Universe 2: H Ellison, E Pangborn, G R Dozois, R Silverberg & W Rotsler

Earlier this month we read Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," a story that debuted in Terry Carr's 1972 anthology of all-new stories Universe 2 and which bewildered me.  Let's take a gander at some more stories from this book, though we'll be reading versions that appear in later publications because I'm not having any luck getting my dirty mitts on a scan of Universe 2.  After I've read the Universe 2 stories by Harlan Ellison, Edgar Pangborn, Gardner R. Dozois, Robert Silverberg and William Rotsler and drafted my thoughts about them, I'll take a look at Joachim Boaz's 2016 blog post about the anthology and we'll find out to what extent we agree, disagree, or just look at the stories from different perspectives.

"On the Downhill Side" by Harlan Ellison

We start with SF's bad boy, Harlan Ellison--that's Harlan Ellison® to you!  "On the Downhill Side" has been reprinted in a number of books, among them Deathbird Stories, which is where I am reading it.  I have secured access to a scan of a 1983 Bluejay Special Edition of Deathbird Stories, which includes a claim on the very first page that this edition is the first version of the book to present Ellison's approved text.  So rest assured that, like a hiker drinking from a sparkling mountain spring, far from the pollution of the city, I am imbibing the pure unadulterated word of Harlan!  I mean Harlan®!

I guess a theme of Deathbird Stories is irreverence towards religion and gods in particular, and in this collection, "On the Downhill Side" is preceded by an epigraph in which your old pal Harlan jokes that he wonders if "the god of love" uses vaginal spray and underarm deodorant.  Oy, this is like a 13-year-old's idea of a humor.

"On the Downhill Side," we readers find, is a story with a relatively simple plot for which Ellison comes up with his own kooky mythology of the afterlife and the supernatural.  Ellison also manages to make his simple enough story very long and tedious by including lots of extraneous detail about the setting (New Orleans, or as you say it, "NAW-lins"), sleep-inducing psychedelic and surreal scenes, and melodramatic episodes from the lives of its over-the-top (I suppose archetypal) characters.  Thumbs down!

Our initial narrator, Paul, is walking around The Big Easy at night with his unicorn.  He meets an attractive woman, Lizette, and they start talking, telling each other stories of their earlier, tragic loves.  Paul has had three wives, and (it appears) drove at least one insane and drove the other two away.  Lizette married a guy for money or something like that.  We eventually realize Paul and Lizette are ghosts--Paul a suicide.  The God of Love (capitalized in the story, though not in the little epigraph) is punishing them, keeping them in the middle region between life and the afterlife because Paul loved too much and Lizette never loved at all.  The God of Love gave the unicorn to Paul to be his companion and helper.  The God of Love, after decades of punishment as ghosts, has also granted to Paul and Lizette a chance to earn a way to the afterlife--if they can love each other in a healthy way, they can proceed to the afterlife.

(I may have monkeyed up some of the above details--this story is so boring my mind was wandering as I read it.)

At first if looks like Lizette is blowing their chance, and she ends up naked on an altar about to be sacrificed to monsters, like something out of a Conan story.  But then the unicorn takes Lizette's place and Lizette embraces Paul.  Paul and Lizette's souls are united, which Ellison indicates by having her voice take over some of the first-person narration as they watch the monsters kill the self-sacrificing unicorn.  Ellison spends two pages describing in brain-melting detail the sight of the unicorn being destroyed and Paul and Lizette's reaction to this event.  Here's a sample:

Colors surged across my unicorn's body, as if by becoming more intense the chill touch of the claimers could be beaten off.  Pulsing weaves of rainbow color that lived in his hide for moments, then dimmed, brightened again and were bled off.  Then the colors leaked away, one by one, chroma weakening: purple-blue, manganese violet, discord, cobalt blue, doubt, affection, chrome green, chrome yellow, raw sienna, contemplation, alizarin crimson, irony, silver, severity, compassion, cadmium red, white. 

After this long passage we learn that Paul and Lizette will be reincarnated in the single body--"man or woman we did not know which"--of a person who will be lucky in love.

