joanna Russ's "Gleepsite."  (I called it an "insoluble puzzle.")  Let's attack six stories today--I know, six is a lot, but it looks like they are short!

"Dominant Species" by Kris Neville 

This story has never been reprinted in English, but our friends over in the Netherlands have had two cracks at it, in 1977 and 1992.  Maybe the subtle and sophisticated Dutch saw something in "Dominant Species" that our gross Anglophonic minds are unable to grasp!  

To my crude American sensibilities this seems like a gimmicky trifle.  A creature much like a duck--maybe it is a duck--thinks itself a god that controls the universe, willing the appearance of food, controlling the weather, etc.  When what we have to assume is a spaceship lands nearby he takes credit for its appearance.  When the beings that emerge from the cylinder capture him he assures himself he has willed this to happen.  Anyway, eventually the aliens (or humans) dissect the duck (or duck-like alien) or whatever it is and we know the bird was suffering delusions of grandeur.  

At four and a half pages, barely acceptable. 

"Stop Me Before I Tell More" by Robert Thurston

Even the Dutch took a pass on this baby!  "Stop Me Before I Tell More" has never been reprinted.  I have good feelings about Thurston, though; I really liked his 1978 novel Alicia II, which I read twice before I started this blog, and also enjoyed 1985's Q Colony.  So maybe I'll be able to tell you "Stop Me Before I Tell More" is some kind of lost classic with a straight face.

"Stop Me Before I Tell More" is an extrapolation or elaboration of a travelling salesman joke.  All through the story's nineteen pages a single line in italics (e. g., "--There was this travelling salesman, see--") is followed by a paragraph or three expanding on it (in our example, describing the salesman's appearance, psychology, and career.)  

The salesman stays the night at a farmer's house after his car breaks down.  The farmer has sexy twin daughters.  One sneaks into the salesman's bed and they have sex.  He can't tell which of the two women she is, and in the morning the girls refuse to reveal the truth.  He stops by this house every year, and each time one of the daughters joins him in bed and he tries to figure out which it is, unsuccessfully.  This is a shaggy dog story, and he and we never learn which twin has been having sex with him.  The punchline of the story, made clear in the italicized lines, is that the joketeller has forgotten the punchline of the travelling salesman joke.    

    

Waste of time.

"Binaries" by James Sallis

Knight would include this one in The Best from Orbit Volumes 1-10 in 1976; otherwise, it has not been reprinted.

"Binaries" is a series of surreal images and paradoxical passages, ten and a half pages, I guess about a writer and his career, his relationships with women and his father, and his trips between and within France, England, and the United States.  One woman has breasts that are different sizes, one woman has a slim torso but big hips and thighs, the guy thinks of himself as a European but stays in America because he feels he belongs in America, this kind of thing.  Sallis presents a self-important and stereotypical view of the writer's life--smoking lots of cigarettes, name-dropping French writers and painters, suffering paranoia. 

Waste of time.

"Only the Words Are Different" by James Sallis

Sallis has two stories in Orbit 9.  "Only the Words Are Different" would be reprinted in Sallis's 1995 collection, Limits of the Sensible World.  It is yet more surreal images of the lives of writers who smoke many cigarettes, but is more coherent, more anchored in reality.

Five vignettes that collectively take up six and a half pages.  1: A writer looks out the window and sees a guy has fallen from the scaffolding to his death far below--the blood is the color of strawberries.  The writer figures this guy was climbing the scaffolding to express his love to the writer.  2: A college professor and his wife are driving home from a party; the wife cries because she thinks her husband is having an affair with one of the female students.  3: A writer discovers a petition signed by millions of people, a petition demanding that poetry abolished.  It is suggested that the people who know poets want poetry abolished because the poets' obsession with poetry is an obstruction to the progress of love lives, profitable enterprises, etc. 4: An American woman wants to have her English boyfriend's child, but he always uses a condom.  He moves to New York to be with her but their relationship collapses and he leaves her.  Then he mails her a condom full of his jizz.  5: In a future (I guess) town where the population is in decline because people don't have any interest in having kids, the Mayor tries to unite the depressed citizenry and shake them out of their ennui by declaring war on roaches.  One woman fights hand-to-hand with the police when they come to destroy her pet roach, a creature she feeds cigarette butts.

Acceptable.

"The Science Fair" by Vernor Vinge

Vinge is an actual math professor who often writes stories about science and technology, and this story actually has "science" in its title, so maybe Vinge can get us out of our New Wave doldrums.    

