2015 stories by Gene Wolfe, Cecilia Holland and Barry Malzberg

In 2015 Baen Books published Onward, Drake!, a tribute to David Drake of Hammer's Slammers fame edited by Mark L. Van Name.  Among the twenty all-new tales and essays in the volume are stories by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and Barry N. Malzberg, as well as one by Cecelia Holland, whose novel Floating Worlds I recently picked up.  Always interested in Wolfe and Malzberg's work, and curious to get a taste of what Holland is all about, I obtained a hardcover copy of Onward, Drake! via interlibrary loan to read those three stories.

(Nota bene: You can actually read Wolfe's "Incubator" and Holland's "SUM" for free at the Baen website.)

"Incubator" by Gene Wolfe

Each story in this book has an afterword in which the author talks about his relationship with David Drake.  Wolfe points out that he, Drake, and Joe Haldeman are perhaps the only speculative fiction writers to have been under enemy fire in wartime.  Wolfe also says, that, while SF strives to present worlds that are more or less plausible, that "The future will not be plausible.  It never is.  Thus, the story you have just read."

"Incubator," less than four pages long, is directly and indirectly about plausibility, about to what extent we can believe what we read and hear and see.  Set in a future in which people have apparently transcended traditional biological conventions (there are androids, "shemales" and "woe men" and some of the characters seem to have had three biological parents), all the characters express doubts about specific knowledge, and one dismisses even the possibility of knowledge.  "No one can see reality.  The mind processes a pattern of light reported by the optic nerves.  The mind interprets that."

As for plot, I guess a person goes to a remote building in response to a summons; at this place she is shown a valuable , "The Egg," which is said to contain "all the old humankind."  The sight of it causes her to flee.  In keeping with the story's theme, it is difficult to tell precisely what is going on.  (It is hinted that this egg is cracking and whatever is inside it will soon be unleashed...maybe 100% all natural men and women who will threaten this future of androids and shemales?)

Deliberately inscrutable, I guess a demonstration of the adage "the past is another country" as well as a discussion of the possibility of true knowledge.

"SUM" by Cecilia Holland

Holland's story is almost seven pages long and, to my surprise, touches on some of the same epistemological issues that Wolfe addressed in his story--it starts with two characters arguing over the possibility that their lives may just be illusions or hallucinations, that instead of being soldiers in the Dutch army searching for Spanish spies for Prince Maurice, they might simply be dead or insane.

The narrator, an officer in charge of five men, enters a house to hunt for the Spanish "cloaked investigators" but triggers an explosive booby trap and ends up buried alive under the wreckage of the house.  Most of the text concerns his efforts to dig himself out of the wreckage.  Holland includes references to Ovid and Nicole Oresme (Drake is a Latinist and an Ovid aficionado) and clues in the text pile up until even an uneducated goofball like myself can figure out by the end that the narrator is in fact Rene Descrates, the famed philosopher.

This is a competent thriller type of story; the literary and philosophical content providing an additional layer of interest and fun.

"Swimming from Joe" by Barry Malzberg

I've never seen Spalding Grey's Swimming to Cambodia or the film The Killing Fields so I am probably missing elements of Malzberg's nine-chapter story here.  (Those nine chapters take up only three pages, so I can't be missing too much, I guess.)

The protagonist of this story is a guy named Hammer who was serving with the U.S. military in Korea in 1954 when Marilyn Monroe visited the American troops there and became obsessed with the actress.  Today, in 1969, he is serving in Vietnam and imagines he sees a huge balloon of Monroe floating over the "killing fields."  Malzberg compares Monroe, who was "killed by Hollywood," to Hammer's comrades ("the Slammers") killed by "the War."  (Malzberg loves the metaphorical construction in which institutions or abstract entities kill people--in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963" he says that "the death certificates of all three [Clifton, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth] should have listed science fiction under cause of death.")  More interestingly, Malzberg/Hammer suggest that Monroe's death made her immortal, and that the memory of her is what is keeping Hammer alive "in country."

In the afterword to "Swimming from Joe" Malzberg tells the interesting story of how he first came into contact with Drake--Drake wanted to send a fan letter to Raymond E. Banks and Malzberg's former employers at the Scott Meredith Agency directed Drake to Malzberg.  The two writers became friends--Malzberg says "He may be the closest friend I have."  Malzberg also reminds us that he served in the Army briefly stateside, and plugs "Final War," one of his most famous stories.

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Of these three stories the Holland is the most conventional and the most entertaining--it has a plot you can follow, dramatic tension and jokes, and a puzzle for you to figure out, the kind of stuff most people who read fiction are looking for.  "SUM" has made me think Floating Worlds will be a good read.  The Wolfe and Malzberg stories are sort of what we expect from those less conventional writers, though I think "Incubator" is less satisfying than most Wolfe stories, while "Swimming from Joe" is sort of average for Malzberg.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be returning to the mid-20th century for them.

Overlay by Barry N. Malzberg

The race tracks must be away from the center of the metropolitan areas because they represent--at least, to those who patronize them--the excision of all those values on which the metropolitan areas themselves are based: rationality, causality, consequence, effort, consumption, production, accretion, etc.  The racetracks are founded upon something different; they are selling (and selling well) the conception that there is no simple way out, that causality is meaningless, that accretion has to do only with psychic conditions and not with possessions (which must be metaphors for true gain) and if they are too close to the metropolitan areas, the message might move uncomfortably near to a larger heterogeneity of the population.  They represent an alternative.  And the alternative is one of annihilation, devastation and waste.

Barry Malzberg takes up a lot of real estate in my brain--in fact I mentioned him in my last three blog posts, contrasting his attitude to that of Spider and Jeanne Robinson and comparing his style to Steve Rasnic Tem's, as well as pointing out his admiration for Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. Well, let's quit pulling at the scab of our Malzberg obsession and mainline some vintage Barry--1972's Overlay. I own a copy of the Lancer paperback edition of the novel which, barely legible stamps indicate, was once in the collection of the Library at Ohio State University's Mansfield Campus.  On Overlay's acknowledgements page we are informed that Chapter I of the novel appeared in a different form in F&SF in 1970.  That "different form" is the story entitled "Notes Just Prior To The Fall," which I read in 2017 in an Ace Double collection.

In two prologues we learn that in Earth Year 1978 the government of the galaxy decided that Earth, with its population of "dangerous and insane" people, was a menace that had to be dealt with.  (Malzberg, writing in the first years of the Seventies, portrays 1970-1978 as "The Welfare Decade," full of high taxes, government debt, riots, arson and religious mania.)  Our narrator, an agent of "the Bureau" tasked with dealing with the problem presented by Earth, introduces himself in the second prologue--the lion's share of the text of Overlay is this alien's diary, the keeping of which he admits is forbidden: "Agents are supposed to leave no written testaments to their mission...."  The narrator describes his meeting with his superior, who tells him that the way to destroy Earth civilization is to "energize" and "manipulate" a "subpopulation."  The boss has already selected the appropriate subpopulation: "horseplayers."

Four people who are addicted to betting on the races and live in the NYC area are selected at random and the narrator begins communicating with them.  The narrator is invisible to them, and can read their minds, send them telepathic messages, and even tinker with their brains, working them like puppets if he so chooses.  (Malzberg sort of compares the alien's manipulation of the Earthlings to the way humans ride horses.)  Three of the four gamblers suspect that the voice they hears who gives them bad advice on how to bet at the track is evidence they are insane, as you might expect.  The fourth is a woman.

Malzberg presents us sad episodes in the lives of these four individuals.  Simmons loses all his money on the horses and then goes to a bar to get drunk, but, not being a habitual drinker, doesn't even know how to properly get hammered.  Tony the horse trainer loses all his money betting on a horse he trains and then goes to an Army surplus store to buy explosives.  Gardner, a social worker for the local welfare agency (Malzberg's body of work is full of people with such jobs as Malzberg himself once held such a job; writing about welfare investigators offers Malzberg rich opportunities to portray the callousness and incompetence of government, the pathologies of the poor, and the misery of middle-class educated liberals working tedious and unfulfilling jobs that put the lie to their rosy notions about the state and the underclass) is given an ultimatum by his girlfriend of three years: either he quits the horses and marries her or they break up.  Seventy-eight-year-old Mary is not only a compulsive gambler but is also addicted to collecting tip sheets, and has giant stacks of them in her little apartment, organized in chronological order, and she likes to peruse old ones, reminiscing on how their advice has steered her wrong over the decades.  (Compare to the Malzberg protagonists who collect stacks of old SF magazines.)  Like Gardner, Mary is presented with an ultimatum--her son, though willing to foot the bill for her rent and food, refuses to finance her gambling any longer.

