Three more above the night: Herbert, Davidson & Klass, and White

Maybe you'll remember that we recently read three stories from Groff Conklin's 1965 anthology 13 Above the Night, a story questioning monogamy by Fritz Leiber and stories of conflict with aliens by Mack Reynolds and Eric Frank Russell.  Well, today we'll read three more stories from that book, taking advantage of a scan of it at the world's greatest website, the internet archive.  We've got something from Frank Herbert of Dune fame, whose "Cease Fire" and "The Nothing" we read recently.  Also, a collaboration between critically acclaimed Avram Davidson, whom we last saw penning a satire about interstellar undocumented aliens and welfare fraudsters and William Tenn's brother, Morton Klass.  And finally a story by James White, famous for his Sector General series--I liked his novel All Judgement Fled and some stories from his collection Deadly Litter when I read them before the inauguration of this blog; a couple of years ago I did blog about White's "Tableau." 

"Mating Call" by Frank Herbert (1961)

The architect of Arrakis here presents us with a gimmicky filler story that is too long for what it accomplishes.  Barely acceptable.

Two women scientists are on the surface of a planet, there to help the natives, people shaped like eggs who move around with five prehensile members.  These natives don't seem to have much by way of technology.  The women bicker quite a bit,  having different attitudes in general and holding conflicting opinions about the locals and the problem that has led them to seek Terran aid--a recent decline in the birth rate.  The defining characteristic of these aliens is the music they make--they can sing a wide array of sounds, and do so beautifully, at least according to the younger, junior of the two scientists--the older woman is tone deaf.  The women's research is going slowly because the natives don't seem to want the women to attend their big sing along events--the women figure this event will give them a clue to the source of the fertility problem.  There's a lot of dialogue, and eventually the women are permitted to attend one of the natives' huge gatherings and witness and record their singing.  The scientists immediately transmit the music up to the mother ship and it is quickly retransmitted throughout human civilization.

It turns out that these natives, who all look the same, don't reproduce sexually--the music they produce at these big gatherings has the customary effect of triggering reproduction by splitting; those egg people blessed with parenthood break in half, which produces two smaller but otherwise identical egg people.  How likely any individual native is to reproduce at the concert is determined by how beautiful the music is.  Recently, the natives have been fascinated with human music, and have been trying to produce music of their own with some of the virtues of Terran music, but haven't been getting it quite right.  Thus, the low birth rate.  But tonight they put on a performance of breathtaking beauty, and more reproduction takes place than ever before.

The twist ending is that the music also triggers parthenogenetic pregnancy in the two women scientists, who will give birth to sterile clones of themselves in nine months or so.  All the women of the right age up in the mother ship are also pregnant.  And all over the galaxy human women who listened to the music live are in a similar condition.  Human civilization will be rocked by this discovery--it is implied that men may well have just been rendered obsolete, the recorded music being easily available to any woman who wants to have a daughter and isn't interested in a sexual relationship with a man.

"Mating Call" has itself been reproduced quite a few times in Herbert collections and some European anthologies.  It debuted in an issue of Galaxy we looked into back in 2015 when we blogged about Fritz Leiber's "The Beat Cluster" and Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Called Shayol."

"The Kappa Nu Nexus" by Avram Davidson and Morton Klass (1961)

Avram Davidson is one of those super well-read johnnies and "The Kappa Nu Nexus" begins with a quote or paraphrase from Joseph Addison's Cato, something 18th-century people read ravenously but which I can't imagine many 21st-century people read or have even heard of.  There was a time when I expected I would read lots of Addison and Steele myself, when I harbored plans of becoming some kind of college professor specializing in 18th-century British history, but that was long ago.  Anyway, "The Kappa Nu Nexus" is chockablock with literary, historical and cultural references explicit and oblique, ranging from "Surrey With the Fringe on Top" to the Whig Party and the Spanish-American War, from Revolutions French and Russian to rebellions Jacobite. 

"The Kappa Nu Nexus" is the tale of Hank Gordon's first day at college and how he becomes the Big Man on Campus.  Before arriving at school, Gordon expressed contempt for fraternities, for partying, women, and booze, and declared his determination to study hard, but that was little more than sham.  Upon arrival he is quickly tricked into joining the failing Kappa Nu fraternity, which is desperate for members.  As he lies abed on his first night in his room at the decaying frat house, he is amazed to see a beautiful and scantily-clad woman with a nametag reading "Thais" step out of the closet and proceed to vanish.  (I actually own a reproduction of Demetre Chiparus' Thais, so I thought this was fun.)  Thais is followed by Cleopatra, Madame du Pompadour, and Nell Gwynn.  Eventually Hank learns from an unusually dressed man who similarly materializes inexplicably that this room is a short cut through space and time, and that it is used by an interstellar time travelling prostitution ring--sexually skilled women of beauty from all periods of history regularly pass through the room on their way to meet clients.  Hank swings a deal--the prostitutes and pimps can continue using the passageway as long as the women service the men of the fraternity on their way through.  As a result Hank becomes a hero and Kappa Nu becomes the most popular frat on campus.

I generally dislike these kinds of joke stories, but this one won me over.  For one thing, the plot actually holds together and is not totally absurd.  The many cultural references are interesting.  Our young hapless (but ultimately triumphant) protagonist and the various bits of slang remind me of P. G. Wodehouse, and the long digressions of Laurence Sterne.  So I can give this one a moderate recommendation.  With its sympathetic depiction of prostitution we might also consider it an intriguing example of science fiction that deals with sex and gender roles.   

Interestingly, "The Kappa Nu Nexus" has been avoided by editors and anthologists--according to isfdb, the only time it has been reprinted since its initial appearance in F&SF is here in 13 Above the Night.

"Counter Security" by James White (1963)

Here we have a quite well-written story with much of the structure of a detective story but a traditional science fiction climax in which the protagonist survives first contact with aliens through application of knowledge, logic and quick thinking.  White also includes subtle unobtrusive humor, and plenty of "meta" elements-- there are direct references to H. P. Lovecraft, Theodore Sturgeon and Alfred Bester as well as SF criticism.  White also successfully paints a believable and engaging main character.  A really good story that scores hits when it comes to SF elements and mainstream literary values--thumbs up for "Counter Security"!  

"Counter Security" is set in a large department store.  Our hero is sort of a slacker or underachiever, an intelligent man who has taken the somewhat low status job of night watchman at the store because it gives him time to read SF magazines (though he only likes "serious" science fiction, not supernatural or fantasy stories.)  White describes this guy's job and the operations of the store in an engrossing, entertaining way.

Our guy has a problem to solve--for weeks the women working in the toy department have come in to work in the morning to find that during the night dolls of black girls have been vandalized, always in the same way.  Is there some racist maniac on the staff?  Or somehow breaking in every night?  We observe as the night watchman solves the crime, making a mind-blowing discovery--space aliens have materialized their ship under the store and at night are infiltrating the building!  The night watchman figures out why they are messing with the dolls and how to make friends with the aliens and we get a nice happy ending.

As I say about writers all the time, I should probably read more James White.  I have been sort of avoiding him because so many of his stories are medical-related and that sounds boring to me, but he has a large body of work outside the Sector General series and it would be easy to track some of them down. 

"Counter Security" debuted in F&SF and was the same year reprinted in a German anthology with a cool cover and in some European magazines; in 1977 it was included in the White collection Monsters and Medics.

