Finishing up Off Center by Damon Knight: "Second-Class Citizen" & "God's Nose"

Let's finish up Damon Knight's 1965 collection Off Center.  As you may recall, I own the 1973 Award paperback edition, complete with its in-need-of-copyediting back cover.

"Second-Class Citizen" (1963)

This is what I call a switcheroo story.  In the old EC comics I seem to recall there being a surfeit of stories in which a guy would swat a fly and then be killed by a giant fly, or go to a planet to catch aliens for a zoo and instead be captured and put in a zoo.  On TV's "The Twilight Zone" I seem to recall an episode in which a Nazi death camp commander, in a dream, is tortured the way he tortured Jews, and an episode in which a U-boat captain who sank an Allied passenger ship is doomed in Hell to be a passenger on just such a ship as it suffers just such a fate.  These kinds of stories are so common that professional writers must have a name for them, a better one than "switcheroo story."

Anyway, I find these kinds of stories to be too simple, too obvious, and in some cases uncomfortably self righteous or disturbingly eager to appeal to the audience's lust for revenge. And a story in which God or "the Universe" metes out "justice" or achieves revenge lacks the excitement and tension of a story in which a human being does so. If a person seeks revenge, he has to face practical obstacles (maybe the target of his vengeance will elude him, or outfight him) and moral issues (is it ever just to seek revenge? has he chosen the appropriate target for revenge? will innocent bystanders be harmed in the fracas? by seeking revenge is the avenger becoming as evil as his quarry?)  But when God or the Universe is the one seeking vengeance there are none of these interesting issues, because God doesn't make mistakes or fail in His purpose.

"Second-Class Citizen," which first saw light in Worlds of If, is about a scientist who is training dolphins to integrate into human society.  He has taught a dolphin to speak a just barely discernible English, and even built the cetacean a sort of robot body with wheels and pincer arms that the dolphin can manipulate with its flippers.  Bizarrely, he is training the dolphin to act as a lab assistant, making it use its clumsy robot arms to manipulate beakers and test tubes.  (Maybe grad students in this alternate universe have unionized?)

I wonder about the historical significance of this story; there are other SF stories that feature "uplifted" dolphins--could this be the first?  Also, would Theodore Sturgeon consider "Second-Class Citizen" to be one of those "anti-science" science fiction stories he was griping about in "The Wages of Synergy"?

Some tourists visit the lab, and a pretty girl (where would we be without the wisdom of pretty girls?) tells the scientist that it is wrong for him to try to get a dolphin to live a human's life.  Then a world war breaks out, making the surface practically unlivable. The scientist manages to escape to a domed lab on the ocean floor, where he can live out his days alone, but he'll have to catch his own food.  He realizes that--oh! the irony!--now his dolphin assistant will be teaching him how to live as a dolphin, instead of him teaching the dolphin how to live as a human.

Lame.

"God's Nose" (1964)

This one is less than three pages long, a pun story inspired by Beckett plays.  (Some of my worst New York experiences have been sitting through Off-Off-Broadway plays inspired by Beckett.)  It first appeared in Rogue, along with pictures of Sophia Loren I can't seem to find online anywhere (but check out these) and sexist cartoons by Syd Hoff you can see here.  (Rogue provided employment and exposure to many SF writers, not just Knight.)

A woman (described as a "Zen Catholic") and the narrator sit on the floor of a room with no furniture.  They await her boyfriend.  She theorizes about God's nose: It must be perfectly formed and infinite in size.  Perhaps the stars are things ejected from God's nose when He sneezed?  Then her boyfriend, whom she introduces as Godfrey, shows up, and the narrator notices that Godfrey has a nose much larger than the average. The end.

Zero divine nasal ejecta out of five.

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These feel like filler; I'll try not to give them undue weight when considering Knight's career as a whole.    

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What's that?  You're curious about what other titles were available in the Award Books science fiction line in 1973?  MPorcius Fiction Blog is at your service!  After the stories in my copy of Off Center (and before the three pages of ads for books on the paranormal) there are two pages of ads for SF paperbacks; these volumes, representing "MIND-SHATTERING SCIENCE FICTION at its very best!" feature genre literature legends Robert Bloch and Robert Silverberg, and a host of other "masters."  Check out the scan below!

