Right there in the beginning of the magazine is a crude ad for TSR's board game Dungeon! and an early edition of Dungeons and Dragons. As a kid I played tons of Basic/Expert D&D and 1st edition AD&D with my brother, and spent many many hours poring over the piles of rulebooks, modules and issues of Dragon magazine I accumulated, and I still think about Dungeons and Dragons every day, my mind still bubbling with ideas for dungeon layouts and quest hooks and different magic systems and easier ways to simulate the interaction between sharp or blunt weapons striking rigid or flexible, metal or cloth armor, and on and on. (Later we'd get into Warhammer 40,000 and I still think about Eldar psychic powers and jet bikes and Imperial Titans and superheavy tanks and comic relief Space Ork weapons systems.)
Then we get Asimov's boring editorial about the definition of the term "science fiction;" fun fact: Asimov doesn't care for "speculative fiction," the most successful candidate for a replacement for the term "science fiction." More entertaining is a sophisticated ad for an edition of Dunsany stories illustrated by Tim Kirk, and more valuable is Charles N. Brown's quite good book column, which briefly addresses many books and succeeds in saying useful things about each of them. In the back of the magazine we've got the letters column, including a chummy one from Barry Malzberg in which he expresses gratitude over how well his story "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" was presented in the Winter 1977 issue. I feel like I recognize its title but I don't think I have ever read the story, so maybe we'll be seeing "The Several Murders of Roger Ackroyd" discussed soon here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
There's a ton of fiction in the Mar-Apr '78 issue of Asimov's but we are only going to read three pieces, those by Brian Aldiss, Jack C. Haldeman II, and the aforementioned Richard Wilson. I considered reading A. Bertram Chandler's included Grimes story, but decided to put it off--my memories of the Grimes stories I read in the period before this blog was summoned via occult procedures from the nether world are that they are just OK, and if I am going to tackle the vast Grimes corpus someday I will want to start with stories published earlier or that depict Grimes earlier in his career.
"The Small Stones of Tu Fu" by Brian Aldiss
Our narrator appears to be a time traveller from the future who likes to explore different places and periods in China. He is hanging out with an aged poet and sage, Tu Fu, visiting a site by a river where stand some monoliths. Were these monoliths placed by a king to commemorate his military victories during the era of the Three Kingdoms, or did they appear naturally? Tu Fu and the narrator exchange little puns and other little jokes--I have to question the appropriateness of Aldiss filling this story, in which people are, presumably, speaking Chinese, with English puns. Then things get philosophical. Tu Fu looks at how the action of the river has, over time, "organized" by size the stones and shells that lie on the river bank. Is this merely the result of random, natural, undirected action, or the work of some obsessively punctilious Intelligence that seeks to order and organize the entire world? And does this Intelligence hate humanity because people are forever undoing its organizing work, shifting stones and shells and everything else to suit its own whims, like the kids who are on the bank picking up and throwing stones, or further grand purposes, like the kings who equip armies and raise monuments? The old sage Tu Fu dies within an hour or so of raising these philosophical questions, and the time traveller returns to the far future, to a time when no human survives, and we realize our narrator is the Intelligence theorized by Tu Fu. We are assured, however, that, despite Tu Fu's fears, that the narrator, the creator and obsessive organizer of our world, does not hate humanity, but loves each human as he loves each pebble, recognizing the unique value of each person and of each stone. Still, it is clear he loves Tu Fu more than the rest of humanity, and will treasure a pebble Tu Fu picked up and handed to him more than any other pebble.
This story is well-written, and maybe some will find it profound in its attitude about God or clever with its paradoxes and jokes, but one could just as easily see it as a pretentious trifle, as filler of an uppity or presumptuous type. We'll mildly recommend it.
"The Small Stones of Tu Fu" has been reprinted in many anthologies of material from Asimov's as well as in a bunch of Aldiss collections.
"The Agony of Defeat" by Jack C. Haldeman II
It is the future--it is illegal for humans to participate in football games, the sport being judged too dangerous. So for a while the game has been played by robots. But this year a team of genetically engineered freaks who have enough oxen and gazelle ancestry to legally be recognized as non-human have made their way to the Superbowl.
This lame filler story describes that beast-man vs droid Superbowl and the way two sportscasters cover it. There are slapstick jokes and little else. Two sample jokes: 1) One of the freaks bites the ear off of one of the sportscasters. 2) The robot team is named the Armadillos and they have brought with them to the stadium hundreds of real armadillos as mascots--when some scamp releases all the little armored insectivores onto the field the freaks are stupid enough that they mistake an armadillo for a football.
