Universe 2: H Ellison, E Pangborn, G R Dozois, R Silverberg & W Rotsler

Earlier this month we read Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," a story that debuted in Terry Carr's 1972 anthology of all-new stories Universe 2 and which bewildered me.  Let's take a gander at some more stories from this book, though we'll be reading versions that appear in later publications because I'm not having any luck getting my dirty mitts on a scan of Universe 2.  After I've read the Universe 2 stories by Harlan Ellison, Edgar Pangborn, Gardner R. Dozois, Robert Silverberg and William Rotsler and drafted my thoughts about them, I'll take a look at Joachim Boaz's 2016 blog post about the anthology and we'll find out to what extent we agree, disagree, or just look at the stories from different perspectives.

"On the Downhill Side" by Harlan Ellison

We start with SF's bad boy, Harlan Ellison--that's Harlan Ellison® to you!  "On the Downhill Side" has been reprinted in a number of books, among them Deathbird Stories, which is where I am reading it.  I have secured access to a scan of a 1983 Bluejay Special Edition of Deathbird Stories, which includes a claim on the very first page that this edition is the first version of the book to present Ellison's approved text.  So rest assured that, like a hiker drinking from a sparkling mountain spring, far from the pollution of the city, I am imbibing the pure unadulterated word of Harlan!  I mean Harlan®!

I guess a theme of Deathbird Stories is irreverence towards religion and gods in particular, and in this collection, "On the Downhill Side" is preceded by an epigraph in which your old pal Harlan jokes that he wonders if "the god of love" uses vaginal spray and underarm deodorant.  Oy, this is like a 13-year-old's idea of a humor.

"On the Downhill Side," we readers find, is a story with a relatively simple plot for which Ellison comes up with his own kooky mythology of the afterlife and the supernatural.  Ellison also manages to make his simple enough story very long and tedious by including lots of extraneous detail about the setting (New Orleans, or as you say it, "NAW-lins"), sleep-inducing psychedelic and surreal scenes, and melodramatic episodes from the lives of its over-the-top (I suppose archetypal) characters.  Thumbs down!

Our initial narrator, Paul, is walking around The Big Easy at night with his unicorn.  He meets an attractive woman, Lizette, and they start talking, telling each other stories of their earlier, tragic loves.  Paul has had three wives, and (it appears) drove at least one insane and drove the other two away.  Lizette married a guy for money or something like that.  We eventually realize Paul and Lizette are ghosts--Paul a suicide.  The God of Love (capitalized in the story, though not in the little epigraph) is punishing them, keeping them in the middle region between life and the afterlife because Paul loved too much and Lizette never loved at all.  The God of Love gave the unicorn to Paul to be his companion and helper.  The God of Love, after decades of punishment as ghosts, has also granted to Paul and Lizette a chance to earn a way to the afterlife--if they can love each other in a healthy way, they can proceed to the afterlife.

(I may have monkeyed up some of the above details--this story is so boring my mind was wandering as I read it.)

At first if looks like Lizette is blowing their chance, and she ends up naked on an altar about to be sacrificed to monsters, like something out of a Conan story.  But then the unicorn takes Lizette's place and Lizette embraces Paul.  Paul and Lizette's souls are united, which Ellison indicates by having her voice take over some of the first-person narration as they watch the monsters kill the self-sacrificing unicorn.  Ellison spends two pages describing in brain-melting detail the sight of the unicorn being destroyed and Paul and Lizette's reaction to this event.  Here's a sample:

Colors surged across my unicorn's body, as if by becoming more intense the chill touch of the claimers could be beaten off.  Pulsing weaves of rainbow color that lived in his hide for moments, then dimmed, brightened again and were bled off.  Then the colors leaked away, one by one, chroma weakening: purple-blue, manganese violet, discord, cobalt blue, doubt, affection, chrome green, chrome yellow, raw sienna, contemplation, alizarin crimson, irony, silver, severity, compassion, cadmium red, white. 

After this long passage we learn that Paul and Lizette will be reincarnated in the single body--"man or woman we did not know which"--of a person who will be lucky in love.

Boring and self-indulgent, ludicrously overwritten and absolutely lacking any sort of interest or excitement.  Why it is has been so popular with editors, with Carr judging it one of the best stories to ever appear in the Universe volumes and David G. Hartwell proclaiming it a masterpiece, we can perhaps chalk up to their belief that Ellison's name sold books.  Maybe "On the Downhill Side" represents an effort on the part of the five-times-married Ellison to work through his guilt over his treatment of women, to rationalize his misbehavior or glamorize his mistakes with respect to women--there is a clue suggesting that the wife who went insane did so because Paul kept asking her to be quiet so he could draw (Paul was an architect) and it is easy to imagine Ellison telling wives and girlfriends to be quiet so he could pen his masterpieces.  It is also easy to imagine the egotistical and self-important Ellison seeing himself as a man whose problems are a result of "loving too much."             

Carr's The Best from Universe also includes Edgar Pangborn's "The Night Wind,"
Fritz Leiber's "A Rite of Spring" and Howard Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens,"
stories we have already read here at MPorcius Fiction Log

"Tiger Boy" by Edgar Pangborn

This is a long one--over 30 pages!  Luckily, it is pretty good; "Tiger Boy" is well-written and paced, with a decent plot and well-wrought and believable characters who have realistic and even touching relationships.  Though better than Ellison's goofy contribution to Universe 2 in every way, "Tiger Boy" has not been anthologized in English.  As the story suggests, we are not living in a world characterized by justice!  I read the story in a scan of the Pangborn collection Still I Persist in Wondering.  This same collection, in German translation, takes "Tiger Boy" as its title story.   

It is a few centuries from now, the feudal postapocalyptic future in which the lord and the church own most of the land and people ride horses around and hunt and fight with bows and spears.  (This is the setting of much of Pangborn's work, including the famous Davy.)  Rumors abound, spreading from village to village, of a boy who travels with a tiger and plays the flute--his music attracts people into the woods, and these people are never seen again.  Except for children, who return and say the Tiger Boy treated them kindly.  (Is all this jazz based on Dionysius?)  

In the village at the center of the story lives Bruno, a sixteen-year-old bastard and orphan.  Bruno, apprenticed to the blacksmith, is a likable sort and a hard worker who never skips work or shows up late, but he is something of an outsider because he is functionally mute.  He can in fact whisper, but keeps this from others, whispering only to himself.  Nobody has bothered to teach him to read, but he loves words and composes poems in his head and whispers them to himself when alone.

Bruno hears the flute music and joins Tiger Boy, who is excited to have a poet accompany him on his travels.  For his art, Bruno is thrilled to have a friend to whom he can talk and with whom he can share his poetry.  When Bruno doesn't show up for work, the blacksmith and the priest who is, secretly, Bruno's father, are worried about him and strive to get a search party going.  The local lord and the religious hierarchy want to hunt down the Tiger Boy and his tiger, assuming they are a menace to the people and/or represent some kind of rival religion.

The blacksmith, who realizes he loves Bruno more than he heretofore was aware, goes into the forest alone to find the boy and dies of a heart attack after getting lost.  The lord and Bruno's father, along with some hunting dogs and a soldier, catch up to Tiger Boy and Bruno.  The tiger is slain by the priest and the lord, and the soldier kills Tiger Boy.  Then the hunting dogs go berserk and kill poor Bruno before the priest can stop them.  This story is a real tragedy!

Thumbs up for "Tiger Boy," which I think I enjoyed more than any of the other Pangborn fiction I have read. 

