Best of Pulphouse: E Bryant, G A Effinger, H Ellison, K Koja, & T F Monteleone

OMG, it's another crazy recent anthology.  (Yes, at MPorcius Fiction Log the 1990s count as recent.)  In our last episode we read four stories from a 1990s anthology full of perversion, Dark Love, and today we've got five stories from 1991's The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, edited by Kristine Kathryn Rusch, which perhaps will also be full of wacky gross material?  In her foreword, a banal thing about how most players in the publishing industry play it safe, producing boring derivative commodified goop for the masses, but the heroes at Pulphouse Publishing flout the conventional wisdom and take risks and offer real art for the discerning, critical darling Kate Wilhelm promises surprises and warns we may be angered by what we read.  It is easy to laugh at the self-importance of self-appointed leaders of the rebellion against the homogenization the results from bourgeois capitalism and democracy, but at the same time I am hoping that Rusch and Edward Bryant, George Alec Effinger, Harlan Ellison, Kathe Koja, and Thomas F. Monteleone can cash the check that Wilhelm is writing.  Let's see.

"While She Was Out" by Edward Bryant (1988)     

"While She Was Out" was a hit with wide appeal and since its initial appearance in the first issue of Rusch's Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine it has been reprinted in four anthologies, including some kind of feminist anthology full of purportedly "inspiring prose" and a book promising "EXTREME HORROR."  Looks like we are starting off with a bang.

Della's husband Kenneth drinks beer and watches sports on TV and complains about her cutting jokes and her giving the twins too many cookies.  Their marriage is in trouble; Della often dreams of leaving Kenneth, even vocalizes these dreams in his presence.  Della takes night classes, learning how to repair the car herself and learning self defense--I guess a sign she is trying to be independent--and he just makes fun of her.

Tonight, while Kenneth watches ESPN, Della goes out to the mall to pick up Christmas stuff--the big day is approaching!--and tampons.  The parking lot is crowded, and Della is annoyed that somebody has parked an old oversized car across multiple spaces.  She writes a sarcastic note and puts it under the car's windshield wiper.  

The car turns out to be in the possession of four young thugs, one from each major racial demographic--we've got a white thug, a black thug, a Latino thug and an Asian thug.  The thugs do not appreciate Della's brand of humor.  Over fourteen or fifteen pages Della has to run from these criminals or fight them; stuff she has learned in night school helps her to survive and in fact slay all four of these creeps.  Bryant describes everybody's injuries, and Della's physical and psychological experience of killing the four young men, in great detail.  The last creep to die, when he has the upper hand (so he thinks!), tries to seduce Della into joining him in his life of crime, he somehow guessing she is unsatisfied with her marriage.  The story ends with an homage to Dirty Harry, with Della pointing an empty gun (she emptied it into one of the punks) at her husband and pulling the trigger before telling him they have to talk.  Having defeated murderous enemies, Della has proven her strength and gained confidence and is now in charge of their relationship.  Hear her roar!

This is a good crime/adventure story and a feminist story in which a woman overcomes men who want to exploit her.  It doesn't really feel like a preachy left-wing thing, though, in part because Bryant includes the kinds of jokes which progressives today wouldn't make, jokes that make light of the Third World and people born with disabilities and liberal fascination with them (e.g., the biggest Christmas gift of the season, the one the twins are begging for, is "The Little BeeDee Birth Defect Baby.")  I almost wonder if Bryant slyly wrote a story to specifically appeal to liberals and leftists and then included in it these little land mines that would make them squirm. 

Thumbs up!  Our Pulphouse adventure is off to a good start!

Raw material for your new favorite Venn Diagram:
the intersection of "inspiring prose" and "extreme horror"

"Chopped Liver" by George Alec Effinger (1989)

This one only ever appeared in the fifth installment of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine and in this Best of volume.  "Chopped Liver" is a joke story with an urban Jewish flavor, people saying "tsurris" and mentioning "the Hadassah ladies" and eating "flanken" and "farfel" and so forth, and it is actually funny, making it a rarity among the joke stories I encounter here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

The humor is mostly in the style, though the plot is also sort of funny.  Butcher Morton Rosenthal is sick of his wife and decides to murder her, and we follow his plotting and execution of his murder plan and then his efforts to conceal the atrocity, and the final twist of fate that sends him to the afterlife in the wake of his wife.

"Chopped Liver"'s milieu and themes--city life and disastrous sexual relationships--are right up my alley, and it actually delivers laughs, so I have no hesitation about giving it a hearty thumbs up.  Black humor fans should certainly seek it out.

"She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" by Harlan Ellison (1988) 

Like today's stories by Bryant and Monteleone, Ellison's "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" was in the very first issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine.  In the intro to "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" here in The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, Rauch announces that Ellison is working on a three-volume set of short stories for Pulphouse Publishing--Ellison was famous for conceiving large scale projects which were never completed, and maybe this three-volume set is another of them. 

A guy wakes up, hearing music, and tries to remember the dream he just had and then reminisces about times in his life when he heard pieces of music in exotic places.

It was the music no one was playing that I had heard at Stonehenge, ten years ago. It was the sound of the pan pipes at Hanging Rock thirteen years ago, and the notes of a flute from the other side of the Valley of the Stonebow eight years ago. I had heard that recollection in a cave in the foothills overlooking the Fairchild Desert and, once, I heard it drifting through a misty downpour in the Sikkim rainforest.

