Four 1960 stories by R. A. Lafferty

It's been a while since we've read anything by R. A. Lafferty, so let's take my copies of 1970's Nine Hundred Grandmothers, an Ace Science Fiction Special with a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, and DAW's 1972 collection Strange Doings, which has a Jack Gaughan cover, down from the shelf and read four stories by the Iowa-born Oklahoma resident and recipient of a 1990 World Fantasy Life Achievement Award.

"Through Other Eyes"

This is a story about how our beliefs and perceptions are not simply objective and accurate views of the outside world, but are guided or distorted by our attitudes and interests, so that we all see different, even live in different, worlds.  The first two pages of this fifteen-page story act as a sort of prologue, in which scientists Charles Cogsworth and Gregory Smirnov talk about the experience of using their time machine, which allowed them to view famous people and events of the past.  These viewings were a terrible disappointment--reputedly beautiful Isolde was obese, famously witty Voltaire was in fact a disgusting pervert, Sappho, remembered as a genius poet, turned out to be a tedious cat lady, the fabled hero Lancelot was in fact almost too feeble to mount a horse, etc.

The main plot concerns Cogsworth's new machine, the Cerebral Scanner, which allows one to experience the inner thoughts and view of the world of other people and creatures.  Through the eyes of a skeptical critic he sees a world that is unsavory and mean, through the eyes of an important business executive he sees a world of numberless details and infinite connections that can--and must!--be managed by a pull of a string here or there (the connections are likened to reins, the executive to God and to a general commanding an army), and so on.  Cogsworth is eager to use the machine to observe the world through the eyes of Valery Mok, a beautiful woman whom he thinks an angel, a wit, and a paragon of kindness. (Lafferty makes clear that she is in fact none of these things, just a pleasant but essentially ordinary woman--Cogsworth's love for her has distorted his view of her.)  When Cogsworth sees the world through her eyes he is painfully disillusioned--her world is one of pervasive, overwhelming, sensuality--to Cogsworth the sensations she enjoys as she smells trees, touches a rail, or looks at clouds are shockingly and grossly, filthy, coarsely obscene.  "I had thought Valery was an angel...it is a shock to find that she is a pig."

When Mok uses the Cerebral Scanner to see the world as Cogsworth sees it, she is amazed to find how bloodless, loveless, and lifeless his view of the world is, and compares him to a pig, a pig made of dry dead sticks.  "You live with dead people, Charles.  You make everything dead.  You are abominable."  Lafferty gives us a happy ending, though; Mok, we see, the lively and sensuous woman, is going to open the cold and clinical scientist's eyes to the throbbing vitality and earthy beauty of our world and the two will live happily ever after.

"Through Other Eyes" first appeared in Future Science Fiction and seems to have been well-received, reappearing in Robert Silverberg's Mind to Mind as well as Introductory Psychology Through Science Fiction.

"The Six Fingers of Time"

This is one of those SF stories in which a guy can halt or severely slow down time and then take advantage of people as they stand still as statues or (not quite so anti-socially) get some extra work done.  The most famous of these stories are perhaps John D. MacDonald's The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything from 1962, which I have not read, and Nicholson Baker's 1994 The Fermata, which I read in the 20th century and plan to reread sometime this century.  If Wikipedia and my memory are to be trusted, both those novels focus on sex and the use of the time-retarding power to do things like undress women against their will.  In E. C. Tubb's Dumarest series there are the drugs slow-time and quick-time that speed up or slow down your metabolism forty times--by taking these drugs you can heal forty times faster or do forty times as much work in an hour (in a memorable scene in Lallia Dumarest uses slow-time to produce enough product to meet a crucial deadline) or slow you down so tedious space voyages seem to pass forty times as quickly.  In some Warhammer 40,000 games psykers can invoke the power of the warp to slow or speed up time for particular individuals or small areas and so get more moves than their foes.

In "The Six Fingers of Time," Charles Vincent wakes up and finds that time has slowed so much that each second, to him, feels like a minute, each minute an hour.  After exploring the slow-motion city he goes to the office and catches up on two days worth of work before any of his colleagues even shows up.

The effect wears off and after some months have passed he begins to almost think that crazy day was no more than a dream.  But then he meets a mysterious figure whose face is hidden, who hints that Vincent, who has a deformed thumb that suggests a sixth digit, is a descendant of an ancient race of six-fingered people who inhabited the Earth before mankind.  This strange character teaches Vincent how to switch on and off his time-retarding power, and Vincent proceeds to uses his weird talent to play cruel jokes on people, to take advantage of women sexually, to steal money, to learn scores of foreign languages and to accumulate esoteric knowledge.

Besides adding the Weird Tales-style bloodline-of-an-ancient-lost-race-of-wizards angle to our guy-who-controls-time-and-abuses-people story, Lafferty, one of the SF world's most prominent and most hard core Catholics, adds a moral and Christian dimension.  The faceless figure, it appears, is the Devil, and Vincent risks a horrible fate for using his inhuman ability to harm others and enjoy benefits he has not earned.

"The Six Fingers of Time" was first published in If and later was the title story of an anthology of stories from that magazine which, somewhat bizarrely, pretended to be an anthology of stories from If's sister magazine Galaxy.  Both magazines were edited by Horace L. Gold, so I guess the publishers of the volume felt they would be forgiven this little trespass against the trust of the SF-reading public.  (No respect!)

"The Ugly Sea"

In three of the stories we are talking about today Lafferty uses traditional SF topics and themes ("I'm travelling through time!"; "I'm reading people's minds!"; "I can stop time!"; "I'm on an alien planet fighting a huge monster!") but "The Ugly Sea" is more of a mainstream literary piece, and appropriately enough first appeared in The Literary Review, a journal put out by Fairleigh Dickinson University of the great state of New Jersey.  (I once attended a wedding at Fairleigh Dickinson.  Fascinating, right?)  It takes up a traditional literary theme, the sea and its strange allure.  No doubt you remember the opening passages of Moby Dick, in which the narrator describes his own irresistible attraction to the sea, which he suspects all men share, and Homer's phrase "the wine-dark sea," which has become proverbial.  Rock music aficionados are familiar with Pete Townshend's use of the beach and the sea as recurring motifs in The Who's masterpiece Quadrophenia, while sword and sorcery fans (to bring us back to SF) may recall how, in Swords in the Mist,  Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser spoke of "their mistress, the sea...her rages and caressings, her coolths and unending dancings, sometimes lightly footing a minuet, sometimes furiously a-stamp, and her infinitude of secret parts."

In the frame story of "The Ugly Sea" Lafferty takes a counterintuitive but quite credible tack, having storyteller Sour John declare that the sea is ugly ("It has the aroma of an open sewer...it is perhaps the most untidy thing in the world...it is monotonous, with only four or five faces, and all of them coarse") but wins the love of men, including Sour John himself, just the same.  The main plot of "The Ugly Sea," which Sour John narrates, is about an associate of John's, a Jewish loan shark named Moysha Uferwohner, who falls in love with Bonny, a twelve-year-old crippled girl who plays piano (badly) at the Blue Fish, a bar frequented by seamen.  Bonny is fated to marry a sailor, so Moysha becomes a sailor himself, even though, as Sour John tells us, the Jews, "God's own people," have always "shunned" that "evil grave," the ocean.  Moysha, according to Sour John, is only the third Jewish seaman in all of history! 

