Six 1970s stories from Barry Malzberg

I recently was thrilled to discover, at Karen Wickliff Books here in Columbus, Ohio, a copy of Pocket Books' 1976 paperback, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  This book is huge, over 400 pages, and I love the nude idealized Everyman cover.  It's time to crack open this baby and try to grok the first third or so!

The introduction to the volume, dated "February 1974 : New Jersey" (MPorcius's home state!) is full of interesting info on the publishing industry and the life of the professional literary man in the 1960s and '70s.  Some will find Malzberg's bragging that he is the most prolific (70 novels written in 9 years, over 200 short stories in seven years) and best ("there are a few contemporaries in my field who are better novelists than I....but none to whom I will defer as a short-story writer") living writer and editor ("I set records that old-timers still talk about...twenty-two short stories rejected in a morning!") off-putting, but I find this kind of extravagance amusing, and Malzberg leavens his boasting with a big dollop of self-deprecation and a heavy sauce of tragedy.  The most important thing to take from the intro, I believe, is that Malzberg thinks of himself as a literary writer (he hints that Philip Roth was a kind of model for his young self) but, as the literary market had dried up and literary people are envious jerks, his only way of realizing a career as a working writer was to cater to the genre market, especially the science fiction market.  (Don't forget the sleaze market, though!)

"A Reckoning" (1973)

Malzberg writes an intro to each of the 38 stories in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  In the intro to "A Reckoning" he gushes about how much he loves Cyril Kornbluth's work.  (Malzberg says in the introduction to this volume that "ninety percent" of science fiction writers are "hacks" and that few SF writers can "write at all;" nevertheless I often find him extravagantly praising individual SF writers, including ones like Mack Reynolds whom I think are pretty mediocre.)  Malzberg picks out "The Marching Morons" for praise.  I am a Kornbluth skeptic, and in particular thought "Marching Morons" was bad, and I'm not the only one!  Well let's see what "A Reckoning," which Malzberg tells us is "a pastiche" of the work of Kornbluth, whom he calls "a brother," is all about.

"A Reckoning"'s seven pages are a preliminary report, a sort of summary or prospectus of a much larger report, from a researcher who is finishing up a study of an astronaut, Antonio Smith, who has been lost while penetrating the atmosphere of Jupiter.  The researcher declares that Smith was insane, but it is clear to the reader that the researcher himself is also likely insane.  He claims that he has documents that rival investigators have no access to, has put an explosive booby trap on the documents to dissuade other researchers from getting them, and, furthermore, is in psychic contact with the lost spaceman.  I liked how, like one of the Samuel Johnson's numerous early biographers, the narrator is rushing to get his work published before that of his rivals, whom he calls a bunch of liars.

Malzberg writes again and again about astronauts who are insane, and much of his work takes up the theme that the space program is somehow doomed, either a total waste or literally a threat to humanity.  "A Reckoning" is in this vein; we learn (should the researcher and/or Smith be believed) that Jupiter is inhabited and the visit from Antonio Smith is going to trigger the conquest of Earth by these Jovians.

"A Reckoning" is exactly what we expect from Malzberg; I haven't read The Falling Astronauts or "Out From Ganymede" in years, but "A Reckoning" feels like a condensed version of elements from both of them.  (I'm going to admit I have no idea how this story has anything more in common with a Kornbluth story than does any other Malzberg story.)  It would be easy to criticize Malzberg for doing the same thing again, but I liked seeing its various classic Malzbergian ideas in this concentrated form, so "A Reckoning" gets a thumbs up from me.

("A Reckoning" first appeared in New Dimensions 3 under the title "Notes Leading Down to the Conquest."  Tricky!)

"Letting It All Hang Out" (1974)

In his intro to "Letting It All Hang Out" our man Barry describes how much trouble he had getting this one sold.  It finally appeared in an issue of Fantastic as "Hanging," and, Barry tells us, appears in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg slightly revised.  He also tells us it could have been written by Stanley Elkin. Elkin is one of those important literary writers I know nothing about.

"Letting It All Hang Out," six pages, is a satirical fantasy that suggests that contemporary cliches like "freak out" and "give me five" are actually composed by a guy sitting in an office somewhere.  Every day a messenger comes by to collect the "eight to ten typewritten pages" of new cliches, reminding me of the messenger boys who would come to whatever tavern or rich guy's house at which Samuel Johnson was hanging out to collect copy for the latest issue of The Rambler just before deadline.  The plot of the story concerns the messenger telling the cliche writer that he is being laid off.

I like it.

Introduction to "The Man in the Pocket"

I'm skipping the next story, the sixty page "The Man in the Pocket," because it was integrated into the novel, The Men Inside, which I read and wrote about in 2011. Malzberg's introduction to the story is interesting; he considers that The Men Inside is one of the least read of his novels because it is "not precisely upbeat."  Well, Joachim Boaz and I read it with some care, so, Barry, consider that all your labor on it was worth it!

"Pater Familias" (1972)

This is a collaboration with Kris Neville, and in his intro to the story Malzberg gushes about how great Neville is.  He recommends in particular Neville's "Ballenger's People," which I read in February of 2015, "Cold War," which I read in January of 2015, and "The Price of Simeryl," which I own (in The Far-Out People) but haven't read yet.  "Pater Familias," which Barry informs us is a failed story of his which Neville heavily revised, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

In the late 1990s a machine will be available for sale that lets you summon your parents from the past for just a few minutes. Why just your parents? Why just a few minutes? This story feels pretty contrived, but is self aware of how contrived it is.

Anyway, the story's narrator, who had a very bad relationship with his father, buys one of these devices and summons his dead father a few times for a chat. Their conversations go so poorly that the narrator's father whips out a knife (he carries it with him to protect himself from the draft rioters endemic to 1988) and kills himself. The next time the narrator summons his father, his rotting corpse appears.  Soon after, the government outlaws the machine.  (I was instantly reminded of that Carter Scholz story I just read--is 1970s SF chockablock with calls for greater government regulation of time travel?)