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I feel pretty good about this batch of stories from 13 Above the Night.  Maybe we'll return to this volume some day.  In any case, expect more stories from mid-century SF magazines next time here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Aliens from Analog: Leinster, Anderson, Brown

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we just read Eric Frank Russell's 1959 Astounding story "Now Inhale" in a 1965 anthology.  "Now Inhale" reappeared in 1983 in the anthology Aliens from Analog.  (I don't need to tell most people reading MPorcius Fiction Log that in 1960, Astounding, perhaps the most important science fiction magazine for decades, changed its name to Analog.)  Over the course of this blog's life we have now read five stories that appear in Aliens from Analog: Russell's "Now Inhale," "The Children's Hour" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, "Unhuman Sacrifice" by Katherine MacLean, "Big Sword" by Pauline Ashwell, and Russell's second story in the book, "The Hobbyist."  The anthology offers six stories which we have yet to read; let's cut that number down by half and read the stories in the book by three guys we already know, Murray Leinster, Poul Anderson and Fredric Brown.  (Maybe we'll read the stories in the book by people with whom we are not familiar, Alison Tellure, Stanley Schmidt, and Marc Steigler, next time.)

(Nota bene: I am reading the versions of the stories that appear in this 1983 anthology edited by Schmidt, editor of Analog from 1978 to 2013.)

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"First Contact" by Murray Leinster (1945)

Here we have a very famous story, one reprinted innumerable times in many languages, a tale that serves as the title story of a Damon Knight anthology and won a Retro Hugo in 1996.  "First Contact" was the cover story of the issue of Astounding in which it appeared, an issue that also prints a story by Frank Belknap Long which I rather liked, "The Trap."

"First Contact" is full of astronomy.  FTL Earth science ship Llanvabon is on a mission to study the Crab Nebula and the two stars at its center, and our main character is the guy with the job of photographing the nebula from various angles and distances and we hear all about the composition of the nebula and the temperature of the stars and so forth.  There's also quite a bit of description of sensors and space suits and that sort of thing, which I enjoy more than the astronomy stuff.

Though full of science and technology, the actual plot of the story revolves around Llanvabon's encounter with an alien ship--the first time humans have ever met a spacefaring extraterrestrial race!  Earth could benefit greatly from trade with these people, who no doubt have different and complementary knowledge and technology, but what if they are unscrupulous and want to conquer Earth, or just cautious and seek to destroy Llanvabon and then the human race for fear humans are unscrupulous?  Any exchange of useful info is likely to offer clues as to the location of Earth and thus put our entire civilization at terrible risk.  The safest course is to blow up the alien ship, but of course there is no guarantee the Earthers will win a fight they start, and a victory will destroy beyond recovery a tremendous volume of valuable data.

The crews of the two ships tentatively open communications and after a few weeks the main character comes up with a way for the two races to exchange invaluable knowledge without incurring much risk of genocidal interstellar war breaking out.  We are left with every reason to believe the human race is on course to build a mutually beneficial interstellar friendship with the ETs.

A solid traditional science fiction piece--thumbs up!

"Wings of Victory" by Poul Anderson (1972)

"Wings of Victory" takes place in the same universe as Anderson's many stories of Van Rijn, Falkayn and Flandry.  In 1979 it was reprinted in an anthology produced by a Soviet publisher that presents in English, with notes and supplementary material in Russian, stories by some of the most important American and British SF writers.  "Wings of Victory" would be included in multiple Anderson collections, one of which, The Earth Book of Stormgate, I own. 

"Wings of Victory" is a science-heavy story, the main point of which seems to be to describe the procedures of exploring an alien planet and to present all the science--biology, ecology, sociology and psychology--behind a fun alien race Anderson came up with.  Anderson includes a love triangle and a mutiny in an effort to produce some human drama, but this stuff is not particularly engaging, being a little too obvious and predictable.  "Wings of Victory" feels like a bunch of exposition meant to introduce to readers the Iron Age civilization of bird people native to the planet in the story, a society which seems to embody values Anderson admires--bravery, freedom, individualism, etc.  We'll call "Wings of Victory" acceptable.

A space boat with a multi-cultural crew of three humans lands on a planet where there are a substantial number of widely separated homesteads.  How civilized can the natives be if they all live so far apart from each other instead of being packed together in cities where trade and exchange of ideas can thrive?  The explorers encounter some large fearsome birds near one of the houses--are these domesticated guard beasts or the intelligent people who built the house?

One of the three explorers is an attractive woman and the two men compete over her attentions as they try to figure out the answers to these and related questions without getting killed in the process; these guys have radically divergent theories about the natives and have long science debates pushing their individual interpretations of the evidence.  One of Anderson's objectives in "Wings of Victory" seems to be to point out how long-held theories may turn out to be wrong, and people in positions of authority dangerously fallible, when faced with novel conditions--the guy who uses his intuition turns out to be correct and he gets the girl while his superior who relies on theories based on life from other planets and tries to pull rank suffers not only intellectual but physical humiliation.

A characteristic Anderson story which competently advances his ideological commitments and shows off his science knowledge, but not one of the more impressive ones from a literary or entertainment perspective.      

"The Waveries" by Fredric Brown (1945)

Here we have one of those science fiction disaster stories that feels like a history article from the future and tries to teach you about some scientific and technological phenomena (in this case, radio waves and the history of radio transmission and reception); "The Waveries" also serves as social commentary or satire, suggesting modern life, the era of the radio and the motor car, is driving us crazy and making us miserable.  Brown also unleashes a lot of speculative economics on us.  Unfortunately, "The Waveries" lacks much by way of character and human drama. 

It is the near future of 1947 and America is enjoying an economic boom as demobilized servicemen return home and set out spending all their pay.  Suddenly, everybody's radios, worldwide, begin picking up odd transmissions that interfere with legitimate broadcasts of music and news.  The well-informed recognize these puzzling sounds as being much like the first experimental signals sent out by radio pioneers like Marconi over 40 years ago, and in short order bits and pieces of more recent broadcasts are received over the air.  These signals overwhelm the airwaves, rendering radios useless, leading to a sharp rise in newspaper and magazine sales as well as a spike in the popularity of live and cinematic performances.

Scientists theorize that aliens of pure energy, living radio waves, have been attracted to Earth by our transmissions, and as they orbit the globe they are conforming their invisible hundreds-miles-long bodies to the shape of the messages that attracted them--the dots and dashes of morse code, snatches of song and speech less than thirty seconds long.

Things take a turn for what looks like the worse when the aliens start eating or absorbing electricity so that telephones, automobiles, aircraft, light bulbs, etc., cease to operate.  (Doesn't the human nervous system also operate via electrical pulses?  Brown doesn't address this as far as I can remember.)  The government seizes control of all steam locomotives and horses, now the world's primary sources of transport and power, and steam engines are produced en masse to power factories of all sizes.  (Brown displays a surprisingly robust faith in the ability of the government to effectively plan the economy in a time of crisis.)

The twist ending of "The Waveries" is that without electricity and gasoline engines people are healthier and happier!  They get plenty of exercise walking, riding bikes, riding horses, and toiling in the fields.  Denied radio and movies, they create their own entertainment via amateur theatricals and bands.  There is so much less stress that people stop drinking hard liquor.  Now, of course, we can't expect the bookish readers of Astounding to relish the idea of breaking their backs laboring on a farm--the main character of this story runs a small town newspaper, doing all the writing and editing and reporting himself.      

A provocative story that reminds you of those nostalgic reactionary types who try to convince you that medieval peasants had better lives than 21st-century office drones.  I'm not buying its rosy view of a simpler life, but "The Waveries" is OK.     

Among the places you can find "The Waveries" are a Penguin anthology called Connoisseur's Science Fiction and an Italian magazine called Gamma.

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Science fiction boosters call SF "the literature of ideas," and today we've read three stories that really do focus on science and speculation, rather than just using science jargon as window dressing for some kind of traditional adventure or horror story.  Whether this kind of SF is your cup of tea, or you prefer blood and guts, sex and violence, characters you can identify with and striking images, is a matter of taste, and I have to admit I find Brown's story a little dry and Anderson's efforts to incorporate relationship drama and combat action into his story a little flat, though these shortcomings are not fatal.  Leinster's story to my mind has the most compelling characters, relationships and images of today's three stories--it deserves that Retro Hugo.