There is also an extended metaphor about the past being a desert and the narrator only having eyes to see the past on one side or something like that; I had trouble keeping awake enough to figure out what this metaphor was trying to tell me.  Too much of "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" is this kind of mind numbing goop, multiple paragraphs that are self-contained labyrinths that take you nowhere if you bother to puzzle them out.  Already on the first full page of the story I was flipping through the succeeding pages, counting how many pages of this jungle I had left to machete my way through--thirteen to go!  

The narrator gets out of bed finally and drives around Scotland, listing for us all the towns he drives through and the highways he uses, describing his ventures into stores to buy food and other items.  This story is a series of lists.  

Punctuating the lists are clues about the narrator's companion, his girlfriend of fifteen years, Camilla.  Is Camilla an hallucination?  A cripple?  Maybe some kind of r--I mean a person suffering a developmental disability?  An animal?  Camilla guides the narrator to a remote cliff, to a hidden cave, where he meets Camilla's family of scaly monsters who eat mundane human beings, live for over a hundred years, and reproduce through incest.  We get lists of mutilated corpses--this one's genitals have been removed, this one's face is gone, etc.  And lists of clothing stolen from the monsters' victims, clothes spanning centuries of history.  We also get a list of the narrator's injuries after a dangerous fall.

Will the narrator join this family of monsters?  Camilla seems sincere when she says she loves him!  They won't eat him, will they?  Or will the narrator escape and come back with explosives and weapons and try to annihilate the monster family, like in a Lovecraft story ("The Shunned House," maybe)?  We can't be sure what course the narrator is going to take as the story ends.  After the story proper we get an excerpt from a reference book on crime, an entry about Sawney Bean, a famous figure of Scottish legend--Camilla's family are the descendants of the Bean clan.

The plot of this story isn't bad, but the style is annoying and the first few pages, all the jazz about music and the puzzling metaphor, are a turn off and are superfluous besides--music doesn't figure in the actual story of the monster love affair and the monster family, as far as I can tell.   

"She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" is one of those stories that, as the hours since reading it go by, and you forget the frustratingly useless passages that should have been stricken by an editor and the irritating style, leaving only the actual plot in your mind, starts seeming a lot better than it did when you were actually reading it.  While I was reading it I thought I was going to give it a thumbs down, but with the passage of time, that which heals all wounds, maybe I have to say this thing deserves a grade of "barely acceptable."

Karl Edward Wagner, whose violent pornographic story "Locked Away" we just read, selected "She's a Young Thing and Cannot Leave Her Mother" for The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII and after that it reappeared in the Ellison collection Slippage (published as Derapages over in Gaul) and a German anthology on the theme of cannibalism.

"Illusions in Relief" by Kathe Koja (1990)

Koja had our favorite story from our last blog post, so we have high expectations for her today.  No pressure, though, KK!  Rauch in her intro to "Illusions in Relief" here in the Best of anthology warns us the story is subtle and we have to concentrate to receive its "message."  Oy, the pressure is now flowing in the opposite direction, and it doesn't feel good!

Joseph is an artist who lives alone in a house.  His work consists of collages made from images he cuts out of old magazines and elsewhere with an X-acto blade.  Somehow, people--erroneously Joseph is sure--think he or his collages can cure their ills, and they crowd around his house, staring in through the windows and leaving him offerings (including periodicals from which he draws images for his collages) and mail him letters and photos describing their diseases and deformities.  When he goes out to shop they beg him, grab at him, accost him at the store.  Joseph's sanity is questionable--he hears voices and suffers hallucinations--so we readers wonder to what extent to believe in the crowds outside and their antics. 

An old man with a green spot on his arm comes by, and Joseph lets him in.  This figure is the most doubtful yet, the most likely we readers are inclined to believe illusory.  The old geezer stays awhile, and while he is there Joseph has fewer mental illness symptoms, his output of collages increases, and the crowd outside stops growing.  The old man offers some ancient wisdom (e. g., "Everybody gets what they don't want....The trick is to find a way to want it") and encourages Joseph in his work.  The green spot grows until the old man is entirely green.  One morning the green old man isn't there.  Joseph hands a collage to a disfigured girl at the door and Joseph's own hand starts growing green!

Alright, what the hell is going on?  What is the message Rauch told us is here?  Is the old man an angel or some other messenger of God come to aid Joseph?  The old man, when Joseph inadvertently prompts him, speaks approvingly of Jesus:

"I want you to work.  You get where you're going the way you're meant to get there.  If you don't jerk yourself off with a lot of shit about guilt.  Save your own fucking soul, you know?"

"Jesus. Philosophy."

"Jesus is philosophy."

The color green in the story, clues suggest, represents peace and goodness, and the old man seems thrilled that he is turning green.  Is the message the old Stoic and Serenity Prayer thing, that you have to accept, even embrace, the world as it comes to you, the things you can't change?  But what is up with the crowd, the people who think Joseph or his collages can heal them?  And Joseph's hand turning green?  Has Joseph's tutelage under the old geezer given him the power to heal, the power others have been feverishly attributing to him despite his denials?  Maybe this story is about how other people's expectations of you can influence your personality and abilities?  Or about the relationship between the artist and his most devoted fans, how each influences the other, for good or for ill?        

