Felix C. Gotschalk: "The Wishes of Maidens," "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" and "And Parity For All"

In our last episode we noted Barry N. Malzberg's comments in a 1980 book review about Felix C. Gotschalk's story "The Wishes of Maidens."  So today let's read that story, and two other Gotschalk tales from 1980, a year that began with a U.S. grain embargo against the U.S.S.R. in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and ended with the murder of John Lennon.

(Back in 2021 we read Gotschalk's 1976 story "The Day of the Big Test" and thought it was OK.)

"The Wishes of Maidens"  

It looks like "The Wishes of Maidens" was only ever printed in New Voices III: The Campbell Award Nominees, an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin.  New Voices III contains stories by the nominees for the John W. Campbell, Jr. award for the period 1973-4, one of whom was Gotschalk (the winner was P. J. Plauger, whom I don't know I have ever heard of before.)

In his intro to "The Wishes of Maidens," Martin stresses the idea that Gotschalk is a stylist, that he has a "voice singularly his own" like Jack Vance, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, or Harlan Ellison.  I admire the styles of Vance, Delany, and Wolfe, so if Gotschalk is anything like them, I can look forward to today's stories.  (For the MPorcius take on Harlan Ellison's distinctive style, check out the last installment of this here blog.) 

If I remember correctly, "The Day of the Big Test" was set in a socialistic future in which the government handed out material goods and privileges based on its allegedly scientific assessment of an individual's value, and "The Wishes of Maidens" is set in a similar milieu.  It has been determined that cervical cancer is caused by sex with circumcised men, and so men who have not been circumcised are allotted all kinds of extra goodies...but of course they have to work for their privileges, having sex with multiple women a day in hopes of impregnating them.  Our hero is one such man, Carson C. Kapstan.

This story is long and tedious, with little plot, being an account of a day in the life of Kapstan.  Kapstan is accompanied 24/7 by a robot assistant and guide who manages Kapstan's schedule and meals and observes Kapstan as he has sex with women, telepathically offering advice based on its extensive files about the psychology of all the women involved as well as real time data on their physiology collected by its sensitive scanners.  The robot also administers drugs and employs other techniques to maximize the possibility of Kapstan impregnating the client.  For example, if the woman is unattractive, the robot can stimulate Kapstan's prostate to ensure he can perform.  

On the day in question Kapstan sees six clients, travelling from one appointment to the next in an air car.  Gottschalk describes in some detail Kaplan's appointments, and also finds time to talk about quotidian elements of life in this future, the architecture and decor and entertainment and hygiene technology and so on.  One noteworthy element is the suggestion that the people of the future, several centuries hence, will be obsessed with 20th-century culture and will watch Laurel and Hardy on TV and say stuff like "You look like Steve McQueen" or "You look like Elizabeth Taylor" and have their vehicles fashioned to look like 20th-century automobiles.  This kind of presentism makes me groan, and it is not like Gotshalk has anything interesting to say about Laurel and Hardy or Elizabeth Taylor, he just throws the names in there for no reason that I could discern.  (I love Laurel and Hardy and I like Taylor, so that is not why this irritates me.)

Of the six clients, the fourth is perhaps the most notable.  Her name is Patty Ribald (Gotschalk's  characters have comedy names) and she wants to maintain her virginity, but she has good genes and the government insists that she breed, so Kapstan rapes her, with the help of the robot, who uses a force field projector on her to quell her resistance and also uses a laser to penetrate her hymen.

Besides trying to be funny, I guess this story is supposed to be shocking, what with its goofs on religion, its rape scene, its depictions of a straight man being anally penetrated, et al.  Maybe it was shocking to some people in 1980, but to me in 2024 it is neither funny, nor shocking, nor entertaining.

Thumbs down. 

"Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon"   

"Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" was the cover story of the issue of F&SF in which it debuted.  Was Gotschalk such a big draw, or just the biggest name in an issue bereft of big names?  Our hero Barry Malzberg has a story in here, but it is co-written with a guy who has only this one credit at isfdb.  I'll have to keep that story in mind for a future Malzberg blog post.  Baird Seales in this issue writes about The Empire Strikes Back, saying he was impressed by Yoda and the tauntauns, and using the film as the occasion to praise Leigh Brackett's 1940s stories; he also figures out a way to obliquely praise Tanith Lee, which is nice.

