1974 "Dazzling" stories: Busby, Effinger, Leiber

Back in 2015 I bought a stack of books in Mankato, MN, and among them was the 1975 paperback edition of Terry Carr's 1974 Universe 5, an anthology of new stories.  This paperback printing has an awesome wraparound cover by Patrick Woodruffe featuring so many of our favorite things--a cat, a bug, boobs, lichen, muscles, they are all there.  (Do the disparate elements of the cover reflect the contents of the stories inside?  Maybe!)  I've never actually read anything from this book, so, ten years after acquiring it, fifty years after it was printed, let's read three of the included stories, which were promoted on the back cover as "dazzling" "storytelling triumphs."

But first, you can check out my dumb twitter joke about this cover.

And tarbandu's blog post about Patrick Woodruffe.

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" by F. M. Busby

Years ago I read Busby's To Cage a Man and thought it alright and two Rissa Kerguelen books and found them "competent" but "long and flat."  All three of those novels, at least as I recall them, spent a lot of ink describing people suffering abuse and trauma, and the Rissa books in particular were full of fetishistic sex.  Well, let's see if Busby crams this approximately 25-page story full of torture and perversion.  

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" feels a lot like boring mainstream fiction about a writer guy who keeps getting married and divorced and who has trouble keeping his attractive wife of whom he is fond from finding out about his attractive mistress of whom he is also fond and doesn't really know what he wants or how to get it, etc.  We get lots of conversations with women about relationships, lots of assessment and comparison of women's personalities and bodies, lots of sexual encounters, etc.

Our narrator is Larry Garth, a writer who gets married at least three times and divorced at least twice.  He doesn't live his life in linear order, from birth to death--instead, he hops around, backward and forward, often waking up in the morning in a different period of his life, able to recall some chronologically later parts of his life, which he has already experienced, and only some, but not all, chronologically earlier parts.  This, as you would expect, causes problems because he may not remember what happened yesterday, but knows that the woman he finds in his house, wife number two, say, is attractive and fun today but is going to be an obese drunk in a few years and he is going to divorce her, and has to pretend he knows the past and doesn't know the future.  To help himself he leaves little notes in his wallet and a safe deposit box at the bank, and tries to memorize things.  There are also advantages--when experiencing a middle-aged period of his life he reads some of his early novels and then when he is experiencing that younger portion of his life it is easy to compose the novels from memory.

I seem to recall reading stories about people with telepathy, about how they feel alone, and then the big moment of the story is when they finally meet another telepath.  Ed Bryant's "The Silent World" is one such story, and I am sure there are others.  I read Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside in my New York days, long before this blog emerged soft and vulnerable from its chrysalis, and I suspect meeting another telepath is a major event in that book.  Anyway, Larry Garth realizes his third and favorite wife is also a person who lives her life out of sequence when he sees her before they have chronologically met and recognizes her, and she recognizes him in turn.  This is a period during which he is living with, but has not yet married, wife #2.  To spend time with wife #3 requires a little sneaking around.  More importantly for us SF fans, as in a lot of time travel stories, the time travelers grapple with whether or not they can change history.  In this happy ending story the protagonists can change history--Garth figures out how to avoid marrying wife #2 and hook up with wife #3 early; wife #2 never gets fat or becomes a drunk and has a happy marriage with some other guy, and wife #3 escapes dying of breast cancer by taking that lump more seriously than she did in the previous, no longer operative, time line.

We'll call this one barely acceptable.  I think it is kind of boring, but Lester del Rey, Jacques Chambon, and Leigh Ronald Grossman all included "If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" in anthologies.  Maybe we should see it as a typical example of New Wave writing, a sort of conventional mainstream fiction narrative with some science fiction trappings.

Two years ago we read the Lafferty story from del Rey's fourth Best Science Fiction
Stories of  the Year, "And Name My Name," and I really liked it.  The included story
by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, "Mute Inglorious Tam," I read two months ago
and called an "acceptable" "gimmick story." 

"How It Felt" by George Alec Effinger

      

This baby has only ever resurfaced in the Effinger collection Irrational Numbers, which our kameraden over in Deutschland know as Endzeit.  Endzeit uses a flopped version of the cover image to be found on a British edition of Kate Wilhelm's riff on the Frankenstein story, The Killer Thing.

Less than ten pages long, "How It Felt" is one of those stories about people in the far future whose technology is so efficient and so powerful they can do almost anything, making life so easy they have fallen into decadence and spend all their time searching for new diversions to ease their ennui.  Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series is I guess the most prominent example.

Vivi is one of the handful of these godlike decadents.  She is special in that while the others lack emotion, she still feels loneliness and fear and so forth--this makes her entertaining to the others.  It also helps her entertain herself--at night the stars scare her, and it is one of her few real pleasures to look up into the night sky and feel this fear.

