Odyssey, Spring '76: T N Scortia, R Bloch, F Pohl, J Pournelle & F Saberhagen

In May I visited an antique store in Carlisle, PA and among the SF-related things I saw--but was too cheap to buy--was the Spring 1976 issue of Roger Elwood's magazine Odyssey, a magazine which published a total of two issues (this being the first.)  Let's take a break from the 1930s and check out five (count them--five!) stories from Odyssey.  Our hero Barry N. Malzberg has a story in the issue, but we'll skip it and read it soon in its book appearance in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, which we've been reading on and off for a while.

"Someday I'll Find You" by Thomas N. Scortia

Here we have a banal twist ending story about how politics corrupts idealistic men.  Oy, if I wanted to read about a corrupt politician who, scared by his falling poll numbers, contrived to unjustly prosecute his rival in the upcoming election, I would just read the newspaper.

A guy has been chief executive of the planet for twelve years. This civilization has small scale nuclear reactors, hover cars, video phones, 3D TV...and a big problem.  In the last decade, due to radioactive contamination, the population of this world has declined from ten million to 150,000!  The Prime Executive's political party has been pouring all public resources into a desperate project--building a space ship that can reach the presumed home planet of a similar alien race whose space probe landed on this planet some years ago. This probe, we readers are made aware, is a NASA probe from Earth, but it must have been launched so long ago there is no telling if the human race is still even alive.

The rival political party thinks the space ship a waste of scarce resources and the idea that the planet from which came the probe fanciful; they propose devoting public effort to setting up a living place in subterranean caverns.  The big election is tomorrow, and it looks like the cavern faction is going to defeat the space ship faction.  So, the Prime Executive's top guy manufactures evidence that the cavern faction's candidate is a thief, and the Prime Exec meets the pro-cavern candidate secretly to try to blackmail him. But cavern boy wasn't born yesterday and records the Prime Executive threatening him and releases this recording to the media.  The cavern people win the election.

But the unscrupulous starship party isn't licked yet!  The ship is almost finished, so they decide to just steal it before inauguration day and blast off for the location the boffins have theorized is the probe's point of origin, taking with them all the engineers and technicians left in the world.  The lack of technical people will make the cavern project the voters supported impossible, but the pro-starship politicians just shrug that off--as we can see every day in real life, elected officials in general have contempt for the voters.  The Prime Executive's wife refuses to join him in this treacherous voyage so, demonstrating his abandonment of personal as well as political integrity he drugs her and drags her aboard.

Everybody on the ship goes into suspended animation, hoping to wake up in orbit around a healthy planet they can live on.  The twist ending is that the planet they just left is Earth--the culture that created the NASA probe fell so long ago it has been totally forgotten--those scientists who deduced the probe's point of origin as another system made a major miscalculation.

The plot outline isn't terrible, but it isn't great, and the style is a little tedious, with lots of superfluous description of how a 3D TV works and that sort of thing.  Barely acceptable.  "Someday I'll Find You" has not, it appears, ever been reprinted.

"ETFF" by Robert Bloch

This story is advertised as "ROBERT BLOCH'S FIRST S.F. WORK IN YEARS!" on Odyssey Vol. 1 No. 1's table of contents, and while it is sadly lacking in actual speculations or science, it is directly aimed at the market of committed SF fans, and in fact has almost no appeal to the casual reader who has only dabbled in SF or knows SF primarily from 2001: A Space Odyssey and old Flash Gordon material.

"ETFF" is a long and tedious inside joke story, lacking in plot and character and human emotion, basically a forest of puns rooted in a mountain of flattering references to SF personalities and perhaps less flattering satires of various SF fan demographics.  When Malzberg does this sort of thing (consider Dwellers of the Deep and Gather at the Hall of the Planets) he provides real human feeling and a sharp controversial edge, but Bloch's story here is absolutely frivolous fan service.