I don't know, maybe I didn't concentrate enough.  Still, a good story, well-written and with compelling images.  "Illusions in Relief" was reprinted in the 1998 Koja collection Extremities.

"Nobody's Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1988)

Editor Rauch warns readers of The Best of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine that "Nobody's Perfect" is a feminist story, and our two main characters fit the bill: Salazar the serial killer of women and cannibal, a predatory man who hates contemporary art and thinks the Apocalypse is around the corner; and Lydia the young liberal do-gooder--the sadness and injustice of the world gets Lydia down sometimes, but don't worry, her "absorption" of "the world's pain" and the pain of her own personal tragedies (as we will learn, she is a victim of the establishment or patriarchy or whatever you want to call it) hasn't weakened her, but made her "stronger and more positive in the long run."

Salazar decides to answer an ad calling for volunteers to read books into a recorder for the blind (I did this in grad school--not as a volunteer, of course, but for money), figuring it will provide him the opportunity of meeting bookish girls upon which to prey.  Sure enough, he meets the beautiful blonde Lydia and gets a date with her.  He is in for a surprise when they meet for the date--at the volunteer meeting, Salazar was staring at Lydia's perfect breasts so intently that he didn't notice her disability--her right arm is "withered" and "flipper-like," her mother having been prescribed thalidomide.

Monteleone describes in detail how Salazar kidnaps Lydia, putting duct tape over her mouth, cuffing her into semi-consciousness, chaining her up in his basement close to the stew pots and rotisserie, cutting her clothes off, etc.  Monteleone also offers us insight into both characters' thought processes and psychological states.

Our somewhat ridiculous twist ending, which, along with the somewhat over-the-top stereotyped characters, is making me wonder if this story isn't something of a sly joke, has the accumulated sadness and humiliation of a lifetime, which Lydia has always turned into strength, plus her rage at Salazar's evil, transform her withered arm, heretofore almost totally immobile, into a super arm with which she kills Salazar with a blow and then breaks her chains.  The last line of the story assures us that Lydia's super arm is going to stay super.

If we accept this story as sincere, I guess it is an allegory of how women and minorities can and have used the pain they have suffered at the hands of the white man to give themselves the strength to accomplish all their amazing achievements.  At least that is what I would tell my colleagues if I was still taking graduate level courses in the humanities and social sciences.

(This story is kind of reminding me of that Steven Spielberg TV episode in which a guy repairs his stricken B-17 by drawing the needed parts cartoon-style on his pad in that the whole production is very professional but the climax, which is supposed to be an uplifting evocation of the human spirit or whatever, might come off as absurd and silly.)      

Whether parody or dead serious, "Nobody's Perfect" is well put together; we'll mildly recommend it.  It is more like an inspiring adventure story or fantasy, or the origin story of a comic book superhero, than an actual horror story, though.      

After its debut in the premiere issue of Pulphouse: The Hardback Magazine, "Nobody's Perfect" was reprinted by Karl Edward Wagner in The Year's Best Horror Stories XVII and by John Betancourt in 1996 in New Masterpieces of Horror (republished in two volumes in 2005 as Horrorscape); you can also find it in the Monteleone collection Fearful Symmetries.

**********

Even though I would cut away pieces of Ellison's story as ruthlessly as Salazar cut off Lydia's clothes, and even though I am not bright enough to grok what Koja's story is all about, I have to hand it to Rauch for publishing and then reprinting these five stories, none of which is bad (80% of them are actually good) and all of which are edgy or wild in some way or other.  A worthwhile reading experience.

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.

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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.   

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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.

Super-Science Fiction, Dec '58: R Silverberg & H Ellison

In our last episode we read a story by Charles Runyon from the December 1958 issue of Super-Science Fiction.  This issue, edited by W. W. Scott and with an Ed Emshwiller woman-in-bondage cover, includes three stories by Robert Silverberg (two printed under pen names) and an apparently rare story by Harlan Ellison.  Let's supplement our reading of 1958 stories recommended by anthologist Judith Merril, the critics' favorite, with these four less acclaimed science fiction tales, though the Silverbergs can't be all that terrible, as Silverberg himself was happy to include them in 21st-century anthologies.  I'll note here that I am reading all of today's stories in a scan of an original copy of Super-Science Fiction I found at luminist.org, not in any book.

"The Aliens Were Haters" by Robert Silverberg 

The year is 2190.  Mankind has discovered and explored dozens of extrasolar planets, but never yet met intelligent aliens.  Our protagonist is a spaceman on foot, crossing the killer jungle of Kothgir II, carrying back to the US base a bag full of valuable plants that back on Earth will be processed into pain-killing drugs, when he makes first contact!

Spaceman Massi, of St. Louis, Missouri, comes upon a wrecked spacecraft in the jungle, and moments later four people from the Brazilian base on Kothgir II arrive.  The American and the Brazilians each claim the invaluable alien artifact for their nations.  The leader of the Brazilians is a mannish six-foot-tall woman; she and Massi enter the alien ship and discover two injured beings, people three feet tall, green and scaly.  Silverberg talks about women in this story in a way that perhaps wouldn't fly today among the enlightened; Massi reflects on how, while she has an ugly face, the Brazilian captain looks pretty good from behind in those tight shorts of hers, and while she is a real hard ass while bossing around her subordinates, her maternal instinct kicks in when she sees the injured diminutive aliens.  