Despite the fact that it makes her special, over the course of this story Vivi strives to deaden her emotions, to become cold--we are given the impression that she regularly tries to reinvent herself, to put on a new personality, and this time the character she is trying to assume is "studied indifference."  Moa, a woman with whom she regularly shares extended lesbian sexual encounters, comes by with a man, Tagea--they have something to show Vivi.  They have discovered a new planet with primitive native inhabitants.  They teleport to the planet, and Moa watches Vivi to see her reaction--Vivi's reactions are usually entertaining, because she is the only person left alive with emotion.  But Vivi is stifling her emotions, so even when Moa causes an earthquake and shifts this planet's largest ocean and blows up a native village, killing all the villagers, Vivi shows no reaction.  Moa even kills Tagea.  Still, Vivi does not respond--she has lost all emotion herself, is no longer even scared of the stars, and Moa loses her will to live--Vivi's emotion was her only pleasure.  

A story in which people can do anything and have no emotion is not going to inspire much excitement in the reader.  We'll call "How it Felt" barely acceptable.

"Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber is a fascinating character with a broad and diverse career, and many are the times I have fulsomely praised his work, as with "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "The Button Molder," but I have also criticized what I have considered his weaker work, like "The Wolf Pack" AKA "Let Freedom Ring" and "The Good New Days."  And again and again I have pointed out potentially uncomfortable elements in Leiber stories, in particular sexual content that leans in the direction of incest, underage sex and rape (see "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 miles High," and "The Glove.")  Well, today I must bring you some unwelcome tidings: "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is an absolute waste of time, an annoying and unfunny joke story in which Leiber seems to be likening Jewish people to cockroaches!  Say it ain't so, Fritz, say it ain't so.

Beetles from all over the world are congregating in New York City, in a plot of grass in Central Park next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for their biennial convention.  Leiber tries to slot various types of beetles into human ethnic categories, one of the story's many sterile jokes:  

...not just U.S. beetles, but coleopts from all over the world--slant-eyed Asian beetles in golden robes, North African beetles in burnished burnooses, South African beetles wild as fire ants with great Afro hairdos, smug English beetles.... 

I'm not against ethnic jokes per se, but just saying "Asians have slant eyes, black people are wild and English people are smug" isn't actually a joke--it's more like a list of ungenerous observations and questionable stereotypes.

Cockroaches are not actual beetles, but they still resent not being admitted to the convention and launch a protest.

...the New York City cockroaches were out in force, picketing the convention....Round and round the sacred grass plot they tramped, chanting labor-slogans in thick Semitic accents and hurling coarse working-class epithets.

Via the sorcery of the world's finest website, the internet archive, I looked at this passage in later printings of "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum."  In a scan of The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976), I found that "Semitic" had been struck, but in a scan of Space Odyssey (a 1989 printing), I found "Semitic" remained intact.

One of the beetles says of the protesting roaches,

"...many of them are mere German (German-Jewish, maybe?) Croton bugs, dwarfish in stature compared to American cockroaches, who all once belonged to the Confederate Army." 

There isn't much plot to this story--mostly it consists of these kinds of anemic jokes.  Leiber manages to work in a few references to rape--studying an English word, the beetles think "B" and "R" are drawings of a snake raping another snake.

What little plot "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" offers comes in the later portions of the story when some of the beetles go to visit the Egyptian section of the museum and come to think the scarabs there are real beetles that have been drugged or hypnotized.  In a satirical reference to Middle East turmoil and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, one Egyptian beetle thinks that these beetles are the victims of some facet of the cockroaches' plan to take over the world:

...part of a World Cockroach Plot carried out by commando Israeli beetles....His wild mouthings were not believed.

The beetles figure out a way to carry off the scarabs, puzzling the museum staff and police.

Whether or not you find this story offensively racist, "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is definitely not funny or engaging.  Thumbs down!  Find it in Horrible Imaginings or the previously mentioned Leiber collection or anthology, if you must.

**********

These stories are not dazzling!  They are not even good!  How could Terry Carr, Dallas News, Kirkus Reviews and the Chicago Sun-Times do us dirty this way?  Maybe these three stories are an unrepresentative sample and we should read some more...well, we'll see.  

Rissa Kerguelen (and The Long View) by F. M. Busby

"I shared his quarters, not by my own choice."

Now the other's cheeks flushed; she gripped Rissa's arm.  "You say my brother raped or enslaved you?"

Rissa spoke carefully.  "No. He could not have done so--I was trained, remember, by Erika.  To some extent he did coerce me.  I accepted that coercion because the alternative was to kill him and fight my way off the ship.  And I needed the ride."

"You?  You couldn't kill Tregare!"

"I think I could have."

Front of my copy

Way back in the dark ages before this blog was born I read F. M. Busby's Cage a Man and liked it, so when I saw the 1977 Berkley Medallion omnibus edition of Rissa Kerguelen and The Long View (both published in hardcover in 1976) with its pleasant Richard Powers cover I bought it. Perusing isfdb reveals that the Rissa books have a somewhat confusing publication history: in '76 the "Saga of Rissa," described as a  "Science Fiction Adventure Masterpiece" was put out in two hardcover volumes with Paul Lehr covers.  In '77 came the edition I own, the paperback one-volume version with the Powers cover. Then in the 1980s the saga was republished in three paperback volumes with Barclay Shaw covers.  (Jane Gaskell's Atlan series has a similarly confusing publication history, some editions being in four volumes, some in five.)  Perhaps adding to the confusion, in 1980 a third book in the Rissa universe starring a different protagonist, Zelde M'Tana, was released, followed by four more books featuring various personages in the same milieu.

