The current tribulations suffered by the internet archive having put a kink in my reading plans, I am resorting to going old school and reading a physical book I actually paid good money for--let's hope this works out better than
the last time I read a paperback bargain!
Remember when we read David Gerrold's Alternities, billed as "All New Electrifying Stories of Original Science Fiction"? And then when we read Gerrold's Generation, promoted as "24 Great New Voices"? And who could forget Protostars, Gerrold's anthology of stories by "The New Stars of Science Fiction"? Good times, good times. Well, thank your lucky stars, because we have a chance to relive those happy days! Today we take down from the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library a copy of 1974's Science Fiction Emphasis 1, an anthology edited by Gerrold that is touted as "Eight All-New Stories by Tomorrow's Stars." (Despite the "#1" on cover and spine, and the stated hope on the back cover that Emphasis would become an annual series, Science Fiction Emphasis #2 has proven even more elusive than The Last Dangerous Visions.) I bought Science Fiction Emphasis 1 in the last year or so, I forget where, for $3.50; my copy was owned by an Elaine (or maybe "Eline?") and on the title page we see that Stephen Goldin performed the role of Associate Editor in the production of this anthology. My experience in academia suggests that the lower your name is on the list of contributors the more labor you actually put into the publication, and while I wouldn't want to compare David Gerrold, whose writing I have enjoyed, to a college professor in one of those disciplines whose findings are unfalsifiable and unreplicable, if we like anything in Science Fiction Emphasis 1, let's remember to give some credit to Goldin, whose Assault on the Gods and A World Called Solitude I enjoyed back in the 20-teens.
Gerrold starts the book with a two-page introduction that is sort of all over the place. We get a knock on science fiction--science fiction, Gerrold says, has to grow up, no longer be space operas about Anglo Saxon heroes fighting aliens, not that Gerrold dislikes such stories. But Gerrold also knocks "mainstream literature," saying it "is merely gossip about people you don't know," while science fiction is about ideas. Of course, science fiction also has to be about people, as well as ideas. Gerrold adds that, in fact, mainstream fiction is coming to resemble science fiction, and notes that many science fiction ideas have become mundane reality. This is not what I would consider a strong essay with a clear point and plenty of supportive evidence, though I guess you can't really disagree with the individual things Gerrold says.
Anyway, Gerrold tells us that the eight stories in this book, chosen from among over one hundred submissions, are mature and moving. We'll see.
"Willowisp" by Joseph F. Pumilia
Back in 2016 we read a story Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley about a guy who wakes up to find his gonads have been replaced by the head of a miniature elephant. (It takes two guys to write such a story, it seems.)
In 2017 we read a story by Pumilia about an energy creature. In 2022 I read another Pumilia-Utley co-production, a tragic tale about time travel and the environment. None of those stories was great, but maybe 2024 is Pumilia's year, maybe "Willowisp" is where Pumiulia is going to shine!
Stories about Anglo Saxon heroes fighting aliens are escapist wish-fulfillment fantasies, no doubt, but so are stories in which the kid who was always chosen last for sports and who was never invited to parties has grown into a guitar-carrying drifter who hitchhikes around the country composing poems and songs and meets a pretty bookish girl who lives in a dilapidated country house and is invited into her bed for a little bit of the old in-out. Like this one.
Our singing narrator moves into the house with no electricity with the long-legged philosophy major. In a woods nearby they often see a mysterious drifting light. Eventually our narrator insists they investigate the light, even though the young woman is scared. He figures out that it is a lost space alien, a translucent tentacled creature that carries around a swarm of fire flies in an invisible container, I guess a forcefield or something. Our guitar-picking hero identifies with this creature, as he too is lost, his first girlfriend being dead and he being estranged from his abusive father.
The alien coaxes our hero and the college girl into a particular spot in the woods, within a circle of trees, and then persuades an army of spiders to build a circular wall of webs stretching from tree to tree around our young couple. The alien then places his lightning bugs on the web wall in specific spots. The narrator figures out this is like an all-natural and organic network of circuits. He and the girl have sex--the best sex they have ever had!--within the web circle, and this activates the device and somehow facilitates the alien's departure from Earth.
Loneliness is a pervasive theme of the story and having accomplished this good deed the narrator leaves the college girl.