Aliens are studying the Earth, and one of them has made a particular study of SF and become a SF fan, and so dons human guise and attends a SF convention in Connecticut.  (Bloch was famous for being the life of the party at such conventions.)  One of the more memorable SF-centric puns comes when the alien, who can heal people just by touching them, is alerted that a hemophiliac girl requires medical help--he says “Take me to your bleeder.”  One of the more vulgar gags has the alien, wanting to thank everyone for being so accommodating, using his miraculous powers to create out of thin air a Hugo award for every attendee; as you know, these awards are shaped like rocket ships, and the alien's wording of the spell, that a Hugo appear “under everyone’s seat,” leads the hard metal objects to materialize, dildo-like, in each and every attendant's anal cavity.  (I guess I am reading this story in the appropriate month.)  

Less memorable are the bog standard jokes that we have heard a million times about how people like to drink booze and how readers and writers have disagreements with editors and publishers.

Of historical interest to us SF fans is the use of fannish slang like “egoboo” and “filk” and caricatures of, among others, Forrest Ackerman (Ackerman is such a film fan he passes up a chance to meet a real extraterrestrial in order to screen Metropolis for the hundredth time) and New Wavers (they are obsessed with sex.)  One of the gags of special interest for you students of gender studies is when the alien attends a feminist panel.  The speaker declares she deserves all the privileges enjoyed by men, and the alien is convinced she is right, and helpfully transforms her into a man.

Thumbs down. "ETFF" is of historical value only.  (Bloch seems like a good guy, and I don't begrudge him writing a love letter to the people and institutions which brought joy to his life, but I'm not going to pretend this is good fiction any more than I am going to pretend a child's crayon scrawls hanging on his loving parents' fridge are good drawings.) 

"ETFF" was reprinted in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling, even though the cover blurbs promise terror, personality and plot, none of which are to be found in "ETFF."

"The Prisoner of New York Island" by Frederik Pohl

I lived in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg periods, and when I go back, as I had to this weekend (though only to Brooklyn), things look and feel different in a way that is disinctly disappointing--most strikingly, the Manhattan skyline looks different than I remember, quite wrong, to my mind, unbalanced and undistinguished.  "The Prisoner of New York Island" has a little of this kind of energy.

It is the future, 2076!  The America of the Tricentennial looks very different than that of the Bicentennial!  "The Prisoner of New York Island" follows two people from Arizona, one male and one female, members of a group marriage, as they visit Manhattan, which is largely in ruins, in early July (Pohl has a pivotal scene take place on the Fourth--remember that in 1976 there was a lot of excitement over the Bicentennial of American independence; having been born in 1971, I vaguely recall some of this excitement.)  As the story proceeds we learn through dialogue and exposition about life in this strange future.  It seems that people left the cities because of a plague and because city life was conclusively proven to be causing mental illness.  The visitors from Arizona, Sim and Suley, live on a nudist commune (they wear cloaks that can be translucent or can go opaque to fend off the sun or offer privacy when they urinate in public) where horses and bicycles are the primary means of transport.  Arizona seems to be independent of any federal government and to have little or no government of its own.  Conversely, in the East people still practice monogamy and have government.  Middle-class people who work in New York live in places like New Jersey--Manhattan is the anarchic home of creepy weirdos and lower-class people.

The man who pilots the boat that brings Sim and Suley to NYC from the mainland warns them that the guides who will accost them prefer to be paid in drugs and will

"...bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be, a hundred years ago or more.  They have a great sense of history, not much of what's real."

Sure enough, the guide they employ (they pay him with peyote) wears what I am taking to be pimp clothes or maybe just 1970s clothes ("a flat, broad brimmed hat...a red vest with green leather buttons, bellbottomed green slacks with red stripings") and talks a lot about the Empire State Building (you can walk to the top but it is a two-day trip) and tells tales of the New Yorkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Some of the stories don't seem to be creditable (for example, we are told Diamond Jim Brady hung out with "Lillian Held," which I guess is a misconstruing of "Lillian Russell" and/or "Lillian Hellman") and a long scene concerns an argument between this guide and a black kid (the Arizonans never see black people out West) about whether or not sharks live in the flooded Lincoln Tunnel.  The Arizonans give the kid some pot so he'll leave them alone.  (The Arizonans themselves use drugs all the time, shooting up hallucinogens as a pastime and, it appears, to enable them to perform feats of clairvoyance.)

