Kathe Koja and Barry N Malzberg, 1995: "The Unchained," "Buyer's Remorse" and "Three Portraits from Heisenberg"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are tracking down collaborations between Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg on the internet archive.  Today we've got three stories published in 1995, the year of the foundation of the WTO, the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and many exciting developments in the campaign to uncover and remove weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  I don't think any of these stories have been reprinted after their initial appearances (I'm not counting the 1999 paperback printing of the anthology our second story appears in.) 

"The Unchained" 

"The Unchained" appears in Tombs, an odd sort of volume with annoying typography and a horrendous pun introduction by Forrest J. Ackermann that you have to see to believe.  

Here we have a somewhat opaque story that I believe seeks to validate both Christianity and homosexual relationships and in fact to reconcile these two things.  We switch between two narratives.  In the late 20th century we’ve got the last hours of life of a man who abandoned his wife and kids to take up with another man—he is in the hospital, dying of AIDS, tended to by a cigarette-smoking nurse and by his gay lover.  We are led to believe the dying man’s family doesn’t approve of the boyfriend, but the nurse insists the lover be considered his real family.  The other narrative is conveyed to us in the voice of Jesus Christ himself and tells the story of the raising of Lazarus from the dead from the point of view of the son of God.  The penultimate line of "The Unchained" seems to echo T. S. Eliot’s Prufrock and the final line, I think, endorses the Christian belief in eternal life, or at least the idea that death is a liberation.

Much of what I say above is conjecture; Koja and Malzberg don’t actually use words like “gay” or “AIDS” or "Jesus;” I am just interpreting the clues.  The point of the story, I guess, is to, by equating Lazarus and the AIDS patient, argue that God thinks homosexual love is as legitimate as heterosexual love and people who die of AIDS are just as likely to get into heaven as anybody else.  SF writers generally think religion is a load of bunk, and focus their ire on Christianity in particular, but this story seems to take Christianity seriously, to, for the most part, refrain from showing contempt for believers.

(There is a passage that seems to ridicule the idea of people abstaining from sex, but the lover in the story seems to somehow identify with those who abstain because he, unlike so many other gay men, hasn't contracted AIDS.  He refers to a "Mr. Play-It-Safe" and to a "sole survivor," and it is not clear whether he is applying these appellations to himself or to a theoretical advocate for abstinence.  Is there any chance this guy, though in a gay relationship, has been avoiding actual penetrative sex and thus preserved his health?  Is the fact that he doesn't normally smoke cigarettes and only does so after his lover dies and the nurse forces a pack of Kools on him a clue that he is health conscious and, just as he has been exercising caution to avoid lung cancer, has been cautious about avoiding AIDS?)   

Another remarkable thing about "The Unchained" is its pervasive presentations of disgusting images and of descriptions of horrible smells.  Again and again in the 20th-century scenes we are told about cigarette butts and other sickening trash, like used condoms, left on the ground, and in the scenes in ancient Judea we hear about how bad the dead Lazarus smells.  I guess the idea is that God created and loves all the universe, not just the healthy and beautiful parts, but the ugly and spoiled parts as well.

What of the title?  Does it refer to the chains of death being loosed from Lazarus, and all Christians?  The sloughing off of a diseased body by those who die in old age?  The chains of law and custom that render homosexuals second-class citizens but which in the 1990s were in the process of being removed?  "The Unchained" leaves us with a lot to think about--it feels like every line strikes a chord or gives us something to chew over--this is the kind of economy I admire in fiction and writing in general.  

A challenging story that pushes the mainstream liberal line on gay marriage but not in a boring tiresome way and offers a lot more as well.  I can't tell you it is fun, but I can give it a thumbs up for being well-written, provocative and engaging.  People interested in thoughtful depictions in SF of Christ and Christianity, and of 1990s depictions of AIDS and other issues of importance to the LGBetc community, should check out "The Unchained."  

"Buyer's Remorse" 

How to Save the World is an anthology of stories in which SF writers offer solutions to social problems, and it has one of those hilariously grandiose and self-important introductions in which the editor--for this book Charles Sheffield--expresses the hope this book will offend people and maybe even be banned--oh, please don't throw me in that briar patch!

There are apparently stories in this thing that offer solutions to  racism and pollution and overpopulation and lots of other real or purported problems facing humanity in 1995, but Koja and Malzberg's story goes the whole hog and suggests, or at least examines the possibility of, abandoning this world entirely--physically, spiritually, psychologically.