These are people who have screwed up their lives, and the alien narrator pushes them irreparably over the edge with his terrible advice and interventions into their brains.  In the final chapters of the novel (of which there are 24, in a book of 185 pages) at the narrator's direction and sometimes compulsion Mary and Tony prepare explosives and then Mary, Tony and Gardner bomb the biggest race of the year, the Belmont (which in 1978 is being held at the Aqueduct for reasons Malzberg describes at some length), killing many people, including the President of the United States.  Simmons acts as the alien's "explicator," yelling at the survivors words fed him by the narrator, a mock religious harangue ("We have forgotten the lessons of the Fathers: no fillies against colts; no maidens in straight claimers....We have been greedy.  We have chased longshots. We have failed to learn the awful lessons of the tote....We have sinned!") 

In a one-page epilogue we learn that the narrator has gone too far, that his superiors are angry that he has made "reclamation" of Earth "utterly impossible."  Just like the human horse players, he "took it too seriously" and has screwed up his life.

British edition

If there is a "point" to Overlay I guess it is that the workings of the world appear to people as an inexplicable chaos, regardless of what techniques they employ and how much effort they expend in trying to understand and predict them.  As a result people act irrationally, screwing up their personal lives, just as the government acts incompetently, screwing up the economy, failing to maintain order, and bungling matters of peace and war.  (Obviously, this is the opposite of the ethic of so much SF, which glorifies and romanticizes our ability to comprehend and master the universe via science and technology.)  The aliens in Malzberg's novel, instead of being superior to humankind, as in so many SF stories, are approximately as incompetent and corrupt as us humans--they don't represent a role model for humans or act as a foil for humans, but collectively represent Earth government and bureaucracy and all its crimes and failures, while the narrator makes decisions that are almost as nonsensical and self-destructive as those of the four loser humans.  We can see Overlay as a product of its time in its depiction of the 1970s as a period during which the wheels are really coming off, with the United States in social, political, and economic crisis; Malzberg perhaps wants us to see the aliens' intervention on Earth as analogous to American foreign interventions during the Cold War, most famously in Vietnam.

I'm afraid Overlay is not among my favorite Malzberg works.  While some of the kind of stuff I like--disastrous sexual and familial relationships and obsessive collectors, for example--there is a lot of horseracing material, and I don't find this as interesting as Malzberg's other typical topics, such as the space program, genre writers, and public employees.  (By the way, if you don't know what an "overlay" is or don't know what "parimutuel" means, like I didn't yesterday--and will probably no longer tomorrow--you can check out this website.)  And of course, like most of Malzberg's work, Overlay lacks the elements that draw most readers to genre literature in the first place: the tone and pacing are flat and monotonous, there are no thrills or chills, images and emotions are nebulous and vague rather than sharp and bold; there is little point in judging Malzberg's work on the same criteria you would use when judging a detective story or an adventure tale or one of those SF "world-building" exercises.

Malzberg's other horseracing novel, Underlay, is much better put together and much more amusing.

There are good things in Overlay, though, and I am still giving this one a thumbs up.  I particularly like the idea (expressed in the epigraph I have selected for this blog post) that the Aqueduct is off in Queens instead of in Manhattan because the skyscrapers and business headquarters of the central city represent reason and order and the race track represents irrationality and chaos.  Also good is a sort of metanarrative about writing--the alien agent laments his shortcomings as a writer and discusses narrative techniques, and admits that, as memoirists and "nonfiction" writers always do, he is streamlining and prettying up what he is presenting as a "true" story.  (Compare to Malzberg's narrator in The Day of the Burning.)

After this hearty dose of 1970s pessimism we'll be returning to the World War II era in our next episode.

Three Amazing 1971 stories by Ted White

Working on my recent posts about Bob Shaw's 1973 collection Tomorrow Lies in Ambush I found myself looking through lots of 1971 issues of Amazing, then edited by Ted White.  I like White's work as an editor and as a writer, and so I decided to read the stories by White himself that he included in Amazing in the year of my birth.  (Editors including their own stories in the books and magazines they edit is one of those things that feels kind of sketchy, but it was a common practice and I guess we just have to accept it.)

"A Girl Like You"

Ted's editorial in the March 1971 issue of Amazing is about comics fandom and his role in XERO, a Hugo-winning fanzine that included lots of articles about comics, and All in Color For a Dime, the 1970 book edited by Richard Lupoff about comics.  Ted describes his (not very successful) attempts to promote the book and SF in general on a radio talk show and here in Amazing achieves a little revenge by getting in digs at Little Orphan Annie and "the Silent Majority."  The editorial finishes up with a brief discussion of an article by our pal Barry Malzberg about Scientology.  It seems Barry wrote about his personal experience with Scientology in the November 1970 issue of Amazing and was threatened by the Scientology people with a lawsuit for libel; the editorial finishes with a letter from Malzberg that is apparently intended to defuse the situation (or perhaps it is a joke...I haven't read the actual article so cannot be sure.)

In his little intro to his story "A Girl Like You" Ted tells us it is about a United States that has instituted an apartheid system--the little intros you find in old SF magazines are always full of spoilers.  Anyway, over the course of the eight-page story we follow the terrible history of Mari-Ellen Agnew (oh, brother.)  Her husband, David, foolishly decided to take their armored car out at night, and they were ambushed by blacks.  The car knocked out by an armor piercing shell, Mari-Ellen, David, and the four black servants accompanying them were forced to bail out, and only Mari-Ellen managed to escape with her life.  It is not long, however, before she is captured by one of the people who ambushed them.

Her captor interrogates Mari-Ellen and in a flashback we learn that David risked driving at night because he was fleeing retribution at the hands of the local authorities--David had found Mari-Ellen cheating on him with a major in the Internal Security Police and bloodied the cop's nose and had his black servants throw him, naked, out onto the street.  In the alternate universe Ted has constructed here, middle-class white women have easy lives, and get bored, and so fill their days with drugs and sexual shenanigans, competing to bed the most married men.  ("Status was achieved by the accumulation of a respectable score....")  After Mari-Ellen tells her tale of decadence she falls to the ground and begs for mercy--the black man shoots her to death.

This is sort of a crazy story.  Like Ed Bryant's 1970 story "In the Silent World," which we read in our last episode, you could say the story is white liberal "virtue signalling," a story in which the writer tells you our society is racist and assures you he is against racism but doesn't have the space or energy to actually say anything interesting about race relations or the African-American experience or anything like that.  (Feminists will wonder why both stories have women protagonists--are our male authors portraying white women as the primary perpetrators and/or victims of white racism against blacks?)  But while Bryant's story is bland, White here produces what feels like an exploitation piece full of gore and salacious sexual content.  We hear all about Mari-Ellen's injuries--the burns on her hands from climbing out of the burning car, her painfully sprained ankle, and the gunshots that end her life; the final sentences of the story feel like something written by Clive Barker as White describes the path of each of those three bullets through Mari-Ellen's body: "...cutting across a shoulder blade like a hot knife, then tearing into her spine where it fragmented."  As for sex, there is all the talk of promiscuity and infidelity, and then the description of David, having discovered her with the Major, smacking Mari-Ellen in the face and then putting her over his knee and spanking her--Mari-Ellen finds this punishment sexually arousing: "[the spanking] warmed her loins for her in a way she had previously never known."  Just before she is shot Mari-Ellen urinates on herself in fear.

It is hard not to think White wanted to write a fetishistic horror story about violence against women and used fashionable hatred of the Nixon administration and opposition to racism as a kind of fig leaf to justify his production of this gruesome piece of pornography.  Thumbs down, I'm afraid. 

Unsurprisingly, "A Girl Like You" has not appeared elsewhere.

"Growing Up Fast in the City"

The May 1971 issue is Amazing's 45th anniversary issue, and Ted's editorial gives a fun and opinionated history of the magazine and its place in SF history.  (Sample opinion: Ted says that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are "better writers than any sf has yet produced.")

"Growing Up Fast in the City" is a first-person narrative; our narrator is a sixteen-year-old boy who attends lots of "rallies" which end up being violently broken up by the police.  He comes to these rallies prepared with a drug that serves as an antidote to the nausea induced by the cop's "Sick Gas" as well as a crowbar, and generally leaves the events with a girl he has picked up--his practice is to have sex with these girls in a convenient alley.  Our hero doesn't confine himself to the ladies however; there are references to circle-jerks with other boys and a confession that one of his most enjoyable sexual experiences was receiving fellatio from another boy.

Our story begins at one of those rallies; Ted includes some slang I guess he made up (people over 18 are called "Voters" and adolescents are called "Intermediaries") to suggest this is the future or another universe or something.  Our narrator is cynical: it is not clear what the rally is for or against, and we are later told he goes to these rallies for "kicks," not out of some political conviction.  This rally was meant to be secret, but the police immediately show up and our narrator theorizes that the organizers of the rallies tip off the cops because all the violence maintains the high tensions that drive the organizers' own popularity.