"Willowisp" is on the high end of acceptable. The style and pacing, stuff that you take for granted when it is fine and only really notice when it is bad, is good here, and of course I am all for having sex with long-legged bookish girls. Doesn't look like "Willowisp" has ever been reprinted, though.
"Bonus Baby" by Felix C. Gotschalk
Another sexy college girl story. Hubba hubba. Gotschalk's story has a mundane wish-fulfillment plot, that he is sort of poking fun at, I guess, and he places it in a far future post-nuclear-war setting in which there are all kinds of robots and forcefields and mutants and the government has assessed everybody on multiple attributes and assigned them scores on a 100 point scale and categorized them as "alphas" and "betas" and so forth; those with high scores are granted all kinds of prostheses that give them special powers, but also laid upon these aristocrats of the cybernetic future grave responsibilities. Gotschalk renders his story something of a challenge to understand with a high volume of semi-opaque neologisms and by keeping the basic facts of this world a mystery to us until the end so their revelation serves the role of a plot twist. I'm not sure if we are supposed to think all the characters are essentially robots just playacting in a cartoonish simulacrum of 20th-century life, but maybe we are.
Jonas is a college student with scores in the 80s, a beta. Some jealous and mischievous girls he is dating play a trick on him, spreading the false rumor that the hottest girl on campus has a crush on him so he will approach her. Jonas does approach this beauty and she actually welcomes his advances, agreeing to go on a date with him; they dance and have sex. It turns out she is one of the "supra-humanoid alpha pluses" and has scores exceeding 99 and all manner of body modifications that allow her to fly and teleport and make sex with her a mind-blowing experience. As a supra she has obligations and must formally date people closer to her rank, but she finds people in her strata tiresome and Jonas' innocence charming and so will continue to teleport to him on occasion for some clandestine sex. There is an element of class-conscious cuckold fetishism to Gotschalk's story--the supra girl is enjoined to wear the frat pin of her public boyfriend, and she puts some of Jonas' ejaculate on the pin before donning it. "Bonus Baby" is like a women's romance novel or a pornographic story in which a peasant has an affair with a lord or lady or an ordinary citizen has an affair with a Hollywood star, a story that both romanticizes the people at the top of the hierarchy and encourages readers to covet the notion that common people are, secretly, better than their social superiors and might get some kind of revenge on them (You may be rich, but I'm banging your spouse behind your back!)
This story is alright; again the nuts and bolts are good, at least if you don't mind having to unravel all the futuristic lingo. And of course I am all for having sex with your social superiors. Are all the stories in Science Fiction Emphasis 1 going to be erotica? Is that what constitutes maturity to Gerrold?
"Bonus Baby" has not been reprinted according to isfdb. It is the fifth story by Gotchsalk I have read, following "The Day of the Big Test," "The Wishes of Maidens," "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" and "And Parity For All."
"Telepathos" by Ronald Cain
Cain only has two entries at isfdb, but "Telepathos" was included in Thomas F. Monteleone's 1977 anthology
The Arts and Beyond: Visions of Man's Aesthetic Future, so there is that
.
Kunst is an American of the middle of the 21st century, living in a small German town, in a neighborhood inhabited by artists. He is the practitioner of a new form of art, telepathos. Not long ago a new substance was discovered, one that absorbs and then radiates human emotion, and artists like Kunst take a blob of this goop and by focusing and concentrating imbue it with a particular feeling, and then other people experience this art simply by being near it and having the emotions of the artist wash over them. Cain explores all the facets and ramifications of this new art form--how the blobs are stored prior to and after being molded by the artist, for example--and uses Kunst and this new art form to comment on the life of the artist and the experience of creating and consuming art, for instance, how artists feel misunderstood, how viewers of art bring their own attitudes and preconceptions with them when they experience a work of art and make their own interpretations of the piece which are often at odds with the artist's intent, but which, regardless, serve to influence the interpretations of later viewers to the point that over time a work of art may come to mean, in the public mind, something very different from what the creator intended. To produce good telepathic sculptures the artist must became an expert in the particular emotion he is trying to instill in the goop, and Cain discusses how by studying an emotion the artist can become immune to it, can observe it clinically without being affected by it, can know he is scared or lonely but prevent his conscious mind and his actions from being influenced by his own fear or loneliness.
