Alpha 4: T Disch, E Pangborn, and T Carr

In Omaha in 2015 I purchased, along with a stack of other paperbacks, Alpha 4, a 1973 anthology of "superb" stories that are "important to the genre."  The potential problem with reprinting old stories widely considered "excellent" and "important" is that serious SF fans will have already read them in other venues, so the back cover of Alpha 4 tries to appeal to new fans of SF, people who may be familiar with the Big Three of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and with mainstream breakout success Ray Bradbury, but not yet with people like Thomas M. Disch, Damon Knight, Philip Jose Farmer and Brian W. Aldiss.  There were nine Alpha volumes in total, so maybe the pitch worked.

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.

"In His Image" by Terry Carr (1971)

Here is another of those stories in which robots who admire humans inherit the Earth and we readers are offered reason to believe humans are not in fact admirable.  There are a lot of these stories out there; I associate this theme with Clifford Simak, but we recently read just such a story by beloved bad boy Harlan Ellison.  Fortunately, Terry Carr here in "In His Image" takes a nuanced view on the matter of whether human beings are worthy of admiration.

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

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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.