Our narrator picks up a girl and they flee when the police move in to disperse the rally--he uses his crowbar to break into an emergency exit from the New York City subway, going in through the out door, as it were.  Back at her apartment they smoke "hash" and have sex and the girl, 14, explains that girls like to be romanced, that for a female to enjoy sex she needs to have some kind of feelings for the boy.  Throughout the story White suggests that our narrator is maturing, and in these apartment scenes hints that he is less interested in casual sex than he used to be and may actually be falling in love with this girl.  But the end of the story informs us that they never saw each other again; the narrator tried to find her, but she must have moved or maybe even been killed.  He has had sex with many girls since then, but he has never felt about any like he does about her.       

The sex in the story is, presumably, meant to be titillating (the girl also relates how a cop at an earlier rally tore her dress and tried to get her to perform oral sex on him) but Ted is also trying to pull the old heart strings here and say something about life.  I'll call this one acceptable.  "Growing Up Fast in the City" has never been reprinted.

"Junk Patrol"

White's editorial in the September 1971 issue is about the failure of the American SST program.  (One of my memories of New York in the '90s, cherished lo these many years of beige suburban existence, is unexpectedly spotting a Concorde parked at JFK from across the Bay from the Wildlife Refuge where I was on one of my birdwatching walks.)  Ted laments the defeat of the SST program in Congress, arguing that the development of faster transport would have been a boon to the human race and complaining that the environmentalist arguments against SST were disingenuous, while the spokespeople who supported the SST argued their case incompetently.

White finishes his editorial by griping that the publisher shortened his novel Trouble on Project Ceres by chopping off the first two chapters.  (It sounds liker poor Ted was having a tough month.)  Ted informs us that these two chapters will be published in the fanzine Granfalloon, and gets a small measure of revenge by subtly suggesting that we readers only make the effort to buy Trouble on Project Ceres after first seeking it at the local library!

After Ted's excursions into splatterpunk and sexual coming-of-age drama, I was pleased to find that "Junk Patrol," the cover story of this issue of Amazing, fits the traditional narrow definition of SF: this is a story about men donning space suits and risking their lives in orbit over the Moon!  I don't have any objection to SF stories that ask "What would it be like to be a murder victim?" or "What would it be like to have gay sex?" but I sort of got into SF because I was interested in questions like "What would it be like to live on a colony on the Moon?"  (People like Nabokov and Proust can handle all my impending death and homosexual relationship literary needs.)  I was further pleased to find that Ted has some pretty interesting SF ideas to impart to us in this one!

It is the 21st-century, and ingenious mankind has generated an atmosphere on the moon, and surrounded the entire moon with a thin plastic sheet that helps maintain atmospheric pressure.  On the surface are little towns and farms; our narrator, Sam Davies, is a farmer, and also a member of the "patrol."  In this story he and other patrolmen are ferried by a spaceship out of one of the entry/exit holes in the "pliofilm envelope which girds the Moon" into space, where they go on a spacewalk in order to collect giant conglomerations of twisted machinery that are approaching Luna--these hunks of junk are the mysterious evidence of a lost alien civilization.  Normally such artifacts are collected and taken to the lunar surface for study, but the pieces captured today are so huge, actually bigger than the spacecraft that brought the patrolmen out to them, that the men direct them towards Earth, where they will go into orbit and be studied in space.  Davies commits a blunder, cutting his suit and foot on a jagged piece of metal projecting from one of the colossal artifacts, and he and his comrades scramble to save his life.

White's fiction often contains "meta" elements and SF community in-jokes (you'll remember that there is a minor character named Terri Carr in White's By Furies Possessed) and in this one Davies refers to old pulp magazines and, more jarringly, the leader of his patrol is named "Jerome Podwill" (two "l"s.)  The real life Jerome Podwil (one "l") painted covers for many paperbacks, including some we've talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, like Raymond F. Jones's The Cybernetic Brains and Ray Cummings's Tama, Princess of Mercury.  Like two years ago I almost bought A. Bertram Chandler's Empress of Outer Space because I loved the Podwil cover, but I held back.

I love a good story about astronauts dealing with zero gravity and space suits and all that, and I'm relieved that I can unabashedly recommend one of today's stories.  Thumbs up for "Junk Patrol!"  Despite my approval, "Junk Patrol" would never again be published.  Shouldn't there be an anthology of stories about people who get holes in their space suits?

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These three stories, even though I think one is pretty good, all feel like White threw them together quickly in response to some emergency, like he lacked a story of just the right length or tone for the next issue and its deadline was breathing down his neck.  I hope he didn't rush them into production because he needed the money!  (I have heard that editors who publish their own stories in the anthologies or magazines they are editing get to pay themselves for the stories.)  "Junk Patrol," with its astronaut hardware, inscrutable extraterrestrial artifacts and little science lectures, is a perfect fit for a venerable, pioneering SF magazine and beyond reproach; the other two stories we read today are a little questionable, though I guess sex sells, and, unless you can get the taxpayer to foot the bill as Michael Moorcock was able to with New Worlds, an editor has to keep an eye on those circulation numbers.

In our next episode: more crazy stories from old magazines available at the internet archive!

Universe Day by Barry N. Malzberg

"How the hell can they expect to send men out to Mercury when they can't even control a simple situation down on Earth?"

Back in 2014 internet SF mastermind Joachim Boaz recommended to me (and to others!) Barry Malzberg's Universe Day, a paperback printed by Avon in 1971, the year of my birth, and published under Malzberg's transparent pseudonym K. M. O'Donnell.  (Check out Joachim's review!)  The cover of Universe Day is pretty good, and I feel a little guilty over the fact that I dropped mine one day and put a big gouge in it.  (I'm afraid I'm not as good a custodian of these artifacts of SF history as I should be.)

Universe Day is a fix-up novel, and the indispensable isfdb lists (some?) of the stories which form the basis of the novel:

I had reason to suspect that this isfdb list is incomplete because the publication page of Universe Day under the heading "Some of this material has appeared in substantially different form in:" lists Nova 2--Nova 2 (1972) includes the Malzberg story "Two Odysseys into the Center"--and Galaxy, with the date 1971--in the March issue of that year Malzberg's "Gehenna" appeared.

Curious to compare the initial short story versions of these tales to what they look like incorporated into the novel, alongside Universe Day I read the short stories upon which it was based!  Two of those listed at isfdb I have actually read and written about before; "Pacem Est" I read last year in my copy of In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories and "Elephants" I read in 2015 in my copy of Infinity Two.  "Making Titan" and "A Triptych" and "How I Take Their Measure" I read at the internet archive, and "Conquest" in my copy of the 1973 paperback printing of New Dimensions 1.  "Gehenna" I read back in 2013 in a library book, and also appears in In the Pocket and Other S-F Stories, and has no relationship to anything in Universe Day, so why Galaxy is listed in Universe Day I do not know, maybe there is a typo in there.  You can "borrow" scans of Nova 1 and Nova 2 from the internet archive, a somewhat cumbersome process of accounts and passwords and waitlists, and I tried this but got sick of waiting and so ordered the volumes through Amazon so I could read "Two Odysseys into the Center" and "Terminus Est" while I was still middle-aged.  To my surprise "Two Odysseys into the Center" has only the most tenuous thematic connection to Universe Day.  

There is a lot more material here than in my usual blog posts which cover a single novel or three to five stories, so I am putting my findings "below the fold."  If you have any interest in the results of this research project in Malzbergian studies, click to read on!

The Comet Kings by Edmond Hamilton

"You can help us willingly with all your knowledge of this universe, and be rewarded by electric immortality.  Or you can refuse.  In that case, we will strip your mind of all knowledge and then destroy you immediately."

In his essentially mainstream novel about a science fiction writer who goes insane, Herovit's World, Barry Malzberg, who has read more SF and thought about SF more than just about anybody, includes a parody of SF of the Lensman/Captain Future type that features heroic scientists and fighting men who explore the universe and battle hostile aliens.  Let's check out an example of the very kind of story Malzberg was satirizing, Edmond Hamilton's The Comet Kings, first published in Captain Future magazine in 1942.  The Comet Kings is the 11th Captain Future Adventure; I am reading the 1969 paperback edition from Popular Library.

(We've read two Captain Future novels by Hamilton already, Quest Beyond the Stars and Outlaw World, and over the course of this blog's life I have read many other novels and stories by Hamilton, who, like his wife Leigh Brackett, is something of a MPorcius fave.)

The government of the Solar System, based in beautiful New York City on Earth, has a big big problem!  Dozens of space ships, both private commercial ships and government war ships, have vanished without a trace in a sector beyond Jupiter.  The Planet Patrol has sent out two of its best agents, old man Ezra Gurney and Joan Randall, a "dark, pretty girl" and "the smartest agent of our secret investigation division" who "knows the spaceways better than most men," to investigate.  These two geniuses also disappear, so the government turns to the Moon for help!  Only four people make their homes on the Moon, scientist Curtis Newton, known as Captain Future, and his three comrades, the Futuremen!  Newton has a crush on Randall, so everybody knows he will take this job seriously!