Total waste of time.
A paperback book version of the contents of the March-April 1978 issue of Asimov's was produced under the title Comets and Computers and so that is one place where "The Agony of Defeat" was "reprinted." This piece of junk can also be found in Laughing Space, a big anthology edited by Asimov and his wife, J. O. Jeppson.
"The Far King" by Richard Wilson
Small town girl Ann Bagley is the daughter of a preacher. Dad is an unusual member of the clergy--he thinks other planets have fostered intelligent life, probably more intelligent than that on Earth, and that God has sent sons to those planets in the same way He sent Jesus to us Earthers. Teenaged Ann daydreams about meeting one of these dreamy Christs from another world the way another girl might dream of meeting Elvis or David Cassidy or Corey Haim or whoever (I don't know who the teen heartthrobs of today might be, or even if there are teen heartthrobs anymore.)
Our narrator is Jack Norkus, the same guy who narrated 1958's "Man Working," though "The Far King" offers a very different explanation of how he learned of the aliens' presence in Chicago than that laid out in the 1958 story. This discrepancy presages a pervasive theme of the story--people's names and identities are fluid and unknowable, and in fact everything a human (Ann, Jack or the reader) knows may turn out to be untrue.
Jack is the same age as Ann and grew up in the same small town and attended the church where her father preached; as teens they spent some time together, talking about her father's theories and looking over the books which formed the basis of his theories. It briefly looked like they might develop a sexual relationship, but this did not eventuate.
As adults, Jack and Ann meet again in the mile-tall skyscraper in Chicago which is the secret gathering place of space aliens come to Earth to conduct research or do some kind of business. Like Jack, Ann takes to spending all her free time in the bar 528 stories above the streets of Chi-town that caters to the aliens. Ann is often referred to by a new, jokey, name, but I am going to keep calling her Ann.
While "Man Working" was about show business, "The Far King" is about sex. Ann is a serious reader and an able sculptress, but also a terrible tease, and hangs around the bar, arousing Jack and the ETs, sitting in their laps and so forth, without giving them a chance to do anything more than kiss her. Jack, who seems to make most of his money selling alien drugs to Earthers, when short on funds, will sell his sperm at a local sperm bank; it is implied that the donation center makes the process of donating particularly satisfying, and that Jack goes there to relieve his pent up sexual excitement when Ann has got him all hot and bothered.
Many of the aliens who hang around the bar can read minds or have super vision or super hearing or whatever, and these unscrupulous types not only learn all of Ann's thoughts and read her copious notes and diary entries, but share all her secrets with Jack. Thusly we learn Ann's biography and her hopes and dreams, why she acts the way she does. The plot really gets going when an alien arrives who can project different images of himself to different viewers. To Jack and Ann, he looks like a handsome human; to the other aliens he looks like an attractive member of their own species. None of the aliens explain this to poor Ann, and she falls in love with this new alien, Leo Reo, purportedly royalty on his home planet.
Jack and we readers learn Leo Reo's life story from a talking robot encyclopedia. ("The Far King" isn't one of those stories in which the protagonist has a goal and we follow him in a straight line as he tries to overcome obstacles in pursuit of his objective; rather, Wilson's novelette is one of those gossipy stories in which the main plot is related piecemeal in little sub-stories, each of which is imbedded in a little frame, a story in which we learn most everything second hand or third-hand from not-quite-reliable narrators.) Leo Reo is the second son of a king of some alien society. While his older brother was being trained for kingship, the neglected Leo Reo engaged in an all-consuming homosexual love affair with an educated male. Leo Reo's lover acted as a mentor, teaching Leo Reo all about art and culture and how to win over people and manipulate them, so when his brother died in an accident, Leo Reo turned out to be a whiz at making friends and influencing people at court.