Long distance travel across North America is conducted by solar-powered dirigible, and we learn halfway through the story what has been hinted at before, that the plot of "Prisoner of New York Island" concerns a guy named Charley Four Trees.  Charley had pledged to join Sim and Suley's group marriage, but right before the ceremony was killed aboard one of these "blow balloons" when it crashed over New York in a storm--all hands and passengers were lost.  Sim and Suley have come to find his remains, and they bribe the guide and the black kid and others with still more drugs, harder drugs, to get them to help find some of Charley's remains in hopes they can clone him.  A human interest subplot involves Sim being jealous over Charley.

Both these plot threads are suitably resolved.  The Arizonans and their drug-loving hirelings find the cloak Suley gave Charley as a betrothal present.  There isn't enough blood on it to clone Charley, but Sim is able to collect sufficient genetic material that he can use it in some fashion left to the reader's imagination while he and Suley have sex, so that nine months later a child is born to Suley who bears a resemblance to all three of them, Sim, Suley and Charley.  

A third plot thread, if we want to call it that, one perhaps inspired by the spike in interest in American history experienced in 1976, perhaps an ironic joke on the "bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be" theme, is pretty annoying and pretty inconsequential.  I refer to the drug "trips" undertaken by Suley and the guide.  These "trips" consist of vague and semi-cryptic visions of New York through the centuries, which we readers experience as fragmentary images of fighting during the War of Independence, ticker tape parades, and on and on.  These images are like puzzles Pohl has constructed for us readers--is the man with "strangely ill-fitting teeth" George Washington?  Must be!  And what about the "curious spider-like structures at some of the corners, platforms on four long legs, and in little sheds on the platforms uniformed men pulling levers that moved semaphores"?  I'm afraid this is not ringing a bell, some kind of optical telegraph system?  I hate this sort of abstract, impressionistic, psychedelic, surreal, trippy, nonsense, and we get almost a page of it, and it has nothing to do with the plot that I can see.  

I guess I'll call "The Prisoner of New York Island" barely acceptable, and, as with Bloch's piece of junk, tell you it may be of historical interest as a snapshot of the SF world in 1976, what with all the references to urban blight and drugs and worries about energy conservation and the environment.

It looks like "The Prisoner of New York Island" has not appeared in any other venues.  I'm reading some rare stories today, kids! 

"Bind Your Sons to Exile" by Jerry Pournelle

Here we have a serious piece of hard science fiction about travelling through the solar system to work on an asteroid mine, a story that also addresses issues of race and class from a conservative perspective.  The story is also a piece of evangelism for the space program, arguing that the solution to such characteristic 1970s worries as pollution and natural resource scarcity or price inflation is to shift extraction and industry off the Earth and so the government should make a priority of space exploration.    

A guy who is half Native American grows up in a crime-ridden California housing project; intelligent and industrious, he manages to escape the local schools with their "timeserving teachers who cared only for quiet in the classrooms and a minimum of work" to attend a middle-class school across town.  From there he got into engineering programs and graduated with impressive marks.  As a credentialed minority he could get a cushy no-show job thanks to affirmative action and quotas, but he has disdain for such handouts--he wants to succeed by his own merits and his own efforts, to be rich but to have earned every penny.  So he signs up for one of the most dangerous jobs in the solar system--working on the first asteroid mine!  When he gets to the rock after a year-and-a-half-long trip, he finds he is the most qualified person there--most smart and educated people don't even consider applying to work in the asteroid belt because it is hellishly hazardous--when our hero arrives he notices many of the old hands are missing eyes, fingers, and/or limbs.    

Our guy is given the job of chief of staff and the task of making the asteroid's operations more efficient.  Lots of text is given over to how the asteroid operates, but a thread of the plot is about our hero learning to get along with other people and build relationships.  When the US government decides to stop supporting the asteroid mine, the mine's leadership figures out a way for the project to support itself, and the asteroid becomes an independent community, a real home to which the main character can truly belong, a community not based on race or ethnicity but on shared experiences, shared goals and shared sacrifice.