"Buyer's Remorse" is a series of letters, or I guess electronic messages, received by what amounts to an advice columnist of the 23rd century, and his or her replies.  One correspondent is spending all of his or her time in virtual reality, even eating and having sex in a virtual world, and his or her friends are trying to get the writer to spend more time in the real world.  Another person talks about how there is no longer any such thing as perversity, there no longer being any moral judgements.  The message of a third correspondent makes clear that people in this future all live in domed or subterranean cities with more or less self-sufficient and carefully controlled environments and ecologies isolated from the outside world; this seeker after advice talks about how somebody has contaminated his or her own dome by cultivating eggs.  A fourth complains of a mate's overuse of aphrodisiacs and other drugs and searches for other partners--it becomes clear that use of drugs is the norm in the 23rd century to suppress some feelings and summon others.  

"Buyer's Remorse" is long and slow and accomplished very little.  The advice seekers are all long-winded and pen very flowery letters, but none of them offer compelling images or betray engaging personalities.  "Buyer's Remorse" doesn't have a conventional plot, and much of its text--the replies of the "Courtesy & Advisement Person" in particular, is difficult-to-decipher and eye-glazingly boring philosophical discussion.  I guess the plot and character elements of "Buyer's Remorse" consist of the reader's journey as he uncovers the personality of the C&AP and the nature of this future dystopia, but this material is not satisfying.  "The Unchained" was not an easy read but it was sprinkled with passages which trigger emotion in the reader and argue some kind of point, and trying to figure out the more difficult passages of "The Unchained" yielded something of interest--what was up with the main characters and what were Koja and Malzberg trying to say about religion and the afterlife?  The challenge of "Buyer's Remorse" yields SF banalities--man ruined the environment so everybody lives in hives and uses drugs and video games to make life tolerable.  Koja and Malzberg throw in oblique references to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and name check Immanuel Kant and Thomas Erasmus--and even one of Malzberg's own characters, Harry the Flat from Underlay, one of Malzberg's best books--but these oases of interest in the dull desert don't do much to bring the story to life.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Three Portraits from Heisenberg" 

I haven't spent much time with Omni, the covers of which always gave the magazine the air of something sensationalist and exploitative, what with all the advertised stories about UFOs and ESP, expanding your consciousness, and sex.  The issue that includes the sole printing of "Three Portraits from Heisenberg" offers articles on Roswell, dinosaurs, and the afterlife, as well as an ad for a CD-ROM of forgotten science fiction novels introduced by Leonard Nimoy.  (Did Nimoy really take time off from counting his quatloos and photographing nude women to read Stanton Coblentz's The Day the World Stopped, Manly Banister's The Conquest of Earth and George Henry Smith's Druid's World?  Doesn't seem logical.) 

The Fall 1995 issue of Omni is pretty slick, with lots of bland but high quality illustrations and a story by Ray Bradbury that I might read some day--the magazine had the ability to get contributors who were talented and/or had big names.  The cover of this issue, I believe one of the very last, illustrates my feelings about Omni--the painting of a naked child is well crafted, but putting a naked child on the cover of a magazine in 1995 feels a little creepy, and the all caps text "WE'RE BACK!" and "BIGGER, BETTER, BOLDER" feels desperate and low class.

"Three Portraits from Heisenberg" has what I am taking to be its T. S. Eliot reference (to Gerontion this time) at its beginning instead of at its end, though of course the big allusion in this story is to Heisenberg and his principle that you can't really know the location and velocity of a particle at the same time, or something like that.  The protagonist of this story is Karen the plasma physicist.  She recently broke up with her boyfriend George, who worked in the same research facility.  It seems they had a lot of sex but it also seems the sex was unsatisfying for her, and that George cheated on her, though it is not 100% clear.  Anyway, Karen keeps seeing multiple reflections of herself in windows at the lab; these sometimes speak to her.  I think these represent Karens who might have been had she made different choices in her life.  There is a lot of confusing blah blah about whether she is observing these other Karens or they are observing her.  By the end of the story Karen is insane, calling up George to babble about being watched and to laugh and laugh and laugh.

This story is even worse than "Buyer's Remorse," is even more pointless as a whole and even less easy to understand on a sentence by sentence basis.  The story is quite brief, but the sentences and paragraphs are long and are full of metaphors that don't convey anything of value:

As you humped so frantic and juiceless in the wretched bed, so the stars and planets tumble haplessly toward final implosion.

Like the galaxies before time, like the blind, bare animals of her breasts sinking underneath his grunts.