Melville's Ishmael equates his desire to go to sea with suicide: "This is my substitute for pistol and ball.  With a philosophical flourish Cato throws himself upon his sword; I quietly take to the ship."  Lafferty's story here similarly conjoins seafaring and death.  It is very bad luck, we are told, for a seaman to marry a cripple, but a sailor marries Bonny when she is fifteen years old, anyway.  This tar soon dies of illness at sea, and Bonny remarries at sixteen--this second sailor is killed in a terrible accident in a ship's engine room.  Finally at seventeen she marries Moysha; Moysha leaves his five-year career as a sailor behind, and these two crazy kids live happily together inland for three years.

But the sea has gotten under Moysha's skin!  Those three blissful years end when Moysha is drawn back to the sailor's life.  He joins Sour John's crew, abandoning his wife and children for certain death.

I've had no luck finding an image online of the cover of the Fall 1960 issue of The Literary Review, so all you people who click over to MPorcius Fiction Log for the pictures will have to be satisfied with an image of the second place "The Ugly Sea" appeared, New Worlds of Fantasy #2 with its effective Kelly Freas cover.   

[UPDATE January 2, 2018: Commenter Todd Mason owns a copy of the Autumn 1960 issue of The Literary Review, and points out below that Lafferty's "The Ugly Sea" is in fact in the Autumn 1961 issue.  I was mislead by a typo at isfdb, which still lists "Fall 1960" as the issue in which the story appeared.] 

"Snuffles"

Planet Bellota is one strange world.  Though a mere one hundred miles in circumference, it has a gravity equal to half that of Earth's.  It is home to many insects, but each individual bug seems to be of a different species.  Lightning storms are constant, and the rinds of fruits are edible while the flesh is unpalatable.  And then there is the sole large inhabitant, a friendly beast much like a large bear which, like the insects, seems to have no sex or parents.  A team of six Earthling scientists is carefully studying this mysterious world until, unexpectedly, Snuffles the heretofore friendly psuedo-ursine suddenly attacks and they have to fight and then flee for their lives!

Lafferty wrote quite a few stories that feature horrendous violence, and "Snuffles" is one of them--the Earth expedition suffers heavy casualties in its struggle against Snuffles!  The survivors of the initial surprise attack march day after day, the wounded Snuffles hot on their heels, toying with them.  Lacking any supplies, the Earthers resort to eating native plants, including those with hallucinogenic properties.  Around the time they start eating this stuff, the survivors begin to receive what appear to be telepathic messages from Snuffles.  Lafferty has already given us reason to suspect Snuffles is a God or Devil or, most likely, a Gnostic demiurge figure (if you needed one, reading "Snuffles" provides a reason to read the Wikipedia entry on Gnosticism), and our suspicions are further fueled when Snuffle's messages (or are they merely hallucinations fueled by the scientists' exhaustion and ingestion of narcotic plants?--like "Through Other Eyes," this story is in part about how questionable our perceptions of the world can be) assert that Snuffles created planet Bellota, and maybe the entire universe.

I didn't know until I had finished the story whether any of the humans would get off the planet alive or if any of the planet's mysteries would be solved.

It is normal to read SF stories in which human beings are jerks who despoil the environment and are too quick to resort to violence.  But in "Snuffles" Lafferty makes sure we see the human characters as good people and even seems to be suggesting that we are too gullible, too eager to see the universe as benign when in fact it is inimical.  At the start of the story one character argues that Bellota is the only "fun" planet in the galaxy (when it is in fact the planet where they will be massacred), and during Snuffle's first attack the leader of the expedition chooses to shoot to wound instead of shooting to kill because "He was fond of Snuffles and gambled that it would not be necessary to kill him."  These people are too reluctant to resort to violence!  Another interesting aspect of the story is how Lafferty implies that Bellota, which seems like a topsy-turvy, atypical world, is actually the only sincere or normal planet in the universe, and/or is a mirror which displays reality to those few who have the opportunity to visit it.       

If you want to read another well-written story by a Catholic conservative about people pursued by an intelligent alien bear (I know some of you have very specific interests) I strongly recommend Gene Wolfe's "Try and Kill It" from 1996, a very good adventure/horror story.  I kind of wonder if "Try and Kill It" is a subtle homage to "Snuffles;" Wolfe actually uses the word "snuffling" in it, though that is hardly dispositive.  I'm also wondering if there is any chance "Snuffles" is an homage to A. E. van Vogt's 1939 "Black Destroyer," one of the inaugural stories of science fiction's Golden Age.  As you no doubt already know, in "Black Destroyer" a bunch of scientists make friends with an over-sized alien beast which seems friendly at first but later starts murdering them.

"Snuffles" first appeared in Galaxy and has been pretty successful, being included in anthologies in America, Britain, France, and Germany, including an anthology devoted to stories about religion.

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It is easy to recommend all four of these stories--they are all smooth and entertaining reads with fun little jokes and all feature interesting themes we've seen before but do different things with them.  Being written over 50 years ago by somebody who wasn't exactly taking pains to appeal to current trends in what constituted acceptable thinking, these stories can sometimes surprise--broad-brush assertions about women (they are more sensual than men!) and Jews (they never become sailors!) are good examples.  The stories also invite consideration of whether they have some deep meaning or philosophical point to make, even if Sour John in "The Ugly Sea" responds to a listener who asks, "Is there a moral to this?" with the flat declaration, "No.  It is an immoral story.  And it's a mystery to me."

Mid-60s SF tales from Arthur C. Clarke, Lin Carter, R. A. Lafferty & Fritz Leiber

It's time for some more stories from Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series, the paperback edition of World's Best Science Fiction: 1966.  Today we've got stories from hard core man of science Arthur C. Clarke, hard core Catholic R. A. Lafferty (check out Edward T. Babinski's anecdotes about meeting Lafferty and other SF writers in the comments of this very blog's "About" page), and two giants of the sword and sorcery field, Lin Carter and Fritz Leiber.

"Sunjammer" by Arthur C. Clarke (1964)

This story first was printed in Boy's Life in '64, but I guess Wollheim and Carr felt it was legit to include it in their anthology because Michael Moorcock presented it in a 1965 issue of New Worlds.  I have to say, the cover treatment given Clarke's story by Boy's Life is pretty awesome, though it is strange that Clarke's name doesn't appear on the cover!  "Sunjammer" (AKA "The Wind from the Sun") seems to be beloved by all, and has appeared in a billion anthologies; I actually read this story in my teens, and it made such an impression on me that I can remember key details.  So, I guess I am already on the "Sunjammer" bandwagon, but after three decades a reread feels justifiable!

This is actually a pretty simple story, and I don't have much to say about it besides to note that it works perfectly.  A pioneer in the development of spacecraft which are driven by the solar wind via huge (fifty million square feet) sails, after decades of wanting to, finally has a chance to skipper a one-man ship himself, in a race against several other such craft.  We follow the race, Clarke making all the technical details of the various ships and their eventual fates both interesting and easy to understand, and expressing (without getting sappy) the "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" spirit of explorers and engineers who are on the cutting edge, mapping out and building humanity's future.  A great example of a hard sf story: streamlined and efficient, bracingly optimistic but also totally believable.

