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 |
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 |
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.
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 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.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.
Little Deaths first appeared in Great Britain, and when an American edition came out a year later it had a better cover but fewer stories; "The Careful Geometry of Love" was the only Koja or Malzberg contribution to survive the trip across the pond. Damn--the SF world is ruthless! Luckily you can get a British printing Little Deaths at ebay or do what I am doing, read a scan of a British edition at internet archive, world's greatest website. (If you read Polish, you are in luck, as the only other place "The Careful Geometry of Love" has appeared is in the Polish magazine Fenix, in 1996.
I will ask no questions, he said, I'm a professional. I run a studio, I'm a businessman. He heard the sound of her laughter, strident and focused in a way he could not fathom....Oh yes, she said, all of you are professionals. You are so serious....You ask no questions even when questions should be asked.
This story is a response to AIDS, or at least exploits the famous disease in an effort to make Barry's story of sexual frustration and incompatibility more "relevant" and more scary. In Malzberg's typical somewhat oblique fashion we observe the thoughts of Samuel as he goes to bed with women but ends up failing to have sex with them in a way that is humiliating. Sometimes Samuel expresses his unusual sexual desires to a woman and she rejects him; sometimes a woman reveals her unusual desires to him and he rejects her. Malzberg doesn't let on what the peculiar tastes in question might be--his story is not an exploitative one, the appeal of which is descriptions of nasty fetishes, but more a rumination about how difficult sexual relationships are, how our desires can't be fulfilled unless we open up ourselves to others, reveal our secrets and make ourselves vulnerable, and how such opening up can expose one to soul-destroying rejections.
Sam feels like a loser, he having bungled so many sexual encounters and, it seems, never won another person's sympathy or affection. He comes to believe that he can never reveal his secrets to others. He resorts (apparently--I don't think this is a dream or fantasy, but who knows with Malzberg?) to raping a woman. The twist ending is that one of Samuel's secrets is that he is HIV-positive. Has he just passed his disease on to an innocent stranger?
This story is OK, no big deal. The AIDS angle is sort of a let down, to be honest--the theme of the psychological risk of opening yourself up is timeless and universal, and the introduction of AIDS weakens the power of that theme by putting the story squarely in a particular time period and focusing on the particular problems of a particular community. And the mention of AIDS is the only element in the story that is that specific--Malzberg doesn't do anything beyond the mention of HIV to paint a compelling picture of a particular era or community, AIDS feels like it is just stuck in there, perhaps even gratuitously.
"The Disquieting Muse" by Kathe Koja
Somebody in Poland was really into Koja, I guess, because "The Disquieting Muse" also appeared in an issue of Fenix with a quite good robotic spider cover. The story would go on to be included in the 1998 Koja collection Extremities.For most of its length "The Disquieting Muse" is like a piece of mainstream fiction, lacking both SF elements and the kind of unconventional narrative techniques and punctuation we see in typical Malzberg-involved stories ("The Disquieting Muse" has quotation marks.) Jeremy works at a mental institution as an art therapist--he loves art, and majored in art as a student, but couldn't get a handle on the academic side and so was directed to this line of work. He has sessions with small groups of mental cases, three at a time, and Koja talks about how horribly these patients smell and their other bizarre idiosyncrasies--one woman, Ruth, refuses to wear street clothes, for instance, and is naked under her medical gown. Jeremy has turned out to be a good art therapist--the people whom he works with have "breakthroughs," and the shrinks appreciate, are grateful for, his accomplishments; Jeremy himself is more surprised at his own success than anybody.
Jeremy also has a girlfriend, Margaret, with whom he has an unfulfilling sexual relationship, he not being very good in bed; besides this shortcoming, there are hints that Jeremy is not very secure in his masculinity, has neuroses of his own, and is an incompetent artist--Jeremy is a loser.