Boring and self-indulgent, ludicrously overwritten and absolutely lacking any sort of interest or excitement.  Why it is has been so popular with editors, with Carr judging it one of the best stories to ever appear in the Universe volumes and David G. Hartwell proclaiming it a masterpiece, we can perhaps chalk up to their belief that Ellison's name sold books.  Maybe "On the Downhill Side" represents an effort on the part of the five-times-married Ellison to work through his guilt over his treatment of women, to rationalize his misbehavior or glamorize his mistakes with respect to women--there is a clue suggesting that the wife who went insane did so because Paul kept asking her to be quiet so he could draw (Paul was an architect) and it is easy to imagine Ellison telling wives and girlfriends to be quiet so he could pen his masterpieces.  It is also easy to imagine the egotistical and self-important Ellison seeing himself as a man whose problems are a result of "loving too much."             

Carr's The Best from Universe also includes Edgar Pangborn's "The Night Wind,"
Fritz Leiber's "A Rite of Spring" and Howard Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens,"
stories we have already read here at MPorcius Fiction Log

"Tiger Boy" by Edgar Pangborn

This is a long one--over 30 pages!  Luckily, it is pretty good; "Tiger Boy" is well-written and paced, with a decent plot and well-wrought and believable characters who have realistic and even touching relationships.  Though better than Ellison's goofy contribution to Universe 2 in every way, "Tiger Boy" has not been anthologized in English.  As the story suggests, we are not living in a world characterized by justice!  I read the story in a scan of the Pangborn collection Still I Persist in Wondering.  This same collection, in German translation, takes "Tiger Boy" as its title story.   

It is a few centuries from now, the feudal postapocalyptic future in which the lord and the church own most of the land and people ride horses around and hunt and fight with bows and spears.  (This is the setting of much of Pangborn's work, including the famous Davy.)  Rumors abound, spreading from village to village, of a boy who travels with a tiger and plays the flute--his music attracts people into the woods, and these people are never seen again.  Except for children, who return and say the Tiger Boy treated them kindly.  (Is all this jazz based on Dionysius?)  

In the village at the center of the story lives Bruno, a sixteen-year-old bastard and orphan.  Bruno, apprenticed to the blacksmith, is a likable sort and a hard worker who never skips work or shows up late, but he is something of an outsider because he is functionally mute.  He can in fact whisper, but keeps this from others, whispering only to himself.  Nobody has bothered to teach him to read, but he loves words and composes poems in his head and whispers them to himself when alone.

Bruno hears the flute music and joins Tiger Boy, who is excited to have a poet accompany him on his travels.  For his art, Bruno is thrilled to have a friend to whom he can talk and with whom he can share his poetry.  When Bruno doesn't show up for work, the blacksmith and the priest who is, secretly, Bruno's father, are worried about him and strive to get a search party going.  The local lord and the religious hierarchy want to hunt down the Tiger Boy and his tiger, assuming they are a menace to the people and/or represent some kind of rival religion.

The blacksmith, who realizes he loves Bruno more than he heretofore was aware, goes into the forest alone to find the boy and dies of a heart attack after getting lost.  The lord and Bruno's father, along with some hunting dogs and a soldier, catch up to Tiger Boy and Bruno.  The tiger is slain by the priest and the lord, and the soldier kills Tiger Boy.  Then the hunting dogs go berserk and kill poor Bruno before the priest can stop them.  This story is a real tragedy!

Thumbs up for "Tiger Boy," which I think I enjoyed more than any of the other Pangborn fiction I have read. 

Italian publications that include "Tiger Boy" 

"The Man Who Waved Hello" by Gardner R. Dozois

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is set in one of those socialistic futures in which, presumably because of overpopulation pressures and concern for the environment (or as my father still calls it, and this story does as well, "ecology"), the government controls the economy, deciding where you can live and how you can decorate your tiny apartment and providing food and all other legal goods.  Dozois' story is about how this life drives people insane.