Looking at the front and back covers of my copy, and the cover images of other editions, I am getting the idea Rissa Kerguelen is a long (630 pages!) space opera in which a teenage girl ("Tomorrow's Ultimate Woman") does that Julius Caesar/Charles Edward Stuart/Napoleon Bonaparte/Francisco Franco thing in which you build up an army out in the provinces and then invade your own (perhaps merely nominal) home country.  In SF, we see Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone and the guy from Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle pull the same gag.  The people who do this are mostly jerks (to put it mildly!), but the triumphalist nature of the back cover text suggests Rissa is fully justified in launching her coup, counter revolution, "Crusade of Vengeance," or whatever it is.  Well, let's stop guessing and start reading about Rissa and her tumultuous youth.

In the one-page prologue we glimpse the history of the decades before Rissa's birth: the struggle between United Energy and Transport, a sort of corporation/political party, and the Hulzein Establishment, a matriarchal organization run first by Heidele Hulzein and then a series of her parthenogenetic clones, first her genetically identical "daughter" Renalle and then Renalle's own genetically identical "daughter" Erika.  Having defeated Synthetic Foods in the North American election, UET gained total control of North America and drove the Hulzein Establishment off the continent.

In Part One of Rissa Kerguelen, "Young Rissa," five-year-old Rissa's parents, TV journalists, are killed in a riot.  The UET government claims they were participating in the riot, and so seizes all their assets and throws Rissa into the local Total Welfare Center, a sort of orphanage/debtors' prison/helot apparatus where people are basically slaves owned by the government and rented out to private entities as menial labor.  Rissa grows up in the Welfare Center, experimenting with lesbianism (she prefers masturbation!) and showing signs that she is a natural leader who has learned compassion from an uncle (who also enjoined her to seek revenge on the military officer who killed her parents in that riot.)  Because she was taught to read at age four (they don't teach literacy at the Welfare Center), in her teens Rissa doesn't have to clean houses--instead she is given the position of office clerk to a corrupt Welfare bureaucrat--part of her daily duties is to be used sexually by the bureaucrat.  (When Rissa is on her period, we are told, "the hard floor hurt her knees.")

To keep the Welfare peeps (30% of the population) docile, there is a periodic lottery, and when she is 16 or so the lottery's winner is Rissa!  She buys her freedom and is contacted by an agent of the Underground, one of her parents' journalist buddies.  Rissa is spirited away to Argentina, to Hulzein Establishment HQ, where she is taught espionage and commando skills.  The Establishment, headed by 70-something Erika Hulzein, rules Argentina ("In this country, if a law annoys Erika, she has it changed") without facing the burden of having to win any elections, and seems almost as tyrannical as UET--surveilling everybody, meting out beatings to people who say the wrong thing, and taking advantage of teenagers sexually--Rissa becomes one of Erika Hulzein's "rotating stable of concubines."

After a year of training, Rissa, in an elaborate disguise, takes a star ship ride in deep freeze that feels like eight months for the passengers on the ship, but is twelve years in the rest of the universe.  UET controls space travel, having stolen the interstellar drive technology from some peaceful aliens known as the Shrakken some fifty years ago, when the Shrakken paid a friendly visit to Earth.  The crews of many UET ships mutiny, however, and there is an entire anti-UET society on the "Hidden Worlds" discovered and colonized by these space pirates.  Rissa gets in touch with a Hulzein operative and books passage on the ship of the meanest of all the space pirates, Tregare; his ship is the most heavily armed of all the mutineers' vessels.  Tregare has a rotating stable of concubines of his own, to which he adds Rissa.  A former member of this stable is the aforementioned Zelde M'Tana, now one of Tregare's officers.

(Rissa Kerguelen is full of non-consensual and not-quite-consensual sex, and Busby's whole book utilizes the strategy we see so often in fiction and journalism of exploiting readers' morbid or prurient fascination with such crimes and grievous misfortunes as sex slavery and mutilation, while at the same time taking care to condemn criminals and sympathize with victims.  Blurring the line between consensual and non-consensual sex is one of his ways of doing this; another is describing in gruesome detail all the scars borne and torture suffered at the hands of UET by people of the Hidden Worlds.  Yet another way is recounting the various crimes attributed to Tregare and later having them explained away as rumors and exaggerations--we get to enjoy the excitement of Rissa having sex with a bad boy, and then any guilt over our titillation is absolved when we learn that he is not so bad after all.  I think of this as "having your cake and eating it, too" or "working both sides of the street.")    

Tregare's ship brings Rissa to the most important of the Hidden Worlds, a planet with the evocative name of "Number One."  Here Rissa meets another of Renalle Hulzein's clones, Liesel, Erika's "sister."  Erika is head of the Hulzein concern on Number One, the Hulzein Lodge, one of the planet's numerous aristocratic houses.  SF writers, and readers, love a setting in which great oligarchic houses with abstruse traditions and elaborate customs compete via political skullduggery, and here we have another one.  Personally, I'm not very keen on this sort of setting--I find political marriages, rumor mongering, and backstabbing among dozens of characters to be confusing and boring. And, while I have noting against escapist entertainment, I think that if SF wants to be "a literature of ideas" it should address the real political controversies of our lifetimes, like the proper role of the state, instead of indulging in rehashes of the power struggles between the Borgias and the Medicis or the houses of York and Lancaster or whoever. I can't get worked up over whether Lord Blahblahblah's incestuous marriage with Duke Sofisto's niece will lead to him drinking arsenic at the feast or building a coalition to defenestrate Baron Epicrano, but I can get intrigued or agitated when an author celebrates the supposed utopian possibilities of an interventionist government made up of experts or issues a dire warning of the dangers of just such a government.

