Protostars is for you! Published in 1971, the year of my birth, edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin, it presents stories, never before published, by "the New Stars of Science Fiction," men and women "that you will be hearing much about in the future." At least that is what the text on the cover says. Here at MPorcius Fiction Log, over the next four blog posts, we'll be reading the sixteen stories that debuted in Protostars. I bought a copy of Protostars in 2019 at the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books as part of my tireless campaign to support local business (who could resist that Gene Szfran cover when it is going for 50 cents?), but you cheapos can read along at the internet archive.
In his two-page italicized introduction to Protostars, editor David Gerrold pokes gentle fun at the pretentious introductions and lofty ambitions of some recent SF anthologies, Harlan Ellison's in particular, and he doesn't echo any of that goop about the authors in the book being "new stars in formation" that "you will be hearing about much in the future" that is all over the covers. He just says the stories are entertaining and have no central theme beyond hopefully being thought-provoking on the question of man's role in the universe. But he does wax ambitious about the glories of the science fiction field: science fiction, he tells us, is "the only literature of the twentieth century that consistently dares to speculate on the nature of reality and man's place in the universe;" science fiction is "theology for the modern man," that, unlike traditional religions, doesn't expect you to accept claims on faith--science fiction writers embrace the scientific method of presenting hypotheses and putting them to the test! Alright!
After this stirring introduction, let's get right to it and read the first four stories in Protostars, contributions by Scott Bradfield, James Tiptree, Jr., Laurence Yep and Stephen Goldin.
"What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" by Scott Bradfield
This story is not very good. Luckily it is a mere three pages long. (It is shorter than Gerrold's introduction to it!) A baby is poorly treated by his parents, the mother who neglects to feed him, the father who hits him so he'll be quiet. Then, apparently, aliens kidnap the child, burning down the house and killing the parents, I guess to hide their tracks. The aliens put the kid in a cage like the cage you might keep a gerbil or something in; I guess we are supposed to reflect that the aliens are treating the kid like an animal, which is better than its parents did? That a physical cage may not be as bad as a psychological cage?
I guess Gerrold printed this story to encourage or support Bradfield or something, sort of an act of charity or an investment in the future of SF or whatever. And you'll be happy to know that Tiny Tim didn't die, I mean, Scott Bradfield went on to have a successful writing career, with four novels and some 40 stories listed at isfdb--Jonathan Lethem, a famous guy I know nothing about, says Bradfield is one of his favorite living writers. I, too, can afford to be charitable, and call "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" barely acceptable filler.
It seems that "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" has never escaped confinement in the nourishing cage that is Protostars.
"I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" by James Tiptree, Jr.
"I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" is a joke story, in part, I believe, a spoof of sword and planet stories and other stories in which a guy from Earth meets the people of a technologically or culturally inferior planet and becomes their leader and improves their society. The story includes lots of contemporary references, to Montessori schools and to "Make Love, Not War" and stuff like that. Notably, the tale contains so many dismissive references to the male organ that it seems obvious that this was written by a woman, but I guess that is easy for me to say because I already know Tiptree's real identity.
On a more elevated level, "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" might be seen as a jocular exposure of the contradictions and hypocrisies of much of respectable liberal thought. The protagonist is an upper-middle class Terran, a wealthy and highly-educated mama's boy, who, finding himself on a planet inhabited by low-tech and bellicose people, is reluctant to pass judgement on their culture or interfere with their traditions, but nevertheless gets them to stop fighting wars for territory and cease sacrificing babies to appease the rain gods, and quickly transforms their warlike agrarian society into a modern industrial civilization, despite the efforts of the native elites to preserve the status quo. The joke ending of the story, which like all the story's jokes isn't particularly funny, is that after the Terran leaves, the people of this planet follow his example and travel to every inhabited planet in the galaxy and turn every society, 4384 in total, into a modern capitalist civilization. Having done this, the peoples of the 4384 planets wonder what to do next--maybe Tiptree is suggesting that modern secular society in which there is no war and no religion is somehow unsatisfying, that people need some kind of driving mission to be happy? Or maybe I am trying too hard to see some kind of point in this story which is full of simple and straightforward jokes, including lots of tepid sex jokes?