I'm not an observer, the face said, you're the observer.  I'm the particle in remission at the heart of the neutron star whose reaction is your anti-reaction.

A character confronted by the choices she has made, by the different careers and relationships she might have had, is a good idea for a literary story, but marrying it to Heisenberg and all these references to planets, stars and galaxies doesn't supplement or enhance the presentation of the topic, doesn't make it more entertaining or more moving--it makes it more boring and more confusing.  It feels like Koja and Malzberg just cooked this up to sell to Omni, a magazine they knew would pay for a story that integrated science jargon, space and sex, no matter how superficially or clumsily.

Bad!

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It is no surprise that these stories have not been reprinted, as all three of them are "challenging" in that they are hard to read.  But one of them, "The Unchained," is also "challenging" in that it addresses issues about which people have strong opinions and tries to get an emotional rise out of you by pushing your buttons about homosexuality and Christianity and by describing stuff that is upsetting (your loved one is dying!) and disgusting (it smells and there are cigarette butts everywhere!)  In "Buyer's Remorse" and "Three Portraits from Heisenberg" we have to hack our way through jungle-like sentences and paragraphs and all we get when we reach the clearing are banal plots and ideas--if we wreck the world we'll have to live underground and spend our time getting high and having cybersex and sometimes we regret the life decisions we have made.  Living in a wrecked world and regretting your career and relationship decisions are good foundations for stories, but to build entertaining or thought-provoking stories upon these foundations the author has to craft beautiful sentences or compelling characters or suspenseful drama or something like that, and what Koja and Malzberg offer in "BR" and "3PH" is long-winded and pretentious obfuscation that ultimately signifies little.  Disappointing.

Galaxy, Oct 1961: Bloch, Pohl, Westlake

We've read three stories from the October 1961 issue of H. L. Gold's Galaxy, Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Called Shayol" (I highly recommended it after reading it ten years ago), Fritz Leiber's "The Beat Cluster" (I said I liked it the same day I opined on "A Planet Called Shayol") and Frank Herbert's "Mating Call" (I judged it acceptable just a few days ago.)  Today let's read three more stories from the issue, those by Robert "Psycho" Bloch, Frederik "Gateway" Pohl, and famous mystery writer Donald E. Westlake.

(I'll be reading all these stories in a scan of the original magazine available at the internet archive, where I spend a lot of my time.)

"Crime Machine" by Robert Bloch 

When I was a kid the TV was on every waking hour, and I absolutely loved it.  Gilligan and the Skipper, Tom and Jerry, Fred and Barney, Bugs and Daffy, Herman and Grandpa, Lucy and Ricky, Oscar and Felix, the list of shows and characters that mesmerized me is endless.  It wasn't just the sitcoms, either; I liked the game shows and any show I thought might include some gunfire.  When I got older and had a TV in my own room, I watched Johnny Carson and David Letterman religiously, and of course there were shows I would tune in just because I thought one of the actresses on the program was attractive.

Like everybody I was a fan of The Brady Bunch, and one of the more powerful shows that I saw as a kid, one of the few that made me think a little instead of just laugh, was an episode of the BB in which one of the male brats became enamored with Jesse James, ludicrously thinking this dangerous outlaw was a hero until he learned different via a dream.  I bring this up because the plot of "Crime Machine" is very much along the same lines as that 1970s sitcom episode, and because Bloch in this story satirizes TV addiction.  (If you have been reading my blog posts about Bloch over the years you know there is a strong vein of social satire in his work, and that Bloch is one of those guys who got rich crafting printed and cinematic entertainment the attraction of which is its depiction of sex and violence but who also thinks sex and violence in the media is bad for society.  I can't really criticize his hypocrisy in good conscience because I'm the type of guy who calls himself a right-wing libertarian and bitches about the government every day but who also has collected many paychecks while working in government offices or for clients who are in government or who have lots of government contracts.)

Thirteen-year-old Stephen's father and uncle are great inventors in the near future.  Stephen watches lots of television shows (they call them "viddies") about gangsters and other dangerous criminals and these shows have given him the idea that the mobsters are the heroes and the police are the villains.  Then one day he stumbles upon one of his genius uncle's discarded inventions, the "subjectivity reactor."  If you stand inside this thing and think hard about something, it will materialize.  Apparently the machine has been put into deep storage because Stephen's aunt got angry when Uncle kept materializing sexalicious babes.  Stephen is always thinking about organized crime, so an automatic pistol materializes.