I groaned when the editor's intro to "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" informed me the nearly 50-page long story was a "post-holocaust" piece.  What was I getting myself into?  I am sick of postapocalyptic stories.  Those happy days of reading Robert Silverberg's "The Planet of Parasites" and Fritz Leiber's "Femmequin973" seemed impossibly distant.  Why wasn't I reading Leigh Brackett or Tanith Lee, like the movie critic seemed to be hinting I should be?  But then I shook off this pessimism and soldiered on, telling myself that in the past I've enjoyed stories that seemed forbidding at first and that you can never trust blurbs and editor's intros.

The first line of "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" refers to T. S. Eliot, and amazingly enough this reference turns out to be more than the name-dropping of a show off, but wholly appropriate, a clever foreshadowing of the entire arc of the story that indicates Gotschalk takes Eliot's The Waste Land seriously.  Gotschalk's first paragraph lays some of the groundwork for the bizarre and somewhat confusing and incredible setting of "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon."  (In the middle of the story we get more of this background.)  In the late 20th century, the Soviet Union outmaneuvered the United States on the international stage and blackmailed California into providing the cause of communism 20 million slave laborers--these poor bastards were teleported to Siberia--and California was thus largely depopulated.  The Soviets also sprayed deadly virulent spores all over the San Andreas region, denying its use to Americans.  An earthquake at the San Andreas fault line opened up a canyon like a hundred feet wide at its widest and thousands of feet deep, and people have started living in this canyon in tunnels and caves dug into its sides--scaffolding bridges connect the dwellings on opposite cliffs.  For some reason the killer spores never drift down into the canyon, so people can live down there.     

The first few pages of this story were sort of hard going for me, as the chronology of when the earthquake occurred and when the Soviets sprayed the spores and when people moved into the caves never made any sense to me, and then Gotschalk hit me with one of my pet peeves--phonetic spelling used to reproduce the accent of a rural hick character--when Hiram, one of the hundred or so members of the cliff-dwelling commune, opens his mouth to say "Why, hail yass, ah do, and thet's coverin' a lotta groun'" as he is sworn in at court at a hearing to investigate the death of a poodle.  Hiram has a personal beef with a guy named Clem, and claims Clem murdered the poodle.

Court is interrupted by the daily scavenging mission.  At certain times of day, the giant toadstools on the surface don't expel spores, so it isn't quite so dangerous up there, and during these periods teams of people will climb out of the bottomless canyon to search for food and supplies on the surface, using aircraft and teleporters to get to areas beyond the fungus forest.  Clem is the main character of this section of the story, and he and a comrade fly to San Diego where they have to contend with a gang of "nut-brown Chicanos" and then a company of bandits armed with a mortar as they scramble to salvage supplies from the abandoned naval base.  California is full of such abandoned institutions and businesses, and one of Gotschalk's recurring jokes is telling us from where the cliff dwellers "liberated" this or that item.    

While Clem was in San Diego, Hiram and Dora, who initially seems to be Hiram's girlfriend, were in an oak forest a mile from the canyon, where they discovered a patch of truffles.  When Clem returns, there is a meeting to discuss how to dispose of the truffles, which can probably be traded with outsiders for things the cliff dwellers need.  We witness Hiram's hostility to Clem, and get a clue as to a source of his animus--behind Hiram's back, Dora is also sleeping with Clem.  We readers come to realize that one of the unconventional mores of the communal lifestyle of the cliff dwellers is what amounts to a prohibition on monogamy--because of an imbalance between the sexes women are expected to put their names on a "polyandry roster" and have sex with lots of guys, though some couples get special permission to have a traditional monogamous marriage.  Dora is on the polyandry roster, but Hiram, a prominent member of cliff-dweller society and irascible, insists Dora is "mah woman" and other men generally respect that. 

A more shocking revelation is that Clem really did kill that poodle, while trying to kill Hiram, but has a plausible alibi and is not convicted.  This is shocking because throughout the story Clem is portrayed as a good guy, smart and brave and so forth.    

In the middle of the story we get the history of Gotschalk's wacky future in which the United States government has collapsed and its former territory is now an anarchic system of independent regional entities at the mercy of the Soviet Union, living off solar power and food imported from Japan, Germany and the Arab states.

