(I forgot to mention last time that Universe 5 also includes a Kris Neville story we read some years ago, "Survival Problems.")
"M is for the Many" by J. J. Russ
As Carr tells us in his little intro to this piece, J. J. Russ is not Joanna Russ but Jon Russ, California psychiatrist. We read Russ's "The Interview" back in 2014, and his "Aurelia" in 2015, and I found both to be acceptable. Gazing at Russ the shrink's page at isfdb, we see he has six credits and that it looks like "M is for the Many" has never been reprinted. "M is for the Many" takes place in one of those overcrowded socialistic futures where the government assigns you living space and decides who can and can't reproduce. Every couple can have only two kids, and the government seizes your kid on his or her fifth birthday. People stay in their apartments all day; kids watch TV, but if you are five or older you are supplied a big "bag" that hangs from the ceiling like a hammock--you zip yourself in, the bag fills with goop, wires connect to your noggin, and you have wonderful dreams all day. If you ever tire of the bag, maybe want some social interaction, you can make friends via what we might call the internet in holographic chat rooms.
Carr in his little intro tells us that "The Night Wind" is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as Pangborn's famous Davy, which I read ten years ago and don't really remember much of.
This is a pretty good military SF story with lots of action scenes and talk of weapons and equipment. The plot and character interactions and the twist ending are not bad. Mild recommendation for "But as a Soldier, For His Country."
Some people, it appears, don't take to the bag--at all. Nyta is one of these--she has nightmares in the bag, so can't stay in it all day like her husband. What Nyta enjoys is being pregnant and raising her children. Most of the text of "M is for Many" is about how she tries to deal with the fact that her child, Lery, whom she dotes on, is approaching his fifth birthday and will soon be taken out the door to the apartment--the door hasn't opened since Nyta's first child was taken away years and years ago. Nyta keeps thinking back on that first child. Nyta calls up the government robot on the video phone to beg it to allow her to keep Lery or to have another child after Lery is dragged off. Nyta tries to get Lery to pay attention to her, to say sweet things to her, like he did when he was two and three, but he just wants to watch TV and talk about how much he is looking forward to leaving mom and getting his own dream bag. Nyta buys pet animals but they don't fulfill her needs. (The interactions between women desperately seeking an outlet for their maternal feelings and the various weird animals they buy are blackly comic.) Nyta tries to use the bag to live out her fantasies of having another baby, but she just has nightmares.
The chilling twist ending. You are permitted up to two children, and if your child dies before its fifth birthday, it doesn't count. It is also permissible to throw your child into the disposal chute--this is termed abortion. Nyta throws Lery down the chute and her husband programs his bag to start collecting his ejaculate during his sex dreams so it Nyta can be impregnated yet again--Lery is her third abortion.
This is a good story that really makes you feel for Nyta and then shocks you with her murderous behavior, though that behavior is foreshadowed and, on reflection, sympathy perhaps returns, as Nyta's homicidal tendencies are perhaps entirely the result of tyrannical government policy (which the government says is necessary because of overpopulation.) Russ's descriptions of this future world are economical and effective. The treatment of infanticide and abortion, of what amount to virtual reality entertainment and internet relationships, of pets as surrogate children, of men's preference for imaginary women over real women, of women's desires to be mothers, and of violence committed by women, make "M is for the Many" very thought-provoking for a 21st-century audience. Thumbs up!
"The Night Wind" by Edgar Pangborn
"The Night Wind" is a somewhat ponderous and pretentious story that tells you religion is a scam and celebrates teenage homosexual sex. The fifteen-year-old narrator is caught having sex with a younger boy and it looks like he might be stoned to death by the religious villagers--homosexuality is a sin and gays are treated similarly to mutants in this post-apocalyptic world--so he runs away. He comes upon a wolf, some kind of monster mutant wolf, I suppose, eating a dead man. The narrator recognizes the victim, a sort of craftsman who lived with his invalided female lover, a fallen aristocratic lady, at a remote homestead, and goes to the homestead to give the woman the bad news. The woman endorses the narrator's sex life and gives him a pile of dough she has stashed, and then dies of a broken heart. This little memoir, which is full of nature imagery (leaves blowing in the wind, domesticated animals having sex, hawks circling high above, lots of talk about the sound of the wind) and what I guess we can call countercultural anything-goes and if-it-feels-good-do-it wisdom (e.g., "any manner of love is good if there's kindness in it" and "I've just lain here wondering what goodness is, and if anybody knows") was written by our protagonist as he sat in the neat and tidy house of the dead couple. Now he will head to the big city to look for one of his earlier gay lovers, an older boy whose family moved out of the village a while ago.
Maybe a story denouncing religion and celebrating teenagers having gay sex seemed shocking in 1974, but in today's world the story is pretty ho hum--Christianity has been in terminal decline my entire life and everywhere I go there are flags celebrating homosexuality; affirming the dignity and beauty of gay sex is one of the rituals you have to perform to maintain a respectable position in mainstream life. Maybe the way "The Night Wind" suggests homosexuality and aristocracy go hand in hand and are inevitably set against religion and the close-mindedness of village life is sort of interesting? We'll call "The Night Wind" barely acceptable--it is a competent wish-fulfillment fantasy for the LGBetc community. Genre fiction is full of wish-fulfillment fantasies, and there is no reason gay people shouldn't get their share.
Terry Carr thought "The Night Wind" one of the best stories to appear in the first dozen or so Universe anthologies and reprinted it in the 1984 volume The Best from Universe. You can also find it in a few Pangborn collections and the anthology Kindred Spirits.
"But as a Soldier, For His Country" by Stephen Goldin
Our protagonist and a friend, veteran soldiers, have no steady girlfriends or families or anything, and so volunteer for a new high tech military program. The government freezes you and thaws you out in the future when they need experienced soldiers. Our guys go through this a few times, fighting in wars in various hot spots. Each time they are thawed, technology has advanced. Pretty soon the government doesn't freeze and thaw you--they just record your mind and, when they need you, they build a new body to download your mind into. Human civilization extends to the Moon and then to other planets and stars, and war goes with it, so our protagonists--or new iterations of their consciousnesses, at least--get to fight against and alongside aliens all over the galaxy. The twists in the story involve the fact that our guy ends up fighting copies of his friend and even of himself. I guess this symbolizes the self-destructive nature of war.
Entertaining. "But as a Soldier, For His Country" has reappeared in the Stephen Goldin collection The Last Ghost and Other Stories and in anthologies of military SF.
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With two good stories and one acceptable one, this batch of tales from Universe 5 is far better than the first batch we sampled. Maybe we'll read more from this assembly of alleged dazzlers, but first we'll be returning to the 1950s, so darn your bobby socks and get your grey flannel suit pressed.
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