Destinies, Fall 1980: F Saberhagen, G Benford & D Drake

A while ago I bought a copy of the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies for a dollar.  Destinies was a quarterly magazine in the form of a paperback book edited by Jim Baen; the Fall 1980 issue is the ninth of eleven published issues.  This one has a space war cover by Vincent DiFate and includes a bunch of essays by SF luminaries like Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and Joe Haldeman that speculate on the future of war and space colonization and stuff like that; there are also book reviews by Norman Spinrad.  But it is the fiction I will be looking at, stories by Fred Saberhagen of Berserker fame, Gregory Benford-- an actual scientist--and David "Hammer's Slammers" Drake.  James Gunn's name is on the cover but I don't see it on the table of contents.

"Recessional" by Fred Saberhagen 

"Recessional" here in Destinies is illustrated by Stephen Fabian, who contributes two female nudes reminiscent in composition of something from a detective magazine and an effective if traditionally composed mad scientist drawing.  I am a Fabian fan, so these are welcome.  "Recessional" was reprinted first in an anthology edited by Saberhagen himself, and went on to be included in two different Saberhagen collections.

"Recessional" is an allusive and somewhat surreal story, a sort of science fiction crime tale with meta, perhaps autobiographical, elements.  It works, and is pretty economical, so I can mildly recommend it.

Our nameless main character is a science fiction writer who is fascinated by the hard sciences and reads the legitimate academic science journals; he loves jargon and includes lots of science jargon in his fiction.  The story follows him as he leaves a science fiction convention on the east coast and drives west.  We readers get lots of clues that, one, he is passing in and out of alternate universes, places where the United States and his own life are slightly different, and two, that he murdered his wife and threw her into the ocean or (in some other universes) maybe a major river, either years ago or (in some other universes) very recently.  As he travels from coast to coast he sees TV shows and hears radio reports about a new scientific technique that allows scientists to scan dead skulls and pick up images from the bone of scenes the dead person witnessed while alive.  There is some suspicion among the scientific community that the images thus collected may not be quite accurate representations of reality, that what the scientists are seeing may be warped by the expectations and biases of the original, now dead, viewer and by the current viewer who is gathering the images today.  Also, some experts fear that the technique of gleaning the images from the skulls, which involves radiation that alters subatomic particles, may warp reality, may be creating or exposing alternate universes.  The writer also keeps hearing news reports about the police finding dead bodies of women on shores and river banks.  We readers have to assume that it is likely in one or another universe that the cops are going to scan the dead skull of the writer's wife and discover who she is and who murdered her.

"Pick an Orifice" by Gregory Benford

The title makes us expect this is a sex joke story, and that is what we get.  It is the near future and some eleven-year-olds whose fathers are computer engineers get their hands on some powerful new software.  They use it to create wild and crazy pornography, people having sex with vacuum cleaners and animals and monsters and so forth.  Benford goes, a little, into some of the theory of how a computer might model three dimensional objects, and into the social implications of computer-generated cinema--in this story actors and directors become a thing of the past, as a computer can do their jobs, and the kids own copyright to the porn they create and so they make a lot of money when their porn becomes famous.  

Weak (though not actually boring or repulsive) as a piece of fiction, but perhaps prescient when we consider how today AI threatens the work of so many middle-class professionals and people in the entertainment industry as computers increasingly demonstrate the ability to manipulate words and images into coherent documents that consumers will accept as readily as that fashioned by human minds.  We'll call "Pick an Orifice" acceptable.

isfdb suggests "Pick an Orifice" has never been reprinted, making Destinies Volume 2 Number 4 essential for all you Benford completists out there.     

"The Automatic Rifleman" by David Drake

Here we have a story which has reappeared in three different Drake collections.  "The Automatic Rifleman" is too long, moves slowly, and is a little overwritten and silly, with lots of superfluous detail and over-the-top characters, but it isn't actually bad.  We'll judge it acceptable filler.

We've got four characters.  Setting things in motion is a big black dude who is educated and very concerned about pollution and injustice and all that.  He has decided to strike a blow for justice by murdering a Japanese politician who is visiting the United States.  He has two henchman, a short angry "swarthy" veteran and an angry blonde woman, I guess the black guy's girlfriend.  As the story begins these three terrorists arrive at an unscheduled meeting with a fourth individual, a man who claims to have the skills and equipment to ensure they succeed in assassinating the politician.  This guy has an unusual automatic rifle which never leaves his hand.

We get a lot of scenes in which these four macho characters demonstrate how much they dislike each other and try to one-up each other and prove to each other and themselves how tough they are.  The science fiction content consists of the repeated hints that the guy with the strange rifle has participated in many famous assassinations, such as those of JFK and MLK, and that the rifle is alive or a robot, the representative of space aliens who are manipulating Earth history and society through targeted killings of influential Earthers.  There's a long sequence about ranging in weapons, then the scene of the actual assassination attempt, and then the resolution of the conflict between the mysterious man with the advanced rifle and the swarthy guy who has been suspicious of him the entire story.

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Of today's three stories, Saberhagen's is the most ambitious and literary, the one that actually succeeds in depicting a human character and generating some kind of human feeling.  Benford's succeeds in the realistic-speculations-about-the-future game, even though it is a dirty joke story and a get-rich-quick wish fulfillment fantasy.  Drake's tale is a sort of men's adventure version of a Twilight Zone story with its obvious twist and all the padding consisting of macho men trying to psychologically dominate each other with their tough talk and by brandishing guns and knives.  

These stories are not great, but they aren't bad, either, so we shouldn't complain.  One thing that perhaps links the stories together is a sense of 1970s pessimism; Saberhagen suggests SF cons aren't fun anymore and has a broken marriage at its core, Benford's story features broken homes, high energy prices and lonely suburban latchkey kids with nothing to do, and Drake's is all about social unrest and urban terrorism.  

So, an underwhelming and perhaps slightly depressing foray into the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  But we've seen much worse.  Who knows what we'll turn up next among my purchases of the last ten years?  Stay tuned to find out.