Best SF: 1968: B Aldiss, M Reynolds, F Leiber, & R Silverberg

A couple of weeks ago we read three stories from Best SF: 1968, an anthology edited by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss.  Today we read four more stories from the book by people in whom we are interested: Brian Aldiss himself, Mack Reynolds, Fritz Leiber, and Robert Silverberg.  I almost said "five more stories," but then I checked the archives and found that the story in Best SF: 1968 by Stephen Goldin, "Sweet Dreams Melissa," has already been covered here at MPorcius Fiction Log, way back in 2014.  (I liked it.)

"The Serpent of Kundalini" by Brian Aldiss

isfdb is telling me that "The Serpent of Kundalini" is the fifth of eight stories in a Colin Charteris series.  Harry Harrison in his intro to the story here in Best SF 1968 tells us that the Charteris stories are "acid-head stories of a future where psychedelic drugs have been used in warfare," hints that the chronology of the story may be "awry," and warns us that the Charteris stories "are not to everyone's taste, because they sometimes require a certain effort on the part of the reader."  Good grief, Harry, are you trying to convince me to skip this story?  Or just prophylactically heading off people who might say they don't like it by suggesting readers who don't care for "The Serpent of Kundalini" just aren't smart enough to get it? Well, let's see if I'm smart enough to get it.

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

I've read a number of things by Reynolds over the years, and in general I think he is a poor writer whose ideas don't deserve to be taken very seriously, but he had a wild and strange--almost mind-bloggingly so--career, and so I read him on occasion.  "Criminal in Utopia" first appeared in Galaxy, the readers of which (in league with the readers of If) we are told voted Reynolds "the most popular science fiction author."  The story was reprinted in an anthology of stories about big business and an anthology of stories about computers, and was integrated with other Reynolds stories about the "Police Patrol" to form the 1977 novel Police Patrol: 2000 AD.  In his intro to "Criminal in Utopia" here in the book in which we are reading it, Harrison tells us Reynolds has lived in or visited over 50 countries, and this story is about credit cards.

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

I hate the holidays.  I hate taking down all the pictures and decor I actually like and dragging that stuff to the basement and then lugging back up images of pumpkins to replace it, and then turkeys, and then snowflakes.  I hate participating in activities, eating food, and listening to music I don't like just because the calendar says it is time to do so.  I hate the stress of picking out gifts for people and worrying the gift will disappoint or even insult them, and I hate putting on an act when I receive a gift that I have no interest in.  And it is not like the holidays are four or five discrete days with rest periods in between that you can get through individually like you can a doctor's appointment or regular maintenance on the Toyota--nowadays the holidays are like a solid three and a half months artillery bombardment without respite.  

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" debuted in the anthology The Farthest Reaches, the French edition of which has a cool Moebius cover I think all you fans of European comics (like our man tarbandu) will appreciate.  "To the Dark Star" has reappeared in many Silverberg collections and is the title story of the second volume of The Collected Stories of 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.

SF: Authors' Choice 2: A B Chandler, H Clement, & H L Gold

Digging through the paperback anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library, I came upon Harry Harrison's 1970 volume SF: Authors' Choice 2.  As the title suggests,  this is one of those compilations of stories of which their authors are particularly fond or proud.  Of the twelve stories in the book I think I have only read Algis Budrys' "Contact Between Equals;" that was back in 2019, and I liked it.  That leaves a lot of virgin territory in this paperback; today we'll explore the stories chosen by world-travelling sailor A. Bertram Chandler, hard science fiction icon Hal Clement and the agoraphobic editor of Galaxy, H. L. Gold.

"Late" by A. Bertram Chandler (1955)

In the period before the inexplicable birth of this blog, I read a bunch of stories and some novels by A. Bertram Chandler, most of them about space naval officer John Grimes.  I liked them well enough, but was hardly blown away by them, and I don't think I've read anything by Chandler during the era of this blog...until today!

"Late" is well-written and seems quite sober, but turns out to be a joke story with an unexpectedly unscientific ending.  I think I can mildly recommend it.

Jelks is a British scientist, a man very thorough and very calm, but also very slow.  Everybody jokes to him, and of him, that he will be late for his own funeral, and we hear this phrase multiple times over the course of the story.  

