"The Serpent of Kundalini" by Brian Aldiss
Colin Charteris is a Montenegrin soldier, veteran of a war in which psychedelic drugs were spread throughout Europe and disrupted minds and societies far and wide. Our guy CC has an image of England in his mind drawn from the stories of The Saint written by Leslie Charteris, and today he is making his first landfall on the sceptered isle, having taken a ferry from France to Dover along with is car. The first third or so of this 15-or-so-page-long story is a dream or delusion or vision of CC's arrival in and first explorations of England full of surreal images that I guess are symbols and metaphors; the text is laced with lame philosophical and paradoxical reflections:
"...attachment to things keeps alive a thousand useless I's in a man; these I's must die so that the big I can be born."
"...motion must be an expression of stillness."
"To what extent was a vision an illusion, to what extent a clearer sort of truth?"
Ugh. The second part of the story describes Charteris' "real" arrival and explorations of England; he keeps comparing this England to his earlier delusions and visions of the green and pleasant land--this "real" England is different and I suppose a little more believable. CC keeps seeing versions of himself going off in different directions--these are the aforementioned "I''s" that must be discarded.
In the final third or so of the story we get some class analysis. Before he was a mystic who followed the teachings of "Gurdjieff," CC was a communist and when he comes upon stereotypes or parodies of suburban English middle-class homes and individuals he angrily denounces them. An Englishman who is even more familiar with the work of Gurdjieff than CC shows our hero around and plans to introduce the Montenegrin to his sexy daughter. CC fears this man is plying him with tea and his daughter in order to divert CC from his true mission, and as the story ends, sure enough, we are given reason to believe that the Colin Charteris we have been following is one of the useless "I's" that is being discarded by the true CC.
A sterile and annoying waste of time. In the same way that modern paintings by people who know nothing of perspective and anatomy are billed as experimental, but all too often come across as merely sophomoric and lazy, all too often stories that, in an effort to be psychedelic or surreal, eschew chronological narrative and a structure in which events in one scene follow logically from that before, come across as shoddy and pointless, and "The Serpent of Kundalini" is one of those. Thumbs down!
"The Serpent of Kundalini" debuted in an issue of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds with a Barbarella cover and Moorcock included it in the anthology Best SF Stories from New Worlds 5.
"Criminal in Utopia" by Mack Reynolds
Sounds horrible. But here we go.
OK, this is better than expected, though not actually good. "Criminal in Utopia" is a very straightforward, quite pedestrian story that methodically describes a person's travelling hither and thither within a city and his quotidian conversations and actions, like buying goods and services. "Criminal in Utopia" is a real legit science fiction story--Reynolds is speculating about future economic systems and police operations--that comes in the form of a crime story, whatever you call a story much like a police procedural but that has its focus the operations of the criminal rather than those of the cops. Do mystery fans call these types of stories "capers?"
It is the future of the "Ultra-welfare State" where, it is implied, most people are Zoroastrians. Everybody has a credit card (which acts more like a debit card in the story than an actual credit card, as far as I can see) and computer access to a network like the internet which allows you to read newspapers on a screen and order consumer goods for same-day delivery through vacuum tubes. Our protagonist has used up all the money in his account. First he requests an advance but he has already gotten two months of advances, and is refused. Then he buys a toy gun over the internet and rides the subway to an apartment building where rich people live. He tricks his way inside a rich single man's apartment and uses the gun to convince the rich guy to order him a real gun, jewelry, clothes, and camping equipment, all of which are delivered within minutes.
Our guy leaves with his victim's credit card and sells the jewelry at a little store, of whose owner he thinks "here was the last of the kulaks, the last of the small businessmen." The money he gets for the jewelry is put onto his account when he inserts his credit card into a slot.
It is not much later that the cops are on to our guy, broadcasting his photo on everybody's wrist TV. The thief uses his gun to convince a man on the street to call and pay for a flying taxi for him to escape in. Our protagonist pulls a few more such scams and spends time in a swanky hotel room drinking expensive booze and eating expensive food. Then the police come to apprehend him.
Then comes our twist ending. Our main character is not really a thief but a government employee testing the system, looking for weaknesses that could be exploited by real criminals.