Italian publications that include "Tiger Boy" 

"The Man Who Waved Hello" by Gardner R. Dozois

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is set in one of those socialistic futures in which, presumably because of overpopulation pressures and concern for the environment (or as my father still calls it, and this story does as well, "ecology"), the government controls the economy, deciding where you can live and how you can decorate your tiny apartment and providing food and all other legal goods.  Dozois' story is about how this life drives people insane.

The main character of the story, a member of the middle-class and an inhabitant of a skyscraper in the forest of identical skyscrapers that spreads uninterrupted from Washington to Baltigore to Gotham to Beantown, uses hallucinatory drugs to get by.  But the drugs are hard to obtain, and so he has another means of obtaining the small measure of satisfaction that keeps him from committing suicide.  If he sees an attractive woman on the street or in the elevator or wherever he follows her, figures out where she lives, and then uses the videophone to call her up and expose his genitals to her.

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is well-written and just as long as it needs to be; Dozois skillfully paints images and transmits tone to the reader.  The setting and character are convincing and compelling.  Good work.

Besides Universe 2, "The Man Who Waved Hello" has only reappeared in the Dozois collection The Visible Man.  Dozois is one of the many writers I should read more often; I liked "Horse of Air" and "Flash Point," both of which appear in The Visible Man, as well as the rare Dozois story "Conditioned Reflex" and Dozois' collaboration with Jack Dann, "Down Among the Dead Men."  There are more stories I want to read than I have time to read them, alas.

German and British editions of Universe 2

"When We Went to See the End of the World" by Robert Silverberg 

This is a story satirizing middle-class strivers, how they are selfish and always competing with each other for attention, how they have abandoned traditional morality and try to fill up their empty lives with such activities as drug use and adulterous affairs.  I guess you'd have to call it a joke story.

At a party a bunch of these educated wealthy couples talk about their recent expensive vacations--paying a company to take them on a day trip to see the end of the world.  The first couple to tell their story doesn't realize any of the other couples has already taken such a trip, and think being the first in their set will add to their prestige--they are pretty disappointed to find many others have taken similar trips.  Each of the many couples has a different story of how the world ends; one couple witnessed the sun go nova, another couple saw a world covered in ice, another saw an Earth entirely covered in water, etc.  (The first couple's experience seems to be based on a scene from H. G. Wells' Time Machine.)  Could the time machine company be pulling some kind of scam?

Besides their time travel vacations, people talk about the news.  I guess Silverberg's joke is that these people are actually living through what amounts to the end of the world but essentially ignoring, or blithely accepting, it.  The last few Presidents have been murdered, peace activists blew up a factory, labor unions blew up Detroit with an atomic bomb, crime is rampant, there are a multitude of plagues ravaging the country, a nuclear weapons test caused an earthquake in California, etc.

I gotta give "When We Went to See the End of the World" a thumbs down.  It is not as aggressively, offensively bad as Ellison's "On the Downhill Side," but it is a waste of time.  We'll say Silverberg's story here is marginally bad.

I guess I am not on the same wavelength as the professional SF community--many editors have seen fit to reprint "When We Went to See the End of the World" in their "Best of" anthologies (I read this thing in a scan of Lester del Rey's second Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year) and it also appears in many themed anthologies as well as The Best of Robert Silverberg: Volume 2.  Because I am going against the grain here, maybe I have to spell out exactly why I think it is bad.  Here goes: in "When We Went to See the End of the World" we find no characters, no plot, and no human feeling--it is just a list of theoretical end-of-the-world scenarios the same joke (we are blasé about some disaster) again and again.  Why do editors like it?  Because they want to endorse Silverberg's contempt for middle-class keep-up-with-the-Joneses types who are (Silverberg and the editors might argue) fiddling while Rome burns?  Well, the world is littered with attacks on the status-seeking politically apathetic bourgeoisie.  Because it dramatizes 1970s pessimism?  Well, Dozois, here in the same book, offers a story that embodies Seventies pessimism but has real psychological insight as well as striking images and it does not feel like a repetitive gag--those editors should have reprinted that story.

"Patron of the Arts" by William Rotsler

I mostly know Rotsler as a draughtsman whose cartoons appear in great profusion in small periodicals, but he has a story in Universe 2 that was reprinted by del Rey in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, where del Rey really talks up Rotsler's abilities as a writer, so let's check out this 25-page story that was later expanded into a novel.

Alright, "Patron of the Arts" is a competent mainstream story about the art world with a conventional plot and conventional themes--it is only a SF story because it is set in the future.  A story almost identical to it could have been set in any time between the World Wars or after 1945.  We'll grade it acceptable.

Our narrator Brian is an extremely wealthy businessman who knows all about art and buys and sells and donates major art works and supports many artists, especially young up-and-coming artists.  The story is about his relationships with one of the greatest artists in history, Mike, and with the most beautiful and fascinating woman in the world, Madelon.  As a rich guy, Brian has banged a lot of women, but he is also a man with exquisite taste, and Madelon is the first woman who is so deep, so mysterious, so full of life, that he can never tire of her.  Mike is a pioneer in crafting art with the new technology of the sensatron cube.  The cube is a transparent box that holds a super realistic 3D image, generally a life-size image of a person, but the cube also presents a 360-degree background--when you face the image of the person in the cube you see what is behind her, and when you walk around the cube to look at the woman's back you can also see what she is facing.  The cube also influences your emotions directly by projecting "pulses" that "work on your alpha waves" and "sonics."

Brian convinces Madelon to marry him, and they have a happy open marriage.  Mike specializes in cubes depicting nude women that project a powerful erotic charge, and Brian wants Mike to do a cube of Madelon.  Mike and Madelon spend months together, Mike having to get to know his subject before he can construct a masterpiece cube of her.  The cube, when finished, is the greatest work of art Brian knows of, but after it is finished, Madelon leaves him for Mike.  It is almost like Brian bought the world's greatest work of art and the price was handing over the hottest woman in the world.

Rotsler pads this banal piece of work with scenes depicting the lifestyle of rich people in the future, lots of references to famous artists, art philosophy--stuff like:

"...Would you do my portrait, or use me as a subject?"  She was perceptive enough to know that there was a more than subtle difference.

and 

"All art began as science and all science began as art." 

--and with presumptively deep thoughts about people and life of the type you'd perhaps expect from an artist:

She owned herself.  Few people do.  So many are mere reflections of others....

At the bottom level are people who are "interesting" or "different."  Those below that should not be allowed to waste your time.  On the next step above is Unique.  Then the Originals, and finally those rare Legends.

"Women are never the same moment to moment."

"Patron of the Arts" is not bad, but it just kind of sits there, a specimen of mundane fiction about people who should be interesting because they are superlatives, the very top examples of what they are, like Michelangelo or Shakespeare or something, but whom are not actually that interesting.  I can't imagine how this thing was expanded into a 200-page novel--it already feels too long, what with the lists of artists, lists of vacation spots, lists of what a rich guys does (buying companies, selling companies, buying art, selling art, blah blah blah.)  [UPDATE APRIL 15, 2025: Check out the comments where someone who has read the novel Patron of the Arts describes the additions Rotsler made to the story's plot and helpfully places it in the context of the time in which it was published.]    

"Patron of the Arts" was reprinted in the very first issue of Vertex and in a few anthologies.

**********

Alright, so I now have strong opinions about six stories in Universe 2.  Let's stroll on over to Joachim Boaz's blog, which is approximately 300 times as successful as mine, and see what he thought of those six stories.

Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," which I didn't understand, Joachim praises as one of the best four stories in the book, but doesn't offer me any help in understanding it.  He considers Ellison's "On the Downhill Side" "saccharine" and "awkward" and dismisses it as a "dud."  Pangborn's "Tiger Boy" and Dozois' "The Man Who Waved Hello" he calls "good."  Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" Joachim doesn't mention.

Leaving aside the Wolfe, which maybe I would love myself if I knew what was going on in it, our only substantial disagreement is over Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World."  I think we agree on what Silverberg is doing with the story, but whereas I found it a lame waste of time, just one more snooty denunciation of middle-class strivers to toss on the mountainous pile of such stories, Joachim "highly recommends" Silverberg's story as the best thing in Universe 2, praising it as an "outright masterpiece" that is "devastating in its implications."  Hmm.   

**********

I enjoyed the Pangborn and the Dozois, the Rotsler is a curiosity, and familiarity with the work of towering figures Ellison and Silverberg is valuable, so this foray into reprints of material that debuted in Universe 2 has been a profitable expedition.  I'd like to read the R. A. Lafferty and Bob Shaw stories in Universe 2, but they are not that easy to find.  Maybe someday I'll come across a cheap copy of the anthology in a brick and mortar store (online copies are over ten bucks!) and engage with some more of its contents--according to Joachim, Gerard Conway's "Funeral Service" is "fantastic," the second best story in the book, and he plot sounds like something right up my alley.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories and (probably) idiosyncratic opinion here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Orbit 13: Lafferty, Bryant, Sallis, Grant, Etchison and Dozois

At the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books, on the clearance carts, I recently spotted a volume entitled Speaking of Science Fiction, a collection of interviews of SF writers and editors conducted during the 1970s via the mail  mail by Paul Walker.  I was interested in the book, but I am incredibly cheap and so instead of buying it I found the scan of it at the internet archive and flipped through it while riding the subway (which in D.C. they call the Metro--oh la la!)

One Paul Walker's interviewees is Damon Knight, and one of the main topics of the interview is Knight's famous series of anthologies of original stories, Orbit.  (Knight also does his husbandly duty, gushing praise for his second wife Kate Wilhelm, talks up the Clarion workshop, and admits that his famous attack on A. E. van Vogt in In Search of Wonder was one-sided and he wishes he had "included something about vV's strong points.")  Orbit, Knight writes, "represents an attempt to bring about a renaissance in science fiction by demanding high standards and giving a lot in return--high rates, prompt reports, courteous treatment, etc."  He says that improving the quality of SF requires "redefining the field" and "letting go of rigid conceptions of what science fiction is;" he argues that "booms for quality" in the past have been the product of editors who have done just that, citing "Tremaine in the mid-thirties, Campbell from '37 to '42," and "Gold and Boucher in the early 50's."  With Orbit, Knight claims, he is not "editing to strict ideas of subject and content," but is "keeping the boundaries fluid" and publishing lots of work on the "fringe of science fiction" or even beyond it that surprise him.  At the same time, and perhaps most interestingly, he asserts that "Orbit has never had anything to do with the stylistic experimentation of the New Worlds/New Wave scene."  I am often struck by how nobody can agree on what the New Wave is or what it was all about. 

The listing of "Gene Wolf" on the cover of the paperback edition is a mistake;
Gary K. Wolf appears in the anthology, not Gene Wolfe.  The promise of 
editorial notes and personal commentary also seems to be a mistake--
at least there is no such additional matter in the scan at isfdb, just two pages of
jokey biographies at the end of the book; in his interview with Walker,
Knight discusses why he stopped composing intros and "blurbs" for Orbit.

Reading this interview has made me want to read some Orbit stories, so I again turn to the internet archive, this time to take a look at Orbit 13 (lucky!) from 1974.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we recognize all too well that life is short, and so we won't be reading all 240 pages of Orbit 13, just cherry-picking stories by writers we already have a particular interest in.  I guess this goes against Knight's whole open-minded, innovation-privileging, no-set-ideas, aim-to-push-the-boundaries mindset, but that's how it is.

"And Name My Name" by R. A. Lafferty 

We start off with a story the superiority of which was endorsed by another important SF editor; after its debut here in Orbit 13, "And Name My Name" was selected by Lester del Rey for inclusion in the 1975 edition of his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year series.  The tale has since appeared in Lafferty collections.

"And Name my Name" posits a bizarre secret history of the world in which the Earth has been successively ruled by different classes or orders of animals: elephants, sharks, whales, crocodilians, etc.  In their time of primacy the ruling beasts have speech, art, even wear clothes, but when they are supplanted by the next rulers, lose these abilities and attributes and become dumb animals.  All except a small elite of seven or nine of their number, immortal representatives of their order at its height.  As the story (15 pages) begins, the seven elite apes, drawn from all across the world, are travelling to a conclave of all the sophisticated elites representing all the past rulers, because the times they are a-changing.  After we have been introduced to the ape delegation, we encounter the seven elite individuals who represent the current rulers of Earth, the human race.  At the big meeting in Mesopotamia a shining man appears; able to bend space and time he treats with each delegation separately but also simultaneously.  He assigns all the different species their roles in the new age, a process referred to as "telling them their names," and the members of the human delegation are pretty discomfited to learn they have no real name beyond "secondary ape" and to hear their culture of towering cities, nuclear reactors and space ships, dismissed out of hand by the shining man, judged less admirable than the hives of termites or the song of the mockingbird.  What will replace the human race that is about to be reduced to dumb animals as its civilization is swept away ,is left to the reader's imagination, but all the non-human characters seem sure it will be an improvement on humanity!

This is a good, fun story, and I think it fulfills Knight's ambitions for Orbit--it is innovative, throwing a new and crazy idea at you, and it is on the fringes of standard definitions of science fiction, seeing as it totally ignores all accepted science around biology and paleontology and all that and replaces it not with speculative science but what is a sort of religious view or just a fairy tale that casts the human race as inferior to the birds and the bees.  At the same time, the story is in direct dialogue with quintessential mainstream SF, as some of the human characters refer to Arthur C. Clarke stories by name. 

Good on Lafferty for producing a good story and good on Knight for publishing it.  Thumbs up!  

"Going West" by Edward Bryant

Looking at the records, it seems that 15 stories by Edward Bryant have been subjected to the sometimes pitiless, generally myopic and always erratic MPorcius microscope, plus the novel Bryant coauthored with bad boy Harlan Ellison, Phoenix Without Ashes, which you might call a piece of shrapnel or a submunition thrown off by one of Ellison's many explosive collisions with Hollywood.  While there are some clunkers among those fifteen, Bryant is a serious writer and his stories are generally thoughtful and ambitious (for one thing he seems to write a lot about various "marginalized communities," e. g., women, blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals, which is sort of risky and interesting), and they are often effective, so we have reason to hope "Going West" will be a good story.   

"Going West" is indeed a good psychological horror/crime story, a character study and biography of a guy whose unhappy life drives him to trespass against the law and others; I guess you could call "Going West" an attack on our society, argue it suggests that American foreign policy and American racism created a monster out of the main character and that all the empty highways and congested interchanges in the story represent the loneliness and chaos of our individualistic culture of strivers and our complex capitalist economy.  (The title itself is a clue that the story is about America writ large, "going west" being a sort of quintessential theme of American history.) 

