(I'm reading all these stories in a scan of a hardcover edition of the 1974 DAW anthology.)
Wollheim and Saha introduce this story with disparaging comments about those who hunt for sport, and a sly suggestion that we will be reading the latest version of "The Most Dangerous Game," so I guess we have to prepare ourselves for a satire.
"Moby, Too" by Gordon Eklund
Our narrator is a mutant sperm whale, a creature more intelligent than any human, a creature with psychic powers that allow it to read minds, to communicate with other minds, to kill with its mind! The whale speaks to us directly, tells us its biography, how it realized its fellow whales were unintelligent, their minds little more than darkness, of its joy at discovering humans whose minds were almost as alive as his own, and his rage when he realized humans were killers of whales! He describes his campaign of revenge in which he tortured and murdered men with his mind! (Don't worry; like the guy in that cable show every body talked about ten years ago about a serial killer who only kills bad people, the whale only kills bad people. People love to kill, and art and literature are forever coming up with ways to allow audiences to vicariously kill people, retail and wholesale, without feeling guilty about it.) Eventually our cetacean narrator abandoned both mankind and whalekind to live alone in bitter coldness at one of the poles. When he returned to warmer climes, he found that whales were extinct, he the last! Or so he believed until he found another whale, luckily a female around his age! They fall in love, even though she is almost mindless. They go to the pole, and when they eventually head equatorwards, they find the human race is extinct, exterminated by some biological warfare agent. Or so they believed until they find the last two humans, a man and a woman, the last two of their kind. At first our narrator plans to kill the humans, but then he realizes how similar the two couples are, both pairs of lovers the last of their species in a harsh world. The whale spares the human couple, and he hopes that the humans will have children, just as he and his mate are having their first offspring, and that the new whale race and the new human race will build a better world than that built by humans last time. This story, we learn, is the whale's monologue to his new son, who I guess has inherited Dad's super intelligence and psychic powers.
I can mildly recommend "Moby, Too." The style and pacing and images and all that are pretty good, the story moves smoothly along and is always interesting. The story is of course misanthropic, a sort of environmentalist wish-fulfillment fantasy in which mankind gets what some nihilistic lefties think mankind deserves, but its main character is believable and the story ends on a note of universalism and hope--"Moby, Too" is a dose of Seventies pessimism but it is neither the absurd satire nor the unrelenting one-note hammer to the skull that I feared it might be.
"Moby, Too" debuted in Ted White's Amazing, where it is illustrated by Jeff Jones, and saw reprint in the 1975 French anthology Univers 01 and the 2016 Eklund collection Retro Man.
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| Also appearing in Univers 01 are Harlan Ellison's "The Deathbird," A. E. van Vogt's "Ersatz Eternal," and Fred Pohl's "The Fiend" |
"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" by Michael Bishop
Here we have a 70-page long story (isfdb calls it a novella) that in plot and structure is quite like a Lovecraftian piece. Clever and sophisticated, and carefully crafted, "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is full of literary allusions and references, and addresses a host of philosophical and historical issues. Unfortunately, Bishop's tale is slow, repetitious, and tedious, lacks human feeling and can be a real slog to get through with its surfeit of description and host of repetitive episodes in which the narrator is more a spectator than a participant. "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is one of those stories that is easier to admire than to enjoy, a story that is something of a puzzle the solution to which is unsatisfying--once you've finished reading it you aren't quite sure if you've figured it out because what you have come up with seems a little underwhelming. "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is also one of those stories which is more fun to think about after grinding your way through it than it is to actually read, at least the first time.
"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" first appeared in If and was included in a Best from If anthology as well as the Bishop collection Blue Kansas Sky. According to isfdb, a revised version of the novella serves as the prologue of Bishop's 300-plus-page novel Transfigurations. The book jacket of the novel indicates it is about Chaney's daughter and her mission to BoskVeld--accompanied by a genetically engineered faux-Asadi--to figure out what happened to Dad and the truth of Asadi history.
"Construction Shack" by Clifford D. Simak
"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" comes to us as a bunch of documents, most of them composed by anthropologist Egan Chaney, a citizen of the interstellar civilization of the future. A major theme of "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is the untrustworthiness and unreliability of science and scientists, and in general all writers, reporters, and written/recorded accounts. A related theme is that sad truth of our lives, that different cultures cannot understand each other, and that even different individuals of the same culture cannot really understand each other. The story dwells on and illustrates the fact that strong cultures and strong individuals tend to exploit and destroy weaker ones. Intentionally or perhaps coincidentally, Bishop echoes Lovecraft in depicting a protagonist who is on a quest for knowledge and encounters a degenerate race and as a result of this encounter experiences a change in his view of his own identity, perhaps losing his mind and even his life.