The main character of the story, a member of the middle-class and an inhabitant of a skyscraper in the forest of identical skyscrapers that spreads uninterrupted from Washington to Baltigore to Gotham to Beantown, uses hallucinatory drugs to get by.  But the drugs are hard to obtain, and so he has another means of obtaining the small measure of satisfaction that keeps him from committing suicide.  If he sees an attractive woman on the street or in the elevator or wherever he follows her, figures out where she lives, and then uses the videophone to call her up and expose his genitals to her.

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is well-written and just as long as it needs to be; Dozois skillfully paints images and transmits tone to the reader.  The setting and character are convincing and compelling.  Good work.

Besides Universe 2, "The Man Who Waved Hello" has only reappeared in the Dozois collection The Visible Man.  Dozois is one of the many writers I should read more often; I liked "Horse of Air" and "Flash Point," both of which appear in The Visible Man, as well as the rare Dozois story "Conditioned Reflex" and Dozois' collaboration with Jack Dann, "Down Among the Dead Men."  There are more stories I want to read than I have time to read them, alas.

German and British editions of Universe 2

"When We Went to See the End of the World" by Robert Silverberg 

This is a story satirizing middle-class strivers, how they are selfish and always competing with each other for attention, how they have abandoned traditional morality and try to fill up their empty lives with such activities as drug use and adulterous affairs.  I guess you'd have to call it a joke story.

At a party a bunch of these educated wealthy couples talk about their recent expensive vacations--paying a company to take them on a day trip to see the end of the world.  The first couple to tell their story doesn't realize any of the other couples has already taken such a trip, and think being the first in their set will add to their prestige--they are pretty disappointed to find many others have taken similar trips.  Each of the many couples has a different story of how the world ends; one couple witnessed the sun go nova, another couple saw a world covered in ice, another saw an Earth entirely covered in water, etc.  (The first couple's experience seems to be based on a scene from H. G. Wells' Time Machine.)  Could the time machine company be pulling some kind of scam?

Besides their time travel vacations, people talk about the news.  I guess Silverberg's joke is that these people are actually living through what amounts to the end of the world but essentially ignoring, or blithely accepting, it.  The last few Presidents have been murdered, peace activists blew up a factory, labor unions blew up Detroit with an atomic bomb, crime is rampant, there are a multitude of plagues ravaging the country, a nuclear weapons test caused an earthquake in California, etc.

I gotta give "When We Went to See the End of the World" a thumbs down.  It is not as aggressively, offensively bad as Ellison's "On the Downhill Side," but it is a waste of time.  We'll say Silverberg's story here is marginally bad.

I guess I am not on the same wavelength as the professional SF community--many editors have seen fit to reprint "When We Went to See the End of the World" in their "Best of" anthologies (I read this thing in a scan of Lester del Rey's second Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year) and it also appears in many themed anthologies as well as The Best of Robert Silverberg: Volume 2.  Because I am going against the grain here, maybe I have to spell out exactly why I think it is bad.  Here goes: in "When We Went to See the End of the World" we find no characters, no plot, and no human feeling--it is just a list of theoretical end-of-the-world scenarios the same joke (we are blasé about some disaster) again and again.  Why do editors like it?  Because they want to endorse Silverberg's contempt for middle-class keep-up-with-the-Joneses types who are (Silverberg and the editors might argue) fiddling while Rome burns?  Well, the world is littered with attacks on the status-seeking politically apathetic bourgeoisie.  Because it dramatizes 1970s pessimism?  Well, Dozois, here in the same book, offers a story that embodies Seventies pessimism but has real psychological insight as well as striking images and it does not feel like a repetitive gag--those editors should have reprinted that story.

"Patron of the Arts" by William Rotsler

I mostly know Rotsler as a draughtsman whose cartoons appear in great profusion in small periodicals, but he has a story in Universe 2 that was reprinted by del Rey in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, where del Rey really talks up Rotsler's abilities as a writer, so let's check out this 25-page story that was later expanded into a novel.

Alright, "Patron of the Arts" is a competent mainstream story about the art world with a conventional plot and conventional themes--it is only a SF story because it is set in the future.  A story almost identical to it could have been set in any time between the World Wars or after 1945.  We'll grade it acceptable.