"Late" takes place in a Cold War world in which the United Kingdom has its own independent space program.  Thanks to his stolid reliability and thoroughness, Jelks is selected for the job of staying alone in an orbiting rocket for months, conducting experiments and taking readings.  Many men would crack up all alone in a tin can for such a long period, but those in authority feel they can rely on the steady and unexcitable Jelks.

After a few weeks up there, Jelks sees some kind of cataclysm take place on the Earth below; he is familiar with all the types of nuclear weapons and all the various weather phenomena, and the character of what he sees baffles him, as the disaster is unlike what he would expect from any weapon or meteorological event.  He pilots his rocket back to Earth, back to England.  There are no people around.  He makes his way to a village church and the opened and empty graves indicate that he missed the resurrection of the dead and the Last Judgement. 

All the dead pan and believable hard science stuff that occupies 90% of the story, about the way the rockets and space suits operate and so forth, made the Christian resolution of "Late" a surprise, though Chandler does foreshadow the ending with the repeated intoning of the "late for his own funeral" joke and by having Jelk scoff at some prophet mentioned in the newspaper who wins notoriety by claiming the end of the world is nigh.

This unusual story first appeared in Science Fantasy and, besides here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, it has only been reprinted in the Australian anthology Beyond Tomorrow, which was published to coincide with the World Science Fiction Convention of 1975, held in Melbourne.  In his afterward to the story here in Harrison's anthology, Chandler says that his first choice for inclusion in this book was his story "Giant Killer," but that one was too long, and talks about the circumstances under which he wrote "Late" and a little about his move from Britain to Australia.

"Proof" by Hal Clement

As with Chandler, I read some Clement before I started the blog but have not read anything by him since the founding of the quixotic venture that is MPorcius Fiction Log; as with Chandler, I liked what I read but didn't feel much urge to read more by him.

"Proof" is Clement's first published story, and, in his foreword to it here in SF: Authors' Choice 2, he talks about how he first got into SF, about how he is a stickler for scientific accuracy in SF, and a little about John W. Campbell, Jr. and Jack Williamson and their influence on his early career.  

"Proof" is a serious hardcore hard SF story, full of phrases like "...the viscosity of a gas does increase directly as the square root of its temperature..." and "We found that electromagnetic radiations of wavelengths in the octave above H-alpha would penetrate the interference...."  Our main characters are two adventurous types, one a native of the Sun, the other a native of the star Sirius.  These two people are elite members of civilizations that evolved inside stars, beings whose bodies consist of magnetic fields and neutrons and whose "food" is neutronium.  They are aboard a ship travelling from the outer regions of the Sun towards the solar core--Solarians live in cities suspended in the outer regions of Sol, but need more neutronium than is available out there, and so send ships down to the core to collect this essential element.  The reason the Solarians reside far from their food supply is that the inner regions of the Sun are inhabited by monsters, dangerous beasts the ship's crew will likely have to fight to secure the neutronium the cities need.

The actual plot of the story does not involve the monsters or the collection of neutronium.  The Sirian visitor is a scientist who has a theory that, if artificially compressed, elements like iron and carbon that in a star are in an ionized plasma form might take on a solid form.  This theoretical phenomena is difficult for the Solarians and Sirians to visualize, and their senses are ill-equipped to detect such solid matter should they encounter it.  At least that is what I think the Sirian is saying; in my youth, when I should have been memorizing the Periodic Table of Elements and chemical formulas, I was clogging my brain with dialogue from The Flintstones and how many hit dice First Edition AD&D monsters have, so this material is a challenge for me. 

Our Solarian character, the captain of the sun diving ship, upon hearing this theory, describes a tragic and mysterious event he witnessed while commanding a ship on a journey between stars another interstellar craft that was accompanying his own collided with some kind of invisible object and was destroyed--perhaps it was a specimen of the solid iron, silicon, carbon, etc., the Sirian is theorizing?  Clement breaks free from the setting of the Solarian sun diving ship to describe the spectacular crash and cataclysmic explosion of the Solarian interstellar ship in a remote area of Earth from the point of view of a human being.  Then comes the little joke at the end of the story--the Sirian scientist doesn't think solid iron and carbon could exist in the natural world and accuses the Solarian of making the story up.