Of today's three pieces "The Disquieting Muse" is the most sexually explicit and goes the furthest in the direction of being actually erotic with its descriptions of conventional sexual desire (e.g., Jeremy gets an erection after brushing against one of Ruth's big breasts) and more or less normal sexual activity (Margaret's cold white fingers on Jeremy's body) as well as weird fetishistic desires (does Jeremy enjoy the smells of unwashed maniacs?) and behavior (see below!)
Ruth turns out to be a skilled draughtsman and painter, and she always creates violent erotic images--a dissected stallion's penis, a man performing cunnilingus on a headless woman's torso, a little girl masturbating with a broken baseball bat--and Jeremy becomes attracted to her--he even fetishistically sleeps with her disturbing but arousing drawings. He thinks of Ruth while in bed with Margaret; he starts masturbating while looking at Ruth's art work; Ruth behaves in a way that breaks all social norms and seems calculated to seduce him. Who is in power in this twisted and strange relationship--is Jeremy abusing Ruth, a person who is seriously ill, or is Ruth manipulating him with her sexuality--or magic powers? In the final scene Jeremy either suffers a delusion or has revealed to him the astonishing supernatural reality of his life: Ruth is some kind of demon or witch who has used her magic to charm Jeremy and his life, to give him the luck that has made his career a success despite his lack of effort and ability. By ejaculating on a picture Ruth drew of herself, Jeremy unwittingly summons the filthy undressed and unwashed woman to his home where she grabs his genitals and squeezes--does she kill him or merely enslave him? In any case, his relationship with Margaret is over, the last sentence of the story pointing out that he no longer returns her calls.This is the most substantial and easiest to digest of today's stories, and the most effective as an erotic piece and as a horror piece. Thumbs up for "The Disquieting Muse."
**********These stories are all worth reading; maybe we'll hunt up some more Koja-Malzberg collabs and talk about them in future episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log. In this space here I'll provide links to earlier Kathe Koja coverage here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
At this here blog we have already addressed a few of the stories that make an appearance in Alpha 4: "Dio," AKA "The Dying Man," by Damon Knight, "Judas Danced" by Brian Aldiss, and "All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty. Today we'll assail three more of these allegedly excellent and important works, one each by Thomas Disch, Edgar Pangborn, and Terry Carr.
"Casablanca" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)
This is one of those stories I own in multiple books, it appearing in the 1971 hardcover Disch collection Fun with Your New Head--I own a 1972 paperback printing of that-- and the 1980 paperback Disch collection Fundamental Disch, a copy of which sits right there on the shelves of the MPorcius Library. It kind of looks like "Casablanca" first saw print in the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories that Scared Even Me, which seems a little odd, all the other stories in that book being reprints. In 1968 "Casablanca" would appear in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, the famously influential and famously unprofitable flagship of the New Wave--the magazine's survival was only possible through subsidies from the British taxpayer and Moorcock himself, who sank into it cash he raised through the rapid composition and sale of paperback fantasy novels.Thomas Disch is a smart guy and a good writer but also a bitter and snobbish sort of character and "Casablanca" is a derisive and even vindicative attack on the American people, in particular the Midwesterners among whom Disch was born. The title is presumably an ironic reference to the famous film, which, like The Godfather, is one of those cultural icons I have never actually watched but which I feel like I know because people never stop talking about it. Anyway, in the Bogart-Bergman movie, Americans in North Africa during a world war act admirably and achieve some kind of nobility, while in Disch's story Americans in North Africa during a world war act crassly and get totally humiliated.
An older married couple are on vacation in Morocco and Disch pokes fun at them for being unable to speak French, for trying to save money, for enjoying sugary treats, for being patriotic about the US of A and for being hostile to communism, exactly the kind of criticisms of provincial Yanks we'd expect from a New Yorker who spent a lot of time in England hobnobbing with other sophisticated smarty smarts. While they are there in North Africa, the United States is destroyed by a nuclear attack and the couple is repeatedly humiliated by the locals because their travelers' checks and American money are no longer worth much of anything. Eventually the wife disappears and the husband is robbed of his only means of getting out of Morocco; his incompetent efforts to find his wife prove fruitless and he is beaten up by a mob and robbed again following a tussle with a young thief.