   

Serpent Catch by Dave Wolverton

"Tull, I know you believe that we will sell ourselves to the humans, and this bothers you.  But my father is a Spirit Walker.  Someday, he says, we shall be their teachers.  We shall overthrow the Slave Lords."

After graduating from Rutgers University, and before moving to New York, I spent nearly three years working at a bookstore in Northern New Jersey for minimum wage. During this period of my life I read mostly books I thought would prepare me for the study of 18th century British history, but I did read some science fiction novels I borrowed from local libraries.  The SF book that most impressed me during this time was Dave Wolverton's On My Way to Paradise.  I then read Wolverton's Serpent Catch and its sequel Path of the Hero.  Since moving to the Mid West I have purchased all three at used bookstores.  I can still recall quite a bit about On My Way to Paradise, so a few days ago I decided to reread Serpent Catch, curious because I could remember very little about it.

Googling around a little indicates that last year Wolverton released revised or reworked versions of Serpent Catch and Path of the Hero, but I am reading the Bantam Spectra paperbacks from the early 1990s.  Serpent Catch was published in 1991, and has a fun map and illustrations by Derek Hegstead, including silhouettes on the first page of each chapter.

Serpent Catch is set in the distant future on Anee, a moon 2,000 light years from Earth.  Over a thousand years before the novel starts, Earth scientists employed genetic engineering to recreate dinosaurs, mastodons, Neanderthals, and other prehistoric creatures, and populated Anee with them.  When hostile aliens destroyed all the Earth's space craft, humans had to hide on the surface of Anee and interact with their creations. Some humans allied with the Neanderthals, but others enslaved them and built a world-spanning slave empire.

Slavery is a major theme of the novel

Anee, full of prehistoric beasts, primitive tribes, genetically engineered monsters, and almost-forgotten technological cities and artifacts, is a brilliant setting for an adventure story.  And Serpent Catch does follow the format of a traditional adventure story, in which the world is going through major changes (for the worse), and a misfit who has some sort of special skill or attribute turns out to be the chosen one who must go on a quest to counteract these changes and save his society.  The human and Neanderthal town of Smilodon Bay is in trouble, because the sea serpents, who were designed by the scientists centuries ago to keep the rapacious Mesozoic animals from swimming from their continent to the Cenozoic continent where Smilodon Bay resides, are dying out.  If plesiosaurs and dinosaurs can swim to Smilodon Bay they will ruin the local ecosphere and hence the fishing-based economy, and leave the town vulnerable to the slavers who control most of the continent.  Our hero is Tull, who is half human and half Neanderthal and has had a difficult home life, and long been regarded by the people of the town as "a man without a people."  A Neanderthal mystic (a "Spirit Walker") declares that only Tull can travel into the evil land of the slavers to capture baby sea serpents to bring back to Smilodon Bay, so off Tull goes with a motley assortment of human, Neanderthal, and superhuman friends.

Superhuman?  Yes; a small number of humans on the moon still have artificial genetic traits possessed by the spacefaring Earthlings who originally terraformed Anee.  One minor human character, a merchant, can do complex math in his head instantly; this skill allows him to predict the changes in Anee's apparently erratic tides so that his ships can cross the seas more safely and swiftly than his rivals.  A major human character has blue skin, is almost seven feet tall, and has lived for centuries, thanks to his access to advanced technologies.  He has traveled the moon for ages, trying to enforce laws against importing dinosaurs to the Cenozoic continent and against slavery, and to prepare the people of Anee for an eventual return to space.

Blue man says pet stegosaurus is a no-no

In a lot of SF books the author will express his displeasure with humanity by contrasting humans with some nonhuman race, aliens or elves or whoever.  There is also a literary tradition of using "noble savages," American Indians for example, as foils for Europeans/whites/Westerners, in an effort to show how selfish, greedy, and indifferent to the environment "modern" people are.  In Serpent Catch, the Neanderthals (who call themselves "the Pwi") play this role.  While humans are ambitious and aggressive, individualistic and cruel, the Neanderthals are always smiling, always expressing affection for each other, live as one with the environment and for their families and communities. Here's a sample from page 46 of this 411 page novel:

Years ago, he'd realized that humans always seem to tell stories of conquest, of men who bulldog mammoths into the ground and slaughter each other in battle, but the Pwi always seemed to tell stories about reconciliation.  