Very early in Bishop's story, we learn that Chaney is preoccupied with the idea that all the primitive cultures of Earth have died out, apparently destroyed by more advanced cultures. When he reads about the mistreatment of the primitive "other" by modern man in books, Chaney suffers guilt, but as the story progresses we find in his interactions with flesh-and-blood "others" that Chaney himself is liable to hate and perform violence against "others," though ultimately he goes native and joins the aliens who are central to the story. Such paradoxes and ironies abound in "Death and Designation Among the Asadi."
The majority of the text of "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" consists of Chaney's "professional tapes," "professional notebooks," and his "private journals," though we also get brief footnotes and commentaries from other men who accompany Chaney on the mission to planet BoskVeld of the star system Denebola. Chaney spends like half a year alone among the natives of BoskVeld, the Asadi, out of contact with the other human members of the expedition--Chaney brings no radio, and collects the food and supplies dropped to him weekly after the helicopter has flown away from the drop site. We readers are encouraged again and again to doubt everything we learn from Chaney's texts. Chaney admits some elements of his writing are fictional, that he compresses time to "suit artistic/scientific purposes" and that he includes allusions he does not expect the reader to understand. The man who edits the transcripts of the recordings admits he has rearranged the order in which passages appear without specifying which sections have been so rearranged. (In this story, materials that are ostensibly scientific or journalistic--ostensibly concerned with conveying true information--are treated by their composers and editors like fiction meant to achieve an emotional response or like deceptive arguments that cherry-pick data in order to make a self-serving point.) We learn that Chaney is addicted to drugs that are purportedly "absolutely nonaddictive." Sometimes Chaney tells us, or his comrades, that things he has earlier written or said are mistakes or that he just made them up; sometimes his colleagues' notes and commentaries point out errors or lies in Chaney's texts.
The plot. Chaney is left among the Asadi, bipedal aliens whose behavior is bizarre and mysterious, often paradoxical. Primitive, they seem to have almost no tools and almost no culture, to sleep alone in the woods without any constructed shelter and then during the day to congregate in a clearing where they do not talk but just mill about and have sex--sex which seems animated by anger rather than love. These aliens do not have any family life, nor any agriculture, and they do not hunt--the Asadi seem to subsist mainly on bark and other difficult to digest food.
The Asadi have big hairy manes, and the one element of culture earlier human anthropologists have detected among the Asadi is how they shave the mane off of individuals who have apparently transgressed some-as-yet-undetected rule; the tribe then totally ignores the maneless individual, studiously pretend he is not there. Chaney is able to live among the Asadi and be absolutely ignored by them because, as a human who makes sure his hair is shaved, he looks more or less like one of these Asadi who is in internal exile and thus scrupulously shunned.
As the story slowly progresses, Chaney gains some limited insight into mind-blowing truths of Asadi culture. The tribe has a chief who is accompanied at all times by a sort of bat or pterosaur creature. The chief doesn't seem to really do any governing or leading, to be honest (the Asadi don't seem to have any problems to solve or goals to achieve), and to what extent the flying monster that sits on his shoulder is controlling him or is a servant of some kind is hard to judge. Bishop offers us many long descriptions of the rituals and other behaviors performed by the chief and by his flying monster and those that constitute the response of the rest of the silent tribe. In brief, these rituals involve cannibalism and reveal that an Asadi who has his mane shaved off is not an internal exile or outcast but in fact the Asadi male chosen to be the next chief once the current chief dies.
When it is time for this shaved individual to become chief, he goes to a high-tech temple kind of like a pagoda, a tall building that apparently appears and disappears as needed--Chaney can only find this building when he follows the shaved Asadi to it, and Chaney's colleagues in their helicopter never see the building during any of their weekly flights. Inside the temple are various futuristic artifacts and devices that Bishop describes in detail but which function pretty mysteriously. This building was apparently built by the Asadi's ancestors, who had a high civilization but fell into decadence and primitivism, or maybe by the little flying monsters. Are the bipedal Asadi or the flying creatures the masters? Did one create the other via some high tech process? Whichever is the case, when Chaney kills the flying monster, the new chief goes to the periodically disappearing and reappearing temple to awaken a new flying thing by cracking open one of multiple metal spheres in which it lies dormant.