Anyway, Rissa learns that Tregare is Liesel's son, born of a traditional sexual union--Liesel chose old-fashioned procreation  because repeated parthenogenetic cloning was resulting in children with debilitating birth defects.  Liesel had to hide Tregare from the rest of the Hulzein matriarchy, as they would accept no male heir and would kill him if they had the chance.  Rissa becomes deeply integrated into the Hulzein Lodge, meeting lots and lots of minor characters, and at the end of Part One finding herself in an arranged political marriage, more or less without her prior consent, to Tregare.

Back of my copy

Much of the real drama in the second half of Part One concerns Rissa preparing for and engaging in a duel to the death with a member of one of the Number One's other numerous great houses.  This duel is fought with no weapons, and, in fact, no clothes!  (Rissa Kerguelen is one of the numerous SF books that promotes nudism, one of Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeons's hobby horses.)  The duel is described in detail, and is pretty gross, with eye gougings, efforts to rip off genitals, torn fingernails, loosened teeth, etc.

People who think fiction should promote diversity may appreciate the fact that Rissa Kerguelen is not only dominated by ruthless women rulers and expert female killers, but is full of sympathetic black, Asian, albino, gay, lesbian, obese and disabled characters.  More interesting to me, however, was a villainous character who is "almost obscenely graceful" and purportedly became an assassin because of his frustrations over being impotent with women.  (I'm still not sure if with this character if Busby is exploiting disgust with male homosexuals or making fun of men who suffer some kind of sexual dysfunction.) This character is killed by an unnamed representative of Number One's ruling order (the referee at the naked duel) after criticizing the oligarchs ("You frunks!  You all hide behind status, don't you?") and breaking their rules.  I thought it interesting that, in a book that romanticizes being a rebel and opposing "the system," that Busby would include a guy who opposed another undemocratic and elitist system and, instead of romanticizing him, portray him being humiliated without his arguments against that oligarchy even being addressed.  (Another case of Busby working both sides of the street, appealing to both left-wing and right-wing readers?  Or Busby criticizing modern socialistic elitism and endorsing old-fashioned aristocratic elitism?)

Oy, I probably should have covered the 630-page Rissa saga in three blog posts, as if I was reading those 1980s editions in which all three Parts have their own book, but instead I am cramming my whole Rissa experience into one long post.  If you care what I have to say about disguise-and-bare-handed-killing expert Rissa Kerguelen's further career, click below to read on!

Important New Wave Stories by Thomas Disch, J. G. Ballard and Langdon Jones

When people talk about the New Wave, one of the things they often mention is Judith Merril's anthology England Swings SF, first published in 1968.  Now, I don't actually own a copy of England Swings SF, but I do own anthologies by two of the most famous and prolific New Wave writers, Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard, which include some of their stories from England Swings SF. Additionally, Joachim Boaz, indefatigable SF blogger and promoter of SF which has faded from memory and perhaps deserves to be more widely read, has generously provided me access to the story by Langdon Jones which was printed in England Swings SF. So, let's check them out and try to gain some kind of insight into the New Wave phenomenon!

"The Squirrel Cage" by Thomas Disch (1967)

I've already praised Tom Disch on this blog numerous times, but Disch has done work I'm not crazy about (when I read them in the aughts, I thought Genocides overwrought and mediocre and Echo Round His Bones and Mankind Under the Leash left me cold) so there's no guarantee I'm going to love this one. "The Squirrel Cage" first appeared in the issue of New Worlds with Charles Platt's The Garbage World.  I read Disch's tale in my 1980 Bantam edition of Fundamental Disch.

Don't tell my wife, but I have had a
crush on this garbage girl for quite a while

"The Squirrel Cage" is one of those stories in which a guy is trapped in a mysterious high tech prison and has no idea how he got there or who put him there.  For some psychological reason I am afraid to carefully dig into, I love stories in which a guy is in a prison and his cell constitutes his entire universe (Araminta Station by Jack Vance and Cage A Man by F. M. Busby come to mind at once as particularly effective SF examples), so "The Squirrel Cage" was right up my alley.  Disch uses the story as an allegory of life (of course), how we all are truly alone and can't know why we are here and have no real understanding of the universe because we cannot trust our senses.  It is also, more specifically, about the psychological reality of being a writer--the prisoner has access to a typewriter, and the text we are reading is things he has typed on his machine.  However, the narrator's typewriter neither admits nor produces paper--the narrator has no reason to believe anybody is even reading what he is writing! (He hopefully fantasizes that his words are being reproduced electronically somewhere and read by someone, maybe lots of people.)  On the last page of the story, when we learn the name of the narrator ("Disch"), he admits that even more terrifying than this lonely meaningless life in the antiseptic prison is the thought of being forced to leave it; a comment on our fear of death or perhaps Disch's own horror at the thought of having to make a living doing work more onerous than writing?