"Uncollected Works" by Lin Carter (1965)

I was surprised to find Lin Carter's name on the contents page of World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series because, while people in the speculative fiction community admire the valuable work he did as an editor and his infectious, tireless enthusiasm for the genre, I think most critics consider his fiction to be mediocre; of the many Burroughs pastiches I have read, I personally consider Carter's to be below average.  Presumably because they recognize this, in their intro to "Uncollected Works" editors Wollheim and Carr assure us that "it would be hard to imagine anything more different from" Carter's usual sword-swinging stuff  "than this quiet tale...."

This quiet tale is quietly bad.  An aging literary critic is our narrator; he drops all kinds of big names like Pound, Proust, Joyce and Yeats.  He is being interviewed by a journalist, and tells the journo the story of a conversation he had with another guy long ago on the Left Bank, a guy he calls the Gentleman in Green because he never learned his name, only meeting him once, right before he got run over by a Parisian cyclist.

You know that old saw about randomness, that with enough time a monkey hitting typewriter keys at random would eventually type out, by chance, the complete works of Shakespeare?  Well, Green Man told the critic that, inspired by this cliche, he invented a device that would type at random at superfast speed, and another device that could read at superfast speed and see if Shakespeare showed up.  Eventually real books did start showing up in the allegedly random text, but not just Shakespeare: the entire Western canon showed up, in chronological order!  The kicker of the story is that the machine didn't stop after it printed books from the current year--it started spitting out books from the future!  So our narrator knows the names of important books and authors of the future, and tells his interviewer that he regrets that he won't live to read these future masterpieces.

A literary nerd feeling wistful because he won't live to read the works of genius of the future is a good idea, but it just doesn't mesh with the random typing thing.  If the random typing machine is predicting the future, it is not really random, is it?  This story would work better with a time machine or an alternate universe or something like that.  Is it possible we are supposed to think the Man in Green and the narrator are mistaken, that the books they think will appear are in fact never going to appear, that they were just the result of random chance after all?

I have to give "Uncollected Works," with its flawed premise and unnecessary layers of frame story and pointless "atmosphere" in which the narrator blah blah blahs about famous writers, a negative verdict.  "Uncollected Works" was printed in the same issue of F&SF as Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," which I read back in the dimly remembered year of 2014.

When I lived in New York there was a
good diner right under that green canoe

"In Our Block" by R. A. Lafferty (1965)

"In Our Block" first appeared in Fred Pohl's If.  In 2000, Martin H. Greenberg and the people at DAW put out a volume called My Favorite Fantasy Story--the book's genius gimmick was to have current top fantasy writers like George R. R. Martin, Charles de Lint and Terry Pratchett select and introduce their favorite story by another writer.  Neil Gaiman, who apparently doth bestride the 21st-century SF world like a colossus, chose "In Our Block" as his fave.

(Read about My Favorite Fantasy Story here; Steven Silver, in his review at the link, helpfully includes a list of who selected each story.  I first flipped through a copy of My Favorite Fantasy Story back in my New York days, at the branch of the NYPL on Fifth Avenue near my office, and, ever since, reading Gene Wolfe's selection, Mopsa the Fairy, has been on my "to do" list.  It has yet to be shifted to my "has been done" list.)

Well, this is certainly an interesting choice for somebody's favorite story; there is not really a plot, at least not a plot that gets resolved--I guess you'd call this a shaggy dog story.  Two guys meander down a dead end block rarely visited, to find odd people, apparently aliens--at least they are familiar with the inhabitants and climate of Jupiter--conducting business in a way that is plainly impossible.  They create products out of thin air, using the power of their minds, which they can then sell at low prices (a luxury car for a hundred dollars, for example.)  The two Earthlings visit several such stores and have funny conversations with the strange merchants, remark upon the oddities they witness, and then leave without trying to take advantage of the spectacular bargains available ("No, I already got a car.")

Faintly amusing.

"The Good New Days" by Fritz Leiber (1965)

"The Good New Days" was first published in the 15th Anniversary Issue of Galaxy, which also included Edgar Pangborn's "A Better Mousehole," which we read in December.

This is a sort of light-hearted dystopian humor story about a 21st century in which an intrusive and incompetent government is always up in your business, robots and strict regulations create mass unemployment, and people live in shoddy tenements, distracted by big screen TVs broadcasting propaganda. The story is told at a breakneck pace, reminding me of one of those old screwball comedies from the 1930s in which everybody talks fast and is "witty" and manipulative.

Our narrator lives in a crummy flat with three of his brothers, his domineering mother, and one of his brother's irritating wives.  I guess the story is a complaint about or an attack on our society for being too money-obsessed and unromantic, but the breathless pace and extravagant ending (accidents kill much of the cast) left me thinking it was much ado about nothing or maybe a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

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I'd be lying if I told you I wasn't disappointed in this batch of stories from World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series.  The Clarke is a perfect example of its subgenre, and the Lafferty is alright, but the Carter (unsurprisingly) is not so hot, and the Leiber is just not for me, though I have enjoyed lots of his work, both before and during this blog's life.

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.

**********

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!

1977 stories by George Alec Effinger, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Carter Scholz

Fellow SF fan R. R. Nurmi,
we salute you!

It's Part Two of our look at Terry Carr's Universe 7, an all original anthology from 1977.  I own a hardcover copy of the book club edition which was formerly in the library of Des Moines resident R. R. Nurmi.  I own several volumes from the Nurmi library, including Anthony Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. 

"Ibid." by George Alec Effinger

I know there are Effinger fans out there.  Well, here is where I tell you people that you have to buy a copy of Universe 7 because it is the one and only place where "Ibid." has appeared.

This is a decent Twilight Zone-style story that touches on Cartesian philosophical issues (can we trust any of our sense impressions?) and the question of whether life has any meaning if we cannot be confident of our knowledge of the outside world (if we can't tell if friends and family really like us or if our work is truly valuable, why not just become a slacker, a drunk or a suicide?)

Cathy Schumacher is an academic who suddenly finds messages directly addressed to her in academic journals, students' papers, supermarket celebrity magazines, even the local TV news!  Is she going insane?  Are mysterious eldritch forces aiding her? Tormenting her?  These bizarre problems are piled on top of more ordinary problems Schumacher is facing, the kinds of problems faced by many (most?) ordinary people: her work (teaching uninterested students about English literature) seems pointless and her daughter and husband are distant--he in fact may be having an affair.  Her response to these problems, revealed on the final page of the story?  Taking up alcoholism!

I like "Ibid."'s structure and themes, and the style is fine.  For a while I thought it should be more scary--the story doesn't transmit to the reader a sense of horror, it is a bit cold and clinical.  (If I opened up a supermarket tabloid and saw a headline that read "Hey, MPorcius, look out!") I'd probably just die right there on top of my cart full of Count Chocula and Ovaltine.)  But thinking further on the story, I have decided that it is less about the heavy kind of cosmic horror represented by the impossible messages, the kind of horror that drives people in H. P. Lovecraft stories insane, and more about one of the quotidian sadnesses of life, that we cannot have any confidence that those whom we love love us in return, the kind of sadness represented by Schumacher's relationships with her daughter and husband, the kind of sadness we see in Proust.  Because this sadness is so common, is experienced by so many of us, a low key tone makes sense, and keeps the story from descending into soap opera melodrama.  