We'll finish up Aliens in Analog soon, so stay tuned if you are curious about Stanley Schmidt's other picks.

Three above the night: Leiber, Reynolds and Russell

Let's crack open another SF anthology available at the internet archive, world's greatest website.  Today we've got Groff Conklin's 1965 13 Above the Night, Dell 8741, which would be reprinted in 1969 with a more exciting cover depicting the Death Star blowing up a skull...hey, why not?  isfdb doesn't credit an artist for this compelling and anachronistic image, which is reminding me of George Ziel's cover for Damon Knight's World Without Children and The Earth Quarter.  Today we'll check out three of the thirteen stories reprinted in this cryptically-titled volume (what does "above the night" even mean?), those by Fritz "Grey Mouser" Leiber, Mack "Socialist Labor Party" Reynolds, and Eric "John W. Campbell, Jr.'s favorite author" Frank Russell.

(We'll be reading these stories in the first edition of 13 Above the Night which cost SF fans 60 cents.  The cover upgrade is worth the 15 pennies, believe me.)

"Nice Girl with Five Husbands" by Fritz Leiber (1951) 

Here we have another Fritz Leiber story about unusual sexual relationships.  This one is not all that titillating, and seems mainly to have been written to promote Leiber's apparent "free love" anti-monogamy beliefs (see "The Ship Sails at Midnight") with its depiction of a future in which people run around naked and have group marriages, an optimistic future of world peace and travel to Mars, of cheap energy and high IQs.  Leiber seems to be trying to suggest that nudity and the abandonment of monogamy are of a piece with solar panels and rocket ships, that monogamy and the nudity taboo are like technologies that will soon be rendered obsolete.

Leiber starts the story by positing that there are temporal winds that frequent specific spots on the globe, and if you are at such a spot at just the right time you will be carried to the future or the past.  Then we meet a guy, an artist, who gets swept into the future by one of these winds; he is in the desert so at first he doesn't know he is in the future of 2050, the landscape not having changed so much over a century.

The artist meets a hot girl and she introduces him to her group marriage and our guy learns about this utopian future.  Leiber's story is mostly just slightly oblique description of this utopian future; there is very little plot, the tepid "drama" of the plot consisting of whether or not the artist will realize he is in the future and whether or not the future people will realize the artist is from the past and not just a conservative or reactionary who has an eccentric taste for monogamy, but since we knew from page one the story was about time travel there is no suspense or surprise--and no drama--for the reader.  Leiber tries to add some tragedy to the story--the artist has the opportunity to join the group marriage and this peaceful world but that opportunity is lost when he gets blown back to the inferior monogamous Cold War world of 1950.     

I'm going to have to give "Nice Girl with Five Husbands" a thumbs down, even though it is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, because it lacks plot and doesn't argue for group marriage and nudism in a logical way, just sort of asserts they are awesome.  Fritz Leiber is in good company when I criticize hi here, as his fellow Grandmasters Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon are also good writers who sometimes foist these earnest utopian stories on us.  Portraying alternative societies animated by different (purportedly "better") sexual mores and inhabited by superior individuals is a great SF idea, but these elements can't build an engaging story on their own--to provide the reader some entertainment they should be integrated into a story in which the characters grow or at least change and/or face obstacles as they pursue goals; if the utopia is all there is to the story it can be pretty boring.

Following its debut in the same issue of Galaxy as C. M. Kornbluth's famous "Marching Morons" (another tendentious story I panned), "Nice Girl with Five Husbands" has appeared in time travel anthologies and Leiber collections.  

"Prone" by Mack Reynolds (1954)

Let's take another gander at the odd career of Mack Reynolds, whom we have written about before, a leftist often published by the famously conservative John W. Campbell, Jr., a world traveler who published articles about booze in men's magazines like Mr. and Playboy, a guy whose SF writing I find mediocre but who somehow won some kind of reader's poll at Galaxy and If.

"Prone" is an absolutely lame joke story; the big central joke and all the little jokes over its short duration are all obvious, like jokes a kid could make.  Thumbs down!

      

It is the spacefaring future, and Earth has been at war with Mars for over a century; neither planet has been able to get a decisive edge over the other, leading to decade after decade of stalemate.  The story takes place in the office of Terra's supreme commander.  There is a lot of dialogue about a young service man who is what they call "an accident prone."  (All my life I have encountered "accident-prone" the adjective, but this story introduces me to "accident prone" the noun.  Always learning!)  Wherever this guy goes people trip and computers fail and buildings spontaneously catch fire and on and on, Reynolds giving many examples which I guess are meant to be funny.  A scientist says that most accident prones suffer injury themselves again and again, but this guy is one of the freaks who is never harmed himself but triggers catastrophic accidents to those nearby.  The Supreme Commander has a brainwave--they'll send the accident prone on a secret mission to Mars in hopes he causes the havoc there he has been causing on Earth.

This bargain basement filler piece debuted in F&SF and has been anthologized a fair number of times, somewhat to my surprise.  

"Now Inhale" by Eric Frank Russell (1959)    

Two losers in a row?  Ouch!  Maybe Eric Frank Russell can pull us out of this slump?

As we might expect of a story that debuted in Astounding, "Now Inhale" is a classic-style science fiction story in which a spacefarer uses his intelligence to survive an encounter with hostile aliens.  Russell's "Now Inhale" is reminding me a little of something Jack Vance might do, but unfortunately isn't as amusing or emotionally engaging as a Vance story--Russell fills the story with mild jokes and tries to generate tension with the fact the protagonist is imprisoned and could be killed at any moment, but somehow the story doesn't give you the legitimate laughs and chills a Vance story might.  Still, at least acceptable, maybe mildly recommendable--I kinda like it.  Maybe this counts as good filler.

 

Terra has colonized a hundred planets, and scouts search for still more.  This future human society is at peace with itself and others--criminal humans are given surgery to fix their anti-social personalities, and there is no point in going to war with nonhumans because there are so many valuable uninhabited planets that it makes no sense to waste resources fighting over an inhabited planet.  Of course, Earth still has a powerful space navy, just in case.

Our hero is a scout who operates a one-man craft.  He has to make an emergency landing on a planet inhabited by aliens capable of space flight--they have settled all three planets of this system.  They condemn our guy to execution as a spy.  These natives have a strange custom--as a form of public entertainment, all people on death row have to play a game of their choice (one like a board game or a card game that can be played in a small room) against an opponent chosen by the state before they are killed; the condemned get executed whether or not they win or lose, so they seek not so much to win as to drag out the game.  Invited to introduce the native TV audience to an Earth game, our hero opts to play a game that grinds on for day after day.  (Russell bases this game on what wikipedia is calling "The Tower of Hanoi;" the space scout attributes the game to the priests of the "Temple of Benares."  Wikipedia suggests this is a very famous puzzle but I have never heard of it.  Always learning.)  Over a year passes, by which time a Terran warship arrives to negotiate our guy's liberation.

"Now Inhale" was included in several anthologies, including one on the theme of television and another dedicated to aliens.  I'm not surprised editors wanted to reprint "Now Inhale," because Russell has a good reputation and this story isn't bad, but television broadcast plays very little role in the story, and the aliens aren't appreciably different from standard human villains from a standard adventure story in which the hero gets thrown in the arena or has to play cards for his life or something, so I am a little quizzical.

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These don't feel like stellar picks by Conklin, but maybe we'll return to the pages of 13 Above the Night to sample some more of his selections and be more impressed by those.  Stay tuned, time and space travel fans.

Wheel of Fortune: N S Bond, K Koja & B N Malzberg and R A Lupoff

I've been hunting down Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg collaborations at the internet archive, and came upon one that has, it appears, only ever been printed in a Roger Zelazny anthology I'd never heard of before, Wheel of Fortune, published in 1995.  From this book let's also read a story by Nelson S. Bond and one by Richard A. Lupoff.  (Hopefully the joke cover of the anthology is not reflective of the tone of its contents.)

