We read three stories from the February 1968 issue of Galaxy on our last outing (those by Poul Anderson and Fritz Leiber as well as a collab between Terry Carr and Alexei Panshin) and my plan for today was to read three more, the contributions of Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty and Keith Laumer, but it turns out I already read the Aldiss, "Total Environment," back in 2016. (2016 MPorcius liked it, even if 2025 MPorcius can't remember it.) So we're just going to read the Lafferty and the Laumer and call it a day.
"How They Gave it Back" by R. A. Lafferty
As regular readers of MPorcius Fiction Log already know, I loved living in New York City and not a day has passed since I left Gotham behind without regret. But I recognize that the Big Apple is not for everybody and that a significant proportion of its constituting components are a fair target for the most withering of criticism. So it doesn't bother me that Lafferty's "How They Gave it Back" is a sort of extravagant satire on how bad New York might get; the story is also a good example of the macabre and gruesome strain of Lafferty's humor and a reflection of his interest in Native American culture. I often complain about satires and joke stories, but in our last episode I gave a passing grade to a joke story by Carr and Panshin and today I am giving a thumbs up to Lafferty's joke story here--it actually made me laugh.
We learn over the course of the story that, in the future it depicts, Manhattan has been taken over by violent gangs intent on killing each other and so the rest of he world has isolated the island. The people of Manhattan would starve if they didn't have a supply of hostages which they trade for periodic food trains from the mainland; as our story begins, this supply of hostages is running out, putting pressure on the man who is mayor.
Few are those who want to be mayor of such a disaster area, and the current mayor, a black man who earlier in life harbored dreams of New York's potential, is chained to his desk in his office in the rat-filled and fire-prone city government building, and there are to be no further elections. (One of the ways this story is "edgy" is this imagery of an African-American in chains, forced to work an unenviable job.) The high-tech lock on the chain can detect psychic waves or whatever, and will open and free the mayor from bondage if he manages to legitimately offload the problem that is Manhattan to someone else by selling it to them for fair value, but who would buy this decrepit and dangerous nightmare island?
Three men in business suits with serious academic and/or professional credentials arrive who do want to buy Manhattan. More important than their degrees and licenses are their ethnicities--in their veins flows the blood of American Indians--and their avocation--they are passionate hunters. These sportsmen want to buy the island and use it as a game preserve where they and their friends can hunt the gang members and other degenerate people who now make up its population! The three Indians pay for Manhattan in this future just what the Dutch paid the Indians back in the early 17th century (at least according to Lafferty's story): hatchets, smooth bore firearms, gun powder, and various other goods. The bloody-minded current inhabitants of New York eagerly take up these weapons, which is all to the better in the eyes of the new owners, who like their game to put up a fight. The mayor is liberated, but can he live long enough on this island of violence to affect an escape? The story ends with a brief passage depicting "Ultimate Justice," apparently Cthulhu-like space monsters, who approve of the sale, and some old time New Yorkers who offer the story's perhaps superfluous punchline.
A fun story that cheerfully presents a cynical view of mankind and such ideas as fair trade, freedom, the law, and justice.
"The Big Show" by Keith Laumer
And a joke story it is, a long, boring, mundane and obvious one of six chapters, a satire of TV and a cold war spy spoof. Sleep-inducing!
It is the future, when people receive a UBI and so have time to watch 300 TV channels! Our hero Lew is an actor, star of a family sitcom which runs like twelve hours a day. Lew has to split his time between his real family and his TV family, and he loses his job because he mixes up the names and extracurricular activities of his real kids and his TV kids. The same day and for similar reasons, his wife divorces him. We get lots of banal jokes about how sponsors control the TV networks and about the power of the screen actors' guild.
In Chapter II, Lew is in Antarctica; thrown off the sitcom, he was offered a role in a documentary on the Eskimo. (It's a joke, son!) We get jokes about a robot polar bear which acts as a remote control camera (Lew at first thinks it is real and is attacking him) and about how the snow is fake and so forth. The chapter ends with the revelation that Lew is just an extra in this Eskimo thing--he has really been brought down here to conduct a secret mission for the CIA.
The Soviet Union has, allegedly, set up an illegal spy station in a nature preserve in the South Pacific where live cannibals and head hunters. The CIA needs a skilled actor to get in there, infiltrate the cannibal tribe, and pinpoint the location of the Soviet installation so it can be bombed. Lew is the perfect candidate because he once was the star of a secret agent TV show.
Once on the jungle island, Lew is quickly captured and quickly escapes. One of Chapter III's jokes is that from a distance Lew mistakes a pizza his captors are eating for a topographical map of the island. He rescues a fellow prisoner, a beautiful native woman, but in Chapter IV she takes off her make up and we learn she is not a native after all but the daughter of a terrible villain. Lew is taken captive again. In Chapter V we get acquainted with the villain, an old man. A former TV star, he feels TV is so bad for individuals and society that he has set up a base on this island to launch a rocket that will jam all TV transmission as it orbits the Earth. Lew considers calling in the air strike on this rocket's launch pad in order to save TV. But then he fortuitously learns that the USSR has set up a new super powerful TV transmission center that will drown out all other TV broadcasts and leave TV-addicted Americans and everybody else in the world no shows to watch but communist propaganda! Lew decides to let the jammer rocket go up. TV is over!
In Chapter VI, with no TV, Lew and the other people on the island are bored, so they begin working on a way to create and transmit TV shows locally.
Bad filler: the style bland, the pacing slow, the plot and the jokes tired. Besides the aforementioned The Big Show, "The Big Show" has been reprinted in a 2002 collection of Laumer humor pieces.
Have all the joke stories I have been reading in Galaxy left me yearning for the blood and guts of Weird Tales? Has reading an economical and fun R. A. Lafferty story inspired me to read an entire Lafferty collection? Stay tuned to find out!
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