So, Ann thinks Leo Reo, whom everybody except she knows is a gay blob monster, is the man she has been waiting for since she was a teen who dreamed of meeting alien Christ analogs. Wilson doesn't do a very good job making clear the motivations of the characters in this story, but for some reason Leo Reo sort of leads Ann on, fosters her belief that she will have a chance to marry him and become a queen on some other planet. Then news arrives that his father has died and Leo Reo is now king. The Far King rushes off, leaving Ann behind. Ann, suffering the largely self-induced delusion that Leo Reo wants her to come to his world and marry him, buys a ticket to Leo Reo's planet and leaves Earth behind. On the alien world (where she never realizes all the people she meets are blobs in disguise, even though they touch her intimately), Leo Reo pays Ann only limited attention. He does use her, in conjunction with various aphrodisiacs and machines, to get aroused so he can produce the sperm needed to impregnate a female of his race--his life of homosexuality has made it very difficult for Leo Reo to get aroused by a female of his own species. Ann realizes that Leo Reo is more or less doing to her what she did to so many males back in Chicago when she aroused them to achieve her own perverted satisfaction and then left them hanging, frustrated. Ann returns to Earth.
As foreshadowed by Jack's own sperm donations, Leo Reo doesn't have sex with females, but has his sperm collected by machines that then impregnate many females, making sure there will be an ample supply of heirs. Leo Reo provides Ann with a little vial of his sperm and a memory tape which she can plug into a dream machine so she can experience virtual reality sex with him and then give birth to his child.
Or so she thinks! "The Far King" is all about people being deceived by others and deceiving themselves, about people pretending to be what they are not, putting on false appearances and bearing false names Jack gets a message from Leo Reo, who has somehow got the idea that Jack and Ann are going to be married--I guess Leo Reo has been deceived by Jack and Ann's alien friends at the bar. In the message, Leo Reo explains that the sperm in the vial Ann wears around her neck as a locket and is always caressing is not Leo Reo's; after all, he is a blob monster and his sperm could in no way impregnate a human woman. The sperm is in fact Jack's, a sample of which Leo Reo's agents purchased at the sperm bank that Jack uses as a brothel.
Jack reveals all to Ann, including his desire to make the lie that they are going to be married reality*, but Ann refuses to believe the truth and rejects Jack's proposal. Finally, however, the aliens at the bar get together to convince Ann to marry Jack and have children with him; why they are doing this was not clear to me, and the way they go about it is ridiculous, I guess just a set up for one of Wilson's jokes, perhaps a meta-joke about common SF tropes.
*One of the story's problems is that Jack never makes clear to the reader why he wants to marry Ann, never talks about what he likes about her, never expresses any affection for her or describes his fascination with her.
The aliens tell the humans that they have the power to look forward, to see possible futures, and that as a favor they will show Jack and Ann one possible future. This turns out to be a scam--the "future" they show Jack and Ann is in fact an immersive film about a guy whose wife gives birth to a messiah figure; in the film, father, who appears to Jack and Ann as Jack, and son leave Earth, abandoning mom (Ann), to start a ministry on an alien world; for some reason Jack and Ann's son, who has supernatural powers, murders Jack. Even though it is revealed that this is a hoax, experiencing the immersive film changes Ann, makes her more mature and wise. (How would the experience of being betrayed by your husband and son make a woman more mature and wise and more likely to marry the guy who betrayed her in the dream experience?) Ann decides to marry Jack and have two children, one from the sperm in the vial and one the old fashioned way by having sex with her husband. The end.
"The Far King" is not very good. The story is long and convoluted, the narrative zigging and zagging in ways that are frustrating, and which further stress the reader's ability to suspend disbelief in a story which is pretty incredible in many of its elements already. For example, we are to think Ann and Jack poor, but if the plot requires it they suddenly have the money to fly to another planet or rent a cabin on a lake. I don't know, maybe this is how the finances of drug dealers work, flush today and impecunious tomorrow, but it is just one instance of Wilson leading you to think one thing and then pulling the rug out from under you. The big final joke, that the aliens pass off a canned film as a view of the Jack and Ann's future, is also hard to credit, as the film seems to match in every particular Ann and Jack's strange relationships with Leo Reo and Ann's father. Maybe the film is so interactive that it conforms to the viewers' lives, or maybe it was already based on their lives, but, like Jack and Ann's finances, it is another thing about the story that strains credulity, that takes you out of the story.
Wilson makes it hard for the reader to care what happens in the story, what happens to the characters. The jocular tone does not jive with the actual events depicted in the story, all of which are sad. Is the reader supposed to feel for Ann and Jack? It is hard to sympathize with the characters because they all behave foolishly and/or unethically. And all the zigging and zagging, Wilson leading us to believe something and then revealing that it is not true, discourages the reader from taking anything seriously--should I feel bad that something happened to this girl, when it maybe didn't really happen?
Thumbs down for this mess.
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