"Pipeline to Paradise" by Nelson S. Bond

Bond was in his eighties when Wheel of Fortune was published, and isfdb suggests this story was originally written for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions, which was originally slated to be published in the 1970s.  "Pipeline to Paradise" certainly feels kind of old with its references to switchboard operators at hotels and the death penalty in New York state (the last execution in New York state took place in 1963.)  I recently read Bond's 1950 story "To People a New World" and found it pretty poor; way back in 2015 I read Bond's strong-female-protagonist post-apocalyptic quest story "Magic City" and deemed it marginally recommendable.  Maybe this story here, which would be reprinted in the 2002 Bond collection The Far Side of Nowhere, will be something I can get really excited about?

Well, not really.  "Pipeline to Paradise" is an acceptable filler story with an ending that I fear makes little sense.

New Yorker Blake has been having terrible blackout headaches--he wakes up from them not remembering what he has been up to.  He starts getting telephone calls--from a man he thinks is dead, Marcus Kane, an old war buddy!  Kane claims to be calling from Heaven!  Blake suspects Kane is actually calling from Hell, and when Blake's girlfriend disappears and Kane keeps telling him to go here and go there to look for her, and instead of finding her at these locales he instead finds murder scenes where young women have been killed, Blake is sure his fears are well-founded.  Kane, no doubt, is enacting a terrible revenge on Blake from beyond the grave, from the pit of Hell!  You see, back in 'Nam, Blake and Kane were alone together and when the Viet Cong attacked them Blake fled and left Kane to die.  (Bond tells us that Blake was carrying an M-30 machine gun, a machine gun I never heard of before.  Maybe this is a typo for M-60.  Or maybe Bond meant to say Blake was lugging around a Browning .30 caliber machine gun, which I suppose is not impossible.  Or maybe this is a clue that Blake's memories of Vietnam are hallucinations.)

Blake's girlfriend turns up dead and Blake is arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders of all those young women.  It appears that Blake is insane--he must have slain his gf and the other innocent women during his blackouts, and all this business about a Kane must be false memories and hallucinations--Blake's court-appointed defense attorney can find no records of a serviceman named Marcus Kane serving in Vietnam.  Like the two novels we just read, Slob by Rex Miller and Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown, "Pipeline to Paradise" is a story about a serial killer and abnormal psychology.  Or is it?  After Blake gets the electric chair the staff at the prison receive a phone call from a laughing man identifying himself as Marcus Kane.  So was Blake's Vietnam story real?  Was he really innocent of the murders?  This ending is meant to be shocking or funny, but it doesn't jive with the fact that nobody can find evidence that Kane was real, so instead of leaving the reader amazed or amused the ending leaves him with a nagging sense this story just doesn't hold together.

"The Unbolted" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg

It looks like "The Unbolted" has never appeared in any other venue--Koja and Malzberg completists take note: as I draft this blog post there are copies of Wheel of Fortune for sale on ebay for less than $20.00.

Malzberg's body of work is replete with novels and stories about the race track; for the Sage of Teaneck, betting on the horses is a metaphor for Man's effort to understand and to master life and the universe, an enterprise Malzberg suggests is doomed to failure.  Another Malzberg theme is the fear that technology is taking over our lives, stealing our humanity, that machines are becoming our masters.  "The Unbolted" combines these two Malzbergian hobbyhorses.  Zelazny in his intro calls the story "surreal" and "The Unbolted" is kind of hard to read, but I think I get it.

In the future people will be able to plug themselves into a computer system and essentially take on the persona of a jockey and racehorse in a virtual world and run a race upon which people lay wagers.  This is a risky business; the practice is addictive, and some riders lose their minds.  Our narrator is one of the top riders oof these virtual races, and has a sexual relationship with a female rider, Gilda, one of his closest competitors.  These two lay down in the room where they will be plugged into the simulation yet again and have a conversation before the next race.  Gilda is pretty pessimistic about the whole thing, suggesting they didn't freely chose to participate in this dangerous career but were rather manipulated into it by the system.

These two and the other racers enter the simulation; it is implied that plugging into the system involves being anally penetrated.  While waiting for the race to start, the narrator recalls a past conversation in which another rider asserted that only "losers"--people who are "empty"--are chosen to enter the simulation, are able to enter the simulation.  The narrator is the favorite to win the race, but suffers a disaster--he doesn't even finish because a fall kills his virtual horse.  Gilda seems to hint that she is part of the system that manipulates the riders and races, calling the narrator a loser and saying "this is what they do, what we do now to the losers...."  

Acceptable; "The Unbolted" is tough sledding and there is little in it that is new to Malzberg fans and it offers no real jokes or surprises, making it even less likely to please people who aren't already big Malzberg fans than most of Malzberg's productions.  I'm not sure what Koja contributed here--everything in it feels like pure Malzberg.  

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" by Richard A. Lupoff

I didn't think Sandworld was very good, I thought Crack in the Sky was poor, and I found reading the ambitious "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" and "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" to be a chore.  The thing is, while I didn't find reading those works of Lupoff's a pleasure, they have all stuck in my mind because they were all odd and surprising.  So here I am, years later, giving this quite long story by Lupoff with an obvious joke title a shot.

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" is a trifling humor story, not annoying but not good, either.  Almost every paragraph contains or is built around some kind of joke which is not actually amusing but fortunately is not actually irritating, either.  As for the plot, it is weak and serves mainly as a mere skeleton upon which Lupoff can hang little joke anecdotes and indulgent nostalgia talk.  (You'll remember how much of Crack in the Sky was devoted to singing the praises of underground comix and Edgar Rice Burroughs--I guess this is just how Lupoff operates, padding out his work with expressions of love for his favorite pop culture artifacts.)

Israel Cohen is addicted to gambling, and this story describes how he became hooked on games of chance and how that addiction has brought him to a terrible crisis, and how he escapes the crisis.  As the story begins, Israel is in Vegas in a casino and is in real trouble because he owes the house a pile of dough and can't pay it back.  It seems possible he may be beaten up or even murdered.  So from his hotel room in the casino Israel calls his three ex-wives for help, one after the other--no help is forthcoming.  He reminisces about how he fell in love with gambling at a Jewish summer camp when he won a giant Tootsie Roll in a raffle.  (In the afterword to the story the author tells us this element of the tale is based on a real-life experience of his--based on my listening to feel like I've heard lots of prominent Jewish people talk about their summer camp experiences.)  Then he sends a fax begging for aid to a randomly dialed number.  

An eleven-year-old girl comes to his hotel room in answer to the fax--she is Lady Luck!  She has the power to take any guise; to demonstrate her powers, she appears as Gene Tierney and then John Wayne.  (This story has lots of references to golden age Hollywood.)  What this power has to do with being Lady Luck, and how her ability to change her appearance furthers the plot, I don't know; I suspect it just offers Lupoff another chance to talk about old movie stars.  I also wonder why Lady Luck's normal appearance is as a child; maybe this is a reference to an old book or film which I am missing.

Lady Luck helps Israel at the craps table, where he wins money sufficient to pay his debt to the casino and leave.  Will he quit gambling?  Probably not.

Barely acceptable.  

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" would be reprinted in the 2001 collection Claremont Tales.

**********

Though none of them actually stink, I am not crazy about these stories.  You can't expect to roll boxcars every throw, genre fiction readers.  The only people I can really recommend hie over to ebay or internet archive to access Wheel of Fortune are the most devoted of Zelazny's, Bond's, Koja's, Malzberg's and Lupoff's fans.  

Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown

Did he dare?  Why not?  He'd taken chances before, although never quite in this way, but then he'd never been in this bad a fix before either.