We realize that Bloch isn't even trying to make his wacky joke story credible when he tells us that the subjectivity reactor can act as a time machine if you think hard about some event in the past.  So Stephen ends up at the site of the Valentine's Day Massacre and witnesses the carnage.  This cures Stephen of his adoration of criminals.  The men who perpetrated the mass murder spot Stephen and when they realize Stephen is in possession of a time machine they try to hijack it.  Luckily Stephen has that pistol--he gets the jump on the killers, shooting them down and getting back to his native time and place safely.

The surprise at the ending of "Crime Machine" is that Stephen's dad had a similar adventure as a youth, going back in time to see firsthand some kind of gunfight in which Wyatt Earp was involved.  (I'd assume a kid would go back to witness the 1881 gunfight at the O.K. Corral, but Bloch references the year 1870--maybe this is some kind of typo?)

I feel like objectively this story is bad, but it is bad in a risible way, and laughing at it made it entertaining.  Bloch in "Crime Machine" also takes a little time out to satirize the gullibility and profligacy of women, who will buy any sort of goop or device said to improve their looks or health, even though such products are always a scam, which I appreciate.  And I have read so much Bloch at  this point that seeing him do his typical thing, no matter how goofy, is like seeing an old friend.  (I have the same attitude about A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg.)  So I guess I'm calling "Crime Machine" acceptable.  

"Crime Machine" materialized in 1982 in the Asimov, Greenberg and Waugh anthology Tomorrow's TV, in 1975 in the Bloch collection Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow, and in 1964 in The Seventh Galaxy Reader, edited by Fred Pohl.

"The Abominable Earthman" by Frederik Pohl

Speak of the devil, here's the Managing Editor of this issue of Galaxy and veteran of the Young Communist League himself with a story bearing a title that is making me expect we've got a tale on our hands about the evil imperialism of the white man or the fact that compared to the goody goody space aliens the human race is backward and savage.  Well, let's try to read it before we judge it.

"The Abominable Earthman" is a longish story; with its many twists and turns and multiple characters each following his own trajectory it has something of the structure of a novel.  Pohl's story comes to us as a memoir of a soldier of the United States Army who played a prominent role in the war against the invading insectoids from Sirius; these aliens have forcefields and biological advantages that render them resistant to most Earth weapons.  Though written in the first person, there are many scenes which the narrator cannot have witnessed; he must be basing his accounts on the testimony of others.

The narrator himself is a dutiful fighting man, but equally important to the narrative is a dimwit, shirker, thief and traitor, Pinky Postal.  The narrator encounters PP again and again through his service life.  Postal is largely a comic relief character, getting into all sorts of trouble as he goes AWOL and steals government supplies to sell on the black market and that sort of thing.  The aliens place their forcefield domes over important pieces of real estate all over the northern hemisphere and Australia (they don't seem to think Africa or Latin America worth conquering) and when it becomes clear the E.T.s are breeding humans in order to augment their supplies of slaves, Postal deserts to the enemy, stupidly thinking he'll be employed by the bugmen as a stud and have the job of banging chicks by the score.  The joke is that the aliens just milk him and artificially inseminate the hundreds of human women they have captured.

Our narrator participates in various commando operations during the course of the story.  At one point he is captured and renews his acquaintance with Postal while in captivity (our narrator eventually manages to escape.)  The narrator is on the scene when the American forces are lucky enough to seize their first dead alien, and when they first capture a living Sirian bugman.  The captured alien is in fact a baby, and the narrator raises it to young adulthood, so it identifies with the natives of Earth, not its own race--this alien ally is crucial to winning the war.  Also essential to victory is the despicable Pinky Postal--this is the central joke of "The Abominable Earthman."  Near the end of the story, Postal and we readers discover that the insect people from Sirius are affected by carbon dioxide the way humans are affected by alcohol--breathing CO² inebriates them and they quickly become addicted to the experience.  The captive Postal, who is being held in loose confinement right in the alien headquarters,  becomes what amounts to a drug dealer among the insectoids--in exchange for breathing on them, Sirians provide him the best food, tobacco, etc.  The entire leadership of the alien invasion force is drunk when the narrator and his comrades launch an attack on the Sirian HQ--the aliens are defeated and Earth saved.  

I'll call "The Abominable Earthman" acceptable--it feels like a competent filler piece.  The story's pervasively jokey tone undermines any thrills or chills the reader might experience during the action scenes and horror scenes and short circuits any dread the plot, which after all concerns alien slavers gradually taking over the civilized world and turning our friends and neighbors into breeding machines, might inspire.  But the story isn't boring or annoying.