That maternal instinct vanishes without a trace when the aliens wake up and gun down the three male Brazilians--she guns down the aliens and makes Massi her captive.  She forces him to accompany her in the march to the distant Brazilian base.  Before they get there, Massi employs a ruse to distract his captor and pounces on her, and we get some sexualized violence as he overpowers her.  They split up, she vowing revenge.  But before either of them can reach his or her nation's base, a second alien ship arrives and bombs both bases into oblivion, slaying thousands of Earthers.  As the story ends, Massi decides he has to hook up with that ruthless Brazilian woman--they are the only two humans left on the planet, and it will be a year before a ship arrives from Earth!  We readers are left to speculate whether she and Massi will fight to the death or become lovers.

This is an acceptable entertainment.  "The Aliens Were Haters" would be reprinted in the 2016 Silverberg collection Early Days: More Tales from the Pulp Era. 

"The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" by Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin W. Knox) 

It is the early 25th century.  The human race has trade relations with hundreds of other civilizations all over the galaxy, and in fact has a monopoly on the carrying trade, as, of all the intelligent races in the galaxy, only the human has developed a FTL drive.  Our protagonist, Garth, is a young employee of the Interstellar Merchant Service, a private company, and as the story begins he goes to the home office in Buenos Aries (today's Silverberg stories suggest Silverberg expected Latin America to come into its own as a rival of Northern Hemisphere countries in the future) to receive an important assignment.  Another of the IMS's employees, a Lidman, runs the one-man trading post on Murchison IV, planet Danneroi, a source of thorium, and he is suspected of selling drugs to the stone age natives!  Allowing aliens access to alien booze or drugs is strictly forbidden!  Garth is given the job of investigating--he will go to Murchison IV on the pretext of acting as Lidman's assistant, but his real job will be to investigate the allegations, and take the guy's job if he has to be sacked.   

On the planet we learn about how the trading post operates, and Garth sees that Lidman is doing a superior job and has great relations with the natives--this dude teaches English classes and has even learned how to perform surgeries so he can save the lives of natives who fall ill!  The allegations that he is supplying the aliens narcotics turn out to be accurate--at some point a native got sick and Lidman administered some medicine to the guy and it gave him "good dreams."  That alien was the first of many of the natives of Danneroi to became addicted to the medicine, and instead of trying to cure them of addiction, Lidman is handing the drugs out to them regularly.  

Garth confronts Lidman, who dramatically declares he had no choice but to provide the natives the drugs, and then kills himself.  Soon Garth, now in charge of the station, learns how the natives forced Lidman into supplying the narcotics they craved--these alien addicts threaten to commit suicide if Garth won't fork over the "dream-stuff," and Garth does their bidding after two of them disembowel themselves right in front of him!  Garth begins to lose his sanity and transmits a message to Earth, begging to be relieved of his duty.

I guess I say this a lot, but this story about two humans from a galaxy-spanning culture who occupy a position of authority among large populations of primitive aliens and suffer psychological and moral crises as a result reminded me of Somerset Maugham's stories of white men in a similar positions in 19th and 20th-century colonies.  Garth even expresses a sentiment apparently common among Western colonizers when he says to himself that the natives are like children.      

Silverberg in this story also addresses numerous aspects of economic theory--monopoly, the subjective theory of value, the role of honesty in a market society, the idea of a just price, etc.  Silverberg does a decent job of speculating on what interstellar trade might be like, and I thought this stuff was all pretty interesting. 

Silverberg's style here in "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" is kind of pedestrian, flat and simple, but not bad.  The problem with the story is that the natives' means of compelling Lidman and then Garth to supply narcotics is not foreshadowed--the aliens' culture and society are not described in any detail at all, so when we learn they are willing to casually destroy themselves if denied a high, it comes out of nowhere.  In this story Silverberg does an entertaining job of speculating about interstellar trade, but the plot of his story isn't really about that, but about addiction and suicide, and what his plot calls for is speculations on the kind of society that would produce people who are quite pacific but nonetheless have little compunction about killing themselves in order to secure for their surviving fellows the hallucinogenics to which they are addicted.

I can mildly recommend this one.  If you are interested in SF depictions of imperialism/colonialism, interstellar trade and drug addiction, I would more strongly commend it to you.  "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" appears in Early Days under the title "The Traders."

"Exiled from Earth" by Robert Silverberg (as by Richard F. Watson)

If "The Unique and Terrible Compulsion" suggests Silverberg had been reading some economics book, "Exiled from Earth" seems drawn from Silverberg's delving into English history and classic English literature--the thing is full of direct references to Shakespeare, at least one veiled reference to Coleridge, and its whole scenario is based on the period of the English republic under Cromwell.

Our narrator is a director in the legitimate theatre, the human head of a human troupe of actors on an alien planet who put on performances of highlights from Shakespeare and Euripides for the natives.  You see, a few decades ago, the Earth electorate voted in a Neopuritan administration that outlawed dancing, stripping, and acting.  Those in the performing arts who didn't want to change their professions were given a free space flight into exile.  