When I read it I thought this four-page story a little slight, but now that I am reliving "Pater Familias," so to speak, as I write about it, I am laughing, so, thumbs up.

"Going Down" (1975)

Years ago Joachim Boaz and I both read the Malzberg stories from Future City, including the dystopian "Culture Lock," in which the government forces everybody to participate in homosexual orgies.  (At the link is Joachim's blog post on Future City, where we both air our opinions and theories about "Culture Lock," as well as a good Lafferty story, "The World as Will and Wallpaper;" my contributions appear in the comments.)  Well, here is another dystopian Malzberg piece with homosexuality as a theme.  "Going Down" first appeared in the anthology Dystopian Visions, and would later be included in the 1984 anthology Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction. 

You might call "Going Down" a character study. Our narrator (who suffers from dissociative disorder and sometimes talks about himself in the third person) was born on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was murdered, and strongly identifies with the young monarch of America's Camelot, even indulging in the fantasy that Kennedy's soul passed into his infant body on that fateful day.  As he grows older the narrator is disappointed in his life; he sees JFK as a man who fulfilled all of his desires, while he himself is a failure, a stifled man who works at a government welfare agency where he deals with violent and grasping public assistance cases who browbeat him.

The 1980s and '90s depicted in the story include some crazy elements; for example, the Kennedy clan is worshipped by the masses--on "Kennedy Day" government employees are required to attend a weird ceremony in which dancers reenact the Dallas assassination and a giant image of JFK's face ("sixteen feet high") is hoisted into the air.  (I thought Malzberg was trying to construct parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and the JFK assassination, with JFK as a Julius Caesar figure; it is implied that JFK's brothers and/or son become president, forming a dynasty, or at least that American presidents take the name of "Kennedy" the way the Roman emperors took the name "Caesar.")

In hopes of becoming the man he would like to be, the narrator pays a considerable sum of money for therapy at an "Institute."  Several of the short chapters of this at times fragmented and oblique 22-page story are internal correspondence penned by Institute personnel.  The narrator receives a sort of hypnotic dream therapy which allows him to experience, as if they really happened, his desires to have anal sex with young boys, adult men, and animals.  The good people at the Institute also throw murder and incest into the mix; this story is full of violent gay sex.  There are also characters who may be real, may merely by products of the therapy or the narrator's insanity, or metaphorical representations of portions of the narrator's psyche, or some combination thereof.  Does the therapy work?  I guess that depends on your perspective; the narrator does not achieve his dreams of being "satisfied in every orifice," like his hero JFK, but the therapy does seem to calm him down ("He feels nothing.")  Something like a lobotomy or a neutering, perhaps?

Crazy and potentially offensive in any number of ways (it seems to both render conventional and to pathologize homosexuality), "Going Down" is absorbing, and I think better than most of the Kennedy-related Malzberg stories I have read.  I also appreciated how it had a recognizable plot arc, actual characters, and memorable images, things we don't always get from our wild and crazy buddy Barry.
   
"Those Wonderful Years" (1973)

This is a pretty mainstream literary story on the theme of how the past can serve as a stable foundation but also as an albatross that can hold you back if you become too attached to it.  The narrator is an insurance claims investigator who is not only obsessed with old pop music ("golden oldies"), but actually lives his life with a deliberate effort to create memories for which he can be nostalgic in the future.  His relationship with his girlfriend, who thinks the nostalgia craze is a government plot to distract people from the problems of the present, collapses when she insists he make a serious commitment to her and start "living in the now."  Malzberg suggests that the girlfriend is like one of the accident victims whose claims he has been able to deny by scrupulous investigation of the facts and following of the rules, that the narrator's commitment to his values has lead him to lack compassion and charity and fail to support others when he might have.  Is it possible that this man who is obsessed with happy memories is actually piling up a bunch of regrets?

Not bad.  "Those Wonderful Years" was first published in Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives, the cover of which depicts a naked girl in an egg with a giant frog.  (You may recall that I own a copy of Frontiers 2: The New Mind, the cover of which depicts a naked man with his arm chopped off.)   

"On Ice" (1973)

In his intro to the story Malzberg says "On Ice" is probably the most controversial story ever published in Amazing.  "Letters were violent for months afterward," he relates, and admits that it "pains" even him to reread it!

"On Ice" uses the same conceit as "Going Down," which would appear two years later. (Maybe I should have read these stories in chronological order?  Well, in the intro to the volume Malzberg warns us that some took years to sell, so publication order doesn't match the order in which they were composed, so probably it doesn't matter.)  There is an Institute where you can get hypnotherapy which gives you the experience of having sex with whoever you want, including your parents.  The first paragraph of the six-page tale is a graphic depiction of a guy having sex with his mother! (You have to retch or laugh, or both, at lines like "'Give it to me, son!' she shrieks....")

The use of the therapy in this story parallels the issue of drugs in real life, and seems also to be some kind of lament about money and how it (according to Malzberg) corrupts people and society.  The therapy, of course, is supposed to be used sparingly to cure the patient of psychological problems, but the narrator uses it as recreation.  A doctor warns him that he may become addicted, but the narrator, accurately, asserts that the Institute will keep giving him his fix as long as he pays, that they care more about money than actually helping people.  I detected a possible caricature of libertarian ideology in the story, as the narrator repeatedly talks about how he is "free," thanks to his wealth and society's technological developments, to do whatever he wants as long as he isn't hurting anyone.  In the last therapy session in the story the narrator eagerly indulges in a scenario in which he rapes and tortures the ineffectual doctor who tried to get between him and his pleasure.

This is a graphic, shocking piece of work, and it is easy to see why it would be controversial.  But I don't think it is gratuitous; it is economical, has a provocative point of view, and is effective.