There is quite a bit of sex in Serpent Catch, and we learn that the Pwi are monogamous and marry for life; Neanderthal widows and widowers generally die of grief soon after the demise of their spouses.  The humans in the book are all adulterers who crave rough sex (the Pwi like tender sex.) The Neanderthal families are all models of amity and devotion, while the human families are dysfunctional, either indifferent or brutal.

I often find this sort of thing hard to take, but Wolverton doesn't push it too far; Serpent Catch isn't a propaganda piece or a broad satire, but an epic quest story with three-dimensional characters.  The Neanderthal and human characters all feel real and the focus is on the adventure elements and on Tull's growth as a person, how he learns about his world and himself, and his place in that world.  By the end of the novel Tull is fully integrated into Pwi society, with a loving Pwi wife (though on his journey he had a variety of erotic encounters with females human and non-human) and Smilodon Bay has a new batch of sea serpents.  However, Tull and the blue man have also learned of even more catastrophic threats to the free people of Anee, setting the stage for the sequel.  

Serpent Catch is stuffed full of weird settings, strange creatures and dramatic incidents of sex, violence, and horror.  (Maybe it could count as "grim dark;" people are getting raped, murdered, and tortured all over the place.)  But there is also a lot about hope and love and wisdom of the folksy pro-community variety (the blue man says, "I have always believed that true morality can only arise when we recognize our mutual dependence on one another...," and a venerable Pwi crone tells everyone "Sometimes a pain is so great it cannot be relieved until it is shared.")  Wolverton's many individuals, tribes and ethnicities all have distinct and believable personalities and motivations.  The plot sustained my interest for the entire course of the novel; I was always curious about what was going to happen next, and I actually cared whether or not characters achieved their goals and lived happily ever after (or, like many people in the book, were frustrated, killed by enemies or eaten by monsters.)  Serpent Catch is a superior adventure story, with much of the flavor of a fantasy quest (people fight with swords and arrows and there is plenty of mumbo jumbo including prophecies), but the elements of a science fiction adventure (there are menacing space aliens, genetically engineered monsters, high tech gadgets and lots of biology and ecology) as well as some musings about crime and justice, freedom and responsibility, and family and community.

Strongly recommended to fans of epic adventure tales.  This week I'll read Path of the Hero; I'm hoping to enjoy it as much as I did Serpent Catch.

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What's that?  You are wondering what other books Bantam Spectra offered to the SF-reading public in early 1991?  I'm glad you asked, for that information is right at my fingertips!

I haven't actually read any of the books advertised on the last two pages of Serpent Catch.  I've read one book each by Timothy Zahn (I think Angelmass) and David Brin (Sundiver) and just thought them OK.  As a teen I loved Weis and Hickman's first six Dragonlance books, starring depressed wizard Raistlin, who for a year or two was my personal hero and role model.  I have fond memories of reading the first Rama book in junior high, but have not read any of the sequels.  

Beyond Thirty by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My father, who lives a thousand miles away, recently told me he was reading a free version of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Lost Continent on his new Ipad.  I love Burroughs, but this was one of his many books I had not read.  I decided to read it before our next phone conversation, so we could talk about it free of spoiler fear.

Lost Continent is the title given to Burroughs' short novel entitled Beyond Thirty when it first appeared as a mass market paperback in 1963.  Beyond Thirty was written in 1915 and appeared in magazine form in 1916, and is a response to the First World War.  I read a library copy of the 2001 edition, part of Bison Book's Frontiers of the Imagination line.  This edition has additional material by David Brin, Phillip Burger and Richard Lupoff.  (The University of Nebraska Press's Bison Frontiers of Imagination series is something all classic SF fans should know about.)

Beyond Thirty takes place in the year 2137.  In order to seal itself off from the cataclysmic violence taking place in Europe and the European empires, the governments of the New World have forbidden any trade or even communication to cross the 30th and 175th meridians for 200 years.  No living person in the Americas has seen Europe, Africa or Asia, or talked to a European, African or Asian, and the government has even tried to keep books about the Old World out of people's hands, so most people in the New World have a total ignorance of the Old World.