A limited edition 2017 printing from Centipede Press

In our last episode we read a 1987 novel about a serial rapist and murderer and today we read a 1959 novel that has the same kind of devilry at its center--at least according to the cover of the 1960 Bantam paperback edition.  Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown seems to be well-regarded, and was even adapted for television, serving as the basis for an episode of the 1960-62 series Boris Karloff's Thriller.  Let's see what is going on behind all those covers of women in their underwear via the internet archive, where are available two British editions of the book, a 1959 hardcover in the American Bloodhound Mystery series and a 1983 omnibus that collects four Brown novels.  (If you are some kind of library history junkie definitely check out the '59 volume at the internet archive, as it is plastered with all kinds of fun warning stamps ("PLEASE DO NOT SOIL, MARK, OR OTHERWISE INJURE THIS BOOK") and administrative notations ("ACCESSIONED: 23,843"; "CLASSIFIED: F") from the Blackpool Public Libraries system.)

I complained that 1987's Slob had a weak plot and characters that were childish about whom author Rex Miller spent a lot of time informing us, sometimes tediously.  Brown's Knock Three-One-Two, in stark contrast, has a plot in which all the scenes and characters are tightly integrated, everything following logically from what came before and from the characters' personalities and goals.  Instead of being what I called "superlatives" or "archetypes" about which we can't possibly care, like Miller's, Brown's principal characters are totally believable, and we shake our heads when they do wrong and feel for them when they are in trouble.  (Of course, it is probably not fair to compare Slob and Knock Three-Two-One, as they have different objectives, Miller's book's raison d'etre being to provide scenes of ugliness, perversity and gore that shock and disgust the reader.  There is sex and violence here in Knock Three-One-Two but it is not explicit and is there to build atmosphere and generate suspense, not as an end to itself.)   

Ray Fleck is a city-dwelling liquor salesman with an attractive tall blonde wife, Ruth.  And an addict--he loves to gamble!  As the story opens, Ray's addiction has landed him in some real trouble.  Ray owes his bookie Joe Amico almost 500 dollars, and Joe is getting a little anxious about his money!  Ray had better pay up soon--or else!  Ruth has some insurance and could cash it in to help Ray out, but she doesn't want to--this insurance is important to her, so important she took a part time job as a waitress at a Greek diner to meet the monthly premiums when Ray balked at doing so.  So Ray spends the evening out as he often does, hobnobbing with his many friends and Dolly Mason, one of the sluts with whom he cheats on Ruth, but, in addition to selling booze and indulging in a little bit of the old extramarital in-out, he tries to borrow enough money to get in on a hot poker game and make enough bread to pay off Joe.  Joe wants to meet him tonight, so Ray had better raise that cash fast!  But getting his hands on the necessary moolah is even more challenging than he feared, and as the evening proceeds Ray gets increasingly desperate and sheds more and more of his scruples until he takes the ultimate monstrous step.  

The saga of the Flecks takes place against a background of a city in fear--a serial rapist and murderer whom the public calls "the psycho" is haunting the town, putting everybody on edge.  So far the killer's victims have been housewives who have let him into their homes while their husbands were away, but the villain might change his tactics now that everybody in town is installing chain bolts and peepholes.   

Brown generates legitimate suspense and surprise as we follow Fleck's progress throughout the town and wonder what Ray, Ruth and the psycho, who is hungry to rape and kill again, will do, and what will ultimately happen to each of them.  Amoral Fleck is a gambler and everything he does is a gamble, a calculated risk, and maybe he ain't too good at that there calculatin' and as we watch he dances on the brink of disaster and commits graver and graver sins in his struggle to climb out of the hole into which he has dug himself.  Brown does a great job with Ray and Dolly, and a good job with many of the other characters--the psycho, Joe, and one of Dolly's many other boyfriends--her "steady," a private investigator--and an acceptable job with Ruth, Ruth's boss--the owner of the Greek diner, and a low IQ news agent who has some kind of complex that leads him to confesses to crimes he hasn't committed.  As we see in so much genre fiction, the evil and depraved characters are far more interesting than the goodies and the victims (how did honest and industrious Ruth get mixed up with Ray, anyway?)

There is a lot of psychology in this book.  The "show me" psychology Brown includes--offering Ray's and Dolly's thoughts as an explanation for why they behave the way they do--is good and totally rings true.  But there is also "tell me" psychology, Psych 101 goop and the kind of pop psychology you learn from popular fiction.  The Greek diner owner is a college graduate and he has maintained an interest in psychology and we get his theories on why the psycho is committing his crimes in the form of letters he types to an old college buddy.  And there is a long section about how the imbecilic news agent's religious father afflicted him with a guilt complex.  This material is the weakest element of the book and these passages are the least tightly integrated with the plot and he story' desperate atmosphere, but they don't sink the novel by any means and I suppose this sort of thing appeals to some readers.

(One of my general complaints about mystery fiction, including (maybe especially) the giallo movies I enjoy, is about the absurd and convoluted Rube Goldberg explanations writers come up with in an effort to make plausible the dramatic but counterintuitive behavior of their characters.  I feel like too often thriller writers come up with a bizarre behavior they think is scary and then work backwards, trying to come up with some reason for a character to act in such a strange way.  I much prefer drama with characters whose personalities and behavior one can relate to--it is easy to identify with Ray Fleck's addictive behavior and his panic over having gotten in over his head, and with the promiscuous Dolly's lust; their actions and problems are like those of an average person's--like the reader's or like people he knows--but more intense.  But who can identify with or recognize a guy who is developmentally disabled and afflicted with a mental illness that stems from his religious upbringing and leads to him confessing to crimes he didn't commit but who still somehow operates a small business at a profit for years?  This doesn't feel real, but like something the author was at pains to concoct to serve as a means of taking a swipe at religious people and providing an explanation for behavior that is not credible but which is required by the plot, and it takes the reader out of the story and softens the emotional impact of the story on him.)

I found the ending of Knock Three-One-Two a little abrupt and anti-climactic--maybe the psycho killer could have done more, and maybe the final scenes in which Ray and the killer meet their ultimate fates could have been more elaborate and more satisfying.  The ending isn't bad, but it doesn't meet the level of what came before, which is so good.

I have some gripes, but the portrait of Ray in extremis and of Dolly, Joe, and the psycho are entertaining enough that I am giving a thumbs up to Knock Three-One-Two, a real page-turner.

After two thrillers only peripherally connected to the world of SF, in our next episode we'll return to this blog's bread and butter, short stories promoted as science fiction and fantasy.  See you next time.

 

Slob by Rex Miller

He will take the woman and the child down into the special place he's made for them in a water main.  And that is where he will summon the know-it-all cop, and we'll see how he likes it when he comes down to get his whore and the brat, see how he likes it in the secret subworld.  

You may recall that we recently read one of the famous Paperbacks from Hell and found within it many ads for other horror novels.  One of them, 1987's Slob by Rex Miller, was actually praised by none other than enfant terrible and critical darling Harlan Ellison.  A British 1988 edition of the novel, complete with Stephen King blurb on the cover, is available at the internet archive, offering us cheapos a chance to see if the book really does "smoke" and "pull a plow" as Ellison claims in the hilarious name-dropping endorsement emblazoned on the special advance copy used to advertise the book to retailers.

The prologue, one page long, which in the middle of the novel we realize is a "flash forward," introduces us to the title slob, a man almost 500 lbs in weight who smells horrible, has killed hundreds of people, and bears the nickname "Chaingang," I guess because he often kills people with a chain and is so huge he's like a one-man gang.  Already on the first page I was shaking my head over one of Miller's word choices: he writes "...sink a sharp object into her throat, ripping down across the breasts and then the abdomen...." and I am thinking "across" is wrong--to me, "across the breasts" would be a horizontal path from one breast to the other.  Doesn't Miller mean "between" the breasts?  (This kind of thing happens only seldomly in the novel, so it is bad luck one of these blunders occurs right there at the starting gate.)