Our narrator Brian is an extremely wealthy businessman who knows all about art and buys and sells and donates major art works and supports many artists, especially young up-and-coming artists.  The story is about his relationships with one of the greatest artists in history, Mike, and with the most beautiful and fascinating woman in the world, Madelon.  As a rich guy, Brian has banged a lot of women, but he is also a man with exquisite taste, and Madelon is the first woman who is so deep, so mysterious, so full of life, that he can never tire of her.  Mike is a pioneer in crafting art with the new technology of the sensatron cube.  The cube is a transparent box that holds a super realistic 3D image, generally a life-size image of a person, but the cube also presents a 360-degree background--when you face the image of the person in the cube you see what is behind her, and when you walk around the cube to look at the woman's back you can also see what she is facing.  The cube also influences your emotions directly by projecting "pulses" that "work on your alpha waves" and "sonics."

Brian convinces Madelon to marry him, and they have a happy open marriage.  Mike specializes in cubes depicting nude women that project a powerful erotic charge, and Brian wants Mike to do a cube of Madelon.  Mike and Madelon spend months together, Mike having to get to know his subject before he can construct a masterpiece cube of her.  The cube, when finished, is the greatest work of art Brian knows of, but after it is finished, Madelon leaves him for Mike.  It is almost like Brian bought the world's greatest work of art and the price was handing over the hottest woman in the world.

Rotsler pads this banal piece of work with scenes depicting the lifestyle of rich people in the future, lots of references to famous artists, art philosophy--stuff like:

"...Would you do my portrait, or use me as a subject?"  She was perceptive enough to know that there was a more than subtle difference.

and 

"All art began as science and all science began as art." 

--and with presumptively deep thoughts about people and life of the type you'd perhaps expect from an artist:

She owned herself.  Few people do.  So many are mere reflections of others....

At the bottom level are people who are "interesting" or "different."  Those below that should not be allowed to waste your time.  On the next step above is Unique.  Then the Originals, and finally those rare Legends.

"Women are never the same moment to moment."

"Patron of the Arts" is not bad, but it just kind of sits there, a specimen of mundane fiction about people who should be interesting because they are superlatives, the very top examples of what they are, like Michelangelo or Shakespeare or something, but whom are not actually that interesting.  I can't imagine how this thing was expanded into a 200-page novel--it already feels too long, what with the lists of artists, lists of vacation spots, lists of what a rich guys does (buying companies, selling companies, buying art, selling art, blah blah blah.)    

"Patron of the Arts" was reprinted in the very first issue of Vertex and in a few anthologies.

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Alright, so I now have strong opinions about six stories in Universe 2.  Let's stroll on over to Joachim Boaz's blog, which is approximately 300 times as successful as mine, and see what he thought of those six stories.

Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," which I didn't understand, Joachim praises as one of the best four stories in the book, but doesn't offer me any help in understanding it.  He considers Ellison's "On the Downhill Side" "saccharine" and "awkward" and dismisses it as a "dud."  Pangborn's "Tiger Boy" and Dozois' "The Man Who Waved Hello" he calls "good."  Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" Joachim doesn't mention.

Leaving aside the Wolfe, which maybe I would love myself if I knew what was going on in it, our only substantial disagreement is over Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World."  I think we agree on what Silverberg is doing with the story, but whereas I found it a lame waste of time, just one more snooty denunciation of middle-class strivers to toss on the mountainous pile of such stories, Joachim "highly recommends" Silverberg's story as the best thing in Universe 2, praising it as an "outright masterpiece" that is "devastating in its implications."  Hmm.   

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I enjoyed the Pangborn and the Dozois, the Rotsler is a curiosity, and familiarity with the work of towering figures Ellison and Silverberg is valuable, so this foray into reprints of material that debuted in Universe 2 has been a profitable expedition.  I'd like to read the R. A. Lafferty and Bob Shaw stories in Universe 2, but they are not that easy to find.  Maybe someday I'll come across a cheap copy of the anthology in a brick and mortar store (online copies are over ten bucks!) and engage with some more of its contents--according to Joachim, Gerard Conway's "Funeral Service" is "fantastic," the second best story in the book, and he plot sounds like something right up my alley.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories and (probably) idiosyncratic opinion here at MPorcius Fiction Log.