I think "The Squirrel Cage" also serves as a sort of satire of people who learn everything about the world via the New York Times--every day a new copy of the Times appears in the cell and the previous day's copy vanishes.  The newspaper is the only contact the prisoner has, apparently, ever had with any other living entity, and it is his only source of information.  One passage (in which the narrator wishes he could keep the papers and pile them up into walls and corridors) reminded me of the famous Collyer brothers, and perhaps the whole story is a sort of subtle reference or homage to them.

Both bleak and amusing, "The Squirrel Cage" is well-written (Disch has a smooth and engaging style) and compelling.  I liked the "New Yorkiness" of it, and there's also the sad frisson I get whenever I read references to suicide in a Disch story.  Worth a look!                

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

As with Disch, I have really liked some Ballard, but also been disappointed by him (I know Joachim loves it, but I found Drowned World tedious and silly.)

In this sexiest of blog posts there is even something for the ladies: it's every woman's dreamPTboat, JFK!

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" first appeared in the magazine Ambit, and in New Worlds the next year.  This is a two-page gimmick story, an imitation or pastiche of a similarly brief gimmick story by Alfred Jarry ("The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race"), larded with dumb jokes and lame puns.  I guess the story is supposed to say something about our society's obsession with celebrity and political violence, and also to suggest LBJ and/or the citizens of Dallas or the American people as a whole are somehow complicit in or responsible for the JFK murder. There are lots of people who like this sort of flashy cleverness and irreverence, but to me this kind of thing is hollow and a waste of my time--as I suppose I have said before online, I'm sick of absurdist humor in which any random shit can happen and of humor based on references to other works of fiction or to celebrities or historical events.

You gotta read this thing because it is "important," but I think it is a facile scam.

"Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

Woah, maybe this post needs a
NSFW tag or a trigger warning!

Here we have a story in the same vein, a gimmicky JFK murder-related story about how people are sexually aroused by violence and by automobiles.  This one is in the form of a dry scientific report about therapy involving catering to the desires of mental patients to assassinate celebrities. Jokes include a clinical reference to a man inserting his penis into a car's exhaust. Presumably this was shocking in 1966, but we are now living in a permissive society in which some of us, me included, are almost entirely shocked out.

Like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" first appeared in Ambit.  I read both of these stories in my copy of the 2001 edition of The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

While the Disch story deals with timeless issues, these Ballard stories are very time sensitive, very topical, very much focused on celebrities and events current in 1966.  I sometimes think including references to some "iconic" contemporary celebrity or event is an act of laziness on the part of the writer--instead of doing the work of inspiring the reader to feel by creating a character or a mood, the writer takes the shortcut of just invoking our ready-made feelings about, in this case, the bogus "Camelot" of the early '60s.  This maybe works on people who were old enough to pay attention to the news in 1963, but I was born in 1971, so the murder of JFK has no more emotional resonance with me than the murder of Julius Caesar or Cicero.

(If I am comparing them, Disch's story also has good writing, while these Ballard stories seem like loud jokes meant to dazzle you with their irreverence.)

"The Hall of Machines" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Hall of Machines" first appeared in New Worlds along with its two companion pieces, "The Coming of the Sun" and "The Eye of the Lens;" together, there three pieces form a triptych known as "The Eye of the Lens."  Joachim has shared with me all three of the components of "The Eye of the Lens," and I will discuss them all here, even though only the first appeared in England Swings SF.

(Check out Joachim's review of this triptych, and Langdon's entire collection of the same name; we actually cover different ground and have somewhat contesting and complementary views of the work.)

I guess Jones is one of the "etceteras."

"The Hall of Machines" consists of the notes of a scholar from some alternate universe (though see below) about an indescribably vast building which houses massive automatic machines of numerous types.  Most of the text is detailed description of various of the machines; one that consists of shiny blades making elaborate cuts (a "Death Machine"), one which extrudes tiny machines from a tube ("The Mother"), a colossal "Clock" made up of a huge spring and innumerable precise gears whose face is turned away from any possible viewer, and more.

I'm going to have to guess that the mysterious Hall of Machines represents the universe, and that the story is about how the laws that govern our lives seem mechanistic, predictable, and open to close inspection, but are so complex as to be practically indecipherable, and are bereft of any values or spiritual meaning.  Jones provides a clue, however, that this story does take place in our universe, and that he is making, or the reader is expected to make, some kind of ethical judgement: the word "Auschwitz" is inscribed on one of the three Death Machines.

"The Hall of Machines" reminded me of Herman Melville's 1855 "The Tartarus of Maids," which also includes detailed descriptions of allegorical machines.  It also reminded me of Thomas Ligotti's 1996 "The Red Tower," which, as I remember it, is just a description by an investigator of an old sinister factory, presumably in some alternate universe.

Jones presents vivid and exciting images, sets a powerful mood and gets the reader thinking.  Quite good.