Slob is 301 pages long, which sounds forbidding, but a sizable fraction of that page count is empty space.  For example, the one-page prologue starts in the middle of page 7 and ends in the middle of page 8.  There are 27 chapters, and they are not numbered but instead have prosaic titles, typically the names of the characters who figure in them.  Each chapter gets a full title page on an odd-numbered page and is followed by a blank even-numbered page, so we have over 54 pages without actual narrative text right there.  When a chapter ends on an odd-numbered page it is followed by a blank even-numbered page, yielding many more blank pages.  And of course every chapter starts in the middle of a page, and many of them end in the upper half of a page.  Probably this thing is actually only about 210 pages of text.

Ellison's praise, in the ad in my printing of Stage Fright by Garrett Boatman and on the cover of that promo edition of Slob, is pretty vague, but it seems Ellison with his barrage of bombast is trying to convince us that it is Miller's writing that is remarkable.  And Miller's themes and style do at times remind us of Ellison's own work; the brand names, the references to celebrities, the sneering at American culture--for example, we get the repeated suggestion that Vietnamese communists are better soldiers than Americans as well as the tired observation that American cheese isn't really cheese.  I find that reading much of Ellison's writing feels not like being immersed in a believable world but like being yelled at by a smartass and Miller himself sometimes gives us a little taste of that feeling when he puts words in all caps to emphasize them

If a more powerful mind, a masterful and dominant intelligence, decides you will do something, you will accede to the wishes of the greater being.  Because you are SHEEP.

or somewhat incongruously addresses us readers directly, as when capping off a jokey comment about our protagonist being satiated sexually with "folks" 

His crankcase was empty, folks.

or when describing the duffel bag Chaingang carries around with him, the one full of fragmentation grenades, claymore mines, crowbars, lock picks, etc.  Three or four times Miller reminds us that "neither you nor I could lift" or "budge," the bag, and he has a few metaphors that  he likewise resorts to again and again, saying Chaingang's fingers are like cigars half a dozen times (at least) and using electricity as a metaphor to describe the feeling of love or lust between the hero and heroine at least three times.

All these elements of Miller's writing serve to remind you this is a book, and a somewhat silly one, taking you out of the story and making it harder to care about the characters, to deplore their evil or sympathize with their plights.  But on the whole Miller's writing is competent, and I appreciate how he employs a diversity of styles that add variety and interest to the book, making the chapters distinct based on who is in them and what is happening to them.    

The first chapter is written conventionally in the third-person past tense, and in it we get to know one of our three main characters, Edie Lynch, an attractive middle-aged woman, mother of an eight-year-old daughter, Lee.  Her husband was murdered by Chaingang and found with his heart missing--the press has dubbed the perpetrator "the Lonely Hearts Killer" because Chaingang often, though not always, rips out his victims' hearts.

The chapters focusing on Chaingang are often written in the present tense and feature feverish stream of consciousness passages consisting of long ungrammatical and punctuation-light sentences that offer the point of view of the gargantuan and nauseous killer as he busts into some random family's home to torture, kill and mutilate them with a chain and a bowie knife or commit some similar mayhem, or fantasizes about or recalls some episode of murderous violence.  The second chapter takes this form.  Our third chapter starts in the first-person past tense in the voice of the novel's hero, Jack Eichord, a middle-aged alcoholic detective.  That first-person section is about Jack's alcoholism and recovery--he's been off the sauce nine years.  The rest of the chapter consists of a third-person section about how Jack is one of the best cops in America, a specialist in catching serial killers who is not as corrupt or vulgar and low class as most cops.

Chaingang and Jack are superlatives or archetypes, like comic book characters, each the best in his business, one an evil genius single-mindedly devoted to killing people for kicks, Earth's greatest predator, the other the rare honest man in government who is single-mindedly devoted to catching serial killers. Our third main character, Edie Lynch, is similarly a sort of Platonic exemplar of her type, Miller telling us she is "one of those rare creatures who didn't have an insincere or mean or malicious or selfish bone in her body." The characters in Slob are kind of childish, and Miller doesn't just sketch them out and then make the plot the focus of his writing; instead, he makes the characters the focus of the book and spends long paragraphs describing their lives, their thoughts, their physical appearances (we get a lot of sentences about how obese Chaingang is, descriptions of his rolls of fat and so forth.) This is OK for Chaingang, because he is over-the-top strange and disgusting, which is entertaining, but the descriptions of Jack and Edie can be boring--do we really need to hear about how much Jack likes the smell of a long list of different types of liquor (smell is very important to this book) or about Edie's volunteer work at a runaway hotline?

The first third of the book acquaints us with the three main characters.  In the novel's fourth chapter Miller offers a detailed description (in past tense this time, perhaps because we are privy to the victim's thoughts) of how Chaingang expertly kidnaps a woman with the aim of raping her, employing psychological strategies as well as brutal violence.  When things go wrong (she reflexively bites him you-know-where) Chaingang kills the woman.  Then he kills a guy who is just driving by.  We learn Chaingang's backstory in broad outlines here and we get a lot of detail later, how he has a genius IQ, was abused as a child, has been in many mental institutions and was released by the Pentagon to participate in an experimental project in Vietnam, serving in a behind-enemy-lines assassination squad.  He made it back to the US through his own ingenuity and since then has been eluding capture as he kills one person after another for the fun of it.  Besides being super smart and super strong, Chaingang is a "precognate" who has what amount to psychic powers--Miller tells us he benefits from "biochemical phenomena that transcend the mechanistic laws of kinesiology and kinetics" and later refers to Chaingang's abilities as a "sixth sense," and, more expansively, explains that the killer is "a human data-processing tool."  Over the course of the book Chaingang's mental powers sense human life nearby, detect the depth of water, and warn him of approaching danger.  He also has a kind of rapport with the natural world, loves trees, plants, and small animals--Miller even uses the hackneyed phrases "at one with the terrain" and "in harmony with nature" to describe this man who lives to kill his fellow man.

We also get chapters about the relatively boring Jack and Edie and near the end of the first third of Slob the detective stuff begins in earnest as Jack and other cops investigate Chaingang's recent murders, talking to witnesses and looking for fingerprints and all that.

Now that we are familiar with them, in the middle third of the book, our three principles start interacting with each other.  Jack meets Edie and her daughter while seeking previously overlooked clues, and the two fall in love, and we get some long-winded descriptions of the lovers' thoughts as their relationship blossoms.  The unusual sex in this book isn't limited to the rape and sexual abuse that Chaingang suffered as a child and metes out to women as an ogrish adult--initially Edie doesn't want to have sexual intercourse with Jack and after jerking him off a few times introduces panty hose and Vaseline to their bedroom activities.

The perhaps tedious middle-aged dating experience chapters are interrupted by scenes in Chicago in which Chaingang murders an old rich lawyer and book collector, robs a store, makes friends with abandoned puppies, and reminisces about torturing a woman and about his adventures in Vietnam--Chaingang's setting up shop under the streets of Chicago (Miller seems to elide any distinction between the Windy City's sewers, water mains, and storm drains) is foreshadowed as Chaingang recalls exploring Viet Cong tunnels, some of the entrances to which lie under the surfaces of bodies of water.  Edie actually sees Chaingang climbing down a manhole into the sewer, not realizing she is watching the man who killed her husband two years ago, the man her boyfriend is trying to find.