Good.

"The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" by Gene Wolfe

I don't have to tell you that Wolfe is widely regarded as the best SF writer of all time and all that.  I read "The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" in my copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel years ago, and here I go again.  This story must be highly regarded, it having been included in the Tor 2009 collection Best of Gene Wolfe.

It is centuries in the future!  The human race is reduced to a kind of Early Modern technological and political level, though educated people have knowledge of the computers of the past and can identify weather satellites in the night sky.  Perhaps to evoke thoughts of the Thirty Years War as well as Cold War fears of a NATO vs Warsaw Pact ground war, the story is set in Germany and people fling around references to Burgermeisters and have names like Hans and Gretchen and Karl.  A war with the Russians is underway, and has been for a long time; soldiers and deserters are everywhere, and in the distance can be heard the thunder of siege guns.  

A man comes to the village of Oder Spree who claims to own the sole surviving operable computer, a computer devoted to playing chess!  After the machine is demonstrated, an academic purchases it for the University, only to find the machine is a scam (much like the late 18th-century "Turk" automaton which captured the imagination of Europe and played such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte); a skinny mutant, a genius chess player with an oversized brain, hides inside the machine to make the moves.  The mutant falls in love with a local blue-eyed blonde and decides he wants to stay in Oder Spree; to this end he conspires with the academic to get his money back from the con artist, but a terrible tragedy results from their desperate plan.

Very good.  You've heard me praise Wolfe before, so you won't be surprised to hear me say the story is economical, full of memorable images, pulls at the heart strings, has clever foreshadowing, interesting premises, and a puzzling mystery.  Shall I voice my theory regarding the mystery?  Of course I will!  The mystery is that the chess-playing machine, to the surprise of the double-crossing scam artists, seems to start working on its own.  Now, Wolfe is a Christian who believes in the supernatural, so it is not impossible that we are to suspect that the machine is animated by ghost or deity as a means of punishing the sinful cheaters who callously put the blonde woman's life at risk.  A related possibility (one the unnamed narrator puts forward, but remember that Wolfe is famed for his use of unreliable narrators) is that the mutant has telekinetic abilities even he doesn't understand--it is his own guilty conscience that brings the antiquated machine to life.  But my favored theory (reflecting my cold-hearted materialism, perhaps) is that the machine is being used in strong sunlight for the first time in a long time (Wolfe mentions the sun and bright sky more than once) and the sunlight has recharged the computer's batteries via unremarked upon solar cells, allowing it to operate as it did a hundred or more years ago.

Like I often do with Wolfe stories, I read it twice in one day, enjoying it both times. Highly recommended.          
 
"Brain Fever Season" by R. A. Lafferty

This story is, according to isfdb, the final installment of a series of stories called "Men Who Knew Everything."  The story is a little opaque; maybe I would have had an easier time "getting" it if I had read some of the previous stories in the series.

The story's characters are immortal and eccentric geniuses who manipulate the world from behind the scenes.  Significantly, they "set up" the equator and the four seasons. The idea behind this story is that there are additional "seasons" which affect not the weather and length of the day, but the human mind.  There are, for example, seasons during which there is a flurry of large scale construction (the Great Pyramid of Giza was built during such a period, we are told) or a sudden flowering of artistic production.  In this story there is a sudden explosion in interest and publication of high brow scientific and philosophical writing, "an information-and-invention sort of fever," across the Northern Hemisphere.

Of course, all this stuff I'm just telling you in a few sentences is revealed gradually through clues over  story's 17 pages, accompanied by lots of jokes and farcical explorations of the ramifications of the abrupt elevation of intellectual prowess of the average man.  This isn't a "realistic" look at what might happen if everybody all of a sudden got smarter (like Poul Anderson's Brain Wave), but a funny, silly story in which geniuses feverishly write books in 18 hours and publishers get them printed and into the stores in five hours, a response to the public's fervid demand for material like "Emanuel Visconti's Costive Cosmologies Freed," the widespread demand for which actually predates the completion of the book's first draft.

A recurring motif of the story is likening the desire for knowledge to sexual desire; people "howl" that they are "hot" for a book and "have to have it right now," and the brain fever season is compared to the rutting season or oestrous period of animals. The explosion in human brainpower first becomes evident when publishers and sellers of pornography (famed for being able to produce and distribute material quickly) start selling mass quantities of books like a Tibetan grammar and a volume on plate tectonics.

"Brain Fever Season" is alright, not great.  I didn't laugh at the jokes (many are just lists, like of funny names) and I didn't feel like my work figuring it out had a commensurate payoff.  Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had been already familiar with Barnaby Sheen and his troupe of weird geniuses.  Besides in Universe 7, you can read it in the 1984 collection Ringing Changes, in English or Italian!

"The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" by Carter Scholz

I've never read anything by Scholz before, but on isfdb I see he has worked with Barry Malzberg and Kathe Koja, writers whose short stories I like, and has some kind of collaborative relationship with critical darling Jonathan Lethem.  A good omen.

The intro to "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" contains what I like to think of as "mysteries," even if you skeptical types out there would probably call them "typos."  Carr tells us that Scholz has a story in Alternities--I just read Alternities and there is no Scholz story in there!  He also tells us Scholz has a story in Clarion IV--there is no Clarion IV listed on isfdb, though probably Carr is referring to Clarion SF, the fourth Clarion anthology.  Finally, we are told Scholz has contributed a story to Output, but what exactly Output is, my five-minute Google search does not reveal.

Enough with the mysteries, on with the story.  "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" takes place in 2016.  A means of sending a person's consciousness back in time to inhabit the brain of another person has been developed; you can't influence your host, but you can see through his eyes and share his thoughts.  The main character of the tale, Charles Largens, is a musicologist, and he has his mind sent back in time to ride as a passenger in Beethoven's head.

A large proportion of the story concerns academic angst and office politics: the grantmaker will pull the grant if they find out how the money is being spent, guys compete over a promotion to head of a department, Largens has sex with another academic's wife, composers suffer writer's block, Largens worries that he shouldn't have abandoned his creative career as a composer to become a mere critic and historian of music, he realizes that his academic career has been manipulated by his mentor, etc.

The science fiction elements of the story revolve around the fact that, while your host won't be influenced by a single or a handful of visiting psyches from the future, so many scholars enter the head of a fascinating cultural giant like Beethoven that ol' Ludwig Van begins to pick up the "crosstalk" and it has a terrible negative effect on him.  Beethoven's output is diminished as he loses sanity (the famous Ninth symphony ceases to exist!) and Largens begins to notice differences between the 2016 he leaves for the 1800s and the one he returns to after each transfer.  In the end of the story Largens acts to shut down the dangerous time travel program and abandons scholarly life to return to his true calling, creating new music.