"The Coming of the Sun" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Coming of the Sun" is a series of connected vignettes, spread over 22 pages, dealing with recurring themes that include insanity, fire, sex, religion, and the sun. The first of these 16 vignettes, a compelling character study of a pyromaniac imbecile, is very good, but after this very entertaining beginning the vignettes become increasingly tedious.  One, involving a grocer kicking a pair of mating dogs, is a shocking and memorable piece of "body horror," but some of the other little tableaus, like a one-and-a-half-page-long description of an elaborate clock burning, and a dream sequence about a guy on a motorcycle driving in circles around and then inside a cathedral, were so repetitive and boring I had trouble keeping my eyes open while I read them.  The last five pages of  "The Coming of the Sun" include poetry that is alternately mind-numbing ("Give me the red and the green of your love--my man, my woman, my child, my God") and groan-inducing ("...an old man masturbates his death-tool and spits white glory at the sun....")  Ugh.  The last page has a drawing of the sun, its flares like tentacles or petals, the words of the last poem jumbled all around it..

When tarbandu talks about the self-indulgence of the New Wave I guess this is the sort of thing he means.  I couldn't sincerely recommend "The Coming of the Sun" to anybody, though it is of academic interest and some might find it "so bad it's good" with its poetry about bloody semen and the cleansing venom of the "sun sun sun."

"The Eye of the Lens" by Langdon Jones (1966)

This one is a description of a film.  (I seem to recall Barry Malzberg resorting to this gag a few times; right now only The Men Inside is coming to mind.)  Jones starts by relating the type of film stock and filters used, and then describes the movie's two actors; all you feminists out there will be thrilled to learn Jones describes the female lead in precise detail over 27 lines, lingering on her breasts and body hair, while dispensing with the labor of describing the male lead in an efficient three lines, even though the man plays two parts.

Banned in Britain?

Then we get what amounts to a script, a description of the shots ("She passes out of the frame, kicking the statuettes idly as she walks") and of the soundtrack.  All you masochists out there will be thrilled to learn that the soundtrack includes just the kind of poetry about love that had us scrambling for cover like an 8.8 cm Flak had zeroed in on us back when we read "The Coming of the Sun"--"love me red with bloody arrows...love me brown, brown as leather..." etc.

The girl walks through a desert, encounters a statue that is crying, then men with flamethrowers who immolate any plants that appear on the desert surface.  (When I was in Denmark, the environmentalist capitol of the world, I saw how they killed weeds with a sort of scaled down flamethrower.  In Iowa I found that they spray Roundup on everything.) She visits a cathedral where a "psychedelic freak out" is taking place, and then comes upon Jesus on the cross. She gets into an argument with Christ, accusing him of being rude, stupid and shallow. In the final scene of the film the girl sits in a field of flowers.

I can't tell if this story is a sincere criticism of Christianity and our society or a parody of an art movie full of banal allegories. Either way it is a bore.

***************

Do these stories tell us anything about the New Wave?  (Let's pretend these stories are our first exposure to this New Wave we've been hearing people argue about.)  Well, they certainly lack many of the very things people tend to look for in conventional science fiction: there is no adventure plot (hell, there is no plot at all), there isn't really much science, and there isn't much speculation on what future societies or stuff in outer space might be like.  It is easy to see why casual SF readers looking for entertainment might be uninterested in the New Wave, and why committed members of the SF community who are into science and interested in what the future will bring might be exasperated by such work.

On the other hand, you can see how these stories would appeal to people who are interested in "serious mainstream literature" and think of themselves as free-thinking individuals or educated radicals.  The stories have the trappings of sophistication: they employ experimental literary techniques and/or abandon traditional literary elements like plot and character; they are pessimistic; they are irreverent or rebellious, implicitly or explicitly criticizing our society and traditional attitudes and beliefs; they include frank sexual content.  The Disch story and parts of the Jones stories are also well-written, and all the stories hope to say something about life or society.  The stories are also connected to long literary, artistic or philosophical traditions.  (And there's the fact that parts of the Jones pieces are difficult to read, and, as we see in academia, sometimes obscurity and tedium can pass for profundity.)

Disch, Ballard and Jones are all obviously thoughtful, well-educated, and capable of good writing--if anything good can come of the New Wave, these are guys who can make that happen--and in this selection I think we can see the golden opportunities presented by the New Wave to able writers, as well as the pitfalls for readers in the New Wave's excesses.  In the same way a quest story or a detective story or an alien invasion story, the kind of thing that has been done a billion times, can be emotionally and intellectually thrilling when it comes from the pen of a talented and dedicated writer, but predictable, shoddy and boring in the hands of the lazy or incompetent, we have to expect that there will be some fine New Wave stories, and some New Wave stories which are a waste of our time.  I think we have seen both kinds here today.

Ten Short Short SF Stories: Niven, Malzberg, Pronzini, Knight & Busby

From the public library this week I borrowed 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, edited by Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg, and Joseph D. Olander and published in 1978.  The volume contains a mere 271 pages of text, and as all you math people out there have already figured out, this means that the average story is less than 3 pages long.  Or maybe that the average length of the stories is fewer than three pages each.  Over the last few days I read ten of these stories, and I will now assign them grades.  Seeing as I am covering ten pieces in this single blog post, I'll try to keep things snappy!

"Plaything" by Larry Niven (1974)

In The Hugo Winners Volume 3 (1977) Isaac Asimov tells us that hard science fiction, the science fiction about science, is what he likes to read, and that he is relieved that young Larry Niven has taken up this vein while he (Asimov) and Arthur C. Clarke and Hal Clement approach retirement.  Niven has three stories in this collection of short shorts; will they be about science?