"Proof" is a good example of a science fiction story that is really about science and not just an adventure or detective story or political satire set in space or the future.  Clement concocts an alternate, speculative, milieu that is very strange but is actually based on the hard sciences and stretches your brain in the way that surreal or psychedelic settings that make zero sense fail to.  Even though there is a minimum of sex and violence, and little plot or character, "Proof" still manages to be entertaining--the setting alone is enough for you to chew on.  So, thumbs up for "Proof."

Since its debut in Campbell's Astounding, "Proof" has been reprinted in numerous anthologies, including several edited by Isaac Asimov and/or Martin H. Greenberg, as well as the Clement collection Music of Many Spheres.          

The cover of Music of Many Spheres is illustrated by a painting by Clement himself

"Love in the Dark" by H. L. Gold

In his intro here in SF: Authors' Choice 2 to "Love in the Dark," which first appeared in the short-lived magazine Suspense as "Love Ethereal," Gold brags about how brilliant his characterization of the protagonist of the story is and makes fun of the woman upon whom he based his character.  Gold comes off as kind of a jerk, frankly.

The character of which Gold is so proud is the unhappily married Livy, a not-very-attractive thirty-something whose husband is Mark Random, a "pudgy" sales manager who wears glasses and a neatnik who is the picture of dull sangfroid; Livy tries to get a rise out of him by loudly kicking her shoes around and scuffing up the walls but Mark just ignores these provocations.  Gold makes it clear that Livy's unhappiness is largely due to Mark's inability to have sex or lack of sexual interest in her.

One night Livy is undressing for bed and feels lustful eyes staring at her.  Of course, those eyes are not Mark's--he has his back to her.  When Livy closes her eyes she can "see" the "man" who is ogling her, muscular hunk of a space alien with blue feathers and pointy ears.  The invisible alien puts the moves on Livy--during the day she can feel this creature kissing her as she does the housework.  The bird man cannot speak to her--his race and ours hear on different frequencies or something--but Livy is thrilled by the sexual attention.

Livy's strange behavior leads Mark to call a friend for help.  Ben is another successful professional who is overweight and unattractive, a guy who has read lots of books on business psychology.  The presence of Ben allows Livy a chance to insult Mark--as she lists off her husband's faults and calls him names, Ben encourages her, telling Mark that it is healthy psychologically for Livy to get this stuff off her chest and, besides, she doesn't mean it.

Of course, she does mean it.  Livy's relationship with the bird man only she can see, and only when she closes her eyes, progresses and she gets pregnant.  Ben figures that she is having an affair and is so guilty over it that her brain is hiding the truth from her by giving her this bird man delusion, and urges Mark to have his wife admitted to an institution.  Livy runs away, but sneaks back to watch the collapse of Ben and Mark's friendship when the invisible bird man hits Mark and Mark blames Ben for the attack.

Livy and the bird man have an invisible baby.  Livy gets a job with a private detective agency; the bird man, being invisible, can gather all kinds of information with ease that Livy tells her employer she has collected.  (Livy and the alien communicate by typing--he has learned English.)      

"Love in the Dark" is an acceptable filler joke story about sex that isn't funny or sexy.  It feels kind of mean-spirited, with its contempt for fat people and its apparent glee in the punishment meted out to Mark and Ben, who don't really seem villainous, just boring and sexually dysfunctional, but maybe we are supposed to feel they deserve punishment because they are business people and not scientists or artists or communist revolutionaries or whatever sort of people Gold himself admires?  "Love in the Dark" is a sort of forgettable routine thing, so it is a little odd that Gold took the opportunity provided by SF: Authors' Choice 2 of this book to make a big deal out of it.

"Love in the Dark" is included in at least three Gold collections as well as some anthologies, including Fred Pohl's Beyond the End of Time, the cover illo of which manages to cram in a multitude of our favorite things: a hunk, a babe, poison gas, a saucer, a space man, and an urban apocalypse, and Basil Davenport's Invisible Men, which has a characteristically awesome Richard Powers cover. 

The 1966 printing of Invisible Men above has the lens on the right side of the illo
blacked out, but that lens on the 1960 edition shows a woman's nude torso,
a reminder that the master of abstract art Richard Powers can also produce 
very fine renderings of the human form

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It is always interesting to hear these writer guys talk about their work and their relationships with each other, and the Chandler and Clement stories are actually good as well as strange or surprising, so I'm definitely enjoying SF: Authors' Choice 2.  And the Gold isn't bad, just mundane, though perhaps it offers insight into the psychology of Gold, an important SF editor and himself mentally ill.