The plot concerns a septuagenarian actor who has gone insane.  He thinks the drama is again permissible on Earth, and that he has a shot at portraying Hamlet in New York.  He askes the narrator to help him get to Earth, and our hero tries to bribe Neopuritan officials into letting the guy return to Earth--even if there is no chance he'll be able to perform, the director figures his colleague would at least be pleased to die on Earth.  The Neopuritans, however, are true to their strict code, and no offer of bribe is going to get them to allow an exiled sinner to get to Earth.  So, the narrator hires some alien hypnotists to make the aged actor believe he has travelled back to Earth--this enables him to die happy.

Acceptable.  "Exiled from Earth" can be found in the 2006 collection In the Beginning: Tales from the Pulp Era.

"Creature from Space" by Harlan Ellison 

If isfdb is to be believed, "Creature from Space" has never been reprinted, and I can't even find a reference to the story at the Harlan Ellison website.  Ellison completists take note!

The star freighter Ionian Trollop is manned by the most hell-raising, womanizing, trouble-making crew in the galaxies, but they run a profitable enterprise because when it comes to getting a cargo from Point A to Point B they are the most reliable in all the known universe.  The story opens with joke descriptions of each of these hellions, and humor scenes in which the bald and overweight super-cargo's six-legged pet bird who recites Dante defecates on the star charts, to the frustration of the captain, who throws his cap on the deck in rage.  There are also multiple scenes in which the men physically fight each other.

(Like the Shakespeare and Coleridge references in Silverberg's "Exiled from Earth," the quotes from Dante here in "Creature from Space" strike me as the writers trying to convince readers or maybe just themselves that SF isn't just drivel written for childish dolts by hacks but something worthwhile, produced by thoughtful educated people for thoughtful educated people.)

The plot of the story concerns the last voyage of Ionian Trollop.  We watch as a meteor busts into the ship and turns out to be a shape-shifting alien who can imitate robots, people, writing implements, etc.  It starts killing the crew one by one.  It is apparently immune to ray pistol fire, or at least able to dodge the rays, and by taking the form of tools, men, or the pet six-legged bird, it is able to hide from the humans it hasn't yet murdered.  In the end it triumphs over the crew and it is hinted the monster will soon arrive on a human-inhabited planet and reproduce and conquer that world and maybe all of human civilization.

A merely acceptable entertainment.  All the comedy stuff about the crew is more or less competent, and the monster-on-the-loose material is OK--the robot scenes are actually quite good, the most entertaining and most productively speculative passages in the story--but these two aspects of "Creature from Space" don't jell or jive; the comic spacemen's idiosyncrasies don't help them overcome adversity nor do they prove to be their downfall, and the men don't grow or change as people over the course of the story, becoming more responsible due to their ordeal or whatever.  The men's personalities and back stories have zero effect on the plot, and thus feel superfluous once you have finished the story. 

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Silverberg and Ellison are skilled professionals and these stories maintain your interest and have fun parts, but they are sort of forgettable and at least two of them have some real structural flaws.  Not award winners, but worth your time if you are curious about 1950s SF or the careers of Silverberg and/or Ellison.

More late 1950s science fiction from a big name writer in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log!

    

Theodore Sturgeon: "Mr. Costello, Hero," "The Touch of Your Hand" and "Affair with a Green Monkey"

The recent criticisms of Theodore Sturgeon voiced by master blogger tarbandu, at his famed blog The PorPor Books Blog and here in the comments section of my very own little enterprise, have brought old Ted to mind.  I've been pretty hard myself on a bunch of Sturgeon stories, including "The Skills of Xanadu," "The Wages of Synergy," "The Comedian's Children," "Fear is a Business," and the Hugo-winning "Slow Sculpture."  But while tarbandu attacks Sturgeon's prose, calling it "mediocre," my main gripe about Sturgeon is his utopianism, his elitism, and his attachment to the idea of collective consciousness--I actually think Sturgeon is an able writer, and I even liked works tarbandu specifically singled out for attack, like the posthumous novel Godbody and the Dangerous Visions story "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"  Other Sturgeon stories I have lauded here at MPorcius Fiction Log include "The World Well Lost," "Make Room for Me," "The Heart," "And Now the News..." and "The Martian and the Moron."  (I'm not listing the many Sturgeon stories I have read since the debut of this blog over ten years ago which I judged only "acceptable" or "marginally good.")  So I guess you are going to have to call me a Sturgeon fan and a dissenter from tarbandu's view.  

Let's read some more Sturgeon today from my 1978 DAW edition of the 1958 Sturgeon collection A Touch of Strange.  (The Hans Arnold cover of this DAW printing, DAW No. 286, isn't great, but I like the Jack Gaughan frontispiece; you can see both--and more!--by clicking those links to some of my most information- and entertainment-rich tweets, tweets guaranteed to yield a rich harvest of unregretted user-seconds.)  There are nine stories in A Touch of Strange and I haven't blogged any of them, though at least one, "The Other Celia," I read in the years before I started this blog.  We'll start from the beginning of the book, reading three stories today and covering the rest in two further blog posts.