Lindsey was raised on the East coast by a single mother, his father having been killed in Cambodia.  Mom was cold and distant, and little Lindsey didn't make friends and was pretty maladjusted.  For example, he came to adore the school buses, to think of them as living animals, and was traumatized when activists angry about busing blew up one of the buses while it sat in a parking lot.

In college Lindsey's bicycle was repeatedly vandalized and eventually stolen.  After graduation, Mom got Lindsey a job at an accounting firm, owned by a Lindsay and his son.  The fourth man at Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsey and Veach was an aggressive homosexual who kept irritating shy and sad Lindsey, flirting with him and advising him to see a shrink he knew who was a "pussycat."  

Lindsey started having some kind of breakdown, which the senior Lindsay recognized, so he gave Lindsey some time off, and Lindsey is now driving to Los Angeles with no fixed reason to do so in mind, other than to get away from home, where he assaulted the doctor recommended by Veach.  As he drives he becomes progressively more insane, and we readers are privy to what appear to be hallucinations as well as memories, each of which may or may not be false, of people and of conversations--we cannot be sure that anything Lindsey sees or hears or remembers is real.  There are also allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice.  In the story's climax it seems Lindsey dies after driving off a highway overpass, victim of his hallucinations or a death trap in a through-the-looking-glass universe of murderous highways.  

As I have told you a hundred times I miss living in New York City and one of the things I miss is never  having to drive--I hate driving and all the attendant risks and responsibilities, worrying about the car's tires and oil and fuel and all that.  Because I am from New Jersey and my wife is from the Middle West and has family who have fled the Northern winters for the balmy South I find myself on many long road trips, driving hundreds and hundreds of miles up and down the East coast and back and forth between Washington D.C. and the rural Heartland.  So, I found Bryant's descriptions of the experience of driving for hours and hours and then trying to navigate a complicated series of junctions quite compelling.  The horror stuff in "Going West" is suitably sad and disgusting, and while the story is something of a puzzle, told out of chronological order and full of surreal sections, it is not hard to figure out.      

So, thumbs up for "Going West."  As a psychological horror story it is certainly on the fringes of, or even outside, conventional definitions of science fiction, though maybe the magical realist ending qualifies it as "SF."  According to isfdb, "Going West" has never been reprinted; too bad.   

*"Sending the Very Best," "The Soft Blue Rabbit Story," "Shark," "Pinup," "Road to Cinnabar," "Audition: Soon to Be a Major Production," "Strata," "Dancing Chickens," "Cowboys, Indians," "Nova Morning," "Beside Still Waters," "In the Silent World," "Dark Angel," "Jody After the War," and "Black Onyx"

"My Friend Zarathustra" by James Sallis

I've read eight or nine stories* by James Sallis over the course of this blog's tempestuous life and I have not liked many of them; in fact, I think I have denounced half of them as a waste of the reader's time.  I am just reading this one because it is a mere three pages long and because I wanted to say that seeing the name "Zarathustra" in print always makes me think of Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl."

This is one of those stories by a writer that is about being a writer, how hard it is, how you hang around with other mentally unstable creative people who cry and vomit all the time and sometimes commit suicide.  It is vague.  Some of it is written in the first person, some in the third person; some is in past tense, some in present tense.  There are lots of images of stuff like the sunrise and neon signs.  The plot, such as it is, is about how the narrator's girlfriend left him for a friend.  The last paragraph seems to be evoking scenes of the torch-wielding villagers who come to the castle at the end of movies about Dr. Frankenstein, perhaps suggesting that writers, painters, musicians, etc., are like mad scientists who take risks, break the rules, and sacrifice others to bring about new life, new life that is sometimes twisted and destructive and arouses the enmity of the populace.  

Pretentious goop that goes nowhere and is eminently forgettable.  "My Friend Zarathustra" would reappear in Sallis's 1995 collection Limits of the Sensible World.

*"Field," "Tissue," "The First Few Kinds of Truth," "Delta Flight 481," "They Will Not Hush," "Faces and Hands," "Binaries" and "Only the Words are Different"

"Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" by Charles L. Grant

Charles L. Grant is the "quiet horror" guy.  If isfdb is to be believed, "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" has never been reprinted, so if you are a Grant completist, it is time for you to hit up ebay and drop two or three sawbucks for a copy of Orbit 13.

There was a nuclear war recently, and almost everybody is dead.  A man and a woman meet at a seaside amusement park, both of these thin and haggard victims of radiation sickness who vomit all the time have independently come to the beach because they have happy memories of the place.  "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" chronicles the first few hours they spend together, during which they fall in love.  As a college kid the man worked on the boardwalk, running a wheel of fortune, and says the line that serves as the story's title, and then remarks that the game is "fixed."  I suppose we are expected to see this as symbolism that our lives are similarly rigged by the existence of nuclear weapons.  The man is resourceful and has got generators running so the two can ride the decrepit ferris wheel.  (Feminists will groan at how the man saves the woman when she gets in trouble, picks her up when she falls, cooks the food, fixes broken machinery, and is a total gentleman who doesn't molest the woman, while the woman mostly cries and worries about her looks and obviously needs a boyfriend more than any fish ever needed a bicycle.)  Riding the ferris wheel offers these two ferris-wheel-lovers hallucinations of their happier days, and they decide to find a boat and sail to Coney Island to ride the much bigger ferris wheel there.  The end of the story is sort of ambiguous, with notes of hope as well as the pervasive idea that they are likely to die at any moment of their radiation sickness. 

Acceptable.  This is more mainstream science fiction than some of our other Orbit 13 reads, consisting of speculation of how people will react if there is a nuclear war, though the focus is on nostalgia and sadness and a human relationship than rebuilding civilization or something like that.    

"Black Sun" by Dennis Etchison

I've been impressed by many of the Etchison stories I have read, like "Daughters of the Golden West," "It Only Comes Out at Night." and "Wet Season"; at one point I even had the idea of reading the entire Etchison collection Red Dreams, though that ended up not happening (yet.)  So, I have hopes "Black Sun" will be good.

Well, the good news is that I am one step closer to reading all the stories in Red Dreams because "Black Sun" is included in that collection.  Maybe we'll really accomplish that goal some day.  The bad news is that this story is pretty opaque and boring.  As far as I can tell, the narrator is in a legal fight to avoid the draft, and his wife is pregnant, sick and suicidal.  There are lots of surreal scenes in which he deals with bureaucratic forms, his insane wife says crazy things, he looks at how skinny she has got, and wonders about the dots on her skin (it seems she is going to an acupuncturist instead of an obstetrician.)  Both these characters are getting pretty rundown, and in the end of the story it appears the narrator is so changed that people don't recognize him anymore.  He resolves to murder the acupuncturist and then take refuge in the wilderness, I guess an extreme reaction to losing his legal fight and/or the death of his wife.

An impressionistic mess; it takes some work to figure it out and what you end up with doesn't seem to justify the effort.  I didn't really see the connections among the story's themes of draft-dodging, acupuncture, pregnancy and darkness (Vietnam is in Asia and acupuncture is from Asia? burning your draft card is associated with hippies and lefties and so is acupuncture?)  The story is just a jumble of stuff and doesn't build to a climax or have any twists or turns, it is just a vague flat line from start to finish.  One problem with the story may be that Etchison is relying too much on readers' passionate connection to current events to give the story energy, expecting people in 1974 to get all worked up over the issue of the draft and so neglecting to include more universal themes; will readers in 2074 get the charge out of a story the main theme of which is the provision of puberty blockers to minors or AFVs to Ukraine that today's readers might get? 

I think I have to give "Black Sun" a marginal negative vote.  