In "Plaything," which is over four pages long (lengthy for this book), a robotic Earth probe lands on Mars and Martian children treat it like a piece of playground equipment, climbing all over it, vandalizing it, etc.  Niven includes interesting biological details about the Martians (their senses are finely tuned to detect slight changes in levels of heat, and this is reflected in their means of "talking") and interesting speculations about the robotic probe's means of gathering data about Mars. A good story.

Grade: B           Sciencey?:  Yes.

"Safe at Any Speed" by Larry Niven (1967)

The title is a nod to Ralph Nader, but the plot is a nod to Jonah of "and the Whale" fame.  A thousand years in the future a guy is "driving" in an air car over an alien planet.  The car is swallowed whole by a huge bird.  They crash, and the guy lives in the car (it has a toilet and a food-creating machine) for six months while he waits for the monster to decay sufficiently, lest he be dissolved by its stomach juices. Cleverly, the story is an advertisement written by the driver, explaining how safe the car is. Again Niven includes some biological and some technological details.  Not bad.

Grade: B-           Sciencey?: Yes.

"Mistake" by Larry Niven (1976)

In the near future, astronauts on long boring solo trips use drugs to get high and thus entertain themselves.  (The guy in "Safe at Any Speed" plays solitaire for six months.) The astronaut in this story hallucinates an alien who interrogates him about Earth defenses. The astronaut takes a pill that sobers him up, and the alien vanishes.

The main joke of the story is that the reader is not supposed to know that the alien is a hallucination until the end.  Besides being a weak joke, in his one-line introduction to the story (what the copy on the jacket calls "a sly and witty remark"), Asimov, in his infinite wisdom, tells you that the alien is an hallucination.  The other big joke of the story is the pun "bad trip."

The best part of the story is Niven's little inside joke that pays homage to his big supporter Asimov, and three other notable SF writers, adventure scribe Edgar Rice Burroughs, hard-SF exemplar Hal Clement, and Christian apologist C. S. Lewis.

Grade: D-  (AKA, "The Peppermint Patty")         Sciencey?: No.

**************

"Inaugural" by Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini (1976)

I like Malzberg, as I hope I have made clear on this blog.  However, I am sick to death of the irrational obsession so many people have with John F. Kennedy.  (In fact I experience a childish glee when people like the scribblers at Reason magazine or the gang at Red Letter Media try to poke a hole in the apparently undeflatable Camelot myth.)  Malzberg seems to be one of the many victims of this obsession, writing many stories that revolve around Kennedy or presidents getting murdered.  So when I saw the title of this story I groaned in anticipation of more Kennedy nonsense.

"Inaugural" is the text of the inauguration speech given by the first woman president ("Carole").  During the speech she quotes JFK's own inaugural speech.  It is a little difficult to puzzle out what we are supposed to take away from the story.  The new president returned six months earlier from the first manned interstellar flight, of which she was commander.  Her second in command ("George"), is now her husband. George appears to be the emotional one, and Carole has to scold him to keep him in line.  The vote (of billions of people) to elect them is said to be unanimous.  The words "unity" and "union" appear again and again in the text.

Did the new president win election by threatening to bomb the Earth from outer space (such things happen in Malzberg stories)?  Is this just a woman's hallucination (people are always hallucinating in Malzberg stories)?  Is the swapping of gender roles a joke or some kind of feminist commentary?  Are the references to union a sign that, like in so many utopian SF stories, in this one an alien element has transformed the human race into some kind of unified entity with a collective consciousness?  Are the references to a unanimous election a suggestion that the USA or the entire world now has bogus elections like in some dictatorship?

This story earns a passing grade, a wrinkled brow, and a shrug.

Grade: C        Kennedy?: Yes
          
"January 1975" by Barry N. Malzberg (1974)

This story is in the form of four letters from writer Barry to his editor, Ben.  Barry is suggesting that he write a series about an alternate universe in which Kennedy won the 1960 election and was later assassinated.  Barry promises that, while the series will be "in the dystopian mode," he will keep it "cheerful and amusing" and that the portrait of Kennedy as president will be "uplifting and noble."  (Ben is worried that "the Secretary" might sue for libel; I guess "the Secretary" is JFK himself.)    Ben rejects the idea, and in the final letter, in which Barry says he will sic "the union" on Ben, we learn how dystopian Barry and Ben's world really is: people in their universe attend "Slaughter Games" and "Public Tortures" for recreation!

The idea that people living in a world in which novelists are unionized and there are government-sponsored Roman-style blood sports and executions would consider our world a dystopia is faintly amusing and interesting.  So, a passing grade.

Grade: C         Kennedy?: Yes.

***************

"I Wish I May, I Wish I Might" by Bill Pronzini (1973)

If we include his collaboration with Malzberg above, Pronzini has four stories in this book!  Wow!

I'm not sure I "get" this one.  Maybe there is a joke or a twist I am missing.

David Lannin is a 14-year-old boy on the beach.  Pronzini carefully describes the kid's appearance, clothes, all the sights and sounds of the beach.  There's a lot of "the sonorous lament of the chill October wind" and "the wind swirled loose sand against his body," and "there was nothing but the sound of the tide and the wind and the scavenger birds...." You know what I mean.  I thought it was odd to see all this detail in a story that is like three pages long.