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I don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I have to admit that all six of these stories, and all the introductory material, are good.  I'm even more pleased than before to have got my hands on a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg; this is a must for all Malzberg fans and for those interested in literary SF from the '60s and '70s.  And I still have over 250 pages to go!

Genius Unlimited by John T. Phillifent

"I'm Rex Sixx, escort to the expert from Interstelpol.  Put that to music and you should have a hit number.  Excuse my levity, won't you?"

For 45 cents, on the eastern reaches of the land where the tall corn grows, I purchased DAW No. 16, Genius Unlimited, written by John T. Phillifent and published in 1972. The back cover copy includes the phrase "a yen to do the science-thing in your own way," and warns us that our hero is named "Rex Sixx."  Is this a novel about a hair band?

Another question: Who is John T. Phillifent?  We'll let the people at DAW answer that one:

Obviously!

To make this blog post relevant to today's youth, I will point out that Phil also wrote some novelizations of The Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV show, the basis for the latest movie craze!  (Why are there so many TV shows and movies and comic books that expect us to just forget all about the Katyn massacre, the Gulag, the '56 Hungarian Revolution, Prague Spring, et al., and cheer on some KGB agent because this week he's taking a break from murdering kulaks and tossing samizdat typists in prison to help the U.S. fight some fictional terrorist group?)

I like the cover by Jack Gaughan.  The guy climbing outside of his space ship to fire his pistol at some menace reminds me of the famous cover of The Gods Hate Kansas. I remember seeing postcards reproducing the cover of The Gods Hate Kansas for sale on a spinner rack in Union Square, across the street from that famous coffee shop.

My copy of Genius Unlimited was once owned by a young man by the name of Patrick Blackowiak.  Mr. Blackowiak planned to order four more DAW volumes, and even filled out the forms in the back of this book, but for some reason didn't tear out the pages and mail them off.  Let's hope this was a case of Mr. Blackowiak finding these Dean Koontz, Donald Wollheim, Mark Geston and Jeff Sutton books on his local bookstore's shelves, or photocopying these pages and mailing them off, and not Mom refusing to enable his addiction to DAW's fine product line.

Fellow SF fan Patrick Blackowiak, we salute you!

Enough preliminaries, what is up with Genius Unlimited?  The first thing I noticed was how poor the writing was, full of clumsy transitions, strange colloquialisms, labored sentences, and odd word choices.  Here's a section from page 11 to give you an idea what I'm talking about:

"I made it grow a name."

The whole book, 140 pages, is like this.  One odd tic that stood out for me was Phil's love of the word "angular."  On page 44 we are told of Alma Tillet that "There was just the faintest hint of Scottish angularity in her speech."  On page 74 we learn that Olga Glink, "despite her angular name was as chubby and curvaceous as any Greek marble..."  On the very same page Graham Packard is described as "a long, angular, austere hawk of a man...."  This is a book which could really use some copy editing.  

The story: On planet Martas is an island, Iskola, where geniuses who can pass a stringent psychological test are invited to live in seclusion and do their work unhindered by the rules and regulations enforced elsewhere.  These are real antisocial types, each living alone in a private compound surrounded by a force screen fence and thousands of acres of dense jungle. When Iskola suffers a mysterious crime wave, its leader calls for outside help.  Interstelpol (I.S.P.) sends a sexy woman (I mean lady) detective, Louise Latham, and Interstellar Security (I.S.) provides her two bodyguards, our hero Rex Sixx and his partner, Roger Lowry.  Latham is a genius herself; her senses are so acute and her brain operates so quickly she is practically able to read minds, foretell near-future events,and see in the dark.  In fact, her nervous system is so quick that it stresses her out, and she medicates herself with vast quantities of alcohol! For their part, Sixx and Lowry wear stark white "immunity suits" (with helmets) that readily identify them as I.S. agents and provide protection from vacuum, radiation, gunfire, and other dangers.

These three characters, who are essentially comic book superheroes, take 55 pages to get to Iskola.  Twice on the way Latham's super senses save her from deadly booby traps, while in a tepid action scene Sixx and Lowry's armor saves them from an attack by thugs with rocket launchers.  Once on the island they do detective stuff, investigating the murder of a senator, Arthur Vancec, who had been visiting Martas from Earth.  Our heroes gather together suspects and witnesses and question them, look at crime scene photos, and search the area for clues.  

Science fiction novels often try to teach you some science, and/or address economic or political issues.  Phil tries to do a little of this.  For example the Iskola geniuses have "high brow" conversations with Sixx and company.  One genius explains the concepts of signal, noise and distortion, another talks about how so many men throughout history have been willing to risk their lives in war in defense of the "abstraction" of the nation or homeland, and argues that only a society that was dying would endeavor to enforce material equality, a policy that punishes those with ability. Then there's the description of the island's environmentally friendly power source (chimneys that draw in moist warm air to drive wind turbines.)

Iskola, an island where superior people can go to live in isolation and do their own thing, is (or could be) a means of exploring themes like the relationship of the individual to the state and society.  At one point Latham says that "Iskola is private property, and it's no one else's business how they live," but Sixx "contradicts" her: "It is now...Vancec's untimely demise has made sure of it.  In a murder investigation there is no such thing as privacy...."  I wondered if Phil meant Iskola to be a satire of or response to Galt's Gulch from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged--the geniuses on Iskola are kind of dysfunctional, and have to call for help from the I.S.P., which I guess is a government agency, and in the end they repudiate (at least the most extreme aspects of) their individualism and plan to invite a bunch of normal people to the island.

(I should note that I have not actually read Atlas Shrugged, only read about it.)