"Telepathos" is a lot closer to my idea of "maturity" than "help E.T. phone home by banging a hot chick in the woods" or "the princess with the magic vulva has sex with you and then leaves you alone and has some other guy shoulder the burden of all the boring time-consuming non-erotic boyfriend duties." Cain's story explores ideas for page after page ("Telepathos" is like 37 pages long) and it includes literary images, the effect of changing light on furniture in a spartan room and that sort of business. I am willing to give the story a mild recommendation, but it is perhaps one of those stories easier to admire than to actually enjoy--for one thing, it is not very plot-heavy.
The plot. Kunst is ill and coughs and vomits and eats little and looks older than his age and so forth, and as we read we wonder if he is going to keel over before he finishes the book he is drafting in longhand; Kunst has the self-importance we expect of an artist and thinks, though his work is not popular or critically acclaimed, that he is far better than the telepathic artists who are rich and have their work on display in museums, and so is writing a book on telepathic art that truly captures the essence of the field, which nobody has yet done. He spends his days in his little apartment and in a cafe, where he talks to a woman artist, an American with whom he is simpatico--like he, she has the dedication of the true artist, "the fervent desire to devote himself whole-heartedly to his work without a thought for personal welfare"--and to a sort of dilettante who serves as a contrast to Kunst, a Canadian who is an able artist but a shallow one who flits from one medium to another. Kunst uses the telepathic powers he has developed to help the Canadian become a better artist and to help the American woman become better able to face the sadness of life. In the climax of the story Kunst masters the emotion "the Fear of Death" and creates a sculpture which projects this fear--having mastered his fear of death, he can live the rest of his life, doomed to end within the year, calmly.
Ambitious and novel; it is too bad Cain didn't write more in the SF field.
"In the Crowded Part of Heaven" by Robert Borski
Yet another story about a guy who gets to bang a hot chick and then move on with his life. What is going on with this anthology? Was Gerrold soliciting manuscripts that had been rejected by
Playboy?
It is the near future. A few decades ago, young women who insisted they were virgins were somehow winding up pregnant. Their kids have super powers--they can see in the dark, are immune to disease, are probably going to live for centuries, etc. The authorities figure space aliens are somehow secretly impregnating these girls. Governments encourage breeding between these hybrids and mundanes in order to strengthen the gene pool and improve the health of the human race. For one thing, the superpeople are compelled to donate eggs or sperm twice yearly to the government gamete banks.
Our narrator is one of the half-alien supermen; he travels the world, performing like a prostitute or gigolo or something of that nature, regularly being hired by women for two-month contracts as their live-in lover. If one of his clients gets pregnant the government will pay for all her health care costs during the pregnancy.
The plot of this brief story follows how our narrator is hired by an attractive woman and they fall in love but he has to leave her because he is committed to the mission of spreading his seed widely, to his duty to improve the human race. Also, since he will live for hundreds of years, he knows a marriage will not work--he will be broken hearted to outlive his wife and his quadroon kids by centuries, and she and the kids will grow to resent his superior health and longevity. A brief passage describes how the narrator is opposed to hybrid rebels who are trying to either build a separate hybrid-only society or disguise themselves and live among pure-strain humans. "In the Crowded Part of Heaven" is yet another of the many "sad life of homo-superior" stories we SF readers encounter regularly.
An acceptable trifle. Compared to our other two male sex fantasy stories, this one is the weakest. The sex scenes in Borski's "In the Crowded Part of Heaven" are not as sexy as those in Pumilia's "Willowisp" or Gotschalk's "Bonus Baby," the human drama elements are better developed in the other two stories, the central gimmick is less novel than that in Pumilia's piece, and the prose is less ambitious and challenging than in Gotschalk's semi-opaque story. Still, the story is not bad.
Maybe because the narrator's human mother was French, maybe because the theme of the story (your mission: impregnate as many women as possible) appealed to French sensibilities, the only time this story has been reprinted (according to isfdb, at least) was in a 1975 French anthology with a topless woman (and Winnie the Pooh?) on the cover. Oh la la, indeed.
**********
None of these stories is bad, and Cain's is actually good, so we have to commend Gerrold and Goldin thus far. We've plowed through like 95 pages of Science Fiction Emphasis 1, hopefully the remainder, like 120 pages, will be as good--it may even be better! Cross your fingers, fellow explorers of SF roads less travelled.
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