Who are the Futuremen?  Oldest of the three is Doctor Simon Wright, a genius scientist who was a close colleague of Curtis's father, biologist Roger Newton.  When his body approached death, Newton removed Wright's brain and implanted it alive in a box equipped with cameras, microphones, and projectors that emit "beams of force" that allow him to hover and fly.  Newton and Wright created in their lunar lab the other two Futuremen, Otho, the synthetic man, and Grag, the intelligent robot.  When his parents died, young Curtis was raised by Wright (AKA "The Brain") and Otho and Grag, and became a brilliant scientist himself, as well as "the most renowned fighting planeteer in the System."

I took these images of Curt Newton's comrades from the scan of the Winter 1943 issue of
Captain Future available at the Internet Archive

Apprised of the disappearance of Randall and hundreds of other people, Newton and the Futuremen fly off to the orbit of Jupiter to investigate.  It is not long before they suspect that Halley's comet is somehow connected to the disappearances, and, when they approach the comet to have a look-see,  their ship is seized by a magnetic force and pulled towards the mysterious body.  They discover, within the glowing energy field that is the outer shell of the comet, a small forested planet with an alabaster city on its surface.  Here lie all the lost space ships, and here our heroes are taken prisoner by the pirates who live on the comet, men and women whose very bodies pulse and glow with electricity!  These electric people do not need to eat or drink, and are practically immortal!

There are no three-eyed aliens in this story

The world inside Halley's Comet is full of surprises.  Our heroes learn that the people of the Comet (the Cometae) only recently became electrified and immortal, when their tyrannical rulers, King Thoryx, Queen Lulain, and the weird old adviser, Querdel, exposed them to the power of the Allus, creatures from another cosmos summoned to our universe by Querdel's science.  The majority of Cometae don't even want to be electrified, as they feel it has stripped them of their humanity--they are sterile and thus denied the joys of parenthood as well as the age-old natural cycle of birth, maturity, and death.  Another surprise: when he is brought to the royal court, Newton finds that his crush Joan Randall has been electrified herself!

Randall of course is only pretending to have joined the Cometae in order to learn more about them and the Allus--she is an intelligence agent, after all.  When Newton and the Brain promise the leaders of the anti-Allus majority population of the comet world that they will try to reverse the electrification of their bodies, the commoners launch an uprising against the royals, and Newton and the Futuremen are right in the thick of the fighting!  Unfortunately, when the rebels are on the cusp of victory, Querdel contacts the extradimensional Allus via his ten-foot-wide ebon orb and a wave of energy from another universe hypnotizes all the rebels into immobility, save the not-quite human Grag and Otho, who escape to the forest outside the alabaster city.

Querdel, in his six-wheeled car, drives the unconscious Newton from the white city to the black citadel of the Allus.  Luckily, Grag and Otho, hiding in the woods, see the car go by and march to the 1000-foot tool black tower.  Within the tower Curt learns the true nature of the Allus and their mission in our universe.  (The scenes in which Newton sees the true forms of the Allus for the first time, and when he looks through the Allus' portal into their universe of four dimensions, seemed to me to owe some inspiration to H. P. Lovecraft, Hamilton's fellow Weird Tales scribe.)  Newton, the Futuremen and Joan Randall work together to shut the portal from the other universe, dending the Allus menace, and then Newton, The Brain, and a Martian scientist figure out how to turn all the immortal electric people back into short-lived normal people who can have children and die.  (Hooray, I guess?)

There are no giant bats in this story

This is a fun, fast-paced, and brief (128 pages here) story, a good example of old-fashioned adventure SF.  The Comet Kings is full of speculative science about things like a comet's make up and why living things age and die, though I'm guessing these theories are today totally exploded, and our heroes overcome obstacles again and again by using their knowledge and via trickery--while there is some hand-to-hand combat and bloodshed, the story fetishizes not strength or martial prowess, but science and quick-thinking.

As part of my project of defending Golden Age SF from misharacterizing attacks, I will point out that while Malzberg's parody in Herovit's World suggests that SF scientist/soldiers are xenophobic, shooting first and asking questions later, and making servants or slaves of alien races, this Captain Future novel is practically a paean to diversity.  It is true that nobody gives a boring or self-righteous speech about the evils of racism and sexism--Hamilton instead depicts the people of the future matter-of-factly taking diversity and equality as a given, portraying Earthlings, Martians and Venusians working side by side, both men and women exhibiting intelligence and bravery, and all of them accepting such strange characters as Grag, The Brain and Otho as comrades.  The masses of the people of the comet are good and quick to aid the strangers from outside--it is only their aristocratic leaders who are evil, and they courageously oppose when given a chance (Hamilton perhaps exhibiting a very American attitude about hereditary rule.)

An entertaining, optimistic and wholesome space opera, perhaps an interesting contrast to the somewhat gritty, pessimistic and noirish Hamilton space opera we read a little while ago, "The Starcombers."

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The last page of my 1969 paperback is an ad, but not for SF books.  Rather, it promotes the history of the Plantagenets by Canadian-born writer Thomas B. Costain.  It looks like people still read these--the first volume, The Conquering Family, published in 1949, has 25 reviews on Amazon.  I like to think that there are thriving classic SF and pulp fiction communities online, but The Comet Kings only has two Amazon reviews and the third volume of The Collected Captain Future put out by Stephen Haffner (which contains The Comet Kings and three other Captain Future novels) has only 11 reviews--I guess this Costain guy is a big wheel!

Four stories by C. L. Moore from Astounding

In 1952 Gnome Press published Judgment Night, a collection of work by C. L. Moore, famous creator of Northwest Smith and Jirel of Joiry and collaborator of Henry Kuttner, her husband.  The hardcover volume with a cover by Kelly Freas included the title novel and four short stories; in 1979 Dell reprinted the collection in paperback with a cover by God knows who.  I own one of those 1979 paperbacks, and in our last episode we read the title work, originally an Astounding serial, the story of a princess's first love affair and the collapse of her civilization, a denunciation of human violence and an expression of skepticism of the value of gods.  Today we will look at those four short stories, all of which appeared in Astounding after Judgment Night's appearance.  I'm going to read them in the chronological order in which they were printed, not the order they appear in this book.

"The Code" (1945)

"The Code" appeared under the pen name of "Lawrence O'Donnell," like all four stories we are talking about today.  This pseudonym was also attached to numerous stories on which Moore and Kuttner collaborated, including the highly regarded tales "Vintage Season," "Clash By Night" and "Fury," and served as the inspiration for one of the pen names used by Kuttner/Moore aficionado Barry N. Malzberg, "K. M. O'Donnell."

(The unusual cover of this issue of Astounding is a collage of US military personnel operating some of their heavier weapons.  Maybe this is related to the included Eric Frank Russell story, "Resonance," the intro of which indicates it is about the Pacific War and whose illustrations feature what we would probably consider racist caricatures of "the Japs."

Bill Westerfield and Peter Morgan are scientists, medical types.  They think that people get old and die for largely psychosomatic reasons:

"You've been conditioned to think you grow old because of time, and this is a false philosophy....you must be conditioned to reverse time.  The body and the mind react inseparably, one upon the other."

Bill's father Rufus serves as the guinea pig for their secret experiments on reversing the aging process, and they shoot the seventy-year-old full of drugs and hypnotize him so he will look at time differently.  And it works!  In the space of a few months Rufus develops the body of a healthy forty-year-old!  But something is amiss with Rufus's brain or mind; he has vague memories that cannot be his own.  Also, Bill and Peter think his face is different from that of the man Rufus was when he was forty...they suspect that Rufus isn't just "growing" younger, but changing into a different person altogether!  Then X-rays indicate that Rufus's bones and organs are changing--Bill's father isn't just  becoming a different person, but a whole different species!

Moore explains, using a metaphor about parallel train tracks that I did not find very convincing, that Rufus isn't regressing to the Rufus he once was, but an alternate reality Rufus in a universe where the evolution of intelligent life proceeded quite differently.  Rufus, as he grows biologically younger and gets closer to that alien track, changes more and more.  In his biological twenties he develops a nictitating membrane and becomes a drunk--the booze helps his mind cope with the overlapping memories of his English-speaking Earth youth and his alien youth in a world of strange languages and weird tuneless music; alcohol is also one of the few Earth foods his half-alien stomach can handle.  He then seals himself in his room and ceases eating altogether, his body burning his tissues for fuel so that he shrinks and eventually becomes an alien egg or larva--for a brief moment Bill and Peter see Rufus's alien mother, before she and the embryonic alien Rufus vanish as he is fully integrated into that other time track.