Perhaps Phil means Genius Unlimited to contribute to a dialogue with other writers interested in libertarian issues, like the aforementioned Rand, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson.  I detected other, more concrete, connections to other SF authors.  For one thing it is hard to believe that the murdered senator's name was not inspired by Jack Vance, who, like Phil, wrote mysteries as well as SF novels.  And in the very beginning of the novel there is also a jocular reference to Frederick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth: "Martas," we are told, means "gravy" in Hungarian, and Lowry suggests the discoverer of the planet must have gotten the idea for the name from a book.

Anyway, in the final third of the book there are chases through the jungle and gunfights and explosions as it is revealed that hundreds of people (paranoids and megalomaniacs who failed that psychology test) have sneaked onto the island over the years and have been hiding in the jungle, awaiting their chance to steal the geniuses' new technology for use in a plot to take over the galaxy.  Lowry and Lapham are captured, but Sixx rescues them.  The geniuses learn the value of cooperation ("...we must discard our policy of independent isolation and work together on this") and Sixx and one of the geniuses, the curvaceous Olga Glink, fall in love.  It seems like Lowry and Lapham will also soon be getting it on.  So a happy ending for everybody (we even learn that Vancec was terminally ill anyway, and came to Martas to expose his evil half-brother, which he succeeded in doing by being murdered by him.)

This book is pretty bad.  The writing is bad, one of the characters is silly and all the rest are without any personality, the jokes are bad, the action scenes are boring, much of the detective stuff and the science stuff feels perfunctory.  There was actually a sequel, printed as a serial in Analog and then as half of an Ace Double, called Hierarchies.  Do not expect to see a discussion of Hierarchies in this space in the near, far, or very far future.  

Future Glitter by A. E. Van Vogt

"Comrades, workers, supporters of the New Economic System.  I imagine that you were all surprised this morning when you saw my image on one or another wall in your house."

We are told that one reason for Damon Knight's famous hostility to A. E. Van Vogt is the latter's apparent sympathy for autocracy and skepticism of democracy.  There is plenty of evidence for Van Vogt's opinions on these matters; he devotes one of Earth Factor X's short chapters to pointing out how the people of Earth "needed somebody to look after them...definitely needed somebody to tell them what to do," for example. Between the covers of Future Glitter we find additional evidence of Van Vogt's political beliefs.

I read the Ace 1973 printing of Future Glitter, which I believe is the book's first edition.  I like the colors on the cover painting by Bart Forbes (I'm guessing it's a watercolor) and the woman with the long neck.  Unfortunately, the text is full of typos. Shame on you, Ace!  If you really thought this was Van Vogt's greatest novel, you would have assigned a proofreader to the project, wouldn't you?

This cover is nice, but has nothing
to do with the story

I also like the British hardcover edition's cover. UK paperbacks of Future Glitter were retitled Tyrannopolis, and given less abstract, more dramatic covers.

In the three and a half pages of the introduction to Future Glitter Van Vogt brags that he is an expert on communism and the People's Republic of China, having "read and reread approximately 100 books on China and Communism" while writing his 1962 novel The Violent Man.  Van Vogt assures us he is a "middle liberal" (a phrase I don't think I've ever encountered before and which, because Van Vogt doesn't provide any context, could mean a number of different things) and then tells us "We must remember that dictators can often solve problems by fiat." Van Vogt provides examples of problems in Peking that a Communist Party official, in the US in 1971 on a UN mission, told him were solved thanks to Party policy.  But Van Vogt warns that some may not like the price to be paid for solving problems via such methods.

I was pleased to find that Future Glitter, published within a year of Earth Factor X, was better written, had a better plot, and included images considerably more arresting and characters much more compelling and sympathetic than that novel.

In the clever first section of the novel, 30 or so of its 200 pages, we meet the elderly Dr. Dun Higenroth, one of the top scientists of the 23rd century, a time when the Earth is ruled by a collectivist dictatorship.  Thanks to the dictator, Martin Lilgin, the world has been spared hunger, war, disease, and pollution for over a century.  On the other hand, there is no private property, the government periodically subjects everyone to invasive psychological testing, and also has absolute control over where you can live, who you can marry, and whether you can reproduce.  The paranoid Lilgin, over the course of his 200 years as ruler, has executed a billion people, based on whims or for such infractions as "questioning the Official Religion."

Nota Bene: There actually is no scene in
 the novel in which people fight in the arena

Higenroth has developed a technique that allows the precise control of "fields" and electricity.  ("When Higenroth discovered that electricity can be made to move from one location in space to another in a simpler way than in nature, many problems in spatial relations became resolvable.") These techniques, generally called "The Pervasive System," provide their user tremendous power, the ability to teleport oneself or others, for example. Higenroth comes up with a way to use his new technique to record and transmit images; by a mere act of will he can cast a field around Lilgin and cause live moving images of the dictator to be projected on the plastic walls of every residence on the Earth.  Higenroth hopes that thus exposing the dictator will undermine his rule.  (This idea hearkens back to the spy rays used by the Weapon Shops to expose the corruption and cruelty of the Empress Innelda in Van Vogt's famous Isher tales.)

His dissident ideas having come to the attention of the authorities, Higenroth is sentenced to public decapitation.  One of my favorite elements of the novel is how the dictatorship's propaganda has convinced the populace that when it beheads intellectuals (apparently a common occurrence) it is not a punishment, but an honor, and a way of immortalizing the man so honored: Higenroth's students divvy up parts of their mentor's brain, and believe that upon his death portions of Higenroth's vast store of knowledge will be transmitted to their own minds.

One of the themes of the novel is how Lilgin uses sex to manipulate important men, like bureaucrats and scientists, whose help he needs but whom he also fears.  The dictator's agents scoured the world to find the prettiest teenage girl on the planet, and married her off to Higenroth two years ago.  This young woman has refused to have sex with her aged husband since their marriage.

In order to keep Higenroth from trying to escape, his wife is instructed to occupy his attention by surrendering her body to him for the very first time.  After finally consummating their marriage, Higenroth acts to preserve his scientific breakthrough for the future: he uses a device upon his sleeping wife that embeds the critical knowledge in the cells of the zygote of their child!