There is still more to the temple. Within it lies a huge library of electronic books that humans will never be able to read. Also significantly, the Asadi who is on his way to becoming chief hangs himself from a metal chain and drools out silk something like a spider's web, which the flying monster uses to construct a cocoon around the maneless Asadi. When he emerges from the cocoon, the new chief has a mane again and takes up the role of his predecessor.
All this is perhaps Bishop's symbolic representation of government as a machine that exists to destroy the innocent and reproduce itself, but I don't know. A series of Asadi rituals Chaney witnesses and which I haven't summarized here are perhaps Bishop's allegory of war.
Chaney interferes with these bewildering Asadi behaviors now and again, and we wonder how much his relationship with the Asadi and their response (or lack of response) to him is influenced by the fact that he looks kind of like an Asadi who has been tapped to be the next chief. Chaney's sanity and sobriety is always in question, and near the end of his sojourn among the Asadi he goes kind of bonkers and summons his human colleagues by firing off flares. Chaney spends some time among his fellow humans, who try to treat his evident mental problems, but eventually he sneaks off to join the Asadi, whom he now considers his people; in his farewell note he suggests he does not seek to be a ruler among the Asadi, but one of the "milling throng."
"Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is a challenging story. Michael Bishop is obviously a smart, educated, sensitive, thoughtful guy who put a lot of effort into this work, but there is a pretty low entertainment-per-page ratio here--the story lacks surprise, excitement, or characters that we care about. If Bishop is just trying to tell us that life is terrible and people suck, well, each of us has already embraced or rejected that view and nothing Bishop says here is going to change our minds, and because the story feels so flat and cold, it won't comfort those who think Bishop is agreeing with them or anger those who think Bishop is disagreeing. "Death and Designation Among the Asadi" is impressive, but it just kind of sits there so I can only recommend it those with a strong interest in literary SF, SF about anthropologists, or Michael Bishop fans.
"Construction Shack" by Clifford D. Simak
Basically, in the period in which the human race has a base on Luna and is sending its first half dozen manned expeditions to Mars, unmanned probes provide ambiguous info about Pluto, so a manned mission is sent out there. One of the three crewmembers of the Pluto mission is our narrator. The three guys discover that Pluto is an artificial construct, apparently a sort of base or shack used by the extrasolar aliens who designed and built our solar system out of cosmic dust. What did they build the solar system for? Is our solar system working like a well-oiled machine, or are anomalies an indication that something went wrong, that the aliens bungled and our system is a lemon?
Simak doesn't answer these questions, and his story doesn't offer much by way of drama (there are no fights and no sex and the three astronauts get along just fine on their two-year flight from the Moon to Pluto) so the entire value proposition of the story is the pleasant science and engineering exposition, the smooth description of exploring the surface of the steel sphere that is Pluto, and the concluding revelation that the solar system is artificial and perhaps broken, the suggestion that the human race is a sort of experiment or a sort of pet, or maybe just some kind of wacky mistake or accident, like an infection.
Lester del Rey included "Construction Shack" in his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year: Third Annual Collection alongside R. A. Lafferty's "Parthen," and you can also find it in at least two volumes of stories from If, multiple European anthologies, and several Simak collections.
All three of these stories are admirable, and each seems to have achieved its author's goals, so you didn't have to endure the kind of slagging I meted out to your old pal Harlan last time we met. And today's productions are a diverse crew, though you might see them all as facets of 1970s misanthropy that remind you that the white man has mistreated third-worlders and animals, hint that humanity is inferior to fictional aliens and even suggest the human race might be some kind of mistake. Each of them inspires and deserves serious thought from readers, though only Eklund's has real human feeling and only Eklund's story is just the right length and depth--Simak's feels a little spare and undercooked, while Bishop went kind of overboard. Simak's is my fave, as I am a sucker for space ships and space suits and that sort of thing, but I recognize that Eklund's is the best if we judge by objective criteria, but Bishop's extravagant piece is far from a failure. Three reasonable choices from Wollheim and Saha, so bravo to those guys.
It's 1960s stories next time, stories which may be a little more lurid than today's somewhat serious fare. See you then!
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