Finishing off Tomorrow: Neil Shapiro, Andrew Offutt, and Greg Bear

Alright, it's the final installment of our look at 1975's Tomorrow, a hardcover anthology of brand new science fiction stories that was edited by controversial anthologist Roger Elwood and was never printed in paperback.  Three stories remain, Neil Shapiro's "Journey of the Soul," Andrew J. Offutt's "Enchante," and Greg Bear's "Perihesperon."

"Journey of the Soul" by Neil Shapiro

I'm always a little surprised that the general consensus favors Disney's 1982 Tron over 1979's The Black Hole.  I may be the only person that finds Tron a snooze and The Black Hole compelling, but it seems to me that The Black Hole is obviously better. Tron has a lame frame story about office politics, a pedestrian quest plot and totally forgettable characters and actors; The Black Hole is about explorers, haunted houses, zombies, mad scientists, and gun fights (i. e., stuff that is awesome) and features actors everybody loves like Roddy McDowell, Ernest Borgnine and Anthony Perkins.  People make a big deal out of the graphic design of Tron, but to me all that glowing shit is just a gimmick; the robots and space ships in The Black Hole are much more interesting. Now, maybe people think the fact that at the end of The Black Hole the good characters go to Heaven and the evil characters go to Hell is stupid, and maybe they are right, but at least it is interesting and a surprise the first time you see it--in the beginning of Tron people magically go inside a computer to find a magical land inhabited by tiny little people, which is just as stupid and is totally boring.

I rationalize bringing up this pet peeve of mine with the excuse that Neil Shapiro's "Journey of the Soul" is all about people who go into a black hole.  Empress Betty Grey has been deposed by democratic revolutionaries, and they sentence her to exile and send her into a black hole.  (The narrator expresses contempt for democracy and assures us Betty Grey was a benevolent dictator.)  On the other side of the black hole she finds a new universe, devised by fellow human Charon, a hermit who moved into the black hole over five hundred years ago.  The laws of physics are different in this universe--for example, space is not a black airless vacuum, but a phantasmagoria of different colored clouds and mists, a primordial chaos which Charon (and soon the deposed Empress) can form into whatever he likes through force of will.  He has built a city, he has created friends and advisers, he can fly, he can breathe vacuum, etc.

What he can't do is create life, and so he is lonely, despite his artificial friends and advisers, and so he falls in love with Betty Grey.  Betty Grey just wants to get back to our universe and get her ass back on her throne, of course.  But then it is explained to her that there is no way to get back to her Empire (if you go back through the black hole you reappear at a random point in our universe) so she embraces a new relationship with Charon.

This story feels long (it takes up 50 pages) and is boring.  There are boring (and unconvincing) technical explanations of what a black hole is and how people can be crushed while passing through one but come out alive on the other side, boring conversations explaining the nature of the malleable universe on the Charon side of the black hole, and boring scenes in which an artificial person explains Charon's psyche to Betty Grey.  The first page has a sarcastic, iconoclastic tone, but that tone is dropped and the rest of the story is straightforward.  Betty Grey's evolution from Charon hater to Charon lover doesn't feel real and doesn't have any emotional resonance, it just happens.  

Hubba hubba!

Gotta give "Journey of the Soul" a negative vote.

In this series of blog posts I have been talking a little bit about the criticisms Roger Elwood has received for his anthologies, which some have claimed flooded the market and made anthologies by other editors less salable, and which are sometimes said to be full of weak authors who published little.  Shapiro probably qualifies as one of these lesser authors.  isfdb lists only two novels by him (one of them, Mind Call, has a striking cover that suggests it is a sex novel) and ten short stories, though several of the stories appeared in F&SF, which I believe is one of the more prestigious SF magazines.

"Enchante" by Andrew Offutt

This five-page story is overwritten, full of fancy adjectives and lots and lots of metaphors.  Offutt crams two "undead fingers" metaphors into the very first paragraph, and adds a third "living dead" metaphor for good measure:

I guess this is intentional, an attempt to emulate or caricature a florid fairy tale.

