F&SF, Oct '67: R McKenna, A Davidson and S R Delany

We recently read R. A. Lafferty's "Camels and Dromedaries, Clem," which debuted in a 1967 issue of F&SF also containing stories by Fritz Leiber, Avram Davidson, J. G. Ballard, and Samuel R. Delany.  This is an issue full of big names, so let's return to it.  We've actually already read the Leiber, "The Inner Circles," under the title "The Winter Flies."  The Ballard contribution is one of the Vermillion Sands stories, and I'm thinking if and when I read them I'll read them in batches, devoting an entire post to Ballard.  (Note that we did read the first Vermillion Sands story, "Prima Belladonna," two years ago.)  So, to round out this blog post, let's read the included story by Richard McKenna, who is most famous for writing the novel The Sand Pebbles.  

"Home the Hard Way" by Richard McKenna    

This is a decent adventure story; you might say it has hard-boiled elements.  It seems to draw on McKenna's experience in the U. S. Navy.

Big strong balding Webb is a level 3 biotech in the space navy of an interstellar human civilization, a somewhat brutish working-class guy who has worked his way up in rank with hard work and native intelligence.  His assistant is a pretty brunette, Chalmers, as good a tech as he--he trained her.  They make a great team in the biotech lab of the naval vessel on which they serve, the Carlyle.  The main job of biotechs is operating, maintaining, and repairing equipment that can turn almost any kind of matter into food.

The Carlyle has been spending a long period of time on a remote colony on Planet Conover, to which they were drawn by a distress call.  This is the most beautiful world our heroes have ever seen, but I guess it is hard to find food there.  The captain of the Carlyle thinks the Conover colony is doomed--it is far off the space lanes, so starting profitable trade will be hard and if there is another problem there may not be a naval vessel close enough to help.  And the captain assumes help will be required--the colony's leaders are trying to build an aristocratic state, and selected most of the colonists for low intelligence, which this means that nobody on the colony is smart enough to operate the biotech machines that make food, and, the captain predicts, there will be a violent revolution soon enough, the peasants rising up against the aristocracy.

The noble families in charge of the colony try to convince Webb and Chalmers to desert the Carlyle and join the Conover aristocracy.  Webb is convinced because a sexalicious blonde promises to marry him, but Chalmers is more duty-minded, and she is in love with Webb, making her immune to the Conover ploy of setting her up with some guy.

Chalmers reports the whole sordid business to the captain and Webb's effort to desert is a failure.  As the Carlyle continues its patrol around this section of the galaxy, Webb tries repeatedly to desert so he can get to Conover and that blonde.  He has a series of adventures, getting caught and stripped of his rank and so forth.  McKenna has a running joke about Webb's bald spot--whores caress it, the police hit him on it with truncheons when he fights them, etc.  There's also a whole thing about how Webb, once an officer, now demoted to the level of a rating or enlisted man or something, is miserable because he can't get comfortable around anybody any more, no longer fitting in among any class of people on the ship.    

The crisis of the story comes when Webb, hiding out after deserting, tries to contact the criminal underworld so he can sell on the black market some equipment he stole from the Carlyle and gets mixed up with space pirates.  These merciless corsairs of the void need a guy who can make food out of rocks and twigs just as much as the colony on Conover does, but they aren't going to offer him a curvaceous blonde bombshell--they are going to condemn him to a life of slavery and danger committing crimes and fighting his former comrades.  Chalmers independently, without alerting the captain, launches a rescue mission to save the big stupid lug.  She gets captured, and it looks like she might get gang-raped by the pirates, but she and Webb manage to escape, killing the pirate captain on the way out.  Chalmers figures out a way to keep Webb from getting in trouble with the captain--in fact, she turns him into a hero!  Webb comes to his senses and marries this jewel among women and the two plan to move to Planet Conover when their commitments to the space navy are up, I guess in seven years or so.

