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!
**********
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.
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