A wizard turns a handsome prince into a frog, telling him that he will be returned to human form should a fair maiden kiss him.  The twist ending, which I predicted, comes when he finally meets a perfectly beautiful maiden and she eagerly kisses him ("'What a perfect frog,' she breathed"): as he is returned to human form she is transformed back into the frog she once was before the wizard got to her, and both are heartbroken.

Acceptable.  In the last line, the moral, Offutt writes, "...true beauty and true perfection are not for men, for they are the work only of Allah, and sorcerers, and artists," a reminder of Offutt's interest in Islam, which we have detected in other of his productions, like King Dragon.

(It is hard not to suspect some link between Offutt's interest in Islam and both his apparent sexual interests--he wrote lots of pornography about women in bondage or under torture--and his apparent attitude about gender roles, which we noticed in his L. Sprague de Camp-style planetary romance, Messenger of Zhuvastou.)

"Perihesperon" by Greg Bear

"Perihesperon" has the honor of being the only story in Tomorrow to have been reprinted in English.  It would appear in 2002's The Collected Stories of Greg Bear, and isfdb is telling me a revised version was included in 1992's British collection The Venging.  Was the one in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear the revised or original version?  I cannot be sure.  I have only read one other story by Bear, "Webster," though for years I mixed him up with Gregory Benford and thought of In the Ocean of Night whenever I saw his name.

Karen is a teenaged girl on an interstellar passenger ship.  She wakes up to discover the ship has been critically damaged and she is the only survivor.  An old man appears who explains that he came in his own one-man ship to help when he saw a meteor hit Karen's vessel, but Bear provides clues, or red herrings, that lead us readers to suspect he may actually be some kind of space pirate.  Whether he is innocent or some kind of criminal, he has but days to live because, as he was struck by a sudden flux of radiation from the liner's damaged engine struck him, wrecking his ship and his internal organs.  Karen is also doomed, as the liner is in an orbit around planet Hesperus that will repeatedly take it through a cluster of asteroids ("moonlets") and is bound to hit one before help arrives.

I guess the meat of the story is how these two, an old man who (according to his claims, at least) has a full life of adventures behind him and a girl who hasn't really lived yet, face death.

This story is OK, an attempt to marry hard SF (airlocks, force fields, radiation, space suits, calculating orbits) with (the author hopes profound) reflections on life and death. It's not great, but not objectionable.  I'm curious what we are supposed to think about the old man (I can't help but think he possibly torpedoed the liner to loot it) and wonder if the revision clarifies his role and responsibility.

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So, we bid adieu to Tomorrow.  It may not be great, but by no means is it terrible; fans of J. Hunter Holly and Sonya Dorman will perhaps want it so they have access to a solid entry in those women's relatively small bodies of work.  The anthology is perhaps noteworthy for its level of diversity, with a hard SF story, a fairy tale, adventure-type stories, a New Wave story, jokey stories, stories that try to pull your heart strings, etc.  I certainly don't regret spending five bucks on Tomorrow, and I don't think it reflects poorly on Elwood.

Final Alternities: 1974 stories by Greg Bear, Vonda McIntyre, E. Michael Blake, Duane Ackerson, and Lee Saye

To me, the biggest name in Alternities is Barry Malzberg.  (Ed Bryant was also a draw.)  But by an objective measure, like sales, Greg Bear and Vonda McIntyre are probably bigger names to the SF world at large than our pal Barry.  Can either Bear or McIntyre produce a story that will prove 1974's Alternities is something more than a collection of odd trivialities and childish dick jokes that is perfectly calibrated to offend prudes, feminists and the LGBT crowd?

"Webster" by Greg Bear

I haven't read anything by prolific author Bear, but today that Bearless period ends, as we examine "Webster."  "Webster" was never picked up by any other anthologies, but it was included in several collections of Bear's work.

Bear immediately tries to get me on his side by mentioning Roy Chapman Andrews in the first paragraph of this story.  One of my very first book-related memories is of reading In the Days of the Dinosaurs with Nana, my maternal grandmother.  This story actually has little if anything to do with Andrews or dinosaurs, though the reference to Andrews' pioneering discovery of dinosaur eggs does foreshadow a strange birth and discovery in the story.