The lion's share of the novel concerns Higenroth's son, who is spirited away from his mother immediately after birth and raised by foster parents he believes are his own. The dictator knows the boy, named Orlo, has the secret of the Pervasive System hidden in his cells, and, hoping to acquire this knowledge, keeps a close eye on him. At the age of twenty Orlo is brought to the dictator's palace and put in charge of a colony of scientists who live in what amounts to a prison (Van Vogt tells us in the intro that he got this idea from reading Solzhenitsyn.)  Lilgin wants Orlo to be close at hand and under government control when the potentially world-shattering knowledge he unwittingly carries bursts forth.

You'll be happy to learn that this cover illo
does actually represent a scene in the novel

Like in a lot of Van Vogt stories we follow the protagonist as he learns the reality of his own life and his world, develops amazing mental powers, and then causes a paradigm shift. Psychological and political theories are also presented.  Like Hedrock in the Isher books, who refuses to depose the House of Isher but instead hopes to moderate it and limit its excesses, Orlo decides that it would be pointless to overthrow the Lilgin dictatorship; his project will be to reform its policies and provide a little more freedom to the human race.  Echoing the cynicism of Earth Factor X, when the knowledge lurking in Orlo's cells is activated and all the world can watch the tyrant's every move, 24/7, this only briefly discomfits the canny dictator.  The charismatic Lilgin directly addresses the common people, and a mob five million strong rushes to his aid and preserves his dictatorship!

Here and in the Weapon Shop books Van Vogt argues that firm rule is preferable to anarchy and war, though he also advocates for checks on that rule--not necessarily democratic or republican checks, mind you, like elections or referenda, but the moderating power of an additional, confrontational, elite.  (To be fair, there are sections of The Weapon Makers which stress the importance of constitutionalism, portraying the fact that the Weapon Shop council is not, or should not be, above its own laws.)  I have already pointed out how in Earth Factor X Van Vogt suggests that ordinary people crave authority and want to be told what to do, and he does that in Future Glitter as well.

Van Vogt is hardly alone in his (apparent) beliefs; in fact, a contempt for the common people and acceptance of undemocratic elite rule are sentiments we see often in the work of Golden Age SF writers.  L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout depicts how the rule of a single superior man brings peace and stability after a long destructive war.  In "Slow Sculpture" Theodore Sturgeon calls for an elite to prune and mold humanity like a gardener would a tree.  Cyril Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" has a sympathetic elite manipulating the masses, who are too stupid to look out for their own interests.  I haven't read any of Isaac Asimov's fiction since I started this blog, but aren't those Foundation books about how a small intellectual elite should be manipulating the rest of us for our own good?

I'd like to see a larger
image of this intriguing cover

The Golden Age writers we think of as libertarians also exhibit some of these attitudes. Many stories by Robert Heinlein stress the importance of respecting the authority of the captain of a ship.  In his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the common run of humanity isn't interested in and won't pursue freedom, and our heroes deceive and manipulate them in order to achieve their goals.  Poul Anderson seems skeptical of authority and government power, but in "Master Key" we see his adventurous merchant character, Van Rijn, express contempt for the people whom he sees as the majority, those who would rather enjoy government-provided security than take responsibility for running their own lives.

I think it is fair to say that there is an element of snobbery to SF; this is something that I am not always comfortable with.

Van Vogt fans should definitely seek out Future Glitter, but, unlike House That Stood Still or Earth Factor X, I am also willing to recommend it to general SF fans: there are plenty of surreal images, speculations about politics and psychology, and characters who made some kind of emotional impact on me.  I think basing a book on his readings of Chinese and Russian history (instead of just his dreams and psychological theories as it seems he sometimes did) paid off for Van Vogt and for his readers.

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A side-note: The phrase "politically correct" appears to be in the news again, so it was a weird bit of synchronicity finding Van Vogt use the phrase in this 1973 novel: "A politically correct statement spoken with the tiniest lapse from correct tone of voice--Lilgin heard the lapse.  That man was not allowed near him again."

The Green Odyssey by Philip Jose Farmer

"'It was the hand of man struck him down, my boy.  If it's violent death you are trying to explain, don't drag in the supernatural.  There's enough murder in the hearts of humankind to take care of every case.'"

I don't run into the word "roistering" very often. But here it is on both the front and back covers of my 1966 printing of Philip Jose Farmer's 1957 novel The Green Odyssey. And from two different sources!

If these blurbs are to be believed, The Green Odyssey is a superlative, one-of-a-kind adventure.  According to the New York Herald Tribune it is the "most agreeable interplanetary adventure novel" ever, and according to Inside S-F it has a heroine who is "unique" and "magnificent."  (Alert the feminists, their dream book has arrived!) Sounds terrific, and the Powers cover sure looks terrific.  Let's see if this 152 page paperback lives up to the hype, and to Power's impressive illustration.

Like Adam Reith in Jack Vance's Planet of Adventure books, and Jason dinAlt in Harry Harrison's Deathworld 2, Alan Green crash landed on a relatively primitive planet.  (Ralph Nader should look into these persistent problems with space ships crashing.)  Green ends up in a country where most of the free people are short brunettes; he's a tall blonde, like most of the slaves, and is quickly enslaved himself.  As the novel begins he is a sort of butler and male concubine to a beautiful but stupid and annoying duchess, Zuni.  Green also has a wife, Amra, who is beautiful but domineering and only respects a man who can dominate her in turn.

(On second thought, do not alert the feminists, this is not their dream book after all.)