"Flash Point" by Gardner Dozois

Looks like another horror story--"Flash Point" would go on to be included by Charles L. Grant in his 1983 anthology Fears and by Dennis Etchison in his 1986 anthology Masters of Darkness.  Were SF readers in 1975 disappointed by the high proportion of horror tales in Orbit 13?  Did Knight think that publishing horror stories in a science fiction anthology was somehow "innovative" or "redefining the field"?  Well, in Knight's defense, "Flash Point" does consist of speculation about the near future, so is more like traditional SF than Bryant's "Going West" or Etchison's "Black Sun."

You can also find "Flash Point" in Noreen Doyle's 2008 Otherworldly Maine, and it is a good choice for Doyle's anthology, as much of its text is devoted to creating a strong sense of place, offering lots of descriptions of the sights and sounds and the flora and fauna of its wooded setting and portraits of its small town people and the main character's relationships with them.  That main character is Jacobs, a guy who makes his living repairing appliances and doing handyman jobs; he is also a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in combat.  (Like "Going West" and "Black Sun," "Flash Point" reminds you that communism is nothing to worry about and that the world's problems stem from the sick society of the United States.  Maybe this is what Knight considered "innovative.")

Jacobs finds a deserted car on the road; Dozois's detailed description of the vehicle and its contents makes it clear to readers that we are dealing with a case of spontaneous combustion!  Jacobs does not recognize this, however, apparently never having had a copy of that Reader's Digest volume Mysteries of the Unexplained that creeped me out as a kid.  He contacts the cops (the sheriff is a violent brute and his subordinates are idiots) and then has lunch at the local diner where we meet the various town  eccentrics and, from the town doctor, get a strong dose of one of the story's themes: abnormal psychology and psychosomatic illness, how the mind can powerfully affect the functioning of the body. 

Dozois gives us a lot of verbiage about Jacobs's feelings, his changing state of mind after finding the abandoned car.  He becomes subject to powerful, violent rages, savors the idea of harming the anti-communist at the diner, a stray dog, the raucous wealthy tourists ("gypsies") who recklessly pass his pickup on the road and harass him.  Late in the story, with a reference to hologram TVs, Dozois makes clear something that has not been evident earlier, that this story is set in the near future; the "gypsies" are a reflection of how violent and cruel and even suicidal American society has become, their extended visits to rural Maine symbolizing how even remote areas are subject to the degradation of American society that started, or at least was most evident initially, in big cities.  The climax of the story is the presentation of stark evidence that the sick culture of America at large has subsumed even this little Maine community, a rash of the spontaneous combustion events and even the discovery of a Satanic coven that practices human sacrifice!

"Flash Point" is well-written, but some will perhaps find disappointing the fact that it is a longish (22 pages) mood piece; the main character does very little, acting merely as a witness, and the plot consists not of the characters taking a journey or overcoming obstacles but instead of the author progressively revealing to us readers the extent to which American society is sick and is turning ordinary people into killers and suicides.  I've already compared it to Grant and Etchison's stories, and a similarity we might see to "Going West" and "Black Sun" is how over-the-top, through-the-looking-glass and surreal the ending of "Flash Point" might seem to some--witches sacrificing babies and a multitude of people spontaneously combusting is pretty "out there" for a story so much of which is so realistic.  

As I have said, Dozois's writing is quite good--he delivers sharp clear images of the character's environment and his mental state, and the pacing is good; I was always interested, the pretty extensive descriptions never becoming boring.  So, thumbs up for "Flash Point."

**********

Living up to our stereotyped view of the 1970s, these are some pessimistic, apocalyptic stories.  And I suppose living up to Knight's objectives with the Orbit series, none of them is straightforward and none offers rational scientific explanations for the events they depict--all of them present characters who are hallucinating or who have experiences that are inexplicable except as religious phenomena or suspension-of-disbelief defying symbolism.  I like horror stories and as I always do, I have judged these stories today on how interesting, entertaining and well-crafted they are, not on how closely they adhere to some kind of platonic definition of "science fiction," but I think it is fair to wonder if Knight, in expanding the definition of "science fiction" so far, is perhaps rendering the term meaningless, or making its essential meaninglessness more obvious.  It is easy to suspect terms like "New Wave" and "science fiction" lack any concrete definition and are mostly useful as marketing categories or shibboleths used by people to declare allegiance to (or express contempt for) an identity group or cultural phenomena.       

More terror awaits us in the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!

1973 Tomorrows by D Gerrold, J Blish and G R Dozois

Let's finish up Ten Tomorrows, the 1973 anthology of all-new SF stories (the back cover somewhat questionably calls them "thrillers" and "adventures") edited by Roger Elwood.  The last three stories in the book are by David Gerrold, James Blish and Gardner R. Dozois, and collectively take up like 80 pages, which sounds like a lot of pages, to be honest, but I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....

"An Infinity of Loving" by David Gerrold

I guess you'd call this a philosophical story, more a series of ideas than a traditional story.  

"An Infinity of Loving" starts by describing two good-looking young people who are in love, and how beautiful and wonderful their love is, and talking about all the unlikely coincidences that go into two people meeting each other by chance and falling in love.  Even though these two individuals are young, attractive, straight and white, Gerrold tells us the love of old ugly homosexuals of some other ethnicity would be just as wonderful.  

Then comes the subject of death, another thing that often comes about by unlikely coincidences, but which inevitably happens to everybody, and with it, the end of any wonderful love relationship the deceased was a component of.  This part of the story betrays the preoccupations of the period in which it was written, with allusions to political demonstrations, rock musicians dying of drug overdoses, and politicians getting murdered. 

The two lovers fear death, and take steps to ensure they, and their love, will live forever.  They have their brains networked together via elaborate surgeries and computer implants, and their personalities uploaded into a computer network.  The last section of the story lets us know that this is basically a scam, that the reproduced personalities in the network are not really the people upon which they are based, and each individual personality is experiencing not a true love relationship with another personality, but mere solipsistic self love.  Gerrold's story is a warning against integrating yourself into technology, arguing that it is a bogus sham experience and true life is connected to the body.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis, and I don't disagree with its arguments, but it feels long and the points it makes are sort of obvious and banal, and Gerrold doesn't dramatize his arguments by presenting us with compelling characters or a gripping plot, he just sort of tells them to you.  While I was reading "An Infinity of Loving" I kept checking to see how many pages were left, anxious to put this experience behind me, so I have to give it a, marginal, thumbs down.

"An Infinity of Loving" has never appeared outside of Ten Tomorrows.

"A True Bill" by James Blish

Sacre bleu, the subtitle to this story indicates that it is "A Chancel Drama in One Act."  Do I really want to read a 25-page play ("Time: Today...Place: A courtroom") designed to be performed in churches?  I guess I am doing it anyway.

In the intro to the play provided for its appearance here in a book purportedly filled with "Great New Science Fiction Stories," Blish reports he and his theatre group put the play on in fifteen churches in what we residents call "the DMV" back in 1966.  Blish makes sure to tell us that one of the churches was in a black slum and that one of his group's lead actors was a black man and that this guy was a great actor.