Regina Abigail Costes is a fifty-year-old virgin living in a small apartment, lonely and horny, her only companions her books, most prominent of which are a Bible and a dictionary. She dreams of having a man, and hits upon the idea of magically conjuring forth a man from the dictionary! Tall and handsome, the man, whom she names Webster ("Johnson" would have been funnier, but maybe wouldn't work in the story's 20th-century American context) has sex with "Abbie." The next morning she bursts out onto the street and says "I know...what all you other women know."  The clouds and the sky tell her "Breathe deeply.  You're part of the world now. The real world." (Bear really goes in for this sort of overwritten romanticism.)  Apparently Abbie (and maybe even Bear?) hasn't heard that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and thinks a woman is not complete without a sexual relationship with a man.

Webster can't go outside, doesn't eat, and he and Abbie have nothing to talk about. Their relationship pales after a few weeks, Abbie even buying a gun, wondering if Webster would survive being shot. For his part, Webster acquires a dictionary of his own, likely to create a woman with whom he has something in common. In the end of the story, more or less by mutual consent, Webster is dispelled and Abbie heads to the bookstore, I guess to get a different book to conjure a different man?  The last line of the story is "She had her choice now."  This ending is a bit confusing to me; didn't she just learn that love with a golem or simulacrum or whatever word we want to use was impossible, that such relationships are unsatisfying? Let's be optimistic and believe she is going to the bookstore to try to date up one of the customers or clerks, not get material needed to conjure up Mr. Darcy or Heathcliff or Odysseus.

I think the plot and themes here are good, but Bear's style, especially at the start of the story, is long winded, overwrought, and heavy-handed.  Still, I'll judge this one marginally recommendable.

"Recourse, Inc." by Vonda N. McIntyre

In 2014 I read McIntyre's "Only at Night" and thought it quite good, and "Elfleda" and thought it just OK.  Let's see what we make of this one, which would reappear in the 1979 collection, Fireflood and Other Stories.

"Recourse, Inc." tells a story with a series of documents, first an advertisement, then a bunch of letters and telegrams.  A man with psychological problems was told by his therapist to start using credit cards in order to gain confidence(!)  One of the banks whose card he has is overcharging him, either due to computer error or criminal intent, sending threatening collection letters for huge amounts.  Recourse, Inc. is a sort of A-Team of people on the edge of the law (former green terrorists, it is implied) that comes to the aid of those harried by collection agencies and fraudulent businesses.  Through correspondence we follow their efforts to get the disturbed man restitution and punish the bank; they try legal means, contacting the government (North America in the story's setting appears to consist of numerous largely autonomous states under a relatively weak federal government), computer hacking (is this 1974 reference a pioneering depiction of attacking a computer over the phone lines?), and eventually resort to breaking and entering.          

One of the story's themes, I think, is the idea that late-20th-century (North) American society, which seems so stable compared to societies of the past and of other regions of the world, is in fact resting on a shaky foundation.  If the computers all go kablooey, or all the oil is suddenly eaten by bacteria--and in this story such things seem very possible--we are in serious trouble!  In the world of "Resource, Inc." governments and other people and institutions with authority or power, including scientists, psychologists, and businesses, are incompetent and/or untrustworthy.

I don't like the plot any more than the plot of Bear's story, but McIntyre's execution is much better; the story is economical, with each sentence adding to the story, each sentence in the voice of a character.  There is no fat, no fluff.  "Recourse, Inc." is a strong contender for the title of "Best Story in Alternities."

"The Legend of Lonnie and the Seven-Ten Split" by E. Michael Blake

True story: Once the academic department where I worked in Manhattan took some of the public monies (meant to finance public policy research) with which we were entrusted and used them to go bowling.  This is called "a team-building exercise." None of us was a regular bowler, and so, by employing the tactic of violently hurling the ball down the lane with all the strength I could muster, I won the title of best bowler in our office of depressed slackers, arrogant hipsters, and committed bolshevists.

Blake has 11 fiction credits at ISFDB and a brief look at his livejournal page suggests his SF-related work is meant to be funny and includes cartoons and skits.

