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.

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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.