A theme of Slob is of an America in decline, an America that is corrupt--in the first half of the book we get references to Americans' poor diet, the Vietnam War, Watergate, police corruption and incompetence. As the second half of the novel begins Miller spends several pages on scenes dramatizing police and government deception of the public, a sequence preceded by Jack's ruminations on how much "clout" the police have in various locales across the US ("...there was one notorious area of New Jersey where a badge was an absolute license to kill....") One center of police malfeasance he specifically names is Cook County, Illinois, which wikipedia tells me is the county in which Chicago resides! And sure enough, the Chicago PD, having captured a murderer, tries to convince the public that they have found the famous serial killer who is slaughtering people and tearing out their hearts, even though they all know the guy they caught is just some copycat small timer. The police commissioner even makes Jack go on a local TV talk show to spread this lie over the airwaves, and Miller, who had a successful career in broadcasting (says the author's bio in this UK copy of Slob,) spills a lot of ink describing how a live TV show operates. As with the middle-aged romance chapters, I was kind of wondering if this kind of material was why I was reading Slob, but I guess it fits in to the America-is-corrupt theme, pushing the idea that TV is an addictive scam. Anyway, Chaingang sees the broadcast on the set of a family he has just slaughtered and whose bodies he proceeds to mutilate in so outrageous a fashion that when a relative finds them she is driven insane by the sight of their mangled bodies and her hair instantly goes white. (As with Chaingang's psychic powers, this adds a note of hard-to-swallow fantasy to the more or less realistic novel.)

Interestingly, like the America depicted in this novel, Chaingang himself is also in decline; whereas in the past he used his super brain to clear his tracks and make sure no clues were left at the scene of his atrocities, nowadays he is getting negligent, and even allows a victim--one of two drug-dealing bikers he attacks from behind--to escape, even starts taunting the police, mailing to Jack the hearts of some of his victims.

In the final third of Slob, our guy Jack gets a fingerprint of Chaingang and uses his connections in Washington to get Chaingang's name and photo.  At the same time, Chaingang learns from a newspaper story that Jack has taken up with the widow of one of his earlier victims--the local journalos helpfully include a photo of Edie.  When Edie sees the photo of the man who murdered her husband she recognizes him as the man she saw go down a manhole, and Jack and the cops begin exploring the sewers, not that they actually find their quarry.  (One of the problems with Slob is that Jack and the cops don't do very interesting or impressive detective work.)

Edie is not the only person to have seen Chaingang entering the sewers; a thief and drug addict known as Woody Woodpecker and his "bag lady" girlfriend have also seen the killer, and WW tells Leroy AKA Dr. Geronimo, an obese African-American quack and recreational drug user who sells herbs and potions and claims to know voodoo and the magic of the Comanches, a man whom Miller describes in ways that today might not be permissible ("fat, black buck...approximately shape and hue of a cannonball*") all about it.  Hoping for a hefty reward, this comedy duo visits the home base of the drug-dealing biker gang to tell them they know where the giant who killed their comrade makes his lair.  We get a series of scenes of all these lower class criminals negotiating over prices and making fun of each other, Miller providing goofy names, personalities, vocabularies and pronunciations for each of them, creating an entire human scum milieu and playing the whole thing for laughs.  

*Over a 13-page span, Miller says Dr. Geronimo looks like a cannonball five times.    

We get a flashback to Vietnam, a present tense description of Chaingang, a one-man long range patrol squad, laying an ambush and springing it on a squad of North Vietnamese regulars, the obese killer employing grenades, claymores, an M60 machine gun and of course the chain he favors in hand-to-hand combat to wipe them out.  The very next chapter, again in present tense, relates the invasion of the sewers by nineteen bikers; Chaingang has set a variety of explosive traps, much like back in the Vietnamese jungle twenty or twenty-five years ago, and the bikers are annihilated in a huge explosion. 

This whole biker episode is not really connected to the Jack and Edie characters and doesn't do anything to advance the main plot but is probably the most entertaining portion of the novel, Woody Woodpecker and Dr. Geronimo (who survive) being sort of amusing and the ambush of the NVA squad being a decent action scene; it doesn't hurt that I don't mind seeing communist guerillas and drug dealers getting blown up (in contrast to seeing innocent families mutilated and innocent women sexually assaulted.)

In the last fifteen pages of text, Chaingang expertly kidnaps Edie and Lee and contacts Jack.  Jack meets Chaingang at a manhole cover and uses Chaingang's weakness--his love of small animals--against the killer to rescue the hostages and shoot Chaingang multiple times.  The final confrontation is wrapped up very quickly, with no long drawn out chase or fight or negotiation.  Chaingang's body vanishes down into the sewer or storm drain system, leaving us readers to wonder if this novel is supernatural enough to suspect Chaingang has survived and will return for a sequel.  There do seem to be additional books starring Jack Einhorn, and additional books starring Chaingang (including comic books!), but whether they take place before or after Slob and whether these two figures appear in any of them together, I can't tell.  

I am not sure whether I should grade Slob as acceptable or marginally good.  Most of the actual Chaingang passages are entertaining, and the Dr. Geronimo stuff is fun.  The Jack and Edie and Lee parts are not good but they are more or less competent--they are not annoying at least.  The plot is weak--the novel is a series of episodes that are not closely integrated with each other and there is little sense of rising tensions that lead to a climax and there is no feeling of catharsis at the end.  I don't regret reading Slob, but I won't be reading any more Chaingang or Eichord novels any time soon.

K Koja and B N Malzberg: "The High Ground," "Literary Lives" and "The Witches of Delight"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are scouring the interwebs in search of collaborations between Barry N. Malzberg and Kathe Koja, and today we have three specimens of such collabs published in the good old days of the 1990s, one each from the years 1993 (Muslim radicals bomb the World Trade Center!), 1994 (Rwandan genocide!), and 1995 (cultists poison people on the Tokyo subway!)  These stories have, as far as I can tell, only been printed once, so maybe we have reason to fear these are below average productions from these widely-admired (by critics and genre lit professionals, at least) writers, but we won't know for sure until we've read them.  

"The High Ground" (1993)

This story appears in Temporary Walls, the souvenir book of the 1993 World Fantasy Convention, ; a book bearing the subtitle "An Anthology of Moral Fantasy inspired by John Gardner's On Moral Fiction."  Am I going to read On Moral Fiction (200 pages) in order to better understand this 13-page story?  No, but wikipedia offers a three-sentence summary that draws on Daniel Burt's The Chronology of American Literature that may allow us to cheat our way to a dim comprehension of Gardner's argument.

In this work, Gardner attacks what he sees as contemporary literature's lack of morality, which he calls the highest purpose of art and which he defines in the book. According to Gardner, morality is not an arbitrary social construct, but an eternal truth, taking on different forms but not essentially changing through the ages. He says that moral fiction "attempts to test human values, not for the purpose of preaching or peddling a particular ideology, but in a truly honest and open-minded effort to find out which best promotes human fulfillment."

Editors Robert Garcia and Greg Ketter suggest Gardner would have "loathed" "The High Ground;" well, let's see what we think.

"The High Ground" is a Socratic dialogue about morality, with allusions to Dante and the Holocaust and maybe other stuff that went over my head, a fairy tale didactic but frustratingly inconclusive.  There are horror images, but little by way of plot or character.  It seems possible that the point of the story is that life is meaningless and morality is mere opinion, but it is not impossible that the point of the story is that people who feel that morality is a mere opinion are the immoral ones and they will be consigned to hell.  

A bunch of fantasy-type characters are hanging out in the "woods of inconsequence;" among them are a wizard, a dwarf, a giant with an oozing sore, a deformed rodent, and an "enchanted virgin" with a stump where she has lost a hand.  The wizard tells the story of how he was given responsibility over a city of some thousands of people, and then was confronted by an evil sorcerer of invincible power--the evil magician demanded a hundred young people as his slaves, and should his demand not be met, promised to exterminate everyone in the city; the wizard had to make this horrible choice, and it scarred him and led him to believe morality is not real.  The dwarf offers the story of Paolo and Francesca; he had some kind of role in the story.  A young woman tells the story of how she was employed in a castle or manor house or something and she and the master fell in love but refrained from consummating their relationship because they didn't want to commit adultery, and were thus miserable.  The giant and an elf don't have their own stories but sometimes offer little comments that contribute to the debate.