"The Science Fair" is a first-person narrative delivered by a private eye--a spy for hire living on an alien world of people with hooves who can see into the infrared spectrum.  He is hired to protect a famous scientist who is giving a speech at the upcoming once-in-a-generation science fair.  There is an action scene in which the private dick shoots it out with assassins.  Then comes the fair.  The scientist reveals that a star is approaching their planet and will likely destroy their civilization in eight generations!  He calls for the scientists of the world to stop working as individuals seeking profit and to work together to create a technological and industrial base capable of preventing the coming cataclysm.  People are thrown into an uproar by these revolutionary statements.  

"The Science Fair" feels like the first chapter of a novel--its last line is a clue that, I believe, suggests the approaching star has a planet orbiting it that is home to another intelligent race.  

I like it; Vinge does a good economical job of sketching out an interesting setting for his story; these aliens live in an environment and have a society I would have read much more about.  "The Science Fair" would reappear in 2001's The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge as well as two European Vinge collections published in 2006.  Look how sad 21st-century book covers are; it is like nobody is even trying any more.

"When All the Lands Pour Out Again" by R. A. Lafferty

This one is a little hard to grok, but I'm going to throw some interpretation out there: "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" is a satire or spoof of man's restless nature, his desire for change, any change, no matter how risky; also, it is a satire of man's solipsism, his hubris and overconfidence, his belief that he can master the world, can know its nature and even control it (this applies especially to academics, politicians and would-be revolutionaries.)  The story may also be a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ or just an assertion of God's power that echoes the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At the start of the fourteen-page story we meet three academics; Lafferty here gently spoofs academic self-importance and highlights how little academics really know and how little they agree with each other.  These three geniuses think that a major, cataclysmic change is in the offing, that everybody and everything is about to change, and they actually welcome rather than fear the change, though millions will die.

Sure enough, people, animals, even geographic features begin mass migrations, and they do it with joy.  People eagerly blow up their homes and places of work and begin long journeys they know not where, surrounded by earthquakes, lava flows, the arrival of space aliens, the sudden reappearance from under the earth of Native American tribesmen and from under the sea of the lost continent of Lyonesse.  The leaders of all the governments of the world escape danger via airplanes and then convene on Lyonesse, Lafferty joking that far away from everybody else maybe they won't cause so much trouble.

Near the end of the story we meet three revolutionaries, men bearing the appellations the red lion, the red tiger, and the red wolf.  Lafferty hints they are satanic; for example, they get their power from below in the form of lava.  These revolutionaries are angry that the radical changes taking place are not under their control; they try, without success, to reassert control, and the whole world laughs at their failure.

In the last paragraph of the story the three academics from the beginning, the men who predicted and welcomed the cataclysm, are described as "three wise men" and depicted wearing sandals and carrying staves and lanterns.    

As usual, Lafferty provides strange images and charming turns of phrase, lots of allusions and thought-provoking mysteries.  I like it.  "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" would be reprinted in a French collection of Lafferty stories and in Lafferty in Orbit.

**********

In an article in the May 12, 1956 issue of The Saturday Review, John W. Campbell, Jr., one of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, informed readers that "science-fiction's fundamental purpose is to make accurate, loose prophecies of general trends" and that it is written by, about, and for "technically-minded people."  When Barry Malzberg met Campbell in 1969, Campbell, as Malzberg tells it in the 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," told him that "Mainstream literature is about failure...a literature of defeat...Science fiction is challenge and discovery," and that "science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out."

To what extent Campbell's definitions of science fiction are merely prescriptive, and to what extent they are accurately descriptive, is up for debate.  Either way, the stories we read today from 1971's Orbit 9 show that much of the science fiction promoted by important figures in the SF world of that year either ignored or deliberately sought to refute Campbell's strictures.  While Vinge's story fits into Campbell's definitions, being about science and technology and offering a hopeful view of the efforts of people to learn about the universe and master it, Neville's, Lafferty's and Thurston's stories suggest man's ability to comprehend and control the universe are illusory; Thurston's in particular is a pure literary piece, relying for its effects entirely on literary technique and containing no science or speculations of any kind.  The fifth of Sallis's vignettes in "Only the Words Are Different" contains some speculation about society and government, but otherwise his contributions to Orbit 9 are like a caricature of mainstream literature: they consist of surreal and fragmented episodes that offer impressionistic glimpses into the disordered psychologies and disastrous relationships of chain-smoking writers, artists and academics.

Thanks for embarking on this brief foray into the New Wave era with me.  In our next episode we'll again be exploring 1970 fiction, this time with one of our favorite women writers.