This story is not bad, but I thought it odd the lovers were going to go to Conover--it had sort of been established that the Conover colony was doomed and/or the people on Conover were jerks.  Maybe we are supposed to think that by the time Mr. and Mrs. Webb got to Conover the doomed aristocratic colony would be gone and they would start a totally new colony--Webb does use the word "homestead."

"Home the Hard Way" would reappear in two anthologies edited by Charles Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg, Love 3000 and Starships; the latter also has Isaac Asimov's name on it--the German edition has only Asimov's name on it.  Abgespaced.

"The Power of Every Root" by Avram Davidson 

There are two "novelettes" in this October 1967 ish of F&SF, McKenna's "Home the Hard Way" (like 21 pages) and Davidson's "The Power of Every Root" (about 18.)  The editor's intro to Davidson's story tells us it is a crime story featuring police corruption and black magic--I shouldn't read these intros until after I've read the story, I know, I know.

That intro also tells us that Davidson lived in Mexico for a while, and "The Power of Every Root" is set in Mexico.  And it is not exactly a loving portrait.  Right at the beginning we get the idea that Mexican men are forever visiting quack doctors and native shamans to cure the venereal diseases they contract regularly.  Davidson also makes much of the Mexican government's pomposity and quixotic drive to secularize its superstitious population.  

The main character of this somewhat farcical story is young cop Carlos, whose blunders have him always in trouble with the chief of police.  He's on the brink of losing his job!    Recently, Carlos has been afflicted by aches and pains and, worst of all, horrifying visions.  He visits the quack doctor, who assumes wrongly that Carlos is having trouble using the toilet or performing in bed.  Carlos flushes the pills this sawbones gives him down the toilet and goes to the local "native herbalist and wizard," a "curandero," who assumes Carlos is the victim of witchcraft or poisoning and warns him to only eat his wife's cooking.

Early the next morning, Carlos decides to try to catch the people illegally harvesting wood from the forest, thinking a big arrest will improve his standing with the chief.  In the dark, he stumbles upon a freshly dead body missing its head.  When some kids come by he sends one of them to get the police chief, and then he guards the body, falls asleep, wakes up to find the body gone.  He thinks he'll lose his job or be arrested himself if the chief learns he has lost the body, so he decides to murder one of the wood stealers and put that guy's body in place of the lost one!  After slaying one of the thieves and decapitating the corpse, Carlos collapses, sick or insane.

Then comes the explanation of the story's mysteries and resolution of the tragedy of Carlos.  Everybody in town, except Carlos, knew that Carlos' wife was a treacherous slut having sex all the time with the two most brazen of the wood thieves, a pair of cousins.  The chief of police, giving Carlos more credit for detective skills than he deserves, concludes that Carlos finally figured this out and killed the thieves in an understandable act of vengeance--after all, the two headless corpses are the horny cousins in question.  The chief is willing to lie to the public to protect the reputation of the police, and claim that one thief killed the other, and then Carlos killed the murderer in a fight while trying to arrest him.

Ad for the story's black magic plot, we learn that the curandero was also having sex with Carlos' wife, so the source of young Carlos' aches, pains, and visions were no doubt poison, provided by the shaman and introduced into his food by Carlos' diabolical spouse.  As the story ends we are led to assume that Carlos is going to end up in the insane asylum and the corrupt police will never bring the curandero (who has not only been poisoning Carlos but also some old hypochondriac woman) or Carlos' wife to justice.

"The Power of Every Root" is well constructed, all the various moving parts operating smoothly together, all the surprises foreshadowed and believable.  All the jokes about sex and using the toilet are not actually funny, but they are not bad.  But I personally found the story more sad and depressing than funny--Carlos is a loser, and I was more inclined to sympathize and commiserate with him than to laugh at him as he was defeated by the world.  To me, "The Power of Every Root" feels a little too much like educated genius Davidson goofing on a backwoods moron for comfort--I suppose the course of my own life leaves me more likely to identify with the guy who is sitting in a puddle after having slipped on a banana peel than the guy who points at him and laughs.  "The Power of Every Root" is objectively good but I couldn't really enjoy it; we'll mark this one as acceptable.  If you are writing your dissertation on "Depictions of Mexico in American Speculative Fiction" or "Latin America as Envisioned by English Language Genre Fiction Writers," though, "The Power of Every Root" is a must!