We'll read some more from SF: Authors' Choice 2, but I think first it is back to 1968 for stories selected by Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss. 

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.

Merrill-approved '58 stories by T Sturgeon, W Tenn & W Tevis

Was it really early July when we last read stories included on Judith Merrill's Honorable Mentions list in 1959's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume?  Merrill's list is alphabetical by author, and in the previous installment of this tour of 1958 SF stories we started the "S"s; today let's forge ahead, finishing the "S"s and taking on the "T"s.

"The Graveyard Reader" by Theodore Sturgeon

Merrill includes two stories by Sturgeon on her Honorable Mentions list for 1958, "A Touch of Strange," which we read back in January, and "The Graveyard Reader," the title story of the Groff Conklin anthology in which it debuted.  I'm reading "The Graveyard Reader" in a scan of that anthology, which has a creepy, even disturbing, Richard Powers cover. 

There are several Peter Hammill lyrics in which Hammill presents the idea of inanimate objects or natural processes like the ocean tide striking the sand on a beach somehow "writing" messages which human beings might be able to read (see "The Emperor in His War Room," "Darkness (11,11)" and "The Wave").  The central gimmick in "The Graveyard Reader" reminded me of this recurring theme in the Van Der Graaf Generator discography.

Our narrator stands before the fresh grave of his wife.  His wife and he had trouble communicating; she refused to vocalize her complaints and desires, I guess expecting her husband to know what to do and say without being told.  It also seems she was unfaithful to him.  She left him one day and three days later turned up dead in a wrecked car with a strange man at the wheel.  The narrator decides it is appropriate to refrain from having anything inscribed on his wife's headstone.

Another man appears.  Our narrator learns that this guy can look at a grave and from various apparently random signs, like the color and shape of vegetation on the grave and the path over the grave traced by insects, learn everything that happened during the deceased's life, even his or her thoughts.  The narrator asks this joker to teach him to read graves, and over the course of a year our narrator becomes a grave reader himself.  Sturgeon's theme is "to know all is to forgive all," and our narrator's ability to learn all about people by reading their graves gives him the life changing fortitude to forgive his wife her trespasses, and forgive himself, and move on to a happier life.  Sturgeon emphasizes that we can all take the healthy course taken by the narrator--gaining peace of mind by forgiving others and ourselves--without engaging in a year-long study of an esoteric pseudo-science by having his main character embrace forgiveness without taking the step of reading his wife's grave, and having a quotidian but sincere inscription engraved on her tombstone.

Thumbs up for "The Graveyard Reader," a well-written piece of work with an interesting argument to make, an argument that has appeal for traditional Christian types as well as progressives who wonder why we even have police and prisons.  Even if you think Sturgeon's attitude is naive and unworkable, he puts it across in a compelling and affecting way in this enjoyable story.

"The Graveyard Reader" has been reprinted many times in Sturgeon collections as well as fantasy and horror anthologies, even though the story is life-affirming rather than horrifying.  The many editions of The Boris Karloff Horror Anthology, I find, have particularly memorable covers.

"Eastward Ho!" by William Tenn 

I avoid the work college professor Philip Klass' published under the name William Tenn because my impression is that he writes satires and my interest in satire has reached a pretty low ebb.  (I elaborate on my attitude towards humor in fiction at the two links that follow.)  Now, it is true that in 2018 I read Tenn's "Project Hush" and had to admit it was pretty good.  However, in 2024 I read Tenn's "Null-P" and it confirmed all my fears about the man's fiction.  That means that today's Tenn story, the third I will have ever read, is a kind of tie-breaker and will likely determine whether or not you ever see Tenn's name here at MPorcius Fictin Log in the future.

"Eastward Ho!" debuted in an anniversary issue of F&SF and has since been reprinted a billion times, in multiple "The Best from F&SF" volumes, in several Tenn collections, and in a stack of anthologies that includes volumes edited by Brian Aldiss, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg (one printing of which reuses a Games Workshop image of Mad-Max/Car Wars-style automobiles) among others.  In "Eastward Ho!" we have a story welcomed and monumentalized by the professional SF community.  I am going to read "Eastward Ho!" in my copy of the Silverberg anthology, Alpha 4, which served up the story to SF readers yet again in 1973 after they had already have a chance to experience it in one of the F&SF "Best Froms," three editions of the Aldiss, and one of the Tenn collections.        