Because it moves at a rapid enough pace and throws lots of ideas at you this is an acceptably entertaining story, even if the ideas are all kind of ridiculous.  It also aspires to a high level of erudition.  Readers of Astounding are expected to know about science, and on the very first page of "The Code" Moore refers to snowflakes making "pseudo-Brownian movements"--I had to look that up on google.  Besides the science stuff there are plenty of literary references--Faust, Theseus, Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare, Longfellow.  This is a story for the educated reader!  The title of the story refers to Bill and Peter's idea that the intellectuals of the past knew more than they are given credit for, and even conducted experiments like the one B & P are conducting on Rufus.  Our heroes think  their predecessors recorded their work in "code" in stories like the legend of Faust, and speculate that Faust's loss of his soul in the story represents some other loss suffered by a experimental subject back in the 16th century; at the end of the story our 20th century experimenters get the solution to the mystery.

"The Code" is like several stories I have read by Kuttner and Moore that are about Earth humans interacting with items or people from other times or dimensions.  "Mimsy Were the Borogroves" is the most famous example, others include "Prisoner in the Skull" and "Shock."  "The Code" is included in a handsome-looking 900-page collection of Kuttner and Moore stories published in 2005 by Centipede Press and titled Two-Handed Engine after one of Kuttner and Moore's most celebrated tales.

We read To The Stars here at
MPorcius Fiction Log in early 2014

"Promised Land" (1950)

It is several hundred years in the future, and mankind has colonized numerous planets and moons within the solar system.  To do so, scientists have used controlled mutation and selective breeding to fashion humans suitable for life on alien worlds.  Some pure strain humans fear that the engineered humans are taking over civilization, that they, however freakish they might be, are the future of mankind.  One such engineered human is Torren, the dictator of Ganymede, the product of the thirteen generations of breeding in "The Centrifuge" that was the abortive project to create people who could live on Jupiter.  Torren weighs five hundred pounds and lives every moment of his adult life in a bath of oily fluid because he lacks the strength to walk--he can barely lift his own arm!  (When I was a kid they told us that Brachiosaurus probably stayed in water to support his tremendous weight, but I think that theory has been abandoned.)  Via TV screens and other devices Torren rules the people of Ganymede, humans specially bred to be able to endure Ganymede's deadly cold and breathe Ganymede's toxic atmosphere.

Years ago Torren chose from among the brats at an orphanage an heir, Ben Fenton, a pure strain human.  Fenton is an adult now, and as "Promised Land" begins he has had it with Ganymede and tells Torren to find himself another heir--he is leaving!  Why, you ask?

Torren is a selfish ruler who feels that the tragedy of his own life as the only survivor of the Centrifuges means he owes others no consideration.  He is having Ganymede terraformed so a large number of pure strain humans can live on it and efficiently exploit its resources--this will mean the small number of peeps tailored for Ganymede will have to live under domes the way Terron and Fenton do today!  Fenton sympathizes with the Ganymedeans and wants no part of throwing them under the bus.

Fenton's attitude was easier for me to understand when I realized that the people engineered to live on Ganymede weren't hideous insect people or ogrish yetis or something, but seven-foot tall Scandinavians with blue eyes and blonde hair and "milk-white" skin, and our man Ben Fenton has a crush on one of them.

He did not think he was in love with Krisitn.  It would be preposterous.  They could not speak except through metal or touch except through glass and cloth.  They could not even breathe the same air.  But he faced the possibility of love, and grinned ironically at it.     

Fenton goes to meet Kristin, and, while they sit in his ground vehicle, an air vehicle bombs them.  They survive the attack, and Fenton sneaks back into Terron's palace to discover that a coup attempt is under way, Terron's pure strain assistant trying to take over.  Fenton foils the coup attempt, saving Terron, but as the story ends we know that Ganymede is about to be rocked by a civil war between Terron and his agents and the Ganymedeans, lead by Fenton, who are determined to resist the terraforming of their chilly home.  Who will win the war will be largely determined by the response to the crisis of the pure strain people on Earth and the engineered people living on Venus and Mars--who will intervene in the conflict, and on which side?  Perhaps the outcome of the Ganymedean civil war will signal whether the new artificially bred human races represent the future of the human race, or will always be subordinate to those who created them.

This is a pretty good story; like Judgment Night it conjures up a strange milieu and presents SF ideas and a civilization on the brink of a new era, but it is economical.  Perhaps Moore here is vulnerable to the charge of making things easy on herself by making the villain a big fatso and the innocent victims people who look like supermodels, however. 

"Heir Apparent" (1950)

To my surprise, I discovered on its first page that "Heir Apparent" was a sequel of sorts to "Promised Land," being set in the same universe, though on Earth instead of one of the other inhabited bodies of the Solar System and at a later period of time, when the solar system is in crisis as the engineered humans on Mars, Venus and Ganymede seek to achieve independence from Earth.  Our protagonist is Edward Harding, former member of Integrator Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda.  As we see in flashbacks, an Integrator Team is seven men, each with a high level of expertise in one field, who connect psychically across long distances via a computer called an Integrator, temporarily melding their personalities and skills within the computer to solve difficult problems related to the governance of Earth's interplanetary empire.  (A theme of this story is that empires collapse because managing them from what in college we called "the metropole" becomes too complicated.)  These psychic connections are so satisfying that those kicked off Integrator teams become depressed and wander the world like lost souls, suited for no other work.  Harding is one such lost soul, as is a former colleague of his, George Mayall, who blames Harding for getting him kicked off the team a few years before Harding himself was let go.

Bumming around the Pacific, Harding meets an obese rich guy, Turner, who is the head of a private espionage network.  (Does Moore hate fat people?  Or does she just hate rich people, and use obesity to signify indulgence and wealth?)  Turner tells Harding that Mayall is working with the seccessionists from a base on a Pacific island.  Mayall has camouflaged this island and surrounded it with traps so that it is almost totally invisible and inaccessible.  Turner wants to capture this island and work his own lucrative deal with the seccessionists, and thinks that Harding--who has the ability to integrate his mind with a boat's computer, controlling the vessel as if it was his own body, and has intimate knowledge of Mayall's way of thinking--is the only man who can get him to the island safely.  Harding and Turner become uneasy partners, each with his own agenda.

Once on the island Harding and Turner confront Mayall and we get doublecrosses and Mexican standoff situations involving guns, knives, holograms, paralysis rays, heat rays, post-hypnotic suggestions, etc.  These standoffs resemble the relationships between Earth and its colonies--they all want independence, but really need to cooperate to prosper, maybe even to merely survive.  The whole business of the Integrator, in which seven people fuse their psyches to produce a more efficient collective "being," mirrors this same theme.

During all the tense scenes on the island we learn why Mayall and then Harding were thrown off Integrator Team Twelve-Wye-Lambda, and what exactly Mayhall is up to on the island.  Mayhall has put together his own Integrator and set up his own Integrator team, one that is devoted to winning independence for Venus.  But who is on Mayhall's team?  Harding discovers that Mayhall has filled the other six seats at "the Round Table" of his Integrator not with human beings but with computer files!  Does this presage a future when human beings will be subordinate to machines, or surrender their humanity to become integrated with machines?  Like Judgment Night and "Promised Land," rather than ending conclusively, "Heir Apparent" ends leaving us expecting a radical shift in human history and wondering what--perhaps horrible--future is in store for mankind.     

Pretty good.  "Heir Apparent" was included in a 1988 French collection of Moore stories.   

"Paradise Street" (1950)

Jaime Morgan was one of the first men on planet Loki.  He is an irascible loner, a trapper who catches the sehft rats that infest the planet and drains their sehft sacs to sell the sehft oil.  But times, they are a changin'; once-wild Loki, a place for an independent manly man, is becoming civilized!  Settlers (Morgan denounces them as "Scum!") are putting down roots on Loki, starting farms and families, and they want to exterminate the sehft rats, who despoil their orchards.  Sehft has also been synthesized off world, so the value of sehft has gone down by like 99%, leaving Morgan in real financial trouble.  Law and order is also coming to Loki in the form of Major Rufus Dodd, an old friend of Morgan's--they grew up together on Mars.

"Paradise Street" is like a story about the old West, with a general store, a saloon, a new sheriff in town, desperadoes and ranch hands--there's even a minor character who is a Native American (a "hawk-nosed Red Amerindian.")  It is also like a 20th century crime story--100% natural and organic sehft (not the synthetic stuff) turns out to be a powerful narcotic, and Morgan, due to ignorance and carelessness, gets mixed up with organized crime and the cops (in the form of his childhood friend Dodd.)  Venusian crime bosses want to get their hands on some organic sehft, but Dodd has confiscated it and locked it all up, so the Venusians hire Morgan to cause a native herd of cattle to stampede; this will distract the settlers and the lawmen and give the Venus mafia a chance to liberate the sehft.