"Criminal in Utopia" is competent if bland, and I'm grading it as acceptable, though there are some problems. The biggest is that using your credit card requires that you press your thumb to a screen that reads your thumbprint, and the main character circumvents this security measure so he can use another person's card simply by photographing the image of the legitimate owner's fingerprint which is printed on his card and then holding that photo up to the screens. Why would a representation of your fingerprint be on your card? Oh, well.
Martin H. Greenberg and John D. Olander included this story in Tomorrow, Inc., which is billed as a collection of stories about big business, but isn't "Criminal in Utopia" really about government? Almost all of the story's activity is conducted by police in the course of their duties and though there are class distinctions it is implied that in this society the means of production is in public hands, and it is explicitly stated that it is the government that handles the cards that are at the center of the story. Harrison in his intro to the story says it is about credit cards, but as I have already noted, the cards in the story don't give you access to easy credit--don't facilitate the borrowing of money--but just deduct or add funds to your bank account; to actually borrow money you have to call up a person on the phone. The real scary part of the story is that in the absence of physical money the government can follow all your purchases and learn all about you. I kind of feel like Greenberg, Olander and Harrison are promoting Reynolds' story as being about what they want it to be about, when it is actually about something slightly different.
"One Station of the Way" by Fritz Leiber
Anyway, in his intro to "One Station of the Way" here in Best SF: 1968, Harrison tells us this is "the only science fiction story of value ever written" about Christmas. An interesting claim, as Arthur C. Clarke's "Star" was published in 1956 and Michael Moorcock's "Behold the Man" in 1966; is Harrison bashing those guys or suggesting their stories are not really about Christmas? Also noteworthy: according to isfdb, "One Station of the Way" has never appeared in a Leiber collection--was Fritz unhappy with it?
Like Aldiss, Leiber is a talented writer with a lot of ideas and a willingness to push the envelope and experiment when it comes to topics, themes and narrative strategies. Sometimes these experiments strike me as failures, and so I never know when I start a Leiber (or Aldiss) story what to expect and whether I will like it.
Our story begins in a desert on planet Finiswar as we observe three "hominids," people with three eyes each, riding "camleoids;" they see a bright light in the sky and ride towards it. Obviously, these three figures are supposed to remind us of the Three Wise Men or Three Kings--these guys even talk of bringing gifts to somebody.
We then shift the scene to a group of four hominids, a "Husband" and a "Wife" and their two kids. They are close to the bright light, which turns out to be a landing space ship. From the vessel emerge its crew, two snake-like millipedes like 50 feet long, one white, one black. The white serpent licks the Wife; this touch not only fills her with a powerful feeling of love, but impregnates her. The three wise men catch up to the party, and attack--they have been following the family in hopes of raping the Wife. (The "gifts" they sardonically referred to were their sperm. Everybody is a comedian.) The many-legged aliens have energy weapons and destroy the spear-wielding "wise men" and then leave.
Through the dialogue between the two serpents we get a clear explanation of what is going on. (Most of the meat of this story is in the dialogue.) The white serpent is travelling around the galaxy impregnating women of intelligent races; the women he impregnates give birth to special children who preach a religion of love--the white serpent's mission in life is to bring love and peace to the galaxy this way. The black serpent is along for the ride and plays a sort of devil's advocate role. While the white serpent is all about love, the black serpent admires the strength and speed, the intelligence and technological progress, that are the result of conflict, of the relationship between predator and prey and between combatants in war. He and the white serpent have bitter philosophical debates on these themes and over whether the white serpent's impregnations lead to peace or actually foment conflict. In their dialogue we also learn, as if we couldn't figure it out ourselves, that the white serpent impregnated Mary on Terra and is the father of Jesus Christ.
Through the serpents' conversation we also learn about the crazy facts of reproduction on Finiswar, and this is the most interesting part of the story. On Finiswar, every male living creature can impregnate every female living creature no matter how disparate their species, so females have tightly closed and heavily armored genitals and mostly reproduce by cloning themselves because if they open their genitals to have sex with males of their own species all kinds of spores and seeds floating in the air will enter them and they will give birth to hybrids. Husband and Wife were in the desert because they wanted to reproduce sexually, and only in a sparsely populated place where there are few other living things could they have sex without risking Wife being impregnated by some other creature. (The white serpent's hypnotic love powers overcame the Wife's many biological and psychological defenses against cross-species fertilization.)