You know those switcheroo stories in which a German U-boat captain finds himself in hell aboard a merchant vessel as it gets torpedoed, or a guy who kills a spider finds himself in a giant spider web, or Wilma goes down to the quarry to operate a dinosaur while Fred dons an apron and does the housework?  Well, here we go again.  In "Eastward Ho!" it is the post-nuclear war future, and Native Americans have better technology than white people (oil lamps and firearms!) and push white people around.

Our protagonist is an ambassador from the impoverished United States of America, which has been reduced in scope by Indian expansion to New England, New York and New Jersey; he is on a mission to the Garden State to negotiate with the Seminole, but upon arrival finds that the Sioux have taken over the area.  The various Indian tribes are seizing land inhabited by the technologically inferior white people at the same time they are aggressively competing with each other, you know, just like the Spanish and British and French fought each other while conquering the New World.  As the story ends it becomes clear that the United States is going to be entirely extinguished very soon by one or multiple Native American empires--our protagonist is probably the highest-ranking official of the US government still alive and not in captivity.  So he takes command of the last vestiges of the US defense apparatus--three ships--and the last free white people in America sail off to colonize Europe; it is funny because in real life white people left Europe to colonize America, and, in the story, white people leave America to colonize Europe!  Get it?  It is the opposite!  Hilarious!

"Eastward Ho!" is a total waste of time.  There is no real plot and very little by way of character, and we can't accept this story as a serious speculation about the future, like we might a story about communists or China conquering the United States.  The backbone and the meat of the story consists entirely in the  switcheroo jokes.  (By the way, if you think the switcheroo technique is a brilliant one, as Robert Silverberg apparently does, you call it "an inversion," as SilverBob does in his intro to "Eastward Ho!" here in Alpha 4.)  Additional switcheroo, er, inverted, elements I haven't already covered include how, while in real life Native Americans are vulnerable to alcoholism, in this story it is white people who can't handle booze--our protagonist's deputy is humiliated by Sioux who give him a bottle of tequila.  The Sioux leaders also say stereotypical stuff that white people in authority might say at the time the story was written, variations on "you are a credit to your race" and "he is a hotheaded young man" and "I judge people as individuals" and so forth.

As for the purpose of the story, I guess it offers self-hating whites an opportunity to do penance in an effort to assuage their liberal guilt, and perhaps enjoyment to lefties of whatever ethnic or racial background who love to see white people humiliated.  Besides the humiliations I have already mentioned, there's a black person in the story who is smarter and more decent than the white characters and condescends to help them, and a white woman who prefers sex with Indians over white men but is kicked to the curb by the Sioux after enjoying her body and consigned to a dreadful life among palefaces.

(If memory serves, Clifford Simak wrote stories in which nuclear war or some other Caucasian misbehavior left Indians (and robots and animals) in charge of the world, but Simak's stories were heartfelt and sincere, not absurdist jokes, so had more value than this junk.  There's also Michael Moorcock's Oswald Bastable novels in which Chinese people or Africans defeat Europeans and Americans, Warlord of the Air and The Land Leviathan, which similarly serve as leftist revenge fantasies but are also serviceable adventure stories.)

"Far From Home" by Walter Tevis

Not long ago we read three disappointing stories from the December 1958 issue of F&SF.  Well, Walter Tevis had a story in that issue that caught Judith Merrill's eye, so let's take a stab at it.  I don't think I have read anything before by Tevis, a successful author several of whose works, both mainstream and SF, were adapted for the silver screen and the idiot box.

"Far From Home" is a well-written trifle, just three pages.  I guess we can recommend it.  Maybe it is meant to illustrate the contrast between youth and old age, and perhaps we should see it as an expression of distaste for life in the American interior away from the coasts.

An old guy who works as a janitor at a public pool in some Arizona town comes to work in the morning to discover a huge blue whale in the pool.  There's a lot about how this guy acts the way he does because he is old, and also some stuff about how he is reminded of the excitement he enjoyed as a child when he saw the ocean while on a trip to San Francisco.  