To stampede the beasts Morgan has to get in tune with nature, and Moore gives us a scene in which Morgan "feels" the rhythm of Loki through his fingers and toes as he crouches in the moss.  Moore also gives us a quote from A. E. Housman's "The Night is Freezing Fast."  (A. E. Housman seems to be a favorite of SF writers.)   Morgan directs the stampede so it wrecks the crops the settlers have spent a year tending, but then the Venusians, with firearms, throw the stampede out of control so it damages the town and even kills a handful of innocent people.  The settlers take up arms and outfight and then lynch the Venusians.  The settlers want to hang Morgan as well, but Dodd, quoting Kipling's "The Explorer," (Kipling is another favorite versifier of the SF crowd, at least the conservative/libertarian faction of people like Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein) helps Morgan escape, directing him to a merchant space ship on which he can stow away and get to a newly discovered planet, where he can play "hermit trapper in touch with nature" again.  Morgan doesn't belong among civilized men, neither the boring community-minded types like the settlers nor the evil predatory type like the Venusian criminals--he belongs alone on the frontier.

There are some silly elements to "Paradise Street," and it does remind you of that famous Galaxy ad that derides that species of SF that is just Westerns in space, but it is smoothly written and entertaining.

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All these stories are worth your time.  "Heir Apparent," "Promised Land" and "Paradise Street" all have action and revenge elements, and all talk about imperialism and colonialism, how individual human beings and the government deal with exploring and conquering and exploiting new territories; "Heir Apparent" and "Promised Land" also do the thing that Malzberg told John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding, SF should do, explore how technology is "consuming" people, taking away their individuality and their ability to control their lives.  (See Malzberg's essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," in which our pal Barry recounts his meeting with Campbell; I know I have recommended it before--it is a great essay for those of us interested in both Golden Age and New Wave SF.) 

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Squint or click to read about these Dell offerings

The last four pages of my 1979 copy of Judgment Night consist of ads for the Dell SF line.  Vonda McIntyre's Dreamsnake gets a page to itself, complete with glowing blurbs from Frank Herbert and Robert Silverberg and a sort of poorly reproduced illustration of a young lady grasping a scaly writhing phallic symbol.  I liked McIntyre's short stories "Recourse, Inc." and "Only at Night," (the techniques she used to tell these stories were quite good) and Dreamsnake won the Hugo and the Nebula, stamps of approval from the people and the pros, so I should probably consider reading it.

D. F. Jones's novel Earth Has Been Found also gets a page to itself (no blurbs, though.)  I thought it was funny that the marketing people at Dell thought that SF readers would be excited by the thought of a story about "California's finest doctor."  Gordon Dickson's novel about astronauts going to Mars, The Far Call, is another item that gets the full-page treatment; "undersecretary for space" sounds a little dry, but next to "best sawbones on the Left Coast," maybe it's not so bad.

If your criteria is efficiency, the best of the four ad pages is the one with a list of thirteen books.  I have a (peripheral, I admit) familiarity with a few of these.

For New Wavey, literary SF types, Dell offers Michael Bishop's Stolen Faces, which Joachim Boaz declared "a near masterpiece," and Richard Lupoff's Space War Blues (I read the ambitious and dense 90-page short story upon which this novel is based in my hardcover copy of Again, Dangerous Visions) and John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline, which I read before I started this blog and thought was alright.

Dell has stuff for the sword & sorcery and planetary romance fan as well.  I assume I read The Silver Warriors by Michael Moorcock decades ago (I know I owned a copy, which my brother probably still has back in New Jersey, greatest state in the union) but I can't remember any specifics about it; it is the second of the Erekose books and sometimes printed under the title Phoenix in Obsidian.  I actually remember the first Erekose book, more or less (I compared it to Edmond Hamilton's A Yank at Valhalla last year.)  I enjoyed all those Eternal Champion books in my teens, and often think about rereading them.  Flashing Swords #4 includes Moorcock's "The Lands Beyond the World," which I think makes up a third of the Elric book The Sailor on the Seas of Fate.  Flashing Swords #4 also includes one of the component stories of Jack Vance's delightful Cugel's Saga (AKA Cugel: The Skybreak Spatterlight.)  I own a copy of Andrew Offutt's Ardor on Aros, but haven't read it yet--I am interested in Offut's work, but I have got the idea that Ardor on Aros is a spoof, not a sincere adventure story, and this has put me off a little bit.  I read the first two Callisto novels by Lin Carter in the 2000 ibooks omnibus edition; they were mediocre.  Ylana of Callisto, according to isfdb, is the seventh Callisto book--I guess people were buying them.

Comments are welcome on all the advertised books, as well as on C. L. Moore, of course.

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More SF from 1940s magazines in out next episode!

Herovit's World by Barry N. Malzberg

"God, how I hate science fiction.  I hate everything about it.  I hate the people who write it and the people who edit it, and don't forget the idiots who read it.  And the word rates and the conventions and what people say to you if you are married to someone who writes this crap."

"It's an honorable field.  It foretold the splitting of the atom and the moon landing."

"Like hell it did."

In his 1976 introduction to The Best of A. E. van Vogt, Barry Malzberg compares himself to van Vogt, arguing that both of them are sui generis, writers who, while members of the science fiction community, must be judged by different standards than their contemporaries in the same field.  When I read this back in 2017 I was thrilled, because I had long enjoyed Malzberg and van Vogt, who are of course very different people in so many ways, in the same way, as wacky characters with wacky ideas who present their ideas in odd and distinctive ways, whose work is challenging because it can be difficult to grasp, difficult to grasp because it ignores some of the traditional structures and forms of fiction, especially genre fiction.  I was also interested to read Malzberg's apparently sincere and obviously well-thought-out* appreciation of van Vogt because I had got the idea that Malzberg's 1973 novel Herovit's World was some kind of attack on van Vogt.

*Malzberg's intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt is a stark contrast to his intro to The Best of Mack Reynolds, which is an opaque metaphor which talks about Reynolds' actual work hardly at all.  Not every van Vogt fan shares my view, however: van Vogt expert Isaac Walwyn, who runs the very fun, very informative, Ischi.net website, considers Malzberg's intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt to be "full of back-handed compliments."  

Well, today we read Herovit's World.  I own the 1974 Pocket Books paperback with the brilliantly strange Charles Moll cover.  I love the typewriter with an eye and the male nude in the crucifixion pose (writers, like most creative people, are totally full of themselves!)  The barren landscape of the background, and the strange font and odd colors serve to heighten the sense that this book, and the people and environment it describes, are otherworldly, bizarre, queer.  (As you can see below, quite a few editions of Herovit's World have good covers.)  On the back we have extravagant praise for Malzberg and this work in particular from Harlan Ellison and from the award-winning fanzine The Alien Critic, which would later change its name to Science Fiction Review and which I first learned about early this year.  Ellison's back cover blurb praises Herovit's World for "destroying SF cliches," while the quote from his review in F&SF on the front cover (and Robert Silverberg's blurb on the book's first page) tell us this book is "important."

To get myself in the mood for attacks on van Vogt and SF cliches, before starting Herovit's World I read the original 1948 version of "The Rull," available at the internet archive--in The Best of A. E. van Vogt Malzberg tells us that "The Rull" is "a largely ignored story in its own time and a forgotten one now, [that] has tremendous power, and may be the best single piece that van Vogt has ever written."  I'd read "The Rull" before, but in revised versions, like the version that appears in the fix-up novel The War Against the Rull, and as I have found in the case of other van Vogt stories, the original of version of "The Rull" is better than the revisions.  Suffice to say that "The Rull" is a terrific story, full of tension, violence, and high stakes, with a weird setting, an alien villain and many new pieces of technology, and it is a story that romanticizes (fetishizes?) science, engineering, quick thinking and intelligence, a sort of Platonic exemplar of Golden Age SF--it also reflects van Vogt's particular concerns in its preoccupation with psychology and "the unconscious mind."

(I also reread Malzberg's "Vidi Vici Veni," a good reminder of how hilarious and outrageous Malzberg can be.  No matter what Herovit's World is like, Barry will always be close to my heart!)

From the first page of Herovit's World we are firmly in familiar Malzberg territory, with present tense narration of the humiliating trials of a Manhattanite protagonist who has a disastrous social life and sundry sexual problems.  Jonathan Herovit is a successful SF writer, with almost one hundred novels and hundreds of stories to his credit, including the dozens of books in the Mack Miller of the Survey Team Series.  Long ago, before his first sale, Herovit's mentor, editor of Tremendous Stories John Steele, told Herovit that his name had "too much of a New-Yorkish type of ring" and so his many books and stories appear under the pen name "Kirk Poland."  This hint that the SF community is anti-Semitic is only one of the many charges Malzberg levels at the creators and readers of SF in this novel; Malzberg is openly hostile and drearily dismissive of SF, root and branch, in Herovit's World, suggesting SF readers are sexually impotent "disturbed adolescents" who don't know a good sentence from a bad one, portraying SF writers as faithless, lecherous alcoholics, and calling the whole SF field "infantile."  Herovit's pseudonym is perhaps also a reference to anti-Semitism, a sort of Polish joke (under the name of "Poland" Herovit writes books full of nonsense and grammatical errors) and a reflection of Jewish resentment of Poles--metaphorically, "Poland" is stealing credit for Herovit's hard work!  Malzberg does creative things with names in this novel; for example, Herovit's agent is Morton Mackenzie, known as "Mack," so that Herovit's most famous character has the same name as his agent, and editor John Steele (presumably based on John W. Campbell, Jr.) has a first name that is practically the same as Herovit's.