Word comes to Duchess Zuni's court that another space ship has arrived on the planet, and its two-man crew has been taken captive.  (The superstitious natives don't know about space and think these space men are demons.) The Green Odyssey follows Alan Green's adventures as he flees slavery and tries to hook up with these fellow marooned spacefarers and get off the planet.  He cuts a deal with a merchant, fights his way out of the castle, and sails away as part of the crew of the merchant's wheeled square-rigged land ship.  His canny wife figures out his plan, and joins him on the voyage with her gaggle of children, one of whom is Green's.

The land ship crosses a vast flat plain to the kingdom where the spacers are imprisoned. Along the way the land ship is attacked by pirates and then by cannibals.  Green also has trouble with the ship's crew and the merchant; fortunately the clever and resourceful Amra is there to help him; she is instrumental in saving his life more than once.  The cannibals kill some of Amra's children, but Farmer doesn't dwell on how horrible an experience this must be.   

One of the themes of the book is how absurd and counterproductive religion is, and how supernatural beliefs grow out of misunderstandings of mundane phenomena.  The planet is covered in high tech artifacts, which the superstitious inhabitants interpret as the work of demons or gods.  Green's modern and rational outlook enables him to outwit everybody else.   I think Farmer must have been an atheist or agnostic when Green Odyssey was written, but as I learned in his essay in The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, his thinking about religion would later evolve.

Green activates a huge aircraft the natives think is a hill, killing numerous people in the process, and takes to the skies, terrorizing the kingdom where the one surviving spaceman is held captive.  The king and the priests surrender the spaceman and the two-man scout space ship, and, after teaching Amra how to operate the invincible aircraft, Green heads to Earth, promising to return to Amra as part of a large expedition that will investigate the many secrets of the planet's ancient technological civilization.  (The flat plain, for example, was created by these mysterious ancients and has been maintained by their robots for centuries.  Like his famous Riverworld series and his World of Tiers books, Farmer's The Green Odyssey is set in an artificial world shaped by mysterious beings.)

The book exhibits considerable hostility towards the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie; I guess we could call this another theme.  The aristocratic women are sexy but stupid, and the aristocratic men are obese.  The merchant character is a skilled leader and sailor, but also fat, greedy, and a ruthless backstabber.   It is also perhaps significant that those children of Amra's who are killed by cannibals are products of her liaisons with aristocrats; we never learn their names.

When Green needs a land boat he just steals one, with the aid of one of Amra's sons. Green sucker punches the guy guarding it, while Amra's son beats him over the head with a pipe.  We are told the owner of the land yacht (whom we know nothing about and who never appears "on screen") must be rich, which in the eyes of some may excuse the theft, but what about the poor guard?

isfdb image of 1957 edition

This attack on the yacht's guard brings up some more themes of the novel, moral relativism and man's propensity for violence.  We are told that Green's modern space faring civilization is a peaceful one, in which children are taught to abhor violence.  Under ordinary circumstances Green would not enjoy any kind of violence, but life on this violent planet has had an effect on him. Green gleefully throws a dog who has been tormenting him for months off a castle balcony, enjoys shooting wild dogs from the crow's nest of the land ship, and is thrilled during a battle, crying out "This is living!"  He also forgives the bloodthirstiness expressed by Amra and her son.  What makes moral sense in some places and some situations doesn't make sense in others. Farmer further suggests that there is a "philosophy of the body," a natural propensity to enjoy action, danger, and violence, that is "older and deeper" than rational philosophies that teach a loathing of violence.  This "philosophy of the body" may lead the cannibals to commit horrible atrocities (we are told that "like all undisciplined primitives," in their initial assault they "killed indiscriminately and hysterically,") but Green needs it as much as his modern logic and science knowledge to survive.

Farmer's body of work is uneven--I recall Maker of Universes, the first volume in the World of Tiers series, being pretty lame--but in The Green Odyssey Farmer gives us a well-realized and interesting setting that includes a believable culture, strange natural and man-made elements, and entertaining characters.  I'd say it is moderately good; the reviewers are correct to say it is entertaining, though I would not share their breathless enthusiasm. 

I recommend The Green Odyssey as a fun adventure.  It is also your chance to see the word "roistering" in action; Farmer uses it twice in the text, presumably inspiring his admiring reviewers to follow suit.

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The last page of my copy of The Green Odyssey have some interesting advertising. 

There is a full page ad for the first of John Norman's Gor novels, Tarnsman of Gor.  In my teens I read Tarnsman of Gor, and thought it a fun Barsoom-style adventure.  It didn't (as far as I can recall) include so much of what the later Gor books became famous for, what Wikipedia calls a "focus on relationships between dominant men and submissive women."  I never read any of the later Gor books, I think they were not at the library (where I got Tarnsman of Gor.)

The final page of The Green Odyssey lists some "early classics" published by Ballantine, most of which I have some familiarity with.  Ahead of Time includes the very good story "Home is the Hunter," as well as "Or Else," which I recall not liking very much.  Brain Wave is good, and To Live Forever is alright, I think below average for Vance.  (I think nowadays we are supposed to refer to To Live Forever by the author-approved title Clarges.)  I read the novella version of Nerves and didn't think much of it. I haven't read Gladiator-At Law, which I assume is some kind of satire attacking lawyers.  I haven't read The Space Merchants, a satire attacking advertising, either.  I'm not into those broad satires, and I don't have any particular animus against people in advertising or the law. 

Two early 1950s short stories by C. M. Kornbluth: "The Altar at Midnight" and "The Adventurer"

On March 12 of this year I explained why I avoid Cyril Kornbluth's work and panned his famous and influential story "The Marching Morons."  But I try to keep an open mind at this here blog, so today I read two more Kornbluth stories, both available for free to all us cheapskates at gutenberg.org.  The gutenberg versions are the original magazine versions, and include the original art by Freas and Ashman.