Pournelle does a good job with all the technical stuff, and I sympathize with his negative attitude about government workers and unions and all that, and his belief in the nobility of earning everything you have, building an individual identity--not one based on your genetic heritage--and striking out and building something new on the frontier.  As entertainment, however, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" falls short.  The style is merely OK, and the story lacks suspense, surprise, a real climax, and real human feeling--Pournelle's story like an opinionated science article.  Perhaps ironically, I suspect my agreement with the politics of "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is one of the things that makes it feel bland to me--I don't read SF to have my own beliefs validated, but to be entertained and to encounter stuff that is challenging or disturbing or surprising--sure, I denounce the commies, poke fun at the feminists, roll my eyes at the Freudians, and dismiss out of hand the supernatural claims of religious writers, but the alienness of those writers' ideas--if they are decent writers, at least--makes their work strange and engaging, and thus more entertaining, to me.   

Considering its aims, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is more successful than Bloch's story, which aims to be funny and is not funny, and probably Pohl's, which includes a lot of annoying extraneous matter, but I can't call Pournelle's story good.  The verdict is acceptable but bland. 

Pournelle would include "Bind Your Sons to Exile" in his anthology of stories about living in space, The Endless Frontier.  You may recall we just read Katherine MacLean's 1975 story from that book, "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl." 

"Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen

Well, I just complained that Pournelle's hard SF story was not challenging, and here we have a contrast, a hard SF story which describes phenomena that are totally wild and hard to understand, at least at first.  

Azlaroc is a heavenly body settled upon by quite a few humans, a place where bizarre phenomena are the norm, phenomena Saberhagen describes in cryptic terms for much of the story, though we eventually get a more-or-less comprehensible explanation.  Azlaroc isn't really a planet or star, though it is of planetary size and shape.  Azlaroc is one component of a three-member system that includes a pulsar and a black hole--the weird energies of these bodies has an effect on atoms and radiation such that every year a layer of altered particles that the settlers call a "veil" falls on Azlaroc and clings to its surface and everything on the surface, including the settlers.  Each veil act as permeable but noticeable barrier between a person shrouded in it and matter which is not under that veil.  Two men who have the same number of veils on them look and sound normal to each other, but if you try to look at or talk to a man carrying around a significantly different number of veils than you do, he will appear blurred and his speech will be distorted.  Food and drink covered in more or fewer veils than are you will smell and taste different.  Once a veil has fallen on you, you cannot leave Azlaroc, but people settle on the place because the veils prolong life.

The reader doesn't grok most of the stuff in the previous paragraph until he is like halfway through the story.  The plot concerns an ambitious rich guy who wants to be the first person to escape Azlaroc, and most of the story is narrated by a guy who accompanies him on his daring quest.    

Somewhat to my surprise, because Saberhagen is not a writer I think about very much at all, I am finding "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" the most satisfying of the stories I have read in Odyssey's first issue today.  It is satisfying to get clues about Azlaroc's bizarre nature and then later learn what is going on, and the quest to escape the place is an actual adventure with suspense and an unpredictable ending that is satisfying when you get to it.

Good.  According to isfdb, "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" has not been reprinted, but when I flipped through Saberhagen's 1978 novel The Veils of Azlaroc I detected signs the text of this story formed a portion of that novel. 

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My view is that the more SF magazines the better, so it is sad that Odyssey only survived two issues, but it is not surprising--this magazine is not great.  Four of the five stories we've read today are not good, and there are additional issues.  Typos are a problem--Fred Pohl's name is actually misspelled on the title page of "Prisoners of New York Island."  The art itself is pretty good, but I guess in order to fill up space the exact same pictures are used multiple times--the full-page illustration for Bloch's story, a young woman in panties and a T-shirt with a Star Trek joke printed on it, appears in red on one page and blue on the page right next to it, and the illustration for Pohl's, a collage of the faces of four of the characters in front of a crumbling New York skyline, is printed three times in the space of five pages.

I don't regret reading these odd and rare stories, but I can only recommend one of them to ordinary readers, though I guess the others all may appeal to various niche audiences.

In our next episode we'll look at something that has had a broader appeal and greater influence than today's selections.