Davidson must have been pleased with this story--it appears in Harry Harrison's SF: Author's Choice 3, one of those anthologies of stories writers consider their best or favorite works.  You can also find it in Davidson collections, and Peter Haining's Black Magic Omnibus, which was split into two volumes for paperback publication.

We read the Barry Malzberg story in SF: Author's Choice 3 back in 2017 

"Corona" by Samuel R. Delany

Delany, like Davidson, is a guy who often gets lionized as a writer of real literature.  Our most recent forays into the oeuvre of Delany are "Aye, and Gomorrah" and "The Star-Pit" but our most memorable are probably Triton and an excerpt from Equinox.  Well, let's see how "Corona" stacks up.

It is the mid-21st century.  Mankind's colonies throughout the solar system are just beyond the pioneer stage, becoming stable establishments.  Buddy, of low IQ and violent moods, comes from a difficult home, his father having abandoned the family, his mother a drunk who had many husbands and can't remember what year Buddy was born.  Buddy tried to steal a helicopter and landed in prison, and is now out of the clink after a harrowing experience behind bars; 24 years old he has a job at the spaceport in New York City.  

Bryan Faust is the singer whose fame has swept the solar system.  You hear his music everywhere!  When his starliner comes into port in NYC the kids mob it, I guess Delany basing this on the reaction to the Beatles or Elvis of their fanatical fans.  Faust's latest hit is "Corona," and the song is on the radio when Bryan is hurt in an accident while a member of the crew working on Faust's starliner--some negligent dope spills gallons and gallons of "hot solvent" on our guy.  Ouch!

Lee is a nine-year-old African-American telepath and genius; her regular reading material includes Spinoza and Nietzche and she does complex math to relax.  Lee is suicidal, because she has limited control over her telepathy, and often experiences the horrible trauma of people all over the Earth, all over the solar system, as they are getting killed or otherwise suffering through terrible experiences.  When Buddy comes to the hospital, she reads his mind and sees not only his current trouble but the brutality he suffered in a Southern prison at the hands of a religious guy.  (With the black person who is both better than everybody else and a victim, and evil Southerners, evil religious people, and an evil  institution of incarceration, Delany is massaging all the erogenous zones of the middle-class liberals that, I guess, make up most of the readership of F&SF.)  Lee and Buddy both have "Corona" running through their heads, having heard the same radio broadcast.  By reading former jailbird Buddy's mind, Lee learns a technique to escape her room, and she goes to Buddy to comfort him.  They bond over "Corona" and he tries to comfort her.  

The doctors get Lee back into her room.  Buddy eventually heals up and gets back on the job at the spaceport.  Lee can sometimes tune in to the minds of people she knows, and Buddy attends Faust's final performance, held right there at the spaceport, Buddy's access affording him a spot up front with the journalists, and Lee is able to share his front row experience of the music they both love, easing her suicidal misery a little.

This is a pretty successful story that offers a glimmer of hope as well as describing atrocities and the plight of people who are born into difficult situations.  In particular, Delany celebrates the ability of good music to bring joy to individuals and to foster healthy human relationships.  

Besides in various Delany collections, "Corona" would be reprinted in Looking Ahead: The Vision of Science Fiction, I guess a sort of textbook that also offers work by Robert Frost, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Norman Mailer, and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones, where it appears alongside work by W. E. B. Du Bois and Walter Mosley.

**********

Three stories we can say nice things about; even if I'm not aligned with every little thing these authors are trying to accomplish, I certainly think each of them succeeded in achieving the goals he had for each story.  A good issue of F&SF.