Even though Herovit has a dim view of the fictional people Mack Miller and Kirk Poland ("he wishes that he could meet old Mack so that he, Jonathan Herovit, could kill him") they also serve as alter egos, wish fulfillment role models, of Herovit's; when Herovit faces obstacles, like when his wife Janice refuses to have sex with him or, in a laugh-out-loud passage, fellow SF writer Mitchell Wilk comes into Herovit's home office and looks at the draft on his typewriter and says "Why, this is the worst thing I have ever seen," Herovit inwardly fumes:

Mack Miller would not have put up with this shit.  Mack Miller would not have to stand in his own office, his own control room, and listen to some balding, bearded fool of a washed-up hack bait him and then start teasing.  Mack would have seized a weapon a long time ago and cleared out the invader. 

Herovit even has a sharp image of Kirk Poland ("a picture of ease and confidence") in his head, and has conversations with Kirk Poland in visions and dreams.  Some of these conversations have a homoerotic character, with Poland, for example, smoothly trying to talk his way into Herovit's bedroom while Herovit tries to sleep (Janice is in the kitchen staring at the TV):

"Come on, let me in; let's discuss this.  Let's talk things over reasonably.  You've been waiting a long, long time for this; now we can have it out man to man.  You'll like it, you really will...."

Herovit is thirty-seven, and his wife Janice, a person who hates SF but whom Herovit met at a SF convention over ten years ago, is thirty-five, and they have a six-month-old daughter, Natalie.  Janice is no prize.  One of the more chilling aspects of the novel is Janice's treatment of their daughter, whom she calls "the bitch" and "the thing."  ("Outside, Natalie begins to cry, Janice to swear at her.  Midmorning, the usual.")  Feminists will perhaps find more chilling still the scene in which Herovit has sex with Janice against her will.

"You're hurting me, Jonathan," she says--at least using his proper name, which is a start.  "You've got to stop hurting me now, please, now, please," but it is impossible to stop and how well she must know it.

Herovit is no prize himself!  Besides the marital rape, we know Herovit cheats on Janice, having unsatisfactory one night stands with female SF fans he meets at conventions.  Malzberg's characters are unambiguously unheroic; in the same way that Herovit's shady business dealings and poor writing at least in part justify the criticisms lebeled at him by people like Mackenzie the agent and Wilk the two-faced friend, Herovit's treatment of women doesn't do anything to refute Janice's ferocious feminist harangues about how men treat women as housekeepers and only pay attention to them when they want sex.

Malzberg's work is not particularly plot driven, but let's look at Herovit's World's plot.  As the novel begins, Herovit is having trouble meeting his obligations on his first contract with a major publisher, finding himself unable to write the latest Mack Miller adventure.  He already has been paid, and the book is quite overdue, and failure to deliver in mere days could jeopardize his relationship with Mackenzie and his access to this important new market.  Then Herovit is visited by his old friend  Mitchell Wilk, who hasn't written fiction in years because he somehow got a job as a professor at a college even though he himself never finished high school, much less college.  Wilk's college is offering a course in science fiction and he invites Herovit to attend a seminar, even promising him a $100 honorarium!  But it is not the hundred bucks that really attracts Herovit, but the news that college girls are easy!

"...the truly important thing is that the ass on campus, the ass is fantastic.  Nowadays they call it cunt, Jonathan....Do you know that they like to fuck?  I mean, they really like it!"

 ...the thought of the ass that likes to fuck, like the remote strains of departed music, touches Herovit...."That's what I read," he says hoarsely, "in the newsmagazines and like that."  

"And it's true.  For once the media haven't lied to us!"  

On the brink of these new professional and social opportunities, Herovit's inability to finish the required novel and deal with his wife become just too much for him, and he accepts the insistent offer that the vision of Kirk Poland has been making him--Herovit surrenders control of his life to his alter ego, his "less New-Yorkish," "all-American" pseudonym.  As so many Malzberg protagonists do, Herovit has gone insane.

This cover is beautiful, but the man is too
handsome for the material--Herovit should be
haggard, unkempt, ugly...this dude is like
some kind of gorgeous male model, fresh from
the salon!

To get the hang of Herovit's body, Kirk takes a walk around the Upper West Side.  Early in the book while walking the streets Herovit was robbed by a beggar, but Kirk proves he is a master of the streets when he confronts and intimidates a reckless taxi driver.  Kirk then patronizes a prostitute--to test out the equipment he will soon be using on Janice, whom he believes will be more tractable after "a couple of fucks like she used to have."  (That morning Herovit had proven unable to perform satisfactorily with Janice when she initiated sexual activity.)  Back home Kirk calls up Mackenzie and humiliates the agent, insisting that he doesn't need "Mack" and is withdrawing from that contract with that big new client--Kirk even tears up the 50-odd pages of that latest Mack Miller adventure that Wilk so severely condemned--Kirk knows Wilk was right.

From his filthy home office (Malzberg's long description of this office and its contents is a great scene) Kirk goes to the bedroom to begin his program of using sex to resolve Herovit's marital issues--he is too late!  Herovit's failure in bed that morning was the last straw, and Janice is packing up all her things, determined to leave her husband.  Janice is actually a more interesting character than most of the flat characters we get in Malzberg's work.  She halfheartedly tries to convince Kirk to take Natalie off her hands, but Natalie's father isn't very interested in the infant, either.  Janice, in the course of denouncing the SF field and every person connected with it, reveals that she was hanging out with SF people back in her twenties because there were so few women involved with SF that even an ugly girl like her could get a lot of dates, which she liked, "even if I was mostly going out with losers."

Janice leaves and the next day, after a dream sequence, Wilk and a young female SF fan, a woman Herovit had sex with at a convention recently, come by, ostensibly to condole with Herovit.  This visit collapses into acrimony, and in the final pages of the novel Mack Miller appears and takes over Herovit's body.  Miller's solution to every problem over the course of his career in the Survey has been violence, and he punches Wilk, then runs out on to the streets of Manhattan, where he attacks innocent strangers and then is killed when he blunders into automobile traffic.  (This ending reminded me of Nabokov's The Enchanter, but the similarity must be a coincidence, as The Enchanter did not appear in English until the 1980s.)

Barry's name may not be on the
cover of this 382-page volume,
but isfdb assures me that Herovit's World
appears within entire.

Herovit's World is only barely a SF story.  A lot of science fiction, of course, speculates about the future or alternate conditions: what will government or war or sex be like in the future, and/or in an alien environment with different technology or cultural values?  Herovit's World isn't like that at all--it has more in common with books like those of Henry Miller or Charles Bukowski or Somerset Maugham, those semi-autobiographical novels and stories that describe the difficult life of a writer or artist and his difficult relationships with women.  I'm not complaining; I love all those books, and I love reading the biographies of men like Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wyndham Lewis.  Judged as a novel of that type, Herovit's World is a big success--it is funny, well-written, and includes a genuinely affecting character in Janice (Herovit himself is too insane and too similar to other Malzberg protagonists to be surprising or truly moving.)  The plot sort of peters out a little at the end rather than building to a big climax, but it still works.

Herovit's World is a success as a novel of literary life, but it says "Science Fiction" on the back cover and all four of the blurbs are from SF sources, so let's assess Herovit's World as a novel about SF and figure out if it has something to say about SF that is valuable.

First, let's consider the idea that the novel is "important."  I think we can forgive people like Silverberg and Ellison for thinking that Herovit's World is important because it is more or less about them, professional writers in the SF field with what people years ago might have called "girl troubles," a sort of Uncle Tom's Cabin or A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich of the SF world, an expose of a world of corruption and injustice!  (Though, of course, Ellison and Silverberg made serious money and won wide acclaim in that world, and Herovit admits that his problems are his own doing, more the author of his own fate than a victim, unlike a black slave in 19th-century America or a prisoner in the Soviet Union.)