(I don't know if people are still talking about "punching down," but "Casablanca" could be the subject of an entire discourse on the concept. Is smart and educated Disch punching down at the ignorant tourists, or is he a homosexual punching up at breeders? Are the Arab mobs punching down at a lone woman and a lone old man, or punching up at the white imperialist bourgeoisie?)
Obviously you are going to enjoy this story if you hate America and relish the spectacle of seeing Americans humiliated by third worlders. Silverberg in his little intro to "Casablanca" here in Alpha 4 bills the story as "comic and terrifying both at once, like most true nightmares," I guess trying to sell it not as a leftist wish fulfillment fantasy but as a horror story. In some horror stories, horrible things happen to sympathetic people and you feel bad for them; in others, horrible things happen to people who have misbehaved and you feel justice has been served. Disch in his story here seems to be conducting a sort of literary exercise in which directs the reader to feel the United States deserves to be annihilated and its expatriates laid low for their sins but leaves enough room for readers who don't share his snobbish anti-American opinions to be tricked into sympathizing with the tourists. I can't say I am on the same page as Disch is here, but the story is thought-provoking and cleverly put together so I guess I have to admit it is good.
(A double-plus-super-anti-subversive subversive hot take on "Casablanca" might be that Disch is laying a trap for his fellow alienated sophisticates, seeing if he can get them to side with mass-murdering communists and Arab thieves against innocuous and ineffectual ordinary Americans.)
"Angel's Egg" by Edgar Pangborn (1951)
Here we have an at times tedious story that feels long and reminds me of the work of Theodore Sturgeon: the themes of love and of collective consciousness; the alien utopia that serves as a foil for our crummy human society; the argument that the cognitive elite should mold society for its own good regardless of the will of the plebians."Angel's Egg" is almost 40 pages long here in Alpha 4 and comes to us as a series of documents in a file in the near future of a one-world government. The wife of Cleveland McCarran, the "martyred first president" of that world government, donated these documents to some institution in 1994, and one component of the file is a letter sent to McCarran in 1951 when he was working at the FBI by a state police captain regarding an investigation of a Dr. David Bannerman, a biologist and school teacher. ("Angel's Egg" is one of those stories that romanticizes teachers.) The lion's share of the file consists of annotated excerpts from Bannerman's journal; these were attached to the 1951 letter and describe in sleep-inducing detail Bannerman's relationship with an alien who looks like a six-inch-tall woman covered in down and is equipped with dragonfly wings; Bannerman calls this doll-sized creature an "angel."
The angels hail from a planet ten light years away and their society is wise because it is 70 million years old. In this oh-so-wise civilization the most honored of all professions is teacher (of course!) and these long-lived aliens spend many years being educated. When the aliens sent an expedition to Earth it was only natural that one of their number hook up with a kindly Terran schoolteacher--Bannerman--whose goodness was confirmed by reading his brain--like so many aliens in SF stories of all types, from space opera to this kind of sappy utopianism, the angels are telepathic.
Besides descriptions of how the little angel makes a little bed in a shoe box and having her around makes him the happiest man in the world, Bannerman fills his journal with summaries of his telepathic conversations with the alien, much of them about how her people's utopian society operates. They no longer experience fear. They no longer experience hate. They have beautiful and intelligent cats who have outgrown the desire to torture their prey. They have the capability to travel to every planet in the galaxy but are humble and have thus far kept themselves aloof and a secret from other life forms.
The angel aliens have finally decided to help other intelligent species, and we humans are to be the beneficiaries of their wisdom--it is implied they will secretly program the minds of influential people so they will behave along the lines the angels think best. (There is a scene in which Bannerman plays chess and the angel programs his mind to play a better game and Bannerman thinks he is coming up with these genius moves himself.) But to provide us Earthers this help they must know as much about us as possible. They can erase your brain and absorb the info themselves, but this process, which takes some considerable time, ends in death of the mind donor. Bannerman, reflecting that the human race of 1951 appears to be on the brink of destroying the world, agrees to donate his mind to the angels for the good of his people. Bannerman starts reliving his life, remembering every moment in detail, and then forgetting it; the process takes like a month, and then he dies.