Blish's play is a reworking of the story of the death of Jesus Christ, with the roles of the Romans played by people much like American soldiers, and that of the Jews by people who are supposed to remind you of Vietnamese people.  (Blish doesn't use any of those proper nouns; instead the soldiers are members of "the Occupying Forces" and the natives are called by the non-coms, though not by their officer, "the gooks.")  Two days ago a native judge allied to the Occupying Forces had three troublemakers hanged.  Today the Occupying Forces and a different native judge are holding an inquest to determine if the three prisoners were justly executed.  Witnesses are called, and their testimony, and stuff said by people in the crowd, make it clear that one of the three people executed was a man who preached brotherhood and peace and got caught up in native politics and whose death was desired by his native enemies.  Among the witnesses and in the crowd are characters like Mary, mother of that man of peace, and Magda, a prostitute who was a follower the man of peace, who play the roles of their Biblical namesakes, as well as caricatures or archetypes of stereotypical 1966 Americans, like a teen-aged hippy who says "Don't blow your cool, baby," a doctor who psychoanalyses the man of peace, a housewife who is worried about inflation, etc.

I found "A True Bill" to be a gimmicky waste of time, though I suppose it could be seen as a useful primary source, an artifact that offers insight into the thought of people in 1966 and into the thinking and career of James Blish.   

You are not going to be surprised to hear that isfdb does not list any other printings of  "A True Bill" after its appearance here in Ten Tomorrows.

"In a Crooked Year" by Gardner R. Dozois

Ten Tomorrows ends with another long piece--like 40 pages--that has only ever appeared in Elwood's anthology here.  "In A Crooked Year" has four epigraphs, lines of poetry from Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Aram Boyajian, and an exchange of dialogue from Catch-22.

The protagonist of "In a Crooked Year" is a survivor of World War Three!  A wounded soldier serving in Pennsylvania, he deserted when his unit was about to fight a battalion of enemy paratroopers and so lived on after his comrades were wiped out; apparently all of those invading paratroopers were also killed.  (The enemies are never identified, because the point of a story like this is not to criticize or stoke the readers' resentment of some foreign country or some political ideology--the point of a story like this is to criticize and stoke your resentment of the entire human race!)  Our main character thinks he is the only human being left alive in the world!

The text of "In a Crooked Year" is at times impressionistic and often mind-numbingly overwritten, offering us readers long sentences that signify little.  Lengthy passages describe stuff he sees, and these descriptions are confusing and vague, a reflection of the physical and mental toll the deserter's experiences are having on him; the man's thought processes are also related, illustrating his loosening grip on sanity.  Here's a short, but otherwise representative, paragraph:

I open my eyes again and let the colors rave at me, drinking them, touching and tasting their subtle, oscillating textures.  I am afraid that the world will absorb me, drown me in its intensity until I become just another light wave spinning and vibrating along the color spectrum, or at best a single leaf nodding its head among the vast sea of living green.

We also get lots of sentences repetitively describing the deserter's hardships and wretched efforts to survive--his aches and pains, his crying and vomiting, his meals of raw snakes and slugs, his dreams and delusions.  As the above extract demonstrates, "In a Crooked Year" is sometimes written in the first-person in the present tense, but at other times the text is in the past tense and delivered by an omniscient third-person narrator.

The deserter suffers survivor's guilt, and is reluctant to go to the battlefield where his unit was destroyed, but eventually does so, thinking there may be preserved food and other supplies there that he can salvage--he's not really finding enough bugs, reptiles and roots to make up a healthy diet.  The first chapter of the story ends with the survivor yelling at God and at the human race.

In the first chapter of the story there was a lot of philosophical talk about the protagonist being the last man on Earth, but in the second (and final) chapter it becomes clear that there is at least one other survivor; presumably this is an enemy soldier, as he shoots at our hero, but misses.  Winter comes, making survival even more difficult, and our insane protagonist sacrifices a bird in hopes this will cause winter to end.  He manages to survive the winter.  In spring, he shoots down the enemy soldier.  Then, he shoots himself.  

If I had to guess what this story is trying to convey, I would say that Dozois is suggesting that the human race is arrogant and destructive towards the beautiful natural world as well as self-destructive, and that man and his technology (one of the protagonist's delusions is that the broken pieces of various armored vehicles have assembled themselves like a Frankenstein's monster and this zombie machine is slowly closing in on our hero) are a cruel burden on that beautiful natural world, but that nature will endure man's presence and thrive after he destroys himself.     

"In a Crooked Year" is a slog to read; dense and slow, it goes on forever and you rarely feel like you are getting anywhere.  Thumbs down!  

**********

Three stories with obvious and banal points to make that make them in ways that are not entertaining and chew up lots of the brief time you have left on this Earth.  And I don't even sympathize with Dozois's supposed insights!

Three losers in a row?  Each one worse than its predecessor?  Ouch!  

**********

Folks, it's time for tonight's Top Ten List!  Tonight's list: Top Ten Stories in Ten Tomorrows.

TOP TEN STORIES

IN

TEN TOMORROWS

10. "In a Crooked Year" by Gardner R. Dozois

9.  "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" by Robert Silverberg

8.  "A True Bill" by James Blish

7.  "The Freshman Angle" by Edgar Pangborn

6.  "An Infinity of Loving" by David Gerrold

5.  "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" by Anne McCaffrey

4.  "A Few Minutes" by Laurence M. Janifer

3. "The Defenseless Dead" by Larry Niven

2. "Matthew" by Pamela Sargent

1. "Yahrzeit" by Barry N. Malzberg

**********

Can I recommend Ten Tomorrows, a book with five bad stories and four good ones?  I actually think I can!  Well, to special people with particular interests, at least!  While it is true that two of the good stories in the book--Malzberg's and Niven's--are available in other books (and on the world's greatest website, the internet archive), the other two, Sargent's and Janifer's, are not, so maybe Sargent and Janifer fans should get a hold of the book.  Similarly, students or collectors of Blish, Gerrold, Pangborn, and Dozois have no other avenue to experience the stories included here.  Finally, and I know I have suggested this already, repeatedly, Ten Tomorrows is a primary source for those who want to learn about the New Wave and the 1960s and 1970s from the horse's mouth and not from tendentious secondary sources.

Call me crazy, but another all-new SF anthology from the 1970s in our next episode!  Steel your nerve!

Orbit 10: G Dozois, G A Effinger, and R A Lafferty

In a recent episode of MPorcius Fiction Log we read stories from 1972's Orbit 10 about the love affair of a telephone repairman and a Native American in post-nuclear war Colorado, the spread of Earth life to the moon and the disputed morality of its further spread, and psychic combat and infantry vs armor combat in Brooklyn.  Who knows to what horrors we will be exposed thanks to today's helping of Orbit 10 stories, one dish each cooked up by Gardner Dozois, George Alec Effinger, and R. A. Lafferty?

"A Kingdom by the Sea" by Gardner Dozois

Dateline: An industrial American town, the present (early '70s, I guess)

Mason is a working-class schlub, a veteran whose father worked in a meat packing plant and who, after a period of drifting and his Army service, now works in the same plant, killing multitudes of cows in quick succession with a hammer, a human killing machine.  Mason is 38 years old, and the job is starting to fatigue him.  Exacerbating his trouble is the fact that a few months ago his live-in girlfriend of three years left him.

Dozois kills a lot of pages doing what I guess a lot of writers think they are supposed to do, describing in detail fogged up windows and rain and riding the bus to work at a crummy, dangerous and perhaps morally suspect job and then back home to an empty apartment to eat a frozen pizza and drink beer and watch an old movie on TV.  Some of this is in past tense, some of it in present tense.  I guess Dozois is performing some topical social commentary on industrialism and capitalism and all that; the story is preceded by the epigraph "For the Democratic National Convention," there are vague references to Vietnam, and there is a longish sequence in which Mason becomes enraged while watching an old movie because the characters are middle-class people who have no problems.  (Unfortunately, Dozois doesn't name the movie; one wonders if he had a specific movie in mind.)  Perhaps more interesting than these class- or economics-based angles are gender-based ones; "A Kingdom by the Sea" may be some kind of feminist story, its ending a metaphor for how (as feminists might say) men lure women in with promises of comfort and then destroy them.