Hanging around the pool is a little boy with a paper bag.  After being humiliated by the whale, which splashes water on him, the janitor runs for help from the town government, and then it is revealed that the boy has a wee little leprechaun in his bag--the appearance of the whale must be one of his three wishes.  When the janitor returns the whale and the boy are gone and I guess we are expected to believe the boy has left the desert for some more salubrious locale, it having been implied that life in Arizona is not good.

I have to admit the revelation that a leprechaun and magical wishes explained the surreal circumstances encountered by the janitor was a little disappointing--I expected there to be no explanation, or for the explanation to be less prosaic.  Still, Tevis succeeds in producing a sort of sense of wonder as well as recognizable portraits of people stuck in a boring place who have either memories or hopes of life in a more interesting, more vibrant, place.

"Far From Home" has been reprinted many times in anthologies and Tevis collections, and is even the title story of one such collection.

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Sometimes Merrill on her Honorable Mentions list recommends stories that received little notice and have been all but forgotten, or stories that lie on the periphery of the porous SF envelope.  But today's three stories not only represent Merrill's own taste but a consensus among the professional SF class.  And we don't have to wonder why Merrill and her fellow anthologists liked them; the Sturgeon and Tevis stories are skillfully written and full of real human psychology and real human feeling, while the Tenn is outlandish fan service for pinkos, an influential demographic among SF professionals as they are seemingly everywhere.

Next time, science fiction from 1980, the year your humble blogger turned 11 years of age.  

F&SF, Dec 58: A Budrys, A Boucher, & F Leiber

Mel Hunter

Let's read three stories from the December 1958 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, an issue edited by Robert P. Mills.  This ish has a fun damsel-in-distress cover by Emsh, Anthony Boucher's mixed review of Theodore Sturgeon's novel The Cosmic Rape and his enthusiastic praise for both Sturgeon's collection A Touch of Strange and for a publication edited by Karen Anderson that celebrates the recently dead Henry Kuttner, Henry Kuttner: A Memorial Symposium.  (In January of this year I wrote about A Touch of Strange myself across three blog posts, one, two, three.)  On the back cover is an ad for a print of a painting by Mel Hunter three feet wide depicting a lunar crater--just send 75 cents to Geek Systems, Inc. in New York City.

Lots of valuable material, but our main interest is the fiction, so on to stories by Algis Budrys, Boucher, and Fritz Leiber.  I almost read the Cornell Woolrich contribution, but then realized it is not a story but a play, and bailed.  

"The Eye and the Lightning" by Algis Budrys (1958)

It kind of looks like "The Eye and the Lightning" was a flash in the pan, promoted on the cover of this issue of F&SF but never reprinted in a book, just in a French magazine and a British magazine.

"The Eye and the Lightning" is a pretty confusing and somewhat convoluted story, all the basic elements of which strain the reader's credulity, and perhaps must be interpreted as merely metaphorical or allegorical; it is easy to see why it was not popular.

It is the bizarre super-individualistic, super-suspicious future!  Everybody lives alone in an underground bunker he builds for himself, the location of which he keeps hidden.  Everybody has a homemade high tech "rig" that consists of a scanner, a teleporter, and a burner.  The rig can home in on and provide a televised view of places and people it is keyed to--you key your scanner to a location by taking a bit of the soil of the place and putting it in the scanner, or key it to a person by securing a lock of his hair or a fragment of his clothes or whatever.  I guess this is like the way you get a bloodhound on the trail by letting it sniff a guy's clothes or how you make a voodoo doll using a lock of your enemy's hair or his fingernail paring.  Once the scanner is keyed to a location you can teleport to that place as well as observe it, and teleport back home from that spot.  And once your rig is keyed to a person you can watch that person and kill him with the burner.  

People need to go out and buy stuff, like replacement parts for their scanner rigs, so they regularly teleport to towns to buy and sell.  In town, everybody wears elaborate disguises--concealing masks, padded suits meant to obscure your body weight and shape, and so forth, and people even put on fake voices--I guess it is implied that the scanners can home in on the timbre of a voice and even your personality.

Such is the background.  As for the main character, we meet a guy who, in this paranoid world in which most people spend every waking moment working on their rigs and disguises to ensure their security, is remarkably chill, spending his time making castles out of playing cards and carving elaborate marionettes and stage sets for them.  Again and again Budrys tells us this guy doesn't understand why all other people are so scared and suspicious and waste their time spying on others and building defenses against others.  We are also privy to his metaphorical dreams.