The title of Pohl's story is misleading.  The plot of "The Abominable Earthman" doesn't seem to rely on the stereotype of "the ugly American" or be a SF riff on the novel of that name, unless leftist Pohl means his drunken alien invaders to be a metaphor for United States intervention in South East Asia in response to communist uprisings and invasions; maybe he does?  Neither do any of the characters bear resemblance to a yeti, a monster who leads a secretive existence in the hinterlands.

It feels minor to me, but "The Abominable Earthman" is the title story of a Pohl collection first printed in 1963 with a Richard Powers cover and then reprinted in 1969 with one of those fun Robert Foster covers that looks like a collage of images of nudes and gears and other mechanical paraphernalia (cf. Sexmax, New Writings in SF 4, The Burning and Over the Edge.)  In 2015 the saga of Pinky Postal was included in what looks like an anthology of humorous SF war stories edited by Hank Davis.       

"The Spy in the Elevator" by Donald E. Westlake

When I was living in New York, long before the birth of this blog during my long exile in the Middle West, I read Donald E. Westlake's pro-government SF novel Anarchaos and his crime novel Somebody Owes Me Money and I wasn't crazy enough about either of them to pursue a further relationship with the three-time Edgar-award-winner.  But 15 years have passed and today we give the famous Mr. Westlake another shot.

It turns out that all three of today's stories are meant to be funny.  If memory serves, two of the three stories we read last time were obviously meant to be funny, and the third was probably supposed to be funny.  It would be great to read some earnest sincere stories next time.  Maybe I need to get back to Weird Tales.

"The Spy in the Elevator" depicts a future the nature of which stems from SF commonplaces overpopulation and atomic war.  In the late 20th century, due to population pressure, everybody started living in 200-story-high skyscrapers.  These skyscrapers became increasingly self-sufficient, with their own shops and factories within their own walls.  They even developed forcefields which kept out dangerous radiation, which was good because an atomic war broke out.  With everybody too scared to venture outside into the radioactive landscape, each skyscraper became an independent polity, totally self-sufficient and suspicious of every other skyscraper.  Raw materials are collected by robots who venture out into the countryside.  Of course the government strictly controls who can bear children and carefully rations food and other goods.

Our hero wants to marry a young woman who works in the department that manages those robots that venture out to collect raw materials.  This chick is obsessively punctual--like the robots--and expects others to be equally punctilious.  So when our guy makes a date with her to ask her to marry him (a two-year hitch, this being one of the many SF societies in which temporary marriages are the norm) and the elevator doesn't answer the call button he knows he's in trouble because he is bound to be late.

Talking to a transit staff member (a hot girl) on the videophone, he learns than a spy from another skyscraper is trapped in the elevator.  So he decides to take the stairs.  But in the stairwell he encounters the spy as he emerges through a maintenance door.  The spy takes him captive and tries to explain to him that he is not actually a spy.  In truth, he is an atomic engineer who figured out that the radiation outside has subsided to a safe level--people can leave the skyscrapers and live the ordinary lives of their ancestors!  Of course the government of his skyscraper didn't want to hear this--if people left the skyscraper the rulers would lose their power.  So he was exiled.  The engineer has lived outside for months, and has sneaked into this skyscraper in hopes of covertly spreading the good news and spurring people to leave the skyscrapers and put behind them this static civilization and build an adventurous civilization that will conquer the solar system and then the stars.

Our guy doesn't believe any of this.  He figures the intruder really is a spy and is also insane.  He gets the jump on the engineer, and being taller, and a professional gymnast trained in judo and karate besides, kills the intruder with his bare hands.  Our protagonist is hailed as a hero, and when the punctual girl in the robot dept. refuses his offer of marriage the sexy woman from the transit dept. is very willing to step into her shoes.

I thought maybe we were going to get a paradigm shift/sense of wonder ending with the protagonist joining the engineer outside and maybe convincing a woman to come along, but I guess the blundering cynical ending is what makes sense for a joke story.  Either way, this story isn't bad; at the very least it is less absurd than Bloch's and more economical than Pohl's.  I can give "The Spy in the Elevator" a mild recommendation.

Besides foreign editions of Galaxy and a German anthology, you can find "The Spy in the Elevator" in the 1989 Westlake collection Tomorrow's Crimes--dig that embarrassing cover.

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I could complain that I encounter too many joke stories, but I kind of did that already, so in the spirit of the season let's be thankful that I didn't actually have a bad experience reading any of these stories.