(Re: the title of the story, I didn't pick up on any other possible Poe references, though the phrase "hollow men" does appear.  The story could be replete with references to poetry in English that sailed right over my uneducated noggin.  There are plenty of direct religious references, and some references to "sci-fi" as well, with the suggestion that religion and SF are a poor guide to real life.)   

The actual SF content of "A Kingdom by the Sea" consists of the fact that Mason has sex dreams about the presence of a woman; he doesn't see her or hear her speak but he senses her, senses a shared love and a mutual exchange of comfort and sexual ecstasy--Mason ejaculates in his pants while asleep in front of the TV.  He comes to believe this woman, an angel or a spirit or something, is going to come to him, and that her arrival is imminent.  The twist ending of the story is, I believe, that she does come to him, but the spirit Mason has been communing with is that of a cow and just as he does with all the others he kills it by bashing in its head with his hammer.  (Maybe this is a pro-vegetarianism story.)

It doesn't feel right to call this story bad, because I suppose it is heartfelt and the product of some labor and all that, but it is not fun or enlightening or novel.  It is just kind of there, inoffensive but unimpressive.  Maybe it serves as a good example of the New Wave SF story which has lost almost all resemblance to traditional SF.

"A Kingdom by the Sea" would reappear in various Dozois collections and some foreign publications, and Ellen Datlow twice presented it to readers of her internet magazines.

Hubba hubba

"Live, from Brechtsgaden" by George Alec Effinger

Dateline: Germany, the second decade of the 20th century

Oy, Effinger's story is perhaps even more New Wavey than was Dozois's, and a little harder to understand.  I'm interpreting it as a meditation on guilt and forgiveness with its primary topic the crimes of Germany during the World Wars.

Much of the text of "Live, from Brechtsgaden" consists of what sounds like excerpts from travel guides, memoirs, and essays printed during the Cold War, all reflecting in some way on the Nazi regime, World War II, and the Holocaust.  The rest of the text suggests that those paragraphs are being spoken, mostly in English, by a young German woman who lies in a coma; it seems she fell into the coma before World War I and was taken to a sanitarium, and then when the war broke out was moved home because her caretakers had to join the war effort.  Later we are given the idea that this comatose woman is inhabited by the lost soul of a Jewish-American tourist from the post-World War II period; this second young woman has the same first name as the comatose woman and has taken a particular interest in the Holocaust, having been charged by a relative to remember the sufferings of her people.  Eventually the comatose woman simply vanishes, forgotten, and the lost soul has to drift on and start anew; I guess these fantastic events symbolize the way even the atrocities of the Hitler government will be forgotten, whether or not they are forgiven, and how Germany and the world will inevitably move on.

As with Dozois's story, one is reluctant to admit not liking "Live, from Brechtsgaden" because it is about a serious topic and presumably represents a cri de coeur and shows literary ambition (and if you say you don't like it maybe people will call you stupid or say you are insufficiently outraged by racism) but I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed it or was moved by it or whatever.

Damon Knight and Robert Silverberg apparently enjoyed this story more than I did, or maybe thought it the serving of broccoli SF readers ought to add to their diet of sword-swinging barbarians, ray pistol-toting spacemen and lectures about radiation and gravity.  Just two years after its debut in Orbit 10, Silverberg included it in Alpha 5, and a year after that it showed up again in The Best from Orbit, Volumes 1-10.  You can also find it in the Effinger collection Dirty Tricks.   

"Dorg" by R. A. Lafferty

Dateline: Oklahoma in the overpopulated future

This is a fun little story that gently satirizes the dominance of postwar culture by youth and the hypocrisy and fraudulence of politicians and other elites, as well as vagaries of popular taste; the backbone of the tale is a farcical look at the question of to what extent art imitates life and vice versa.

Starvation threatens the world!  A new comic strip character has caught the imagination of the public--called the dorg, this creature matches the populace's hopes, fears and mood, as it can derive sustenance from eating rocks and is perennially worried.  A renegade psychologist publishes his theory that animals do not develop naturally over millions of years of evolution, but instead appear when needed by mankind, and that they are either summoned, or prophesized, by artistic representations--ignoring all evidence to the contrary, this head shrinker claims that there were no horses or deer or whatever until after cave men painted them on cave walls!  He asserts that a real dorg is due to appear at any moment.  And, true enough, people in Oklahoma start sighting the fictional beast!

Government officials, in their slapdash ramshackle way, have been trying to resolve the food crisis, and the y scramble to take advantage of the dorg.  A commission is convened, and among its members are the cartoonist and the psychologist.  The commission heads to OK, led, de facto if not de jure, by a representative of a sort of government-sponsored pressure group modelled after a guild or trade union, Amalgamated Youth--all entities must, by law, include an Amalgamated Youth representative in their ranks.  Illustrating how bogus such political activist groups are, the AY rep, who got this job because she is good-looking, is actually older than everybody else on the commission, but don't you think this stops her from calling her colleagues a bunch of old men and haranguing them about the need for fresh new ideas; she also is not above using violence to encourage her colleagues.

As the story ends we know that the dorgs are real, but cannot be sure how responsible the cartoonist is for their appearance or whether their appearance is going to free the world from hunger.

A charming, fun little thing, like a sweet dessert after the pretentious downers we have been ingesting.   I might add that if we suspect Dozois's story of promoting left-wing economic, class, gender, and interspecies politics, it might make sense to suspect Lafferty's story of just the opposite, or at least of mocking progressive politics, with its, however goofy, dismissal of the theory of evolution and vindication of the primacy of man over beast, as well as its portrayal of a woman political activist who is corrupt, violent, presumptuous and ineffectual.

"Dorg" reappeared in 1977 in a French anthology, and later in various English and translated Lafferty collections.

**********

The Dozois and Effinger stories succeed on their own terms, but I'm not really eager to buy what they are selling.  The Lafferty, on the other hand, is right up my alley--brisk, light and fun, with a crazy and fresh premise.  

More postwar SF stories from the MPorcius Library's anthology shelves in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

1970 stories by Gardner Dozois, Avram Davidson and Thom Lee Wharton from Orbit 8

When I find myself near Dupont Circle in this nation's capital on a rainless day, I generally spend time looking at the clearance carts on the sidewalk in front of Second Story Books.  It is always fun to flip through the art books and military history books that are going for four bucks, and I have purchased quite a few SF paperbacks there for one dollar or even a mere 50 cents.  On my most recent visit I found two volumes in the Orbit series of original anthologies edited by Damon Knight, numbers 8 and 10.  A look at isfdb indicated that these books included stories by Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty that I did not already own and had not already read, so I parted with a dollar to take them home.  I'll read my perforated copy of Orbit 8 first--looking over the table of contents I have decided to read every story in this volume (excepting any I have already blogged about.)

Joachim Boaz, SF blogger extraordinaire and generous supporter of this here blog, read Orbit 8 and wrote about each story back in 2015.  Enough time has passed that my memories of his opinions are a little hazy, and I think I can read and assess these stories without being unduly influenced.  After I read each story and draft my own opinion I will check out Joachim's blog post and see if we are at loggerheads or seeing oculum ad oculum.