Second, let's look at Herovit's World as a roman a clef; what does Malzberg claim or imply about specific real life SF figures?  Joachim Boaz in his review of Herovit's World foregrounds Malzberg's satire of A. E. van Vogt, and, excepting Herovit--an exaggeration of Malzberg himself--our favorite Canadian is the most recognizable figure in the book, even though his appearance only takes up a few pages in a flashback to a meeting of a short-lived SF writer's professional society (a "guild.")  Under the name V. V. Vivaldi, van Vogt appears as a drunk who has not written lately because of his involvement in a goofy religion, but who speaks extravagantly of the superiority of SF to other forms of literature.  "Science fiction...is a way of life, a way of thinking, a new and important means of dealing with the universe."  I don't think van Vogt was actually a drunk, but Malzberg portrays every SF writer as a drunk in this book, so why should van Vogt be portrayed any differently?  And of course van Vogt did get deeply involved in Dianetics, though he rejected the later evolution of L. Ron Hubbard's project, Scientology, a distinction van Vogt, who has no interest in religion or mysticism, makes very strongly in interviews (see Charles Platt's interview with van Vogt in Dreammakers ), but a distinction which Van's legions of detractors (Joachim among them!) ignore.  Interestingly, instead of portraying van Vogt as a controversial figure (van Vogt's work was famously attacked by Damon Knight in 1945 and has had many detractors since), Malzberg has all the guild members siding with Vivaldi against Herovit when a dispute between them erupts.  I think the fairest stroke of Malzberg's impressionistic sketch of van Vogt is in portraying Van's confidence in SF--in this novel he talks quite like an uncharitable paraphrase of how he writes in nonfiction parts of The Best of A. E. van Vogt, in which he says stuff like: "the individual who repeatedly exposes himself to the reading of science fiction will eventually change his brain.  For the better."  Perhaps Malzberg means this to be ironic (Malzberg portrays SF as trash, so to have a guy extolling its virtues like this is ridiculous) but I actually find van Vogt's conviction and dedication charming.

After van Vogt, the most obvious representative (non-Malzberg) figure is John Steele as John W. Campbell Jr., who like Vivaldi is revered by the masses of SF fans and pros that make up the background characters of Herovit's World.  (Janice was chair of the Bronx Honor John Steele Society when Herovit met her.)  Steele's helping Herovit come up with a less Jewish-sounding pseudonym rings true, as Campbell did help people like van Vogt and Heinlein come up with pseudonyms, and he did take possible prejudices of his readers into account when making editorial decisions, for example, not printing Samuel L. Delany's Nova, which Campbell himself liked, because he thought his readers would not want to read about a black protagonist.

Herovit recalls a Mack Miller Survey Team story written in 1961 or so:

In 1961 the best way to sell to Tremendous was to cobble up a good justification of slavery and send it off the Steele with a sincere covering letter saying that you were trying to think the unthinkable through. 

Were there really lots of stories in Analog about slavery in the early 1960s, or is this just a sort of take on Campbell's dismissive views of blacks and defense of segregation and his oft-attested willingness to buy any story about psychic powers?   The 1961 story Herovit wrote for Steele was about the "cunning little Survey Team" brainwashing some aliens so they would rebel against their overlords and become the Survey Team's slaves--could this be a reference to the elitism of so many major SF works (Asimov, Heinlein and Sturgeon all advocate smart people manipulating the masses in the Foundation stories, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and "Slow Sculpture," all three of which won Hugos.)

Could Mitchell Wilk, the guy without a high school diploma who becomes a college professor, perhaps be based upon high school drop out (and SF Grand Master) Frederik Pohl?   

The description of that specific Mack Miller story and my speculation it is a spoof of the elitism of SF raises the topic of Malzberg's presentation of actual SF texts in Herovit's World.  What "SF cliches," as Ellison puts it, does Malzberg "destroy?" Are there specific authors' bodies of work or individual works he is satirizing?  One of the odd things about Malzberg--and I think Ellison is somewhat guilty of this as well--is that he will often moan that SF is horrible, but he always praises individual writers, even famously controversial writers who often serve as critics' punching bags, like L Ron Hubbard and van Vogt and Heinlein and Mark Clifton.  (The exception is Lovecraft, whom Malzberg slagged in the 1989 story "O Thou Last and Greatest!" though Malzberg wasn't even bold enough to use Lovecraft's name in that story, instead describing him with a contemptuous reference to the Rhode Islander's face--easy for a handsome devil like Malzberg to do, I suppose.)

Malzberg provides something like seven or eight pages from Mack Miller novels for us to examine.  The Mack Miller stories bear very little resemblance to either van Vogt's or Malzberg's own SF work, even though Herovit's life seems loosely based on Malzberg's own.  Herovit says that he doesn't know much about psychology or write about sex, that his "focus [is] on the hard sciences," and of course we know that both Malzberg and van Vogt have among their main themes psychology and the mind, and that Malzberg writes about sex all the time.  Neither man has a long series of SF novels about the same heroic character.  (Though Malzberg did write the 14-volume Executioner-style paperback series "The Lone Wolf" between 1973 and '75.)  What Herovit is writing seems to resemble the work of E. E. "Doc" Smith and Edmond Hamilton, both of whom contributed numerous volumes to long-running series about teams of super soldier/scientists who, like Mack Miller, battle hostile aliens, the former the Lensman series and the latter the Captain Future novels.  Ellison in his review of Herovit's World links Herovit to Smith, but without using Smith's name.

I guess Malzberg's general criticism is that SF of the Lensman-style makes people appear simple and life a series of triumphs when in fact people are complicated and life is a tragedy.  Lensman-type heroes are too successful, they handle problems too easily, and they don't have any emotional or psychological issues.  In his review Ellison tells us SF has to mature and join mainstream literature, ascribes to Malzberg the belief that SF has to try to follow William Faulkner's prescription that fiction should be about "the human heart in conflict with itself," and that is the sort of stuff Herovit hoped to write (he has a "long novel of Army life... all blocked out in his head") and I guess Malzberg hoped to write as well.

I don't take this kind of criticism very seriously, as it is like complaining that an apple isn't an orange, when oranges are freely available.  If you want all that human heart stuff, it isn't hard to pick up a volume of Proust and let alone that paperback of Spacehounds of IPC.  It also ignores the fact that different writers have different objectives, and people's life experiences are diverse.  John W. Campbell, Jr. told Malzberg (see Malzberg's 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971") that science fiction was about success, about heroes, about the human ability to solve problems and figure stuff out, and of course sometimes people in real life really do solve problems and achieve success.  I don't think that a literature that celebrates humanity's achievements and ability to overcome obstacles is illegitimate, and I don't think that straightforward entertainment is illegitimate either. I also think that you see plenty of human heart stuff in the SF field, not only in post-New Wave era work by people like Thomas Disch and Gene Wolfe* who are obviously strongly influenced by "serious" literature, but even during the Golden Age from, say, Kuttner and Moore--"Vintage Season" is a good example.   

*In the same column in which he praises Herovit's World and our pal Barry to the skies, Ellison also reviews a pile of new anthologies and in the course of discussing them lists who he thinks the eight top writers in SF in 1974 are--Disch is #4 and Wolfe is #7.

On a more specific level, Malzberg portrays Mack Miller as a shoot-first-ask-questions-later kind of guy who blasts a lot of aliens (though as we have seen he does turn some into servants or slaves.)  Is this caricature a fair portrayal of the Smith/Hamilton type of space adventure story?  Obviously there is a lot of war and violence in those space operas, just like in literature and entertainment in general, and obviously people enjoy it.  But is the implicit charge of xenophobia fair?  If you actually read Smith and Hamilton, as well as Heinlein and Burroughs and van Vogt (as Malzberg and Ellison certainly have), you'll see that the human polities form alliances with many alien races and that individual humans make friends with individual aliens all the time.  "The Rull" actually ends with the human race about to enter a peace treaty with the Rull.  SF is full of war, but it is also full of trade and diplomacy and camaraderie, just like real life.  This is a weak criticism!

(Malzberg and Ellison in the texts IU am discussing today do not make the sort of standard allegations you hear from Christians, pinkos and other busybodies that violent entertainment creates a violent society or that pop culture makes people too individualistic or too consumerist or too conformist or whatever, even though in other contexts, like a film column in the January 1991 F&SF, Ellison argues that violent films cause street crime.)

Even though Ellison implies that Herovit's World "immolates" a long list of SF cliches, I am hard pressed to find many more SF cliches in the novel than that SF heroes are "too" competent and shoot lots of bad guys and manipulate people.  In the novel Malzberg notes that heroes like Mack Miller don't have sex, something Ellison makes a big deal about in his review, using the phrase "sexless heroes," and Ellison adds that they don't use the toilet.  Does every story have to have a relationship angle?  And how many stories would be improved by periodic updates on the characters' bowel movements?  I'm afraid Malzberg's attack on SF is not as comprehensive or as devastating as Ellison (in his back cover blurb) makes it out to be.

Silverberg and Ellison oversell Herovit's World, but I still loved it; it is hilarious and fascinating, on every page you find some gem of a joke or phrase.  And Malzberg doesn't oversell "The Rull."  Two masterpieces of their respective subgenres, and top examples of what their respective authors are trying to accomplish--I highly recommend both to people interested in the history of SF or just enjoyable reads.