Twenty-year-old Lonnie is the best bowler in the overcrowded America of the future, where almost every square mile is covered in "Urban Complexes."  Except for the five kilometers around Las Vegas (known as "LaVe"), a city of sinful pleasure operated by the "Satan-Mephistopheles-Diablo Holding Company."  Most who enter LaVe do not return, but those who do escape become legends, and Lonnie seeks to become just such a legend.

This is one of many stories about making a deal with the Devil and/or competing with the Devil, like in that 1979 song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."  Instead of competing in a violin competition, Lonnie bowls against the Devil.  Lonnie is an expert practical physicist (Blake edited Nuclear News and includes lots of references and jokes about such topics as probability curves, electrons, and Karl Schwartzchild), able to bowl a strike without fail after learning the nooks and crannies of an alley. Lonnie wins his bet with the Devil, and is even clever enough to escape the city when the Devil tries to badger him into joining up with Satan-Mephistopheles-Diablo Holding Company; the SMD offers high salaries and easy women, but Lonnie has seen how working at such a firm can destroy a man's body and soul.

This story actually fits the old fashioned SF model of a guy succeeding because he is clever and cunning and knows all kinds of hard science and engineering jazz.  It also fits right in in Alternities with its juvenile sex joke--the guy who runs the bowling alley in LaVe bears a curse which limits his sexual activities to intercourse with the finger holes of bowling balls, and poor Lonnie has to witness just such a performance.

Mildly entertaining.  Blake has no collections listed at isfdb, and "The Legend of Lonnie and the Seven-Ten Split" never appeared elsewhere, though personally I think it would be quite suitable for an anthology of 20th-century stories about the Devil, or of SF/F stories about sports.  I assume there must have there been such anthologies. 

"Sign at the End of the Universe" by Duane Ackerson

Anything I write about this story will be longer than the story itself:

Maybe this story is about how arbitrary our points of reference and points of view are.  Or maybe the point of the story is that our world, so full of crime and war and heartbreak, is the exact opposite of what it should be.

A silly and gimmicky piece, but if we choose to judge the stories in Alternities on an efficiency basis, this one isn't bad.  Ackerson has only six fiction credits at isfdb, but many poetry credits.

"No Room for the Wanderer" by Lee Saye

Saye has four stories listed at isfdb.

I like art, and I like fiction, and I like poetry, but the self-importance and pretension of some creative people can really make me roll my eyes. "Art is work" and "Art is not a luxury" and that sort of thing. As if life for smart educated people wasn't already easy enough in our welfare state society in which the taxpayers are subsidizing the library, the museum, the opera, the university, et al, creative types turn around and tell the farmers, truck drivers, mechanics, electricians, plumbers and police officers that keep our society from collapsing into starvation and mass violence that those productive types couldn't survive without the artistes' daubs and scribbles--the parasite mistaking itself for the host!

Saye's story is about a poet with a degree in English literature who seeks to volunteer for a place on a starship headed for a new colony on an alien planet. When he is told that the colony is only accepting people with technical or scientific skills, or tourists who can pay their own way ("We're starting a whole new civilization out there and we need mechanics and engineers.  I'm sorry."), the poet says "You're building a whole new civilization with technology, but there's no room for the poet.  I'm sorry for your civilization."  This jackass looks down on any civilization that lacks his own divine presence!

Besides the obvious fact that it makes sense for pioneers in a hostile wilderness to have technical skills and not waste resources shipping an unproductive person across a bazillion miles of space, it is ridiculous to think that people with technical training cannot create a vibrant and satisfying artistic and literary culture. Lots of artists and writers, particularly in the SF field, have had science or engineering degrees, and/or held real 9 to 5 jobs.

I'm not sure if the protagonist of "No Room for the Wanderer" is expressing the author's own view, or if we are supposed to think the poet is being absurd. Either way, this story is well-written and thought provoking, and I'm giving it a passing grade.

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It is with some surprise that I report that all five of these stories from Alternities are worthwhile.  Our first two expeditions among its pages were a bit rocky, but today's tales raise the average of the volume to an acceptable level.  Gerrold and Goldin didn't sell us a pig in a poke after all.