"Mr. Costello, Hero" (1953)

With the way he romanticizes collective consciousness in works like The Cosmic Rape AKA To Marry Medusa and the molding of society by elites in works like "Slow Sculpture," I tend to think of Sturgeon as a collectivist elitist.  So I was a little surprised to see the villain of "Mr. Costello, Hero" espouse a philosophy of unity, pursue a policy of government planning of all social and economic activity, and cavalierly dismiss the profit motive, almost as if the story was a satire of collectivists and maybe even a defense of individualism and business people.  I suppose it may still be that in part, but by the end of the story Sturgeon has diluted that angle, also painting the villain as a religious fanatic and as a power-hungry man who has no principles and just likes to pit majorities against minorities along whatever fault lines are available (not just ethnic distinctions) in order to destabilize societies and gain control over them.  The way the story's themes are inconstant and jump from one angle to another is matched by the personality of the villain, the Costello of the title, whose powers and modus operandi, as well as his motives, are unclear and a little all over the place.  Is he a hypnotist?  Or just a charismatic manipulator who also makes brazen use of blackmail?  Sometimes Costello seems like a sincere totalitarian ideologue and a real clever operator, other times to be absolutely insane.

"Mr. Costello, Hero," is narrated by the purser of a civilian star ship, a trading vessel that follows a regular route, making port at the same five or six systems one after the other in a regular circuit.  The narrator is not very smart, but is a sort of whiz with arithmetic and statistics, and is ideally suited to the job of managing the ship's stores and merchandise and handling passports and manifests and things.  As the story begins, the captain of the ship is complaining that a passenger, Mr. Costello, has had a strange effect on crew behavior--the men trust each other less, and seem to have developed a reluctance to be alone.  Everybody on the ship, except the skipper, is very fond of Costello, and there is an off-stage political/psychological struggle between Costello and the captain which we learn about in fragments second or third hand--Costello is the winner of the struggle, largely by employing the strategy of making recording of people's speech and then using the recordings as blackmail or as misleading legal evidence. 

Costello gets off the ship at a planet the economy of which relies largely on trappers who live alone out in the wilderness for long periods of time and then bring furs to market.  When the narrator's ship comes to this planet next time he finds that Costello has reworked the entire society, turning the place into a totalitarian police state dedicated to his own stated belief that all of humankind should be "a single unit" and "sin" is the result of being alone, of enjoying privacy.  Being alone has become illegal and people are forced to live in barracks where they can't even use the toilet in privacy, and the trappers are a shunned and demonized class, and the fur trade has been destroyed.  Costello wants to hire the narrator to help him keep track of population and economic statistics, to help him better control this planet, and, when he expands his rule to other planets, the entire human race.  Costello even suggests the purser will be awarded a sexy blonde girlfriend, the woman who stars in Costello's propaganda broadcasts, on which she recites such arguments as "All sin starts in the lonesome dark" and "humanity is a thing made up of many parts...any part that wants to go off by itself hurts the whole...." 

Even as he is describing stuff about Costello that makes us readers skeptical or hostile to the man, the narrator steadfastly maintains his fondness for Costello and he considers taking the job when his current contract runs out.  But when he next gets to that trapper planet he finds the Earth's Space Navy has the place blockaded and Costello has been seized and put in a mental institution.  The narrator is allowed to meet the internee, and finds Costello manipulating native hive insects the way he manipulated people on that trapper planet, setting a majority of alien ants against a minority, the same way he pitted the urban majority against the rural trapper minority.

"Mr. Costello, Hero" is just OK.  I've already suggested that it lacks singleness of purpose.  In the end we are told that Costello's modus operandi is to find a minority in a society and drive a wedge between it and the majority, and that all that unity of mankind anti-individualism stuff is just a smokescreen.  But on the ship at the start of the story Costello doesn't seem to have found a scapegoat minority, and all the collectivist stuff seems sincere.  This muddles the message, or exposes the story as having only a banal message or no message at all, which is disappointing.       

Another problem with "Mr. Costello, Hero" is that it feels long (it is it is like 25 pages in DAW No. 286) and a little slow.  I have a sort of allergy to stories in which a guy goes through the same experience again and again, like going to the same planet again and again, as in this story, and seeing a neutered Costello in captivity in the end to get the psychological explanation is pretty anticlimactic.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, seeing as Sturgeon titled the story "Mr. Costello, Hero," we have the fact that our narrator is more of a spectator than a participant in the story--the story isn't about the purser's pursuit of goals (he doesn't have much of any) and isn't propelled by his handling of obstacles or making of decisions.  The real protagonist is Mr. Costello, but most of Costello's struggles, his triumphs and defeats, happen off screen, and his real motives and personality are not clear, but are a mystery that is solved not by the narrator but by minor characters who pop up now and then only to disappear soon after.  Maybe "Mr. Costello, Hero," is Sturgeon's meditation on the idea of the hero in popular literature, say like John Carter or Conan, or on the hero in history, say Caesar or Napoleon, the man who bends the universe to his will and remakes society to his specifications.  How do ordinary people view these larger-than-life figures?  What are the motivations of the great man that lead to his campaign to change the world?  Should we admire or fear such men? 

Despite all these many gripes, the story is not all that boring or annoying as you are in the process of reading it, so "Mr. Costello, Hero" gets tossed into that large basket of stories that are neither deplorable nor laudable but merely acceptable.

   

"Mr. Costello, Hero" debuted in Galaxy, and has appeared in many anthologies, among them Frederik Pohl's Assignment in Tomorrow and Tom Boardman's Connoisseur's Science Fiction, which has a strange and perhaps disturbing cover illustration.  

Am I crazy, or is that cavalryman's face a woman's squashed breasts?

"The Touch of Your Hand" (1953)

Another Galaxy story, this one the cover story, though the great astronaut image by Emsh on the cover of the ish illustrates some other piece and has nothing to do with Sturgeon's "The Touch of Your Hand."  "The Touch of your Hand" hasn't been anthologized, but it has turned up in many Sturgeon collections.  

