"The Last One Left" (with Bill Pronzini)
Unfortunately, "The Last One Left" is a waste of time. Maybe it is supposed to be a "meta" "recursive" spoof of traditional SF ideas, but it just comes off as a boring rehearsal of those ideas.
The main character of "The Last One Left," a long time patient of a psychoanalyst, has been noticing that the people of New York City are being replaced by tentacled aliens whose eyes sit atop long stalks. Nobody else seems to notice this. Could it be that the man is just insane? Or is he the only man who can see through the aliens' disguises, and for some perhaps related reason the last man to be swapped for an alien? The man theorizes that the aliens have to leave their planet for some reason, maybe pollution or overpopulation, and are switching places with humans and making the Earthpeople slave in the mines or factories on their increasingly uncomfortable home world.
At the end of the story we discover the truth; I guess it counts as a twist ending that the guy is more or less correct that aliens are taking over the Earth by switching places with humans. This is not an adventure story, so we don't see what the man discovers on the alien world; instead we get a little insight into what the aliens think of Earth--"too much sunlight and too much air." To which I say, love it or leave it, alien bastards!
Malzberg has done this kind of thing elsewhere and made it funny, but this time out the story just seems to be going through the motions.
"Getting Back" (with Jeffrey W. Carpenter)
This story seems to be based on the fact that some veterans who return to civilian life miss the camaraderie and sense of purpose they had in military life, and the idea that returning service members and people who have been released from prison have trouble "reacclimating" to ordinary life. Perhaps also the common trope in fiction of the crazed Vietnam vet.
After three years on a space station, a man returns to the Earth--as part of the reacclimatization program, he will stay with a married couple; the husband has reacclimatizing astronauts as one of his work duties. Suggesting how much being an astronaut changes you, how life in orbit is worlds apart from life on the Earth, astronauts take a "space name" during their period of service beyond the atmosphere, and while they are expected to go by their original birth names when they return, some chose not to.
The astronaut is horrified by how people on the streets, including his cab driver, act: aggressive, angry, selfish; this is a marked contrast to how he and his comrades behaved up in space, where relationships were characterized by "brotherhood" and "kindness." The married couple are no better; the husband just wants to watch violent sports on TV, and he and his wife get in a physical fight minutes after the astronaut arrives. The husband takes as given that life on Earth is terrible, and even finds the idea of life on the space station, where everybody allegedly is "like one big happy family" of men who "all took care of one another" sounds "awful." The pressure gets to the astronaut, and after the wife has left the room, the spaceman strikes down the husband, who dies upon hitting his head on the TV. The final stinger in the last paragraph is the suggestion that after he kills the wife the astronaut will truly be reacclimated--he'll be a violent selfish jerk, like people down here generally are.
Heavy-handed, but somewhat amusing, social satire. It is interesting to see that, while is so many Malzberg stories space travel drives people insane, in "Getting Back" space seems to be (as the astronaut says) "nice," a refuge from the insanity of modern life.
"They Took It All Away"
Here's today's solo story, the story that begins on the back cover of the first issue of Amazing to be combined with Fantastic, the issue with the big photos from The Empire Strikes Back and the very sympathetic profile and interview of Harlan Ellison that we talked a little about last time.
The Earth is suffering some sort of natural cosmic disaster or some manner of alien attack! All over the world, including New York City where our tale is laid, people and things are disappearing; most photogenically, middle sections of skyscrapers disappear, but the levels above and below suffer no structural damage, so that the upper stories hang still in mid-air.
Our narrator is a civil servant, his job being to help statistically catalog the disappearances. Some fifteen percent of area and thirty percent of the population of the Big Apple are gone! Our narrator is an irresponsible fellow; instead of toiling hard in his office, and spending his free time comforting his wife, he is hanging around at the race track! He finds horse racing fascinating, but never himself places a bet. It is hinted that he started paying attention to the horses just when the disappearances started, three weeks ago.
From the track the narrator goes home to briefly talk to his wife, then rides a taxi, and his conversations with horseplayers, the taxi driver, and his angry drunken wife present a range of reactions to the cataclysm facing the world. I suspect the reaction of the men to the bizarre crisis is meant to be a metaphor for how people continue living their lives even though death is inevitable, and how throughout the calamitous 20th-century people have continued living their lives despite wars, revolutions, and radical technological, economic and social change--all the men say things like "Life goes on," and "What can you do?" and they continue pursuing their hobbies and doing their jobs. As for the wife, she hits the sauce and suspects that the people in charge of society, like her husband, are either doing nothing to solve the problem or are actually the cause of the problem, a Malzbergian indictment of the apathy and incompetence typical of government and elites, a theme we so often see when Malzberg in his fiction talks about the welfare system and the space program and other government endeavors.
The twist ending is that the wife is, amazingly, on the right track. The narrator suddenly remembers that he is an alien agent, sent to cripple the Earth, and hypnotized into thinking he is human so he can evade detection with ease. Now aware of his responsibility for the cataclysm, he reverses it, and all the disappeared property and people suddenly return. We are given reason to believe that he has undone the damage because there is nothing like horseracing in his society, and he loved it so much he feels Earth worth preserving.
The final two-sentence paragraph of the story reinforces the theme of habitual elite incompetence. "Headquarters will be extremely angry, yes. But this kind of thing happens to us all the time."
Thumbs up for "They Took It All Away," which has interesting images and relationships and pursues the themes we expect to find in Malzberg's work in fun and thought-provoking ways. What is up with the drawing of a guy in a chair, though--this story was a grand excuse to depict Manhattan skyscrapers and suspension bridges with holes in them and crowds staring aghast at this desecration of the world's greatest city!
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The best of these stories is the one Malzberg wrote all on his lonesome, but the one he wrote with the college kid has some merit, being amusing in spots and having some real human feeling with its failed marriage and bewildered innocent newly (re)birthed into a hostile world. Sadly, the Pronzini collaboration is just tired jokes that offer no commentary on life or the world, no emotion or humanity. Also sadly, the weakest story is the only one that has been reprinted. Sometimes it pays off to flip through old magazines--there are some rare gems in there!
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