The story restarts with the wizard again telling his story; presumably these characters are retelling their tales of woe and having their debates on the nature of morality again and again throughout eternity.

I'm going to have to give a thumbs down to "The High Ground," it feeling long, being kind of boring, and offering debates that just run in circles that stem from contrived and improbable stories.  Is this story attacking Gardner's insistence that morality is "an eternal truth" by offering theoretical situations in which people have no opportunity to behave morally?  It is not surprising that this ultimately sterile story has not been reprinted.  I read "The High Ground" it in a scan of Temporary Walls at the internet archive by following a link at isfdb; at time of writing there is something fishy with the file's name and it can be hard to find on your own, but if you click the isfdb link you will go right to it.

"Literary Lives" (1994)

"Literary Lives" has only appeared in Mike Resnick's Alternate Outlaws, a paperback with a cover illo chillingly depicting Elvis Presley as a bolshevist terrorist.  Recent events suggest that people don't really take seriously the political advice of celebrities like Cardy Bee and Meghan the Stallion or even Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, but if The King of Rock and Roll himself was on on the side of Moscow or Peking maybe today I'd be wielding a hoe on a collective farm or sitting in an office listening in on conversations via bugs and wire taps--scary.  

Resnick in his intro to "Literary Lives" tells us it is about Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, two people I know very little about, so I may not get a lot out of this story.  (I know "You might as well live" from Bryan Ferry and of course people talk about Hemingway all the time, so I have a vague sense of the conventional wisdom about him.)  Let's give it a try, anyway.

"Literary Lives" lives up to its title and is a pretty literary story with lots of stream of consciousness jazz and plots that are told largely through flashbacks.  I say "plots" because the story comes in two parts, each depicting a distinct alternate universe in which Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemmingway share a disastrous sexual relationship and one murders the other.  (Spoiler alert!)  There is plenty of block quoted poetry, but whether it is Parker's real poetry or something Koja and Malzberg cooked up, I don't know.  I think we can call "Literary Lives" a feminist story--the two Dorothys' relationships with her father, husbands, and other men are prominently featured, the thoughts and careers of prostitutes are explored, and the text contains lines like "in this America nothing, but nothing, was as invisible as a sixty-year-old woman."  

Part 1 is set in the 1980s (Trump Tower is mentioned) and in this alternate universe an aging, overweight Dorothy Parker (wikipedia says she was born in 1893, but in this universe it seems she is 60) is a novelist and today is appearing on a New York-based TV talk show promoting her sixth novel set in Edwardian England.  (She abandoned poetry long ago.)  During the commercial breaks, she thinks back on her life, on her marriage to a failed womanizing poet (I guess alternate universe Ernest Hemmingway) who sired her two (now estranged) children and cheated on her so outrageously that Dorothy considered suicide and then contrived to murder hubby and one of his girlfriends.  After hubby's death, Dorothy began her career as a novelist.  The story ends with the novelist walking through New York, observing a multi-ethnic squad of street hookers.  

The Dorothy Parker of the second part of "Literary Lives" is herself a prostitute in the late Forties.  Her career as a writer in New York and Hollywood made her feel like a whore so she became an actual whore.  (As I type that it sounds pretty funny but as I was reading the story it felt perfectly natural.)  We saw this artist-as-whore theme in our last episode when reading Koja and Malzberg's "The Careful Geometry of Love."  This iteration of Parker is also an alcoholic, and we get a scene of her vomiting.  One thing this part of the story mentions again and again that was not brought up at all in the first part is the fact that Parker is Jewish.    

One of Parker's johns turns out to be Ernest Hemingway.  Papa bangs Dotty and then accuses her of making him impotent for three years back in the Twenties by laughing at the size of his penis--he says her laugh, her jokes about his member (she called it "she," a clever bit of emasculation that is probably illegal in Canada today and may well be here tomorrow) have haunted his dreams all through the Depression and the War.  He whips out a knife and stabs her repeatedly, his dialogue making explicit the way the knife is a phallic symbol and surrogate.

"Literary Lives" is well-written and the themes are sort of interesting, but it feels very long, and it bangs away at the same themes and ideas again and again.  And of course I expect there are all kinds of nuances that Parker and Hemmingway fans will appreciate that totally escaped my detection.  We'll call it acceptable.

"The Witches of Delight" (1995)

Here's the third of our unreprinted stories--we are digging deep today, friends!  The sole appearance of "The Witches of Delight" was in Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg's anthology Witch Fantastic.

"The Witches of Delight" is another longish story that comes to us in two distinct parts.  In the first part we meet Joe Thompson, a writer who lives in the suburbs with his wife and two kids and commutes to the big city to work, attend art gallery openings and the like, and of course to cheat on his wife.  Thompson has been having dreams in which he has sex on an alien planet with a sort of witch queen, a beautiful woman clad in black who has long white legs, long white fingers, and small pointy breasts.  Also, Thompson's Dad is dying or recently died in the hospital.  The tale of Thompson, his father, and this Queen is kind of confusing, with us readers not quite sure which of the narrative's fragments are real and which are dreams or delusions.  There are images of the Queen coming to Thompson's Dad in the hospital and having sex with him while Joe watches, and of Dad's broken body littered throughout Thompson's suburban home.  Thompson meets the Queen in real life, at an art gallery where there is a new exhibition of photographs of a female model, and she takes him to her apartment to have sex with him.  She suggests she is an immortal sorceress who has ruled other planets and knows the future as well as the past, at some points declaring "I am history" and likening herself to figures like Medea, Sylvia Plath, Anne Boylen and Catherine the Great, at others saying "I am your future," but later claiming those assertions were lies and what she really is is "duty" and "honor."  It is all pretty inconclusive and contradictory.  I got the impression that Koja and Malzberg might be making some feminist point about how men use and fear women and haphazardly, for their own purposes, assign to women attributes and responsibilities, and how history is an endless repetitive tragedy because of men's ambitions and neuroses but men try to blame their actions and the resultant unhappiness on women.

The second half of the story concerns a love triangle.  We've got Horst, an immigrant, I suppose a Jew from the former communist East (the text refers to "the hard edges of the shtetl, the barley soup, the hard consonants of the grey regime slid[ing] from him") who came to America and began an affair with Anne, an art photographer.  They had tons of sex, but then Anne began photographing a new model, Margo, an extraordinarily good subject who becomes a muse for Anne, and a lover; Anne became cold to Horst in bed and otherwise.  (Anne is the photographer, and Margo the subject, of the exhibition where Thompson meets the witch Queen.)  Horst is so needful of Anne that he wants to surrender his masculinity so he can fit into the "sorority" that Anne and Margo comprise; he shaves his genitals and even offers to castrate himself.

The story ends mysteriously, with Anne presenting Horst some kind of revelation and asking him if he understands, but we readers can't know if he does understand and we certainly aren't given the means to understand ourselves.  The endings of the Thompson narrative and the Horst narrative exhibit many parallels, sharing words and phrases (for example, Koja and Malzberg use the word "history" a lot in both.)  What happens to the two men at the hands of their sex partners? 

Thompson lies there: beneath the witch of the worlds, queen of covenant, bitch of last and final consequence, in passage and at torment: subsumed by history, overtaken by time and content at last not to rise.

[Anne] leading him [Horst] to the space he must now occupy, the square of light which would from now on be his home. 

It isn't particularly clear--have they been murdered?  Trapped in some kind of limbo forever?  Victims of evil women?  Or criminals against the fair sex suffering a just punishment?

"The Witches of Delight" is well-written and entertaining with plenty of erotic and horrific images, and the personalities and motivations of the men in the story are clear and easy to understand, though the philosophical or ideological content of the story is a little hard to pin down.  I can give this one a thumbs up.

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"The High Ground" is a waste of time, but "Literary Lives" works and "The Witches of Delight" is a real success.  Maybe we'll continue our search for Koja/Malzberg collaborations in the near future here at MPorcius Fiction Log.