Like "Mr. Costello, Hero," "The Touch of Your Hand" is a long one (like 43 pages here in A Touch of Strange), and it feels very long because Sturgeon spends page after page describing boring activities, like work at a construction site, and on exposition that instead of setting the stage for the action explains the action after the fact, including a lecture on logic and a somewhat ludicrous sociology and history lesson.  Also like "Mr. Costello, Hero," it seems to be addressing one set of issues but then switches gears, and also like that story has a protagonist who doesn't really drive the plot, which is resolved by minor characters.     

The first half or so of "The Touch of Your Hand" feels like a fable or a fairy tale, an exploration of economic history and the rise of civilization that touches on subjects like the division of labor and economies of scale.  Like "Mr. Costello, Hero," it also considers the motivations of the great men who bend the universe to their will and build and change society, and whether those of us who are not great should embrace or resist such men and their visions.  

Our protagonist is a beautiful blonde woman, Jubilith, who lives in a peaceful village where individuals grow their own food and make their own tools and only a few people are specialists who engage in trade.  She is in love with a tall strong handsome man, Osser, but has seen Osser bullying other villagers into working with him, for him, building a stone tower.  Who needs a stone tower?  Why does Osser insist on forcing people to help him build it, but refuse to permit Jubilith, who aches to be at his side and support him, contribute to the construction?

To explain, Osser leads Jubilith on a long foot journey to a huge crater, within which are metal ruins.  Osser takes Jubilith deep underground, navigating the darkness with flashlights, to a chamber where he shows her a black and white film--never before has Jubilith experienced electricity or motion pictures.  The film is a sort of documentary of space flight and of a huge modern city of skyscrapers, automobiles, aircraft, and extravagantly attired crowds.  Osser finds in the city a grand vision and a purpose for himself; no doubt the city was built by strong driven men like himself, in command of inferior men and in competition with other great men.  Jubilith is skeptical--is all this material wealth worth pushing people around?  Do people really need multiple sets of clothes or to fly in the air--do such things make them happier?  Osser insists that the greatness of the city is worth all the cruelty and hardship involved in building the city, and sees himself as the founder of a rebirth of the high tech civilization of their ancestors.  His stone tower is only the beginning.

The text thus far had led me to believe that the story was set on Earth after a nuclear war.  But Sturgeon then pulled the rug right out from under me after Osser and Jubilith had seen the film.  First, Jubilith repairs a malfunctioning flashlight, opening it up and working on the innards of the thing, even though she has never seen one before.  Then, when the two climb out of the underground cinema, Sturgeon tells us there are two suns--this cannot be Earth!

Jubilith, unsure what to do about Osser, goes to consult the village's wiseman.  The guru explains the astonishing truth behind what is going on with Osser and the nature of Jubilith's people.  You see, these people have telepathy and a sort of collective consciousness, but it operates on a sort of subconscious, autonomic level--they don't talk with each other through thought waves or transmit and receive images and feelings, the way telepaths usually do in SF stories.  Instead, they subconsciously share expertise when confronted by a problem.  When Jubilith's flashlight was failing, the memories of another person from some other village on the planet, who had at one point repaired a flashlight, flooded into her mind.  Jubilith and almost everybody else on the planet takes this power for granted, doesn't even realize the knowledge is coming from another person.  With access to this vast store of knowledge, these people don't need to congregate in cities and almost nobody needs to specialize, because the knowledge of any one specialist is available to all others on the planet.  These people also don't have any written language or movies, as they have a far more efficient means of accessing information.  

So, what is up with Osser?  Well, the behind-the-scenes rulers of this society wanted to see what a person would be like who didn't have this telepathy, so they hypnotized a baby so it couldn't receive the telepathic transmissions.  Osser was that baby.  Osser felt like a loser all his youth, as he had to work hard to figure everything out, whereas everybody else just seemed to know how to handle any problem automatically.  The secret masters guided Osser to that movie theater, and the film led him to believe that his society was a fallen society, a weak one, and that he, being physically strong, could rebuild this  high-tech superior society by leveraging his strength and pushing people around.  

So, what is up with those ruins and that the movie theatre?  Well, ages ago, aliens who lacked telepathy arrived on the planet and the friendly natives permitted them to build cities in designated areas.  But eventually the fast-breeding aliens started encroaching on territory without permission and the natives had to exterminate them.  But the film is not of those colonials' cities--it is a film of the Earth!  Realizing the threat posed by alien races, the secret masters have sent probes out to study alien planets and monitor alien space ships.  Earth is one such planet.  The rulers' conclusion is that the telepaths cannot live in harmony with non-telepathic people--such people are violent and imperialistic and the only solution is to destroy them upon contact.  

In the kind of coincidence we see all the time in fiction, the very day Osser is trying to herd all the villagers out of their individual houses to the environs of his stone tower to become city dwellers is the day a space ship is due to arrive from Earth.  Autonomically accessing high tech knowledge, the villagers build and deploy a powerful piece of energy artillery while Osser watches.  The bulldozer and the energy cannon they somehow throw together in just hours put his stone tower to shame, and Osser goes insane seeing the building prowess of his fellows, people he thought totally uninterested in, and almost incapable of, building.  The Earth ship is disintegrated in the air above (Jubilith is assured the Earthers died painlessly.)  The wiseman hypnotically reverts Osser to childhood--he will live as a child in an adult's body all his days, happily innocent, blissfully unaware he was turned into a dangerous guinea pig and put through a terrible ordeal by the authorities.  That is unless Jubilith, who is given the key to awakening Osser back into adulthood by the guru, decides to free him from the hypnotic spell.