This story is well-written and constructed.  The idea that scholarly research work is sterile and stifling, and can render a creative person impotent (one character literally gets too caught up in his Beethoven research to be able to achieve an erection and have sex with his wife) is provocative, reminiscent of the way (one suspects) that actual soldiers and politicians look down on military and political historians, athletes look down on sports journalists, novelists look down on critics, etc.  (Scholz's story also reminded me of Proust's idea that things like friendship are a waste of time for the true artist, distractions from his real work, his art.) Sterility, like impotence, is a theme of the story--2016 is called a " barren year" and we learn in an aside that New York City has been reduced to a population of only two million, so that instead of new buildings going up, buildings are actually being torn down!  Sounds even worse than the real 2016!

Worth checking out.  "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" would later appear in British and German anthologies.

***********

A good anthology, with seven stories that I can definitely recommend and only one clunker.  Universe 7 earns the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

Early '70s stories by R. A. Lafferty, Alan Dean Foster, & Leonard Tushnet

We're still reading The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, edited by Donald Wollheim.  Today we have a story from 1970 by R. A. Lafferty and 1971 stories by Alan Dean Foster and Leonard Tushnet.

"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty (1970)

This is a fun, surprisingly light-hearted and straightforward (Lafferty's work can be grisly and a little opaque, but not here) story with a good central idea and sprinkled with interesting little factoids. And of course Lafferty's charming and amusing style.  I enjoyed it a lot.

We learn that carnivals that travelled the American countryside in the 19th century offered, as one of their amusements, long paintings depicting the shore of the Mississippi.  Like a giant scroll, these paintings, several feet tall and up to or even more than a hundred yards long, would be unrolled by mule power so that viewers were given the illusion that they were travelling along the river bank.

The main character of "All Pieces of a River Shore" is a 20th century collector, an American Indian of some means by the name of Leo Nation.  He collects a multitude of things, from books and posters to wagons and locomotives, mostly related to Native America and the Old West.  Nation has decided to start collecting the aforementioned river shore paintings, heralded in their day as "The Longest Pictures in the World."  Over the course of the story, as he crosses North America hunting up and buying up these artifacts, he learns that the more common crude examples, made in the last few centuries by the white man, are merely imitations of startlingly clear panoramic pictures of mysterious origin known to Indians long before the arrival of Europeans.  When Nation and his friends closely examine these "originals" they find they depict flora and fauna long extinct (giant sloths, for example) and in such detail that even under a microscope no brushstrokes are visible--in fact, one can see the individual cells in a leaf!  In the last part of the story we learn the startling origin of these weird artifacts.

Here is a story I can recommend without reservation.  First appearing in Damon Knight's Orbit 8 (reviewed by Joachim Boaz here), you can also find "All Pieces of a River Shore" in the Lafferty collection Lafferty in Orbit and the anthology Alpha 4.

"With Friends Like These..." by Alan Dean Foster (1971)

Foster wrote the novelization of the first Star Wars movie, as well as Splinter of the Mind's Eye, the first independent Star Wars novel.  Reading "With Friends Like These..." makes the choice of Foster for these tasks feel very appropriate, because the story is a space opera with many elements in common with the Star Wars films.

The galaxy is riven by a tremendous war!  Standing against the powerful Yop empire is a Federation of over 200 dazzlingly-different alien races.  (Some have feathers, some are hairy, some have tentacles, etc.)  This war of space battleships has been going on for centuries, and the multicultural alliance is losing.  A desperate ploy is conceived!  450,000 years ago another war shook the universe, the war between Earth and the Venn!  The people of Earth were found to be the galaxy's greatest warriors, and the Venn were exterminated, but the predecessor of the Federation was able to drive humanity back to Earth and surround the planet with a powerful force field, trapping our doughty descendents there.  That forcefield is still in operation today, and "With Friends Like These..." tells the story of a Federation expedition to lower the forcefield and enlist the aid of the human race against the Yop.

At first it looks like the human race has been reduced to a small population of farmers who resort to using draft animals to plow their fields.  But in reality mankind has evolved tremendous psychic powers!  In one scene a young man uses his mind to disintegrate an entire Yop battleship!  Earth's domestic animals also have high intelligence and telepathy!  And the Earth has been hollowed out and is full of machinery--in the story's final scene the planet sets off under its own power to join the Federation fleet, a colossal dreadnought that will no doubt vanquish the Yop and, one of the Federation's wise men fears, make humanity master of the galaxy!

The tone of this story is light-hearted, with lots of little jokes and no real tension or thrills.  Endearingly, Foster refers directly to Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, and King Kong (one of my very favorite films), suggesting that the fame of these icons of pop culture will endure half a million years.

"With Friends Like These..." first appeared in Analog, and in his intro Wollheim suggests the story exemplifies the spirit of editor John W. Campbell and his prominent magazines, the idea that humanity will triumph over every obstacle.  (Foster, it seems to me, is also undercutting, or showing the dark side, of that idea, portraying the human race as uniquely belligerent.  In his 1978 intro to The Best of Eric Frank Russell, Foster, apparently a conventional lefty who bites his nails with worry over the environment and sympathizes with the Viet Cong and all that, tells us he disagreed with Campbell about just about everything.)

Inoffensively, adequately, pleasant, but I'm skeptical it is one of the "best" stories of its year.

"Aunt Jennie's Tonic" by Leonard Tushnet (1971)

If Wollheim hints that he chose Foster's "With Friends Like These" for this anthology because it is a good example of an Astounding/Analog Terra uber alles space opera, he comes right out and tells us that he chose "Aunt Jennie's Tonic" because it has an "ethnic background" and is about "the origins of modern medicine from primitive folk remedy."  I'm going to be honest--"the origins of modern medicine from primitive folk remedy" doesn't sound like a recipe for a thrill ride to your humble blogger.

Our narrator is a Jewish-American chemist.  When he realizes that the home remedies concocted by the aged immigrant woman who ministers to his relatives from her cluttered apartment in what is now a bad neighborhood, actually work, he analyzes them at the lab.  Most simply duplicate the formulas of commercially available drugs, but one preparation appears to be a unique elixir of youth that revives his dying dog and, when he takes it himself, enhances his job performance.  The chemist, envisioning riches and a Nobel prize, becomes obsessed with duplicating the potion, no mean feat after his "aunt" is murdered by thugs.  His pursuit of the miracle drug imperils his sanity, family life, and career.

I liked the "East Coast Jewish life" parts of the story, the young American atheist scientist's relationship with the elderly representative of his superstitious Yiddish-jabbering Old World ancestors.  But I think the chemistry parts were too long; Tushnet provides an overabundance of examples of Aunt Jennie's productions and describes their creation in superfluous detail.  (I think "Aunt Jennie's Tonic" qualifies as a hard SF story, albeit one married to a mainstream narrative about the culture of immigrants and their descendents.)  The dramatic part of the story, our narrator's collapse, is rushed, almost perfunctory.  There's really no build up or climax--Tushnet's premise and background take up most of the page count and are carefully constructed, but the main plot is poorly paced and structured, almost like it is an afterthought.

Still, a marginal recommendation.

***********

The Lafferty feels like a "Best of the Year" story, but the Foster and Tushnet, while good, seem to have been included for their interesting attributes.