Alice Bradley Sheldon (Tiptree's real name) has a reputation as a genius, but this story is just competent filler.
The SF community doesn't seem to agree with my dismissive assessment of "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty;" the story has appeared not only in many Tiptree collections, but the 1972 edition of Lester del Rey's Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year and a Russian anthology with a pretty crazy cover.
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| What is with the spacing and the punctuation in that Asimov quote? |
"In a Sky of Daemons" by Laurence Yep
In climactic moments in Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, two novels I strongly recommend, treacherous women destroy the main character's art work. Well, just such a crime kicks off "In a Sky of Daemons."
Yep's story is set in the far future, when humans have colonized alien planets and there are machines called mass converters that can make most anything--you toss in a handful of sand and rocks and the machine can make you gemstones, you toss in some dead organic matter and the machine can make you an apple or a pear. The government can control the weather. The people in the story wear "soma suits" (you remember your Brave New World, don't you?) that induce euphoria and live a largely communal life in a society of "Cells," though pairing off as couples is not uncommon.
Our hero, Birth Chile, is a male artist living in the city; he has been in a couple's relationship with a materialistic hot chick, Honey Girl, and when he comes home to their apartment he finds Honey Girl has sold all his paintings and sculptures! He storms off, walking out on their relationship and walking out to the country, to the shrine run by the oldest man on the planet, Holy Joe, who is kept alive by high technology. Holy Joe is so old he can remember when this planet was colonized, and the days before the soma suits. Most of the people on this planet are practically immortal, but the robots that serve the paternalistic and authoritarian entity that rules the planet, SET, regularly take people away to be killed; the people are later rejuvenated or "reborn," but without their memories. Holy Joe is an exception; he is not immortal, and can truly die, but high technology has kept him alive for centuries. In return for that technological assist, and for the ability to retain his memories, he has promised SET not to share his oldest memories, or consented to have some kind of hypnotic embargo put on them; SET, it seems, considers knowledge of the past to be a threat to its rule. Holy Joe is treated as a kind of sage or guru, and people commonly come to his to ask questions, but his answers, for which he demands payment, are often vague or tricky, in the traditional manner of sybils and prophets, and he will reveal nothing about SET or life before the colonization of the planet.
Birth Chile wants to get some answers from Holy Joe, but Honey Girl shows up in her fancy air car to interfere, ostensibly for Birth Chile's own good. In a fit of rage he immediately regrets, Birth Chile strikes Honey Girl, killing her. SET's robots, which float through the air via anti-grav technology and are likened to angels, appear and take away the corpse and inject Birth Chile with drugs that paralyze half his body.
Birth Chile uses Honey Girl's air car to go to the place to which people who are to die are taken, and from which they eventually emerge reborn. There, I think, he encounters the personalities of people who have been killed by SET and not yet reborn; these personalities join Birth Chile in his body, which is healed, and he acquires memories that explain the mysteries of the past. We readers are treated to a series of flashbacks, first to a space naval battle between an Alliance and an Empire, and then to scenes of the founding of the colony at which the story takes place. The battle was a raid by a fleet from an alliance of worlds that sought to steal from the Empire the secret of immortality, which the Empire had refused to sell them on the grounds that they were too uncivilized for it. The Alliance raiders were defeated and captured, given the immortality treatment and then put on a distant planet--the colony where Birth Chile and Honey Girl and everybody else in the story lives is their prison/sanitarium and SET their jailer/therapist. The best image in the story is a reflection of the fact that the prison colony is on a planet deep in extragalactic space--so far is this world from the Milky Way that the stars in the sky are all concentrated in a single disc, like the accusing eye or hungry mouth of a demon.
