Stories from Playboy by Matheson, Beaumont, Clarke and Niven

Back in 2016 I purchased the 1971 paperback anthology Last Train to Limbo at a church sale in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  (I get around!)  This volume of stories that were originally published in Playboy includes several stories I have already read in other books, like William F. Nolan's "Papa's Planet," Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial 'F' for Frankenstein," (zoinks, this must be the story that Fredric Brown's "Answer" reminded me of a little while ago) and Fredric Brown's "Puppet Show."  But between its covers are a number of stories by authors who interest me which I have yet to read, and today we'll cover four that span the middle of the 1950s to the dawn of the 1970s.

"The Splendid Source" by Richard Matheson (1956)

This is a joke story, a spoof (I guess) of detective fiction and those SF stories in which a conspiracy of supermen who run the world behind the scenes is uncovered.  A somewhat silly rich guy becomes obsessed with finding out who writes all the dirty jokes men tell each other, and he travels all over the country, talking to bartenders and bellboys and salesmen, listening to dirty jokes and trying to figure out where they came from.  He eventually is ushered in to the secret headquarters of the centuries-old secret society of men who write the dirty jokes that are circulated by word of mouth around the world.

This story is a waste of time; it is like 20 damn pages long and my eyes were glazing over as I tried to read it.  Maybe I should note that, like an orange soda that contains no juice, this story about dirty jokes contains no dirty jokes, but just reminds you of them.  There are jokes, but they are tame.  For example, we get a list of the protagonist's earlier quixotic cultural ventures, like his unfinished contrarian books The Slums: A Positive View and Horatio Alger: Misunderstood Satirist.  Those two titles are the best jokes in the entire story, and appear on its fourth and fifth pages.     

"The Splendid Source" was reprinted in F&SF in 1957 and has since appeared in anthologies of humorous stories and in Matheson collections.  It is included in my copy of Collected Stories: Volume Two, and in the little commentary there after the story Matheson tells us that he wrote a sequel in which the hero gets into the adult film business but, for some reason, Playboy didn't buy it.

Whoa, looks familiar

"The Monster Show" by Charles Beaumont (1956)

"The Monster Show" appeared in the same issue of Playboy as Matheson's "The Splendid Source," and was also reprinted in F&SF.  

This is another joke story and another attack on television and consumerism.  I'm tripping over a lot of these lately.  Do I read SF to hear bad jokes and endless moaning from snobby smarty-pantses about how the average person is a TV-worshiping knuckledragger?  I'm suffering an acute shortage of tense stories in which a guy in a space suit uses his engineering knowledge to fight a robot!

In "The Monster Show," Beaumont takes us behind the scenes of the TV business in the consumerist future of 1976 where the TV execs use wacky slang and take drugs to endure the pressure of trying to get high ratings.  After two pages I was turning back to the table of contents to see how long this thing was--sweet relief, only eight pages.  Anyway, the bulk of this story consists of a conversation between TV execs in which one guy describes an evening's programming to another, the biggest evening of programming of all time!  The jokes Beaumont serves up consist of the kinds of exaggeration gags a dim 3rd-grader could compose--"We begin with a two-hour commercial roundup, advertising the products of our fifty-seven sponsors," and funny name jokes--one of the fifty-seven sponsors is "Chewey-Flakes."   The twist ending is that this special evening of programming is an alien plot--one of the execs is an alien spy and the night's TV shows will be putting everyone on Earth asleep so we won't be able to resist the alien invasion.  Did a child write this?

"The Monster Show" has been reprinted in Beaumont collections, and not many other places.

"The Food of the Gods" by Arthur C. Clarke (1964)

This story comes to us as an historical document, the six-page transcript of a speech given to Congress several hundred years in the future!  From this document we learn that, in the 21st century, scientists figured out how to synthesize food of all sorts from rocks and water!  Any food, from broccoli to hamburger, can be identically duplicated in a lab and mass-produced in a factory, which ends hunger and puts farms and ranches out of business.  Most people in the future depicted in this story don't even know their ancestors ate dead animals, and being appraised of this fact makes some of the Congressmen at the hearing physically ill!

The shock ending of the story comes when the person giving the speech, a spokesman for a food manufacturer, reveals that he is before Congress to complain that one of his firm's competitors is playing dirty pool.  The new food they have introduced, which is universally popular and is putting all the other food manufacturers out of business, is a duplicate of human flesh!