In our next episode we'll finish up with The 1972 Annual World's Best SF, reading contributions by Eddy Bertin, who is new to me, member of the "Big Three" Arthur C. Clarke, and enfant terrible Harlan Ellison.

Nota bene: The 1972 Annual World's Best SF also includes short-tempered chess player Barry Malzberg's "Gehenna" and Ted "Killdozer" Sturgeon's "Occam's Scalpel," which I won't talk about this week because I read them and wrote about them on this blog in the past.

Poul Anderson, Harlan Ellison, and Virginia Kidd tackle The Future Now

Are you ready for some weapons-grade pessimism?  Well, that is what the cover of the 1977 anthology, The Future Now, edited by Robert Hoskins, promises.  Let's crack open the brilliant Richard Powers cover and see if Hugo and Nebula winners Poul Anderson and Harlan Ellison, and literary agent to the stars Virginia Kidd, can deliver the gloom and doom our black hearts crave!

"Home" by Poul Anderson (1966)

This story originally appeared in 1966 in the first of Damon Knight's Orbit volumes, under the title "The Disinherited."  Joachim Boaz wrote about the story last year when he read the entirety of Orbit 1.  I think he liked the story more than I did.

Dutch edition

Each piece of fiction in The Future Now has a new introduction by its author.  Anderson's intro to "Home" is mature, calm, even optimistic.  Sure we got problems, our buddy Poul admits, but people have always had problems.  And people have also always had love, beauty, even heroism, even as we do today.  Poul, this is not the pessimism we are looking for!

The story, however, is suitably pessimistic.  In the future mankind has achieved the ability to travel to alien planets and deploy long-term scientific teams on them.  After a century or so of exploration the Earth suffers from overpopulation and a stifling government, and the interstellar program is shut down.  The story chronicles the reaction of a colony of scientists on the planet Mithras when an expeditionary force arrives from Earth intent on taking them back.  The colonists, having lived on Mithras for three or four generations, have almost no emotional connection to Earth and refuse to leave.  The leader of the force from Earth argues that the boffins must return to Earth, because if they stay on Mithras and multiply they will abuse the native Mithrans, who, though friendly, have a radically different culture than the humans', making conflict inevitable.  The mission commander employs force to get the human colonists to comply with the order to return to Earth.

This story is acceptable, but no big deal.  The plot and characters primarily serve to get across two of Anderson's ideas: that it would be a false economy to cancel a space exploration program, and that different cultures inevitably come to blows.  To make his latter point Anderson piles on all kinds of historical examples: European colonization of the New World, European imperialism in Africa, the long history of Jews living as minorities among other cultures, etc.  While Anderson's arguments are generally persuasive, the story is bland; there is no excitement and I didn't really care what happened to the opposing factions of humans or the unambitious natives who have no concepts of money or property.  

(An aside: "The Disinherited" seems like a better title to me than "Home."  The human race is being disinherited because the space program is cancelled--we deserve to learn all about the universe, that knowledge is our legitimate inheritance.  The humans born on Mithras lost touch with Earth culture; they were disinherited of the many achievements of their race.  They were also disinherited when they had to leave the planet they grew up on, Mithras, and abandon their friendships with the natives.  And if they had stayed their descendents would have disinherited the Mithrans when the inevitable war broke out, a war the more aggressive and efficient humans would be sure to win.)      

"Silent in Gehenna" by Harlan Ellison (1971)

I currently reside in Ohio, where, it turns out, Ellison was born and spent much of his youth.  Near Columbus is a town called Gahanna, which never ceases to amaze me; apparently "Gahanna" is an Indian word for the confluence of three rivers, but you'd think the founders of the town would have shied away from a name which sounds so much like a word used as a synonym for Hell and which was first applied to a place of human sacrifice.

(Perhaps appropriately, my dentist's office is in Gehenna, I mean Gahanna.)

In his intro to the story Ellison praises Robert Heinlein and brags that he (Ellison) was spied upon by the Johnson and Nixon administrations ("I put my body on the line") for his commitment to social change.  He warns that if we pay too much attention to the common people (they are "frightened masses" who have a "beast mentality") that dissenters will be burned at the stake.  He laments that the 1970s are a period of "Fifties-style apathy."  Now this is the elitist pessimism we are looking for!

"Silent in Gehenna," which first appeared in The Many Worlds of Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Ben Bova, is a sort of polemical fable with jokes and a few experimental literary techniques.  I'm not crazy about fables and satires.  I like a story which has some kind of emotional resonance, and I am rarely moved by a story which is full of absurd exaggerations and surreal nonsense, a story which makes no effort to create a believable world.  I'm the only person who doesn't like Ellison's universally beloved "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman"--besides being a silly and extravagant fable, it is based on a weak and solipsistic premise, that premise being that Harlan Ellison is too important to have to meet deadlines.  I have a similar attitude about "Silent in Gehenna."  The premise of this one is that nobody really listens to Harlan Ellison as he points out the world's injustices; if they did, maybe they would do something about those injustices!  I think "Silent in Gehenna" is a little more sophisticated than "'Repent, Harlequin'" because it integrates the criticism of welfare state liberalism you hear from hardcore leftists, that efforts to ameliorate the problems of the downtrodden of society (with food stamps and housing vouchers, say) make it harder to radically change society (e.g., by nationalizing and collectivizing farms and real estate) and solve the downtroddens' problems once and for all.  (I don't agree with this view, but I find it thought-provoking.)

In the dystopian future college campuses are like POW camps in which the students are held behind electrified fences, watched over by armed guards, trained only to serve the evil corporations!  One-man guerilla army Joe Bob Hickey sneaks into college campuses and blows up buildings and tries to inspire the students to revolt. But do people want to revolt?  No, the foolish masses do not want to revolt, they are suffering from false consciousness, blinded by patriotic propaganda and a timid desire for law and order!

In the crazy symbolical ending Joe Bob is spirited away by aliens, conscripted to act as the conscience of this alien society, in which one race of creatures lords it over a smaller and weaker worker race.  When the strong abuse the weak, Joe Bob yells at them.  Joe Bob's yelling does nothing to change the iniquitous society; in fact, Joe Bob may merely be helping the oppressors assuage their guilt, unwittingly buttressing the immoral society by relieving the pressure that might lead to radical change!          

Joachim wrote about "Silent in Gehenna" in 2013 when he read the Ellison collection Approaching Oblivion.  I'm sure he liked it a lot more than I did!

"Flowering Season" by Virginia Kidd (1966)

Kidd served as literary agent to some of the most critically acclaimed SF writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, R. A. Lafferty, and Gene Wolfe, writers who have received accolades beyond the SF ghetto.  This story first appeared under the title "Kangaroo Court" in the first Orbit; Joachim reviewed it when he discussed that volume.   (It seems like I'm stalking Mr. Boaz today, doesn't it? I assure you, and the authorities, that this is purely a coincidence!)

British edition

Joachim and I agree on this one--it is bad. Long (45 pages!) and tedious, poorly structured and paced, full of extraneous gunk but no interesting characters or compelling events, it is a real waste of time.  I try on this blog to make a distinction between stories that are not for me, either because they are not to my taste or offend my sensibilities in some way, and stories which are just incompetent. "Flowering Season" is the latter, a poor piece of work with almost nothing to recommend it to anybody.