In the climax of the story Birth Chile--now first person narrator, when the story for most of its length has been in the third person--deactivates SET (a computer) in a close quarters fight that I guess is supposed to remind you of a fight between a knight and a dragon or between Thor and the Midgard Serpent. The humans take control over the robots, and in a sense-of-wonder the-resourceful-human-race-has-a-heroic-history-of-adventure-and-exploration-ahead-of-it ending, Yep makes it clear that the people of the prison/sanitarium planet, now liberated/cured, are going to build a vital independent society, cast off the soma suits, build FTL ships and return to the Milky Way.
"In a Sky of Daemons" is an ambitious and challenging; I found it a little hard to understand, much of it being dense, parts of it being fragmented, and the characters' personalities, motives and actions being often surprising and mysterious--I read it twice because I felt I hadn't really got it the first time round. Yep fills his story with allusions to Christianity and to Eastern religions, and there are lots of what I take to be references to the work of T. S. Eliot (apparent references to The Waste Land include: the first line of the story, which reminds readers of the epigraph to Eliot's famous poem; the prominent appearance of the phrase "Unreal city;" and a sentence which ends "living in the dust and eating roots and grass...."), whose work of course is itself full of allusions to Christianity and to Buddhism.
I found it to be a hard nut to crack, but I think the work was worthwhile, so I'm giving "In A Sky of Daemons" a thumbs up. Its integration of religious themes, references to high literature, a struggle for human freedom, scenes of warfare and a sword swinging hero remind me of Gene Wolfe's work; maybe Wolfe fans should check this story out.
"The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin
"The Last Ghost" is a seven-and-a-half page story about death and having your consciousness uploaded into a computer so you "live" forever. (We just read a story on similar themes by Gerrold.) Two incorporeal beings meet in a silent black nowhere, but they sense each other and communicate. One has been in this void for a long time, is male, taciturn and has almost no memory. The newcomer is female and voluble and mentally acute. The female's body died five thousand years ago, and she has spent all those centuries as a computer file or simulation or whatever, in robot bodies, having adventures and exploring the galaxy and studying. She must be in this black limbo because of a computer malfunction. She tries to figure out what is up with this other entity, who is almost catatonic and unable to express himself. By the end of the story we learn the tragic truth. Before the computer uploading system was available, the souls of those who died would come to this blackness, which is a sort of waiting room or staging area from which people would then transition to the afterlife proper. One soul, this quiet guy, was left here in this limbo to point the way to the newly dead. But when people stopped truly dying because everybody's personality got uploaded into a computer, he was left alone, and being alone with nothing to do and nobody to talk to for like 5,000 years has made him almost a vegetable. Being with this woman is reviving him, but then the woman is sucked away as the computer malfunction is fixed.
When you stop and think about this story, it doesn't make any sense (this is the first computer malfunction in 5,000 years? For 5,000 years nobody refused to have his personality uploaded or was prevented from doing so by an accident or negligence? Uploading your personality to a computer doesn't move your soul to the computer, it is just recording a copy, so if cancer or a car wreck or a terrorist attack kills you, your soul would still go to the afterlife) but the story still works on an emotional level when you first read it, as Goldin does a good job of presenting it and keeps it succinct. So I'm giving it a mild recommendation.
"The Last Ghost" was nominated for a Nebula and has been reprinted in several anthologies; it is also the title story of a 1999 Goldin collection.
What is with that Russian cover? The woman looks like Axa, a well-known European (French I think) comics character; the Alien looks like it's eating a banana. Wacky stuff.
ReplyDeleteWow! I'm so glad you commented! I had never even heard of Axa before, and thought the woman on that cover was just a generic cave girl or barbarian lady, but looking around online, I think that you are right, it is Axa--just like with the Giger Alien, the people who put that book out were trying to exploit interest in a famous franchise character!
DeleteThanks for your insight!