This story is OK...there is no actual human feeling or suspense. I guess the story is supposed to generate excitement in the reader in the form of shock or outrage or titillation in reaction to the religious, philosophical and sexual content. But in the post-Christian, pornified America of 2025 the ideas in the story are no longer thrilling, just faintly interesting.
Like "Criminal in Utopia," "One Station of the Way" debuted in Fred Pohl's Galaxy. Pohl included it in The Eleventh Galaxy Reader and editors in Italy, Germany and the Netherlands also liked it enough to reprint it.
"To the Dark Star" by Robert Silverberg
"To the Dark Star" has the form of a traditional science fiction story--a diverse team of scientists travels a great distance and spends a long time studying an astronomical phenomena (Silverberg tries to teach us stuff about the life cycle of stars) and the scientists find themselves trying to solve a life-threatening problem using their wits. But Silverberg adds in some cynical revisionist or even New Wave elements that drive most of the drama. We might interpret "To the Dark Star" as one of those SF stories in which the goody goody aliens by contrast illuminate how violent, envious and uncooperative we humans are, and even as an allegory about tribalism or racism, but luckily for those of us who read fiction for enjoyment and not to hear the same boring complaints about us from our supposed betters again and again, "To the Dark Star" is more hard-boiled or noirish than preachy, and is written economically and from the point of view of one of the flawed humans, not the point of view of a wise man or superior being or omniscient narrator. Thumbs up!
It is like 1000 years in the future and three scientists have been sent to witness the collapse into a singularity of a large star that has already gone supernova. Our narrator is the normal human on the team. One of his companions is a woman altered to live in a high gravity environment, a hugely muscled and squarish woman whose body and voice are absolutely unattractive to a 100% organic and all natural non-GMO man like our narrator. The third member of the research ship's crew is a representative of the only other intelligent species humans have ever met, a people with three legs and almost no head, the brain being in the torso.
The two humans are very competitive and hate each other; one of the themes of the story is that scientists are not necessarily noble seekers after truth but are sometimes selfish careerists who are always trying to one up each other. The alien is relatively calm and responsible and plays the role of mediator between the two humans.
After a few months orbiting the collapsing star, the crew have to make a big decision. When total collapse is imminent, they will send a drone machine to the surface of the dying star and one of them has to connect his brain via radio (or equivalent) to the drone so he can experience first hand what happens when the dying cinder of a star "breaks through the walls of the universe and disappears" as it "undergoes a violent collapse to zero volume" and at the same time achieves "infinite density." Such an experience could very well kill or drive a man insane, so our narrator and the woman are loathe to take on this task. Each uses dirty tricks to try to get the other to "volunteer" for this risky mission, drugs and hypnosis among them. When the crucial time comes they fight hand to hand, but come to a stalemate, the narrator's combat training neutralizing the woman's super strength. So, the humans gang up on the alien and force it to undergo the dangerous experience.
A solid piece of work, a fine performance by Silverberg and a very good example of SF that is full of science, human drama and social commentary and is still briskly entertaining. "To the Dark Star" is like a model of what a modal science fiction story should be.
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We can see why Harrison and Aldiss would include these four stories in a "Best of" book. Silverberg's story is actually quite good, and with its sexual elements and misanthropy suits the 1968 zeitgeist. Aldiss' is very experimental and topical, with its drug theme and general rebellious attitude, its hero being committed to left-wing politics and Eastern mysticism. Reynolds' story is all about current events, the threats posed by credit cards, computer surveillance and government surveillance. And Leiber's story is in-your-face provocative, a bizarre interpretation of the origins of Christianity plus weird sex. The Aldiss aside, these stories are worth reading for their ideas and as entertainment; the Aldiss is only valuable as some kind of historical or biographical document to those interested in the SF field and/or Aldiss in particular.