Scottsdale, Arizona is one of the most wealthy of these independent principalities, and Clem and Hiram are given the job of going to Scottsdale to trade the truffles with the people there, and much of the second half of the story concerns this trip.  Gotschalk does a good job of making this trade mission a tense adventure, as we wonder if Hiram and Clem will end up fighting each other, or getting into a fracas they are doomed to lose with the Scottsdale people, who have high tech weapons, contempt for the cliff dwellers, and sinister cultural practices, like capturing poor people to stock their zoos.  The earlier revelation that Clem attempted to murder Hiram gives the reader reason to believe that anything can happen, any character can get killed or commit a blunder or a terrible sin.  Again and again we readers fear loudmouth hick Hiram is going to piss off the arrogant Scottsdale toffs and get himself and Clem cheated, enslaved or just murdered.

Clem and Hiram make it back to the canyon with high tech clothing.  As it turns out, this clothing offers protection against the spores.  The cliff dwellers, wearing the clothing and using additional equipment and services purchased with the truffles, are able to destroy the Soviet fungus, plant crops on the surface, and move out of the caves.  The love triangle among Clem, Hiram and Dora is also resolved.

Despite my initial misgivings, and a sense this whole story is absurd, "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" works as an adventure story and a human drama, and as a science fiction story full of speculations about technology and human society under strange alternate conditions.

I can moderately recommend this one, which is markedly better in style and structure than "The Wishes of Maidens."

"And Parity For All"

The November 1980 issue of Amazing includes an article by Tom Staicar that describes his interview and other interactions with Harlan Ellison at a SF convention.  Staicar makes sure to directly quote Ellison when Ellison is fulsomely complimenting Staicar’s own writing.  Ellison also brags about his popularity in France and laments that, in the same way so many don’t really understand the depths of Moby Dick, they don’t recognize the many layers of Ellison’s complex and sophisticated work.  Staicar marvels at how mean people are to Ellison, a guy who is always so nice to everybody.  We learn Ellison doesn’t drink booze and doesn't watch TV (but he knows Charlie’s Angels is bad) and reads very little SF, but likes Kate Wilhelm, Thomas Disch, Robert Silverberg and Gene Wolfe, whose Shadow of the Torturer he calls “sensational.”  

Staicar seems like a very positive guy.  This issue of Amazing also includes his glowing reviews of novels by A. E. van Vogt and David Houston and an anthology co-edited by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini.    

Malzberg also has a story in this issue that I will have to get back to some day.  In a bit of unconventional marketing, the story actually begins on the back cover, under a drawing of a man in a business suit sitting in chair.  I found it amusing that while inside the issue Steven Dimeo gushes about the visuals of The Empire Strikes Back, which are full of spacecraft, aliens, monsters and violence, someone else at the magazine thought the way to catch the attention of people at the newsstand was with a picture of a guy in a suit in a chair. 

Well, we are not here to plot our next Malzberg blog post nor to examine the psychology of Tom Staicar, but to read Gotschalk's four-page story "And Parity for All," which was reprinted in a German anthology in 1985.  

"And Parity for All" is a gimmicky joke story, a total waste of time.  A kid has a model city in a glass box like a meter on a side, inhabited by robotic or holographic fighting men and their artillery, vehicles, etc.  Via a keyboard the kid plays wargames with this elaborate device, and we witness most of the story from the level of the simulated soldiers, who have developed consciousness and complain about the kid's orders and demand their rights when it looks like the kid is going to turn the machine off.  Among the anemic jokes are Gotschalk describing distances and speeds to many decimal places--the city is .9144 meters wide, for example, and the range between two aircraft is described as 45.72 simulated meters.  Another joke is a list of the types of buildings in the model city, a list five lines long.

Ugh.

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All three of these stories have elements of the absurd, and I rarely like absurd stories.  I like stories that have human feeling and a real plot with suspense and/or some kind of pay off.  The least absurd of these stories, "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon," actually provides a real plot with some suspense and something like human feeling, so it is by far the best.  

Am I going to read more Gotschalk?  Signs are not good, but it is not impossible.  Am I going to read more 1980 SF for our next episode?  All signs point to yes!