In the future the Earth has a world government and a class-bound society; this arrangement has brought universal peace, but there is little or no competition or ambition and civilization is sterile, static, stagnant.  Aliens that look like kangaroos arrive, and negotiate with the Earth government.  Kidd's story is, in part, about office politics, and a government official who suspects the aliens are inimical and must be destroyed keeps all data about the aliens from the official who is supposed to negotiate with the ETs; negotiator guy is just coming off a six-month vacation studying Eastern mysticism.  (Talk about Eastern mysticism is some of the extraneous gunk I mentioned earlier.)  I guess it is supposed to be funny when the negotiator bungles his meeting with the visitors, and I guess the six pages of intelligence reports we read along with him are also supposed to be funny.  None of this is funny.  The negotiator gets his act together and we readers endure page after page of human-space kangaroo dialogue that is so boring I wonder how Kidd kept awake at her typewriter while writing it.

We get what amounts to a happy ending when the kangaroo aliens capture the single belligerent human and leave with him, and we are assured that the encounter with the aliens will inspire human civilization to again embrace risk and the adventure of exploring the universe.

"Flowering Season" is a strong contender for the worst story I have read during the period I have been writing this blog.  It is not bad in a funny or spectacular way, it is bad in a way that deadens the soul and makes you consider abandoning the written word entirely and embracing the idiot box as your sole source of entertainment.  I don't know why Hoskins thought it worth including; it only barely meets the volume's "the future is going to suck!" theme.

Kidd's intro isn't bad.  She laments that Earth's space programs were prodded not by pure motives but Cold War competition, and predicts that they will be abandoned in the future due to considerations of cost and safety.  Kidd also lays on us some of the elitist attitudes we saw in the Ellison selection: "The pollster's man in the street cannot see any point in space exploration...."  This introduction provides no warning of how dreadful the story is going to be.

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These three stories are about ideas more than they are about people.  I am able to enjoy an "idea story" which lacks good characters and plot if the idea is new and exciting, but the ideas in these stories (space exploration is good, different cultures don't get along, people are apathetic) feel sort of obvious, even tired.  Anderson tries to give us touching characters and human emotion and just reaches the finish line (in fact, compared to the broad allegorical caricatures in Ellison's story and the flat zeros in Kidd's, Anderson's people, which I thought bland, look deep and rich.)  Ellison gives us literary fireworks, but, in my opinion, doesn't quite make it.  Kidd never leaves the starting gate.  I have to admit that I haven't enjoyed The Future Now as much as I had expected.

  
Among its stories The Future Now also includes Edward Bryant's "Shark," which I read in 2014 and liked, and Barry Malzberg's "Final War," which I remember finding limp when I read it long ago.  Bryant's intro to "Shark" in this book is quite fun; he talks about the genesis of this story, about the prevalence of nice dolphins in SF, and derides Peter Benchley, author of Jaws.  Malzberg's introduction to his story is also worth reading; he talks a little about the conditions under which the story, which was pivotal for his career, was written, and about its reception.  "I remain grateful for the sale and the career it made me," he tells us.

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Finally, let's take a look at one of the ads in the back of The Future Now, a page which has a fun graphic, promises "The Universe of Science Fiction" and lists twelve books, several of which seem worthy of comment.

Aurora: Beyond Equality, is a feminist anthology; the text on the cover, "Amazing Tales of the Ultimate Sexual Revolution," it seems to me, hopes to seduce potential purchasers with a promise of erotic content.

Joachim warned us against Cloned Lives back in late 2013.

I own Vonda McIntyre's The Exile Waiting but have not read it yet.  I think Joachim owns this, but I don't think he has written about it.

I thought Stochastic Man was a weak Silverberg and said so at Amazon in 2007.

Ghosts, Castles and Victims is a huge (over 500 pages) anthology of excerpts from classics that fit into the "gothic" category (including Walpole, Poe, Dickens, Blackwood, Stoker) plus short stories stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edmond Hamilton and essays about the gothic by the editors.  I'd probably buy this if I saw it at a store for the prices I usually pay for old paperbacks (2 bucks or less.)

The Late Great Future is another anthology about how the future is going to suck--it has bigger "name" writers than does The Future Now, like Ray Bradbury, Daniel Keyes, C. S. Lewis, John D. McDonald and Roald Dahl.  I'd probably pay a buck or two for this.

And of course I have fond memories of H. G. Wells' Time Machine and War of the Worlds--I believe this Fawcett omnibus edition of the novels has an intro by Isaac Asimov and a cool red cover by Paul Lehr.

As always, readers who have read any of the advertised books, or anything out of The Future Now, are invited to share their insights in the comments!

1968 science fiction stories by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty & Samuel R. Delany

Last week I went to one of the many Half Price Books here in central Ohio (land of the mind-blowingly difficult driving test) to sell a stack of 2nd and 3rd edition AD&D rule books I had never used, and while there I took a look at the science fiction and "nostalgia" shelves.  When I saw Ace 91352, World's Best Science Fiction 1969 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, I was in love.  The cover by John Schoenherr and the interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan were great, and the anthology included many stories by writers I care about.  Here was one I had to have!

The introduction by the editors is fun, with Wollheim and Carr subtly criticizing the other yearly "best of" SF anthologies and pointing out what makes their own series distinctive.  Wollheim and Carr tell us they don't include fantasy stories in World's Best Science Fiction, and they don't include old stories like some of the other anthologists do ("we don't ring in stories by, say, Alfred Jarry or James Thurber that were originally published in 1930 or 1940.")  My research at isfdb indicates that editors Harrison and Aldiss included James Thurber's 1941 story "Interview with a Lemming" in Best SF: 1967, while it was Judith Merrill who included an Alfred Jarry story in 1966's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, almost 60 years after Jarry's death in 1907.  Wollheim and Carr also claim to try to read every SF story published in the world.  Ambitious!

While I lack the ambition and work ethic of Wollheim and Carr, this weekend I did read three stories from World's Best Science Fiction 1969, the contributions by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, and Samuel R. Delany.

"Masks" by Damon Knight

"Masks" first appeared in Playboy, and has been widely anthologized, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo.  Will I like this popular favorite?

"Masks" is about the psychological issues of the first man to have his brain transplanted from a ruined human body into a robot body.  As I have said before, I love stories about immortality and minds and brains being transplanted; this is perhaps a product of my fear of death.  So I was on this story's side from the get go.

The guy in the robot body, Air Force veteran Jim, isn't too happy.  The scientists and engineers who are running the experimental robot body program think he's unhappy because he doesn't properly dream, or because his robot body doesn't look human enough.  These eggheads strive to help him have dreams that will stabilize his psychology and to construct him a body, a face in particular, that looks as human as possible.

It seems to me that Jim's "problem" is, in fact, that he is now disgusted by, perhaps even feels contempt for, humanity and all other living things, thinking himself beyond them because he is essentially immortal.  Knight drives home Jim's hatred for life by pointing out how he has had his quarters in the lab protected from germs with special ultraviolet lights and air conditioning systems, and by including an episode in which he murders a canine.  There is a also a cool scene in which Jim broods over people's pimples and saliva and the oil of their skin.  And there is the fact that he habitually wears a blank metal mask over his artificial human-like face, and makes visitors wear surgical masks.