"Horse of Air" by Gardner R. Dozois

This is a well-written and compelling piece, a strong start to the book; Knight must have been excited to get it.  At least he included it in the 1975 Best from Orbit anthology.

Dozois employs an interesting narrative strategy: we get an unreliable first-person narrative, interspersed with a more honest stream-of-consciousness (or unvoiced inner monologue) narrative and a third-person omniscient narrative; these latter two texts emphasize or undermine the claims in the main text.  This is quite effective at presenting and distinguishing between different facets of the character, those he wants to display and those he'd rather not.

Our narrator is one of the few people left in a big city (I guess New York), trapped in a high rise apartment far above the street with a fenced in balcony like those one sees in public housing projects.  The start of the story consists of the narrator looking out over the city, of descriptions of his view and his intellectual and emotional responses to what he sees.  As I have told readers of this blog before, I love the kinds of descriptions of rooms and views we find in literary fiction like Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Marcel's room in Balbec, for example, and his view of the church steeples from a moving carriage) and Wyndham Lewis's Self Condemned (Rene Harding's Canadian hotel room) and Dozois really succeeds in painting an absorbing picture in the reader's mind here.   

Then the back story is filled in.  Our narrator, who studied at Annapolis, is a member of what he calls "the upper class" and even "the aristocracy."  (This isn't really the way educated Americans talk, especially self-described "liberals" as this guy is--perhaps a hint this is all a dream or fantasy?)  His class of people, in response to black crime, secluded themselves in these high-rises, and (shortsightedly) handed over political power to the managers of the high-rises.  Eventually the management company sealed the high-rises' inhabitants in, "for their own good." (The plumbing is maintained and twice a week food and supplies arrive via a dumbwaiter.) 

The narrator hates blacks because they "are responsible for the destruction, for the present degeneration of the world," but the third-person omniscient narration indicates that his hatred largely stems from envy--reminding me of the scene in Henry Miller's Plexus (Chapter 15) in which the narrator goes to hear W. E. B. Du Bois speak, Dozois enumerates the many ways (in the eyes of the narrator, at least) black people are better than white people; their easy sexuality, their depth of feeling, their exuberant and happy culture, their rebellion, all a contrast to the square and bland and boring and obedient ways of whites. 

In the final third of the story we are given an increasing number of clues that suggest that some, maybe all, of this SF stuff is the delusion or dream or fantasy of an ordinary man, maybe a businessman, who is stressed out by the pressures of city life in the late '60s/early '70s and a failed relationship with a woman.

"Horse of Air" is quite good, like a Malzberg story that has been carefully polished over a number of drafts instead of being slapped together at high speed as Malzberg's work so often appears to have been.  Joachim also liked it, saying it is the best story in the book.  Whoa, does this mean I should quit now?  "Horse of Air" would reappear not only in The Best of Orbit but the Dozois collection The Visible Man and the seventh Nebula anthology, it having been nominated.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison

I tackled this one, the second story in Orbit 8, back in 2016 when I read Donald A. Wollheim's 1972 edition of World's Best SF.

"Rite of Spring" by Avram Davidson

Here's another story that Knight included in The Best from Orbit.  "Rite of Spring" doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of traction otherwise, however--I think it only ever appeared in books with "Orbit" on the cover.

This is a trifling little vignette (less than seven pages of text) from some weird (post-apocalyptic?) future or alternate world.  I am guessing it is an acknowledgement and demonstration of the fact that customs and social arrangements are arbitrary and silly.  Davidson's story is full of hard-to-decipher allusions and hints about the alien milieu it vaguely depicts; maybe it is supposed to recreate in the reader the feeling of spending the briefest moment in a foreign culture or being exposed to only a few snatches of information about a foreign civilization, to give us the sense that all the apparently bizarre things these people are doing have deep roots and layers of meaning it would take a lifetime to fully understand.  Maybe Davidson is trying to put us in the shoes of an explorer or traveler confronted by alienness, like an 18th-century European who found himself briefly among  people in China or Persia or sub-Saharan Africa, or an Eskimo or Yanomamo who suddenly found himself in Victorian London or the Paris of the Second Empire.

"Rite of Spring" takes place on a farm, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.  Living there as well are a young man, Roger, a young woman, Betty, and a spectacularly obese woman, Mrs. Machick.  The action described in this deliberately opaque story suggests that the Robinsons are responsible for feeding the (apparently idle) Machick, and training young people like Roger and Betty in "the old ways."  It is suggested that both Betty and Roger are only the latest in a series of young people who are employed and tutored by the Robinsons; Betty does domestic chores and Roger does farm work, chopping wood and the like. Betty is from the city, where, the characters say, it is difficult to teach young people the old customs.  (These 1970s stories are down on city life; I guess I am lucky I moved to the Big Apple after it had been tamed in the mid-1990s.)  Roger wants to have sex with Betty, but he is told to wait until the time is right.  The arrival of the first robin of spring is the signal that the right time has arrived; Roger catches the bird, it is decapitated and its blood drunk, and then Roger roughly takes Betty, who initially puts up some resistance.

Gimmicky, a story that is technically competent but has no human feeling or real intellectual content.  Joachim liked it even less than I do, giving it only one out of five possible stars.  I am willing to say it is an acceptable experiment.

"The Bystander" by Thom Lee Wharton

Who is Thom Lee Wharton?  Well, this is his only story listed at isfdb, and that is all I know.

"The Bystander" feels like what I guess the mainstream detective novels I never read are like, if that makes any sense.  A retired dentist, in his forties, is now owner/manager of a bar in New Jersey (or as I call it, the greatest state in the union.)  An FBI investigator comes by to talk to him about his relationship with his business partner, "Joe the Nuts."  The dentist drives the flatfoot to the shore in his antique car (a 1934 Packard) where they talk in an old Coast Guard bunker from World War Two.  The bar owner describes how, like the guy in that Kinks song, he was a success as a bourgeois professional but was not satisfied and became a drunk.  After hitting bottom he lucked into owning a bar; the FBI man and we readers hear all about his struggles to make the bar a success.  And the bar is a success, because the Mafia supplies the food and entertainment.

In the story's last pages we learn that this interview was the first move in a war between the federal government and the Mafia in which many are killed.  The dentist is not killed however, and it is implied that he is somehow pulling the strings behind the scenes, that he caused this war because he is bitter that his wife and child died of a disease or something and he sees the Mafia and the government as equally bad.  Or something.  I don't get it.

This story has no SF content and as a mainstream crime story is a total waste of time.  Wharton makes no discernible effort to back up his apparent argument that the government is a racket just like the mob and is equally delinquent in any effort to portray the psychological pressures of a man broken by the loss of his family or dissatisfied with middle class suburban life.  I am very open to the argument that the government sucks and that middle class life is a tragedy, but the author offers only the tiniest of crumbs to dramatize these themes.  Instead we get twenty pages of pointless details, the literary equivalent of white noise.  Bad!  Joachim gives it one out of five stars and even admits he couldn't finish it!

Inexplicably, Knight not only included "The Bystander" here in Orbit 8, but in The Best from Orbit!  Damon, what are you doing?  Was Thom Lee Wharton the pen name of a loan shark? 

"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty

I recommended this one, the fifth story in Orbit 8, with some enthusiasm back in 2016 when I read it in Wollheim's 1972 World's Best SF.

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We'll get back to this 1970 anthology, but first we'll take a little trip to the 1920s and to the Moon with Edgar Rice Burroughs.