As for the plot, our protagonist teleports out to buy more parts for his rig, even though he has the bare minimum of a rig.  He is confronted by angry mobs and suspicious individuals--the already crazy world is getting crazier because of rumors that somebody has developed an even more advanced rig, one that can detect when another rig is watching you.  Our guy manages to escape various episodes of danger by using different types of grenades and teleporting.  In the course of the day's adventures he develops relationships with a young male electronics expert and an attractive young woman and the three end up in the protagonist's bunker.  The three are very suspicious of each other, and the woman tries to use her sexual attractiveness to get in good with one and then the other of the men, as she thinks one of them has one of the new advanced rigs and is thus able to protect her.  At least I think that is what is going on.

In the end it turns out that both of the male characters have innovative rigs, but the protagonist's is by far the better.  Our twist ending is that the chill protagonist has a split personality--he can be chill because his other personality is the world's top electronics expert and has devised the best rig in the world, even though his chill personality thinks it is the lamest rig in the world.  The story ends on a happy note--our hero is going to spread the innovations of his advanced rig around the world, with the result that everybody will meet on a plane of equality and people will be less suspicious and build friendships and communities again.  Again, that is what I think is what is going on, though I am not quite sure.  As the world gets safer, our hero can spend less time as his defensive personality and more time as his chill personality until his defensive personality eventually expires.

I had trouble wrapping my head around how the rigs work and why people were acting the way they were and how such a society could develop and maintain itself; the hard science, sociology and psychology of "The Eye and the Lightning" seem to have been arbitrarily and unconvincingly thrown  together by Budrys merely to allow him to make some kind of metaphorical point.  What might that point be?  That we all desire friends and love and recognize that a community can accomplish things that isolated individuals cannot, but at the same time we all fear others because other people can break our hearts if we open them and physically kill us if we let our guard down in proximity to them?  I also am considering if this story is influenced by sad realities made obvious by World War and Cold War conditions--liberal polities like the United States that value freedom and the rule of law may have to develop split personalities to survive in the same world as such monstrous polities as those that made up the Berlin-Rome-Tokyo Axis and the Warsaw Pact, may need a second personality devoted to defense and able to engage in ruthless behavior, a second personality that the primary, liberal, personality barely even knows about.  If we extend that metaphor, is Budrys suggesting that if the United States develops a super defense we should share it with our rivals?  Are the conventional rigs like nuclear missiles and the new rigs like an anti-missile system?  Or maybe the rigs are like a conventional army and the advanced rigs are like nuclear weapons, which put competitors on an equal footing?

This story is not entertaining enough, and its philosophy not lucid enough, for me to endorse, but it isn't terrible, so maybe people who like a puzzle will enjoy it?  I'll call it acceptable.

Oh la la!

"The Pink Caterpillar" by Anthony Boucher (1945)

This story first appeared in an issue of the magazine Adventure and was reprinted by Donald Wollheim in the seventeenth issue of Avon Fantasy Reader in 1951.  It would go on to be included in Boucher collections and the David Alexander anthology Tales for the Rainy Night.

Like Budrys' story, Boucher's "The Pink Caterpillar" is sort of convoluted and has a central gimmick that doesn't make sense, or at least one which I can't understand.  The tale takes the form of a detective story, and is apparently one of a series of novels and stories starring a red-headed Irish-American gumshoe who here in "The Pink Caterpillar" is called Fergus O'Brien but who in other tales apparently bears the name "Fergus O'Breen."

Note that I am reading this 1958 version of the story, which is different in at least one way from the 1945 version--in the '45 version, on the first page, Hitler is mentioned in passing, and, in the '58 version, Khrushchev's name has been substituted for Der Fuhrer's.

O'Brien is hanging around with his fellow servicemen.  Our narrator is some other Navy man, but O'Brien's dialogue takes up most of the text of the story.  The topic of native witch doctors comes up, in particular their power to snatch one item from 100 years in the future and bring it to the present.  O'Brien contributes a story that illustrates the use of this power, a case he dealt with in Mexico before he joined the Navy when he was a detective working for an insurance company.