Anyway, David finds a bottle, opens it up, and out comes an invisible genie. The genie tells David he can have three wishes.  Then he crows that he has achieved his revenge on the mortal sorcerer who put him in the bottle, and leaves.  David goes home to his mother. He tells mom that he's got three wishes, and he's going to wish for "a million-trillion ice cream cones," for the ocean to always be warm, and for every boy and girl in the world to "be just like me."  The final line of the story is David saying the magic words from the story title; in the short paragraph before that we learn that David is retarded.  (Pronzini provides no clue in the first two pages that David has any developmental or mental disorders; his dialogue is in normal English, for example.)

Is the joke that David has just destroyed modern society or even the entire world with his dumb wishes? Or is the joke that David hallucinated the genie?  Either way, lame.

Grade: F (student is also directed to attend sensitivity training)

"Dry Spell" by Bill Pronzini (1970)

Kensington, a professional writer on the edge of financial ruin, has had writer's block for weeks.  Suddenly he comes up with an idea for a SF story in which aliens are plotting to take over the world.  These aliens can read everybody's mind, and if any Earthling figures out what is going on, they erase that info from his mind.  In a twist we all saw coming, Kensington's scenario is the truth, and the aliens erase it from his mind before he can commit it to paper.  The aliens are the source of his writer's block!

Weak.         

Grade: D-

"How Now Purple Cow" by Bill Pronzini (1969)

Again, I think I may be missing the joke here; is it a feeble reference to cattle mutilations?

[UPDATE JUNE 2, 2018: Commenter Geoduck in the comments below directs us to likely source material for Pronzini's (to me) mysterious story!]

A farmer spots a purple cow on his land.  He calls the local newspaper to get a reporter to come see it.  The reporter, on the phone, mentions recent UFO sightings.  Before the reporter arrives, the farmer touches the purple cow, and is turned into a purple cow himself.  The end.

Grade: F (student is also directed to schedule appointment with guidance counselor to discuss possibility of repeating this semester)

*************

"Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" by Damon Knight (1967)

This is another story I may not be quite grasping.  In this case there is a chance my limited knowledge of the Bible is hamstringing me.

(NOTA BENE: I am grading this story as it stands in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.  This story originally appeared in Dangerous Visions, where presumably it is supported by several pages of supplementary matter by the author himself and editor Harlan Ellison.)  

It is the Day of Wrath!  God, a moving pillar of smoke, accompanied by seven angels, comes to the Earth to find it desolate, apparently due to a nuclear war.  The Archangel Michael blames the English, the Russians, the Chinese, and the Americans.  God goes to England, where deep in a pit He finds a message, in all caps, "WE WERE HERE.  WHERE WERE YOU?", I guess some English person's lament that God had abandoned them, or maybe Knight's idea of a joke.  

I have to admit that these stories that suggest the people of the West were no better than Brezhnev, Mao, and their henchmen rub me the wrong way.  And as an atheist unfamiliar with the Bible maybe the power of the story's phrases and images are flying over my head.  So perhaps I am not equipped to judge this tale.  Still, I must judge, and this story seems melodramatic and bombastic, and not very successful at making its point clear, whether it be an atheist attack on religion, a leftist criticism of NATO policy, or a heartfelt lament that God had failed to intervene in the Cold War.

Grade: F          

"Eripmav" by Damon Knight  (1958)

A page of embarrassing puns and kindergarten-level jokes.  The title is a bad joke, and things proceed downhill from there.

Grade: F

"Maid to Measure" by Damon Knight (1964)

A three-page story with one pun, a pun worthy of a seven-year-old who reads Playboy.

A man is trying to break up with his blonde girlfriend so he can date a brunette.  The blonde is experimenting with witchcraft, and by saying, "I'll change into a bikini," she is transformed into a bikini.  The brunette stops by, and dons the bikini.

And to think I defended Knight's Beyond the Barrier against Joachim Boaz's denunciations!

Grade: F  (student is expelled)

*************

"I'm Going to Get You" by F. M. Busby

I liked Busby's Cage A Man, an adventure/horror novel with strong psychological and social elements about a guy who is kidnapped by solipsistic aliens who don't realize humans are intelligent beings and inflict excruciating experiments on him before he escapes.  So I picked him for my tenth short short.

"I'm Going to Get You" is a three page monologue from a crippled man, directed at God.  The cripple relates the many disasters of his life (family killed by drunk driver, being beaten up by criminals, etc.) and blames them on God's callousness and/or cruelty.  The cripple declares that he will achieve revenge on God by committing suicide.

In some ways this story is comparable to Knight's "Shall the Dust Praise Thee": God's existence and goodness are questioned.  But whereas Knight's story is loud and vague and ridiculous, Busby's story has a character and a story, some real emotion and some real thought behind it.

Grade: C+

**************

I'm not the audience for sophomoric joke stories or stories with an obvious "twist," and so Knight and Pronzini have been graded harshly.  But a short short story can be a decent traditional SF story, as Niven shows with two of his offerings, or a story with real character and heart, as Busby demonstrates.

I will probably read ten more selections from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories next week.  Until then, my merciless red grading pencil will rest.