"The Altar at Midnight" (1952)  

This is sort of a hard-boiled story set in the Skid Row of some Earth town.  The narrator meets a spaceship crew member in a strip bar and takes him to a different bar, one inhabited by crippled drunks who enjoy telling the stories of how they were crippled working for the railroad.  The spacer explains how the regular changes in air pressure and the hard radiation in space have damaged his body, how being a spacer is risky, gets you involved in trouble with women, damages relationships with your family, weakens your religious faith, coarsens your morals, etc.  It turns out that the narrator is the scientist who made space travel possible.  He feels guilty about his accomplishment, because of how rough space travel is on people and (it is hinted) because Earth's Cold War tensions have spread to the moon (where there is some kind of missile base) and maybe Mars and Venus.  

The story is short and to the point, which I appreciated.  Its pessimism about space travel reminded me of Murray Leinster's Other Side of Nowhere (1964) and Edmond Hamilton's "What's it Like Out There?", also published in 1952.  Then there is the story's bleak view of the railroad.  It is remarkable how many science fiction writers and stories express ambiguous or even hostile attitudes towards technological advances - in just the last few days I read L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout (1940), in which he blamed modern war on "machinery," and of course there are many more examples, even before talk about pollution and ecology and the environment became de rigueur around 1970.  

"The Altar at Midnight" is an effective story, even if you aren't some kind of Luddite who thinks that the locomotive and rocket ship were a mistake.  It is economical, the tone is consistent, and the style is not bad.  It is no great masterpiece, but it is worth reading.

"The Adventurer" (1953)

In the future the United States (called "the Republic") is a tyrannical hereditary monarchy, wracked by coup attempts and fights among the elite over succession, perhaps reminiscent of the struggles for succession we see in the Roman Empire.  The United States is still locked in a Cold War with the Soviet Union; this conflict has extended out into the solar system, including on Io, which is half Soviet and half Republican.  The story follows events in Washington among the politicians and on Io, where a shooting war breaks out and a charismatic young officer becomes a hero.  Like Caesar or Napoleon, the young man turns on the Republic and makes himself ruler.  It is revealed that his rise was engineered by patriotic conspirators who wanted to end the current political system, but instead of embracing the conspirators, the young officer, who declares himself a god, has them all executed.

This story seems pointless.  The satirical elements, the adventure elements, and the trick ending elements are all weak.  Was Kornbluth just projecting a silly romantic theory of history (that on occasion great men rise up to take over and revive moribund empires) onto the future in order to ridicule it?      

Embedded in the story is an interesting idea, a future art form whose main focus is not line or form or color or composition (as in a painting or sculpture) but texture; one doesn't appreciate these art objects primarily by looking at them but instead by touching them.  I guess this is maybe a joke, perhaps an ironic reference to money (the art objects are called "fingering pieces") but I found it the most memorable part of a weak story.

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So, one average story and one poor story.  There is a third Kornbluth piece available at gutenberg, The Syndic, but it is a full length novel and I'm not feeling up to it after the almost useless "The Adventurer."  The Syndic in 1986 received a Prometheus Award for being a "Classic Libertarian SF novel," which is intriguing, so I will probably read it someday, but not today.   

Return of SF Hall of Fame 2A: Heinlein, Anderson, & Kornbluth

Cover of a later edition

Monday I decided to reread three of the novellas in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume 2A. 

Universe by Robert Heinlein

I can still remember reading Universe for the first time. I was standing on the corner of 34th Street and 8th Avenue, waiting for my wife (then just my girlfriend, as in those days I was righteously declaring that our love need not be ratified by any god or government.) We were going to eat at the Tick Tock Diner. (Google maps suggests that the Tick Tock Diner has managed to stay in business despite being bereft of my patronage for some years.) I had a battered paperback of Orphans of the Sky, a fixup of which Universe makes the first part. Not only was this paperback in parlous condition, but it had an inexplicably terrible cover (a photo of tracer bullets or street lights taken from a shaky camera by a Sidney Kramer), and a hilarious ad on the back for some kind of steamy bestseller (The King by Morton Cooper.) The back cover description of Orphans of the Sky sounds like it is for a different novel altogether.  I still own this bizarre artifact.

My copy of Orphans of the Sky

Anyway, I was immediately hooked by Universe. I can still remember thinking, "Wow, this is a good one!"  It must have been the first Heinlein I had read in years.  Rereading it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame yesterday I again enjoyed it. It is a straightforward, old-fashioned SF tale about people on a generation ship who don't know they are on a space ship.  Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (1958), which I read recently, seems to be a response to this story, and includes some minor details which felt like subtle references to this Heinlein work. 

Universe first appeared in 1941.  The main character, Hugh, is a member of a tribe of normal humans; smarter than average, he has the opportunity to learn to read and become a scientist.  The "scientists" of the tribe are more like priests than scientists, and think the explanations of things like gravity in their science books are in fact allegories for, for example, human sexual relationships.

Living elsewhere in the ship is a tribe of mutants.  (Any mutants born in Hugh's tribe are thrown down the "Converter" and recycled into electric power.)  The mutant tribe and Hugh's tribe are in a sort of low level war, and while out scouting Hugh gets captured by the mutants and enslaved.  Fortunately he becomes the servant of the mutants' leader, an intellectual who shows Hugh the control room of the ship and explains to Hugh that the ship is not in fact the extent of reality, but merely a vehicle traveling though a universe of astonishing and beautiful extent.  Hugh becomes a leader of the effort to make peace between the mutants and his own tribe and take control of the ship and bring it to a planet.

I like Heinlein's brisk economical style, and he does a good job describing the strange milieu of the ship, with the fight scenes, and with all the stuff describing the control room and the excitement of Hugh when he realizes the true nature of his world.  This is solid classic SF.

The characterization in Universe could have been a little better; several people show up in the end of the story that perhaps should have been described in more detail earlier.  Nowadays I suppose we would expect one of the three or four "good guys" to be a woman.  But maybe the story deserves a few points from the politically correct crowd because of Heinlein's advocacy of equality for mutants?  Universe is also one of the many SF stories to lampoon religion and show religious belief and the religious hierarchy standing in the way of a recognition of reality and of progress.    