"The Touch of Your Hand" is a pretty convoluted story that starts out on one tack and then changes course; unfortunately, the themes it takes up in the second half are less interesting than those I thought were the main topic while I was reading the first half--we go from a discussion of the meaning of progress, the role of the city, and the motivations of ambitious men to silly conspiracy jazz and childish utopianism: "well, golly, it would be awesome if we just knew everything everybody else knew without having to make any effort."  I'm already against utopian stories, and I'm already against stories in which aliens are shown to be better than Earth people, but at least most utopian stories suggest a program, and at least most stories that present goody goody aliens offer up the possibility that humanity could be positively influenced by the goody goody aliens; such stories hold out hope that our current society could be improved by the changes advocated by the writer.  But "The Touch of Your Hand" is total pessimism--in this story humanity was born deficient, and there is no hope of us just spontaneously developing collective consciousness or having it conferred upon is by the aliens.  The only solution for us is death!

Gotta give "The Touch of Your Hand" a thumbs down.    

"Affair with a Green Monkey" (1957)

In the intro to Robert Bloch's "Toy for Juliette" in Dangerous Visions, while discussing the "dichotomy" that the "gentle" and "peaceful" Bloch writes stories that are "gruesome and warped," editor Harlan Ellison brings up "...Sturgeon's lament that after he had written one--and one only--story about homosexuality, everyone accused him of being a fag."  Assuming Ellison is accurately reporting something Sturgeon said and Sturgeon was being truthful, what is the "one--and one only--story"?  Could it be "Affair with a Green Monkey?"  isfdb has a "LGBTQ+" tag on "Affair with a Green Monkey," so maybe!  Let's turn our gaydar up to maximum gain and investigate!

"Affair with a Green Monkey" is a slightly cryptic joke story, and the joke is sort of naughty (that is if I understood it.)  It is also one of those stories about how humans (or at least the male of the species!) are all jerks that presents aliens who are so much better than we are.  

Fritz Rhys is a big strong man, middle-aged, and head of a human services department of some kind in Washington.  He has a much younger wife, Alma.  At a park Fritz and Alma witness a gang of thugs attacking some guy--Fritz rescues the guy, driving off the malefactors.

Fritz prides himself on understanding people, and he immediately senses that the victim, who has a wacky name like Loolyo, is a homosexual and the thugs assaulted him because of this fact.  Sturgeon doesn't use any words like "homosexual" or "gay" but makes it all clear through little jokes and things.  Fritz has nothing against gays, and insists Loolyo stay in his home with his wife all day to recover from the beating, instead of going to the hospital.  While Fritz is at work, his wife and Loolyo go to all the tourist attractions together and read books to each other and play records together and so on.  Alma falls in love with this guy, whom Sturgeon hints is a space alien.

Some days later, Fritz finally finds time to have a serious talk with Loolyo.  A well-educated member of the elite liberal class, Fritz wants to give Loolyo, a member of an oppressed minority, some friendly, expansive, condescending know-it-all advice.  Fritz explains that people hate and fear those who are different and at the drop of a hat will form a mob to beat up those who are different should they discover them.  Fritz has his own little metaphor--if you painted a monkey green the other monkeys would form a mob and beat up the green monkey because it is different.  He advises Loolyo to act like a heterosexual man, to feign interest in fishing and hunting and be gruff and never show emotion and so forth.

Fritz finally sees his wife and Loolyo together and from the way Alma looks at the guy, Fritz can tell she has a crush on him.  Fritz tells them to go spend a few hours together, thinking Loolyo will explain he is a gay man and so their love is impossible.  Sure enough, when they are alone, after he kisses her and gropes her, and before she watches him hop into his space ship, Loolyo explains to Alma that they can't be lovers, but the reason is because, if I am reading the clues right, his erect penis is seventeen inches long and over five inches thick.  Alma, when she returns home, laughs about how small Fritz's penis is, humiliating him and likely threatening the survival of their marriage.

I guess we'll say this one is OK.

Besides Venture, where "Affair with a Green Monkey" first hit the stage, you can check out this elaborate dick joke, which I guess also serves as a warning not to judge people by their appearance, in various Sturgeon collections but also Modern Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Norman Spinrad, and a French anthology on the theme of invaders.  

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All three of these stories start off addressing some conventional but interesting topic (are ambitious men and their projects really so great for the rest of us?) or making some obvious but legitimate argument (don't beat up gay people!) and then veer off into convoluted plot twists involving less than credible psychological and biological explanations (we've all got a superpower you don't even realize you have, except for this guy we hypnotized as a baby...) or just an oblique bizarre joke (E.T. has a monster cock!)  Also, none of them is actually good.  Though only the longest of these stories is actually poor, it seems that today I cannot respond to tarbandu's criticism of Sturgeon with a ringing endorsement of ol' Ted.

But don't give up hope, Ted fans!  We've got three more Sturgeon tales coming up, and any one of them might be a blockbuster!