O'Brien was sent to Mexico by the insurance company to investigate the death of a gringo whose sister sought the insurance money; the company was suspicious because some evidence had arisen that the deceased was referred to by Mexicans with the title of "Dr." even though he was not in fact a doctor.  O'Brien describes all kinds of clues and interviews with people he conducted, giving his comrades (and I guess readers) a chance to solve the case themselves.  In the end the story's outlandish and macabre gimmick is revealed to us.  

The gringo had an enemy.  Gringo got a witch doctor to summon from 100 years in the future the skeleton of the enemy.  Somehow, this meant that the enemy no longer existed in this time, I guess because two of any one item cannot exist in the same time.  Should the skeleton be destroyed, the enemy would reappear.  So, the gringo took care to preserve the skeleton.  (He convinced the Mexicans he lived among that he was a doctor to explain why he had a skeleton mounted in his house.)  This guy was not as careful about his skeleton as I would have been, for example, letting the cleaning woman near enough to the skeleton that she knocked one of its fingers off.  (My wife would like to hire some stranger to come into our house to clean, but I flatly refuse, positive such a person would break one of the Rookwood vases or knock over one of the Art Deco statues.)  The enemy's finger, fully fleshed, thus appeared and crawled around, menacing the gringo.  (This is the pink caterpillar of the title.)  You'd think after this mishap that the gringo would really take care of this skeleton, but somehow he permitted some high-spirited young American engineers working for the local mining company to steal the skeleton on Halloween and throw the skeleton on a bonfire.  As a result, the enemy reappeared in toto  and came after the gringo, who died of a heart attack upon seeing his foe.

"The Pink Caterpillar" moves along at a decent clip and the various horror images in the story are good, but Boucher has to come up with so many absurd and contrived situations to provide a basis for those images that the story's plot is a ridiculous mess.  And I'm not a fan of stories that consist of "Here's a bunch of clues, reader, try to figure this out--ha ha, the answer is something totally impossible that doesn't make sense, you lose."  I guess I'm issuing another rueful "acceptable " grade. 

"Little Old Miss Macbeth" by Fritz Leiber (1958)

Mills, in his introduction to "Little Old Miss Macbeth," which he calls "a nocturne," promotes Leiber's earlier F&SF contributions "The Big Trek" (which I feel like I've read, but I guess that was before I started this blog) and "A Deskful of Girls" (which I read in 2024), and suggests Leiber is a "vividly visual" writer and all three of these stories have "distinctively evoked" and unforgettable images.  Well, let's see.

Actually, images are all that "Little Old Miss Macbeth" has going for it--besides verbose descriptions of surreal images, all we get are a lame joke and a lame surprise ending.  An old woman gets out of bed, sleep walks through a dark deserted city full of strange (but harmless) mutants and broken windows, to some other building where she silences a leaky faucet, then walks back home.  The surprise ending is the revelation that, after some kind of apocalyptic war, there are so few people alive that each person can have an entire ruined city to him- or herself.  

Gotta give this waste of time a thumbs down.  SF pros seem to love this sterile literary exercise, however.  (At MPorcius Fiction Log, we go against the grain!)  Rod Serling chose it for Rod Serling's Other Worlds, which bears the tag line "Fourteen amazing tales of galactic terror and suspense," even though "Little Old Miss Macbeth" features no terror or suspense.  It also appears in Marvin Kaye's Witches and Warlocks: Tales of Black Magic Old and New even though it is not about black magic and Stefan Dziemianowicz, Martin H. Greenberg and Robert Weinberg's 100 Twisted Little Tales of Torment even though it is not about torment.  You can perhaps find "Little Old Miss Macbeth" most readily in the oft-reprinted The Best of Fritz Leiber, even though...well, you get the picture.

[UPDATE OCTOBER 28, 2025: Prompted by a commentor, I talk more about "Little Old Miss Macbeth" below in the comments; specifically, what it might have to do with Shakespeare's famous play.]

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Ouch, three stories I cannot recommend.  Leiber's is probably the most successful in terms of the author achieving his goals--it has no blunders, and I am rejecting it because I am not an admirer of the goals Leiber set himself with the story.  I can get on board with what Budrys and Boucher are trying to do with their stories, but I think they pursue their goals in an unsatisfactory fashion, their plots convoluted and their science-fictional and supernatural devices contrived and unconvincing.  

Too bad!