To keep anybody from crossing the 30 or 175, the Americas have a powerful navy that patrols both meridians.  This short novel (just about 100 pages) is about Lieutenant Turck, our narrator, a naval officer who, due to mechanical failure, inclement weather, and treachery among his crew, is abandoned on a boat with three regular sailors, and ends up shipwrecked in England.  He finds that the Great War has totally obliterated British civilization, that Great Britain is a wilderness inhabited by wild beasts and people with a stone age technology and social structure.

As you would expect in a Burroughs novel, Turck fights beasts, gets captured by jerkoffs, escapes from said jerkoffs, rescues a beautiful princess, falls in love with said princess, and so forth. What’s a little different in Beyond Thirty is the anti-war theme. Writing with the World War, which the U. S. is not yet involved in, in mind, Burroughs again and again reminds us how great a city London is, and how fine a people the English are (Burroughs comes off as a serious Anglophile here), and warns of how foolish and wasteful it would be for that great civilization to be lost to war. Burroughs not only points out again and again how war has destroyed so many buildings and killed so many people, but even presents examples of the ruinous effect of war on human psychology and morality: the barbarian English of 2137, even the beautiful princess, consider that life is cheap and murder is normal.

Recognizing the enthusiasm for war felt by some virile young men (and reflected in so much of Burroughs’ own fiction) Burroughs has his protagonist admit that he and others of his class have often fantasized, longed, for war, but when Turck sees the ruin that war has led to, his view changes.

In the last quarter or so of the novel Turck goes to the Continent where he encounters more barbaric whites and is captured by civilized blacks. While the Europeans are illiterate spear-carrying hunters, these Africans have guns, swords, domesticated horses, and books – many, even among the privates, are voracious readers. The blacks are conquering Europe and enslaving all the whites who come into their hands. Making his anti-imperialist point directly, Burroughs has Turck say that the blacks have obviously been better off with black rulers than they were when whites ruled Africa in the days before the Great War.

Burroughs is broadly sympathetic to the blacks, but he still says things which wouldn’t pass muster today, like pointing out an ethnic hierarchy in the African army; the officers have Semitic features while the privates have thick lips and wide noses.

With the Europeans broken and reduced to barbarism, the civilized empires of the Africans and the Asians are fighting for dominance of Europe. Our American protagonist, enslaved and serving as an African cavalry officer’s body servant, accompanies a mighty black army to the African city that has been built on the ruins of Berlin.  The army of the Chinese Emperor takes this city, and Turck is captured.  Fortunately the Chinese believe his story of being from the Americas, and in the last few pages of the novel Turck becomes a sort of ambassador, meets the Chinese emperor, and is the trigger for renewed friendly relations between Asia and the Americas.  Perhaps undercutting the book's anti-war and anti-imperialist themes, Turck triumphantly predicts that the Chinese are going to throw the blacks out of Europe and then the Americans are going to civilize the barbaric Europeans.

The introduction by David Brin and the two essays, one by Phillip Burger and one by Richard Lupoff, are all worth reading.  Burger's interpretation of the book is very different than mine; whereas I thought the book a denunciation of war, Burger argues that what Burroughs is doing in Beyond Thirty is lampooning American isolationism, showing that Europe fell into barbarism because the U.S. failed to aid the Allies in their war with the Central Powers.  When Turck says again and again that London was the greatest city on Earth and now it is gone, I thought Burroughs wants you to think, "Damn, we have to make sure we don't have any more of these horrible wars," while Burger believes Burroughs intent was to make you think, "We'd better go help the English before Fritz eradicates their beautiful civilization," or, "Those Europeans can't seem to do anything right, we'd better get over there and sort them out."  According to Burger the anti-imperialism themes I see are anti-European imperialism; Burroughs thinks the Euros are selfish exploitative imperialists, but that the U. S. or some other power (like the Chinese in the story) could be helpful enlightened imperialists.       