Jim doesn't want to fit into human society by wearing an artificial body that looks just like a normal human body--since he doesn't have adrenal glands and all those sorts of organs he no longer experiences human emotions like fear and love, and so he doesn't have any interest in friends or sex partners.  Instead, he wants to be alone, and sketches designs of four-legged exploration and mining vehicles that he hopes his brain will be installed in so he can live in sterile extraterrestrial environments, far from all life.

A good story with some clues to puzzle over.  What does Jim mean when he compares the eggheads maintaining him to cancer patients?  What emotion is Knight referring to when he writes "there was still one emotion he could feel."?  I like it!  If you were in some college literature class you could compare it to Poul Anderson's classic 1957 story "Call Me Joe," in which a crippled guy wants his consciousness installed in a monster body that is used to explore the surface of some inhospitable moon.              

"This Grand Carcass" by R. A. Lafferty

This one was first published in Amazing Stories; at the time our buddy Barry Malzberg was editing that venerable magazine.  "This Grand Carcass" feels more accessible than most of Lafferty's work that I am familiar with, and even has a sort of traditional horror story structure.

In some interstellar civilization of the future one of the galaxy's most successful businessmen, Juniper Tell, is approached by a similarly successful magnate, Mord. Saying he is all "sucked out" and will soon die, Mord sells Juniper Tell a super robot, the first of the level ten robots, a machine vastly superior to the many robots already in Tell's employ.  In a matter of days this superior machine crushes almost all of Tell's business rivals and vastly enriches Tell, utilizing strategies that are so sophisticated that no human could have thought of them, but which are also amazingly efficient, so efficient that after having been developed, these methods seem like the only way the deed could have been accomplished.

Despite the spectacular successes of his partnership with the super machine, Tell finds himself feeling weak.  Investigation of the new robot reveals that it is not powered by batteries or outlets, like conventional robots, but is living off of Tell's life force, sucking him dry.  Like Mord before him, on the brink of death, Tell sells the vampire machine to another robber baron type.

The style of the story is brisk and silly fun, the little jokes and suggestive names of the various human and robot characters amusing.  Should we furrow our brows and seek a deeper meaning to "This Grand Carcass?"  I think we can see a skepticism of mechanization; Tell derives little satisfaction from business successes derived wholly from letting the machine make all the decisions for him.  In fact, the machine "sucks the spirit and juice" out of the businessmen who employ it.  Perhaps this is Lafferty's commentary on our modern world in which few of us raise our own food, do math without a calculator, or walk when we can ride motor cars everywhere, a world in which we are so reliant on machines it seems ridiculous to try to get things done without using them (how would your friends react if you told them you walked to the grocery store three miles away or calculated your taxes longhand?)  Maybe the story is a warning that if we contract out our very thinking to machines, we will lose our souls.

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany

This is a revised version of the story originally published in New Worlds, the famous British flagship of the New Wave. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won a Hugo and a Nebula, is specially highlighted on the back of this anthology, and has been reprinted a zillion times, so provides another chance for me to see if I am on the same wavelength as the SF community.  

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" quickly strikes one as a New Wave-ish story, a first person narrative that is full of "word play" ("I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century"), expresses contempt for "the establishment" (police and businesspeople, for example) and has somewhat absurdist images, like a vast mechanized dairy farm and a gangster who owns and operates an ice cream shop.  In the first few pages the narrative even slips into the present tense, but mostly sticks to past tense.

Our narrator is a young thief and master of disguise who shifts easily from one identity to another, living in a future in which much of the solar system has been colonized and people have constant access to the media via little ear pieces.  In New York City (the Pan Am Building and Grand Central Terminal, buildings I saw every day for years, figure prominently) shortly after getting out of prison on Mars, our hero is approached by a representative of an elite branch of the police force and learns that, through the collection of what we might now call "metadata," the government's computers can predict people's future moves with considerable accuracy.

The narrator is friendly with some of the famous pseudo-bohemian artists known as Singers, and accompanies one to a party in a luxury apartment in upper Manhattan. The Singers and their popularity, we are told, are a response to the alienation from real experience caused by the pervasiveness of mass media; like Homeric bards the Singers are poet-actors whose powerful art can only be experienced at close hand, it being illegal to record their performances.

I guess, with the Singers, Delany is romanticizing the role of the creative performer in pre-mass media days, when art was an intimate personal expression and not (as Delany perhaps sees it) the commodity churned out by organizations as it is today. (Delany wants us to compare the mass-produced milk at the dairy farm where the narrator briefly worked with mass-produced media.)  I don't really take that line myself, and I'm not sure the Singers really work at promoting this sort of democratic, populist idea.  The Singers are like rock stars, adored by the public and catered to wherever they go, but how do they get so popular if it is impossible for ordinary people to access their work via broadcast or recordings?  Delany suggests they are bohemian individualists, but they are in reality creatures of the elite: they benefit from what amounts to a government monopoly or a powerful and exclusive guild system: not only will the government crack down on you if you try to record their performances, but each political division is allowed only a small number of Singers (four for all of New York City) and when a Singer dies a new Singer is selected by the surviving Singers.  (Maybe Delany means to paint the Singers as hypocrites or a sham?)

At the party our narrator sells some stolen goods to a famous gangster known as "The Hawk," the police raid the party, and our narrator escapes because one of his Singer buddies, a disheveled man known as "Hawk" (there's that clever wordplay again, two characters with almost the same name), creates a distraction by giving an impromptu performance that starts a dangerous conflagration and draws a crowd.  The narrator ends up on Triton, where he starts an ice cream shop and pursues illegal activities, becoming a rival to The Hawk.

This story is just OK.  I guess I'm too old or too conservative to find smart alecky thieves and neurotic self-important artists who are members of a tiny elite but pretend to be poor down-and-outers (Hawk wears ratty clothes and walks around barefoot and has some kind of masochistic streak and so is covered in scars and has memorized how he got each scar) inherently interesting or sympathetic, and Delany doesn't do much to make the characters special (are they meant to be archetypes of The Artist, The Cop, etc?)  I couldn't get myself to care whether the cops caught our narrator or that Hawk had sacrificed himself for the narrator.  The story's ideas (mass media is alienating; with statistics you can predict and control society; and politicians, police, gangsters and artists are all part of the establishment and fabric of society and all are equally corrupt and menacing) are OK, I suppose, but not surprising or moving.

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None of these stories is bad, and all three say something about man's (potentially dangerous) relationship with high technology.  What do radically improved convenience and efficiency do to the human psyche and human spirit?  But while the Knight has emotional drama and the Lafferty is fun, the Delany reads like a cynical hipster's exercise in style; Delany denounces bourgeois society and romanticizes criminals and creative types, but not in a way that is very entertaining for somebody who doesn't already share the author's sentiments.

In this episode we looked at stories by authors I have had some experience with; next time we'll look at stories in World's Best Science Fiction 1969 by authors with whom I am totally unfamiliar.