Call Me Joe by Poul Anderson

I am sympathetic to Anderson's attitude and ideas, and often think he has good plots, but I also often find his characters and writing style to be weak.  Luckily, with 1957's Call Me Joe, which I reread today after some years, Anderson managed to marry a decent character and emotion story to his cool SF idea; this is one of the best of Anderson's many stories. 

To explore Jupiter's surface, where the pressure, temperature and atmosphere are so harsh space ships don't last long enough to make a return trip, scientists build a centaur-like creature in a lab.  They send the creature, Joe, to the Jovian surface, and from a satellite thousands of miles away a psychic, Edward Angsley, controls Joe.  Connected to various apparatus that magnify the psychic connection he has with Joe, Angsley sees, feels, and hears everything Joe does, and controls Joe's body as he does his own; essentially, when he is hooked up, he is Joe.

Angsley, once an active man, is a cripple confined to a robotic wheelchair, having lost most of his body below his chest in a terrible accident.  His time controlling Joe -- hunting, fighting, and taming native beasts and struggling to build tools and shelter on the unforgiving Jovian surface -- is for him a fulfilling life of freedom and purpose, a far better experience than sitting in his wheel chair, a head, two arms, and little else.  Eventually he migrates his entire consciousness from his wasted human body to the powerful Jovian body.  The denouement of the story indicates that Angsley is only the first of such mental transfers; other disabled people, as well as old people, will in the future be able to shift their minds from their weak bodies to strong ones and live longer, more exciting and fulfilling lives. 

Anderson does a good job with all the sciency stuff, the adventure stuff on Jupiter works, and perhaps most importantly Anderson succeeds in making Angsley a believable and sympathetic character.  Like Universe, Call Me Joe is solid classic SF, technophilac, optimistic, and telling the tale of a new and better world being discovered.  (Oh, if you are keeping track, there's no women characters in this one either.) 

(Cool illustrations by Kelly Freas for the first appearance of Call Me Joe are viewable at the SFFAudio site.)           

The Marching Morons by Cyril Kornbluth

I generally avoid Kornbluth's work.  I've spent most of my adult life in and around academia and bookstores, where everybody is some kind of left winger and wants to talk your ear off about how they hate SUVs and the taxpayers should pay their tuition, medical bills, and rent for them and how it would be so great to live in Canada where everybody is so civilized and sophisticated.  I've heard enough of that sort of thing to last me a lifetime. I always figure the fiction of Kornbluth, the member of the Futurians who had green teeth, will constitute an effort to convince me that I should be in the streets with a torch, setting fire to every Rolls Royce, Cadillac, ad agency, and Armed Services recruiting station I can find, and so it has been my practice to give it a wide berth.

Despite this, I read The Marching Morons years ago.  I then forgot the whole thing beyond the "time traveler finds future is inhabited by dolts" premise.  With the idea that I should probably be familiar with every story in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, today I reread The Marching Morons, which was first published in 1951.

The Marching Morons is a farcical satire meant to be funny.  Jokes include a man accidentally put in suspended animation in a 20th-century dental accident; his alive but inert body is used as a mascot at football games. The story is also "meta;" when awoken from suspended animation after hundreds of years the man expects the future to be like the science fiction stories he has read.  He is surprised to find that there are still "dollars" and not "credits," for example.

The future world population consists almost entirely of stupid people, 5 billion of them.  A small elite of people of normal intelligence works manically to keep everything running, and to fool the idiotic populace into being content.  For example, because the average person (IQ 45) is a horrible driver, cars are built which can only achieve 60 mph, but the cars are rigged so that the drivers believe they are going 150.  When the protagonist talks to one of the elite he is upbraided, told that the reason society is in such a mess is because middle-class people like him back in the day did not have as many children as the stupid "migrant workers, slum dwellers and tenant farmers" - The Marching Morons is a eugenicist tract!

It is also an attack on real estate agents or I guess businesspeople in general; the protagonist, besides being a racist, was a real estate agent in the 20th century and he immediately tries to bamboozle the future elites and make himself dictator of the world.  Kornbluth tells us he is directly emulating Hitler!  The 20th-century businessman helps the future elites trick the millions of morons into a death trap, and then the elites trick him in turn, sending him to his doom. 

What can you say about such an insane story?  How much of all this stuff did Kornbluth in 1951 believe?  And how much of it did the members of the SFWA, who chose it for their Hall of Fame in the late 1960s, believe?  Were the members of the SFWA a bunch of eugenicists who thought business people were lying Nazis?  Or did they just think all this stuff was hilarious?         

Even putting aside its eugenic and anti-business politics, I don't think the story is so hot.  It does include those in-jokes for members of the SF community, but I didn't think that they were particularly funny.  It includes several venerable SF devices and themes, like time travel, a small secret elite running the world, people (like the people in Heinlein's Universe) who have a radically inaccurate view of their world, and overpopulation.  But, being a big farce, the story has zero human feeling.  Also, I felt like Kornbluth was playing a trick on the reader, leading the reader to identify with the 20th-century man early on, and then suddenly revealing him to be a racist Nazi.  Is the reader then expected to identify with the future elite, even though they put the extermination program into effect?

I'm a little bewildered about the popularity of this story and its inclusion in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame.  (Oh yeah, there's no women in this one, either, but since all the characters are either morons or mass murderers, I don't know if women will want to complain.)  

(The 1951 issue of Galaxy which includes The Marching Morons is available at the Internet Archive; the illustrations are unspectacular, but not bad.)

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Well, there is probably no need for me to reiterate it, but I think the Heinlein and Anderson stories are pretty good, and the Kornbluth story pretty weak.

I plan to read and reread more novellas from The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume 2A in the near future; I'm hoping the Korbluth entry is some kind of aberration.