Beyond Thirty is probably one of Burroughs’ lesser works, but its anti-war and/or anti-isolationism slant, and the insights it may provide into American thinking during the early part of the First World War, add a layer of interest. Fans of Burroughs should check it out if they haven’t read it, as should those interested in anti-war or anti-imperialist SF, or in portrayals of blacks in SF.   
      

Out of this World Science Fiction Classics from Bantam, 1983

In the back of my 1983 copy of Samuel Delany’s Empire Star is this advertisement for Bantam’s “great series of science fiction classics,” full of fancy, terror and adventure.  What is the story with these ads?  Why do some paperbacks have them, and others do not?  Was Delany annoyed that his book contained ads like this?  How were the books chosen for the ad... are these books Bantam is proud of, or are these books they printed too many of and are scrambling to unload?  If Ursula K. LeGuin saw this page back in 1983 would she say, "Awesome, my buddies at Bantam are really working hard promoting my work!"  or would it be more along the lines of, "Cripes, Bantam must really be having trouble selling all those copies of my Earthsea books to the stores."  How many people actually used this "handy coupon" to order books from Bantam?  What percentage of Bantam's gross revenue came from such orders?       

Four of these books are by Ursula K. LeGuin, whom I’ve never read, and three of them are by Warren Norwood, whom I’ve never even heard of, but I am familiar with several of the listed books.

Sundiver by David Brin

I read this in the ‘90s, in fact I think it was the first SF book I read after a few years of avoiding SF and reading mostly history and poetry, the period when I thought I might actually finish grad school and get a degree.  I thought Sundiver was just OK; I liked the sciency stuff of flying into the sun, but wasn't impressed by the murder mystery stuff (the guy with laser eyes did it.)  I never read any more of Brin's fiction, though his critique of Star Wars (that it is elitist and promotes hereditary aristocracy), which I must have read in Slate right after "Phantom Menace" came out, I found very interesting and has stuck with me.  

The Dinosaurs by William Stout, Byron Preiss and William Service

I love this book to death, and have spent many hours admiring the beautiful illustrations.  Stout works in various media and various styles, so even though its dozens and dozens of pictures of dinosaurs by the same guy, each page is fresh and exciting.  I can still remember seeing this in the bookstore in the mall for the first time, and then buying it on a subsequent trip.  The store only had one copy, and it was a little shopworn, but I put a piece of masking tape on the spine and the book is still in one piece, 30 years later.

Harlan Ellison also loved The Dinosaurs, and wrote a gushing blurb-sized review for it in the February 1982 issue of "Heavy Metal," which I learned on tarbandu’s blog, The PorPor Books Blog, back in February of 2012.   There is also an enthusiastic preface by Ray Bradbury. 


The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury 

As I have said earlier, I don’t think I have read every story included in all the different editions of Martian Chronicles, but I have read many of them here and there, and liked them.  I think Thomas Disch's criticisms of Bradbury (that Bradbury can be too sappy and sentimental) have some merit, but in the same way that I still like Star Wars even though David Brin scores some points against George Lucas, I still like lots of Bradbury's work.  "The Silent Towns," one of the stories included in Martian Chronicles, isn't sappy or sentimental at all. 

Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

This book is on Half Price Book's list of 100 SF books, and its Wikipedia entry makes it sound like it might be good. 

The Man Who Fell To Earth by Walter Tevis

I saw the movie of this with David Bowie. I really like Bowie, as a musician and just as an appealing character who livens up the TV screen whenever he appears, and the movie had some memorable images and scenes, but also felt too long and a little too silly.

A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter Miller, Jr.

I read this in the mid '90s, when I worked at a bookstore in New Jersey, after graduating college but before moving to New York and starting grad school.  This may have been the last SF book I read for a long time, before the SFless period ended by Sundiver. (Though I read Dave Wolverton's On My Way To Paradise and two Serpent Catch books around the same time.  I enjoyed those books, and remember them pretty well.) I remember very little of A Canticle for Leibowitz, except a vivid discussion of how you shouldn’t try to euthanize a sick cat.  I should probably read A Canticle for Leibowitz again.   

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If you want to join Harlan, Ray and me in gushing about Stout’s The Dinosaurs, or if you want to tell me who Warren Norwood is and why I should know him, or say anything at all about these Bantam books or David Bowie, feel free to do so in the comments.