The file contains, and our story concludes with, a brief statement from the self-sacrificing Bannerman's chess partner, a doctor, that provides clues that make it clear that Bannerman's journal tells the absolute truth, and that Bannerman's dead body shows no signs of distress, only contentment--it is the most well-ordered dead body the doc has ever seen. ("Angel's Egg" is a story bubbling over with superlatives--doc also says Bannerman was the most stable human being he ever met.) It is not quite as clear, but I guess we are supposed to think that McCarann's presidency and the world government are signs the angels are manipulating us to have a better society. "Angel's Egg" is one of those SF stories like Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing and the overrated film The Day the Earth Stood Still that expects us to welcome alien imperialism.
(I often talk about how genre fiction is wish fulfillment fantasy, and maybe we should also consider this story as the wish fulfillment fantasy of a childless man who likes the idea of having a smart beautiful daughter. Did Pangborn have children? A skim of Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction hasn't yielded any info on his family life.)
I found the first half or two-thirds of "Angel's Egg" pretty boring and annoying but by the final third or so, after the sappy preliminaries are done with and the chess partner is introduced into the story, I guess I fell into its groove and it got a little more interesting. I guess we'll call it acceptable.
"Angel's Egg" debuted in Galaxy and appears to be Pangborn's first published SF tale. Many of the prominent SF editors--Damon Knight, Groff Conklin, Martin H. Greenberg, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, and Edmund Crispin--have seen fit to serve up this slab of sentimentality to their readers.
It is like three centuries in the future. In the period between the Nixon Administration and the time in which this story is set the human race developed human-like robots, built abstract sculptures the size of mountains, polluted the air severely, and then retreated into domed cities to escape the pollution that corroded the mountain sculptures and made the air almost unbreathable. This story relates the search conducted by our narrator, a human-like robot, of the tallest building in a domed city for the last surviving human being! Our narrator makes clear he admires humans because they are always striving to climb higher, both literally and metaphorically. When he finds the last human being the man turns out to be a drunk who hates robots--when he isn't vomiting he is calling the robots mere machines no better than staplers or typewriters. The faith of our narrator is not shaken--in fact, after the medical robots take off the last living human our narrator decides to emulate the human race, to embody our ambition, by figuring out how to climb one of the mountain sculptures. His computer brain doesn't have enough data to mathematically calculate the probability of success in scaling the sculpture without falling, and this is one way in which he is able to emulate his creators, going on a dangerous adventure without any certainty of how it will turn out!
Of today's three stories this is the most conventional and comfortable, the easiest to read and the one with the least irritating (to me) message or theme. I like it."In His Image" was the cover story of an issue of Amazing published in the year of my birth; the story is titled "In Man's Image" on the magazine's interior pages. "In His Image" hasn't been reprinted nearly as often as "Casablanca" and "Angel's Egg," but, speak of the devil, it did appear in the third volume in the Harlan Ellison Discovery Series, the Carr collection The Light at the End of the Universe. As I was copyediting this blog post I learned that the internet archive, world's greatest website, was back in action, and I was able to read Carr's intro to "In His Image" in The Light at the End of the Universe; Carr relates how Amazing editor Ted White acquired the Mike Hinge painting and asked Carr to write a story based around it and the result is this story
**********
If you were inclined to think SF fans were misanthropic and pessimistic self-important snobs who hold normies in contempt and expect them to destroy themselves and maybe the world unless some elite group were to seize the reins from them, these stories would not disabuse you of this notion. I'm not on board with a lot of what these stories have to say, but none of them are actually bad, though at times Pangborn's "Angel's Egg" comes close. I am, however, skeptical that "In His Image," while a good story worthy of inclusion in an anthology, is "important."
Stay tuned for more short stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log.