I'm going to call this one acceptable--it is sort of interesting and not boring or irritating, and the jokes are inoffensive.  It has been reprinted many times in Clarke collections, not much elsewhere.

 

"Leviathan!" by Larry Niven (1970)

According to isfdb "Leviathan!" is the second in a series of six or seven stories about a character named Svetz.  On the cover of a Niven collection that includes many of the Svetz stories we are told Svetz is a "Time Retrieval Expert."  The Dean Ellis cover of this collection has a pretty sincere and "sensawunda" vibe, so maybe Niven is going to break us out of our humor story rut.

In the Clarke story it is so far in the future that even the educated have forgotten that people used to eat meat from dead animals, which is hard to believe, because classic literature that the college professors of the future will read, like Virgil's Aeneid and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, include references to people slaughtering beasts and cooking them up and eating them up.  (Who could forget that scene of Francoise and the killing of the chicken?)  Well, in "Leviathan!" the people of 1,000 years in the future, when the world is ruled from the UN palace, don't have any records or knowledge of what a gila monster or a sperm whale look like.  So when the ruler of the world, the UN secretary general, wants a gila monster and a sperm whale for his zoo, and Svetz goes back in time to find them, he has no idea what precisely he is looking for!

This story focuses on the sperm whale; at the start of the story the UN apparatus already has a forty-foot fire-breathing dragon in custody which everybody calls a gila monster.  Svetz takes a sort of aircraft back in time to the mid-nineteenth century and flies over the Atlantic, hunting for a whale.  His equipment first detects a sea serpent, and Svetz, at the controls of the anti-grave devices and stun rays at his disposal, struggles with the tremendous monster, which we are told is four times the size of a sperm whale.  In the end of the story we get a literary joke (after vanquishing the serpent Svetz captures Moby Dick and brings the albino cetacean back to the future) and a hint that the reason Svetz keeps finding dragons and sea serpents and other fantastical beasts when he goes back in time is that the time machine itself is fucking up the universe.

Another joke story, but not bad.

"Leviathan!" has reappeared in Niven collections and in anthologies of time travel stories and sea serpent stories.  (Some of these anthologies get pretty specific.)

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Four joke stories, though the ones that integrated a little science into the drollery were not repellent.  I am going to be stacking the deck in an effort of avoid joke stories in our next episode, however!

1965 stories by Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Clifford Simak and James Schmitz

I was lucky enough to find a bunch of exciting SF paperbacks for a dollar each on a recent visit to a central Ohio Half Price Books.  Let's get started on the stack with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series, the paperback version of World's Best Science Fiction: 1966.  Today, four stories, all from 1965 SF magazines, by some pretty big names in the SF biz.

"Becalmed in Hell" by Larry Niven

The narrator and his comrade Eric spent four months flying to Venus, and are now exploring its dense 600 degree atmosphere from within their space ship.  Eric, I should note, is a disembodied human brain whose nerves are connected to cameras and the rockets and so forth so he can control the ship like it's his own body.  But then, trouble.  Eric can't feel the ramjets, so the narrator has to go out into the deadly Venerean atmosphere to conduct repairs.  But is the problem mechanical, or psychological?

This is a good example of the type of hard SF that seriously tries to figure out what an alien planet might be like and how NASA might try to explore it, a story full of science and engineering. Niven also includes lighthearted references to less realistic SF stories about adventures on Venus and movies about disembodied brains.

Good.

"Becalmed in Hell" first appeared in F&SF and has been widely anthologized; it actually appears in another book I own, Damon Knight's A Science Fiction Argosy, from which we read "Lewis Padgett's" "The Cure" back in 2015.

We read Bayley's "The Ship
of Disaster" in September of last year,
remember?

"Apartness" by Vernor Vinge

I think this may be Vinge's first published story; it appeared originally in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds.  Back in 2015, I praised another early Vinge tale, 1968's "Grimm's Story;" like that story, "Apartness" involves ships, which is fine by me--I can't swim, but I love stories about the sea and one of the things I miss about New York is looking at the ocean and all the ships and boats on the river and in the harbor.  "Apartness" is also a lament about racism and intolerance and man's propensity for war.

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  A nuclear/biological/chemical war has obliterated the Northern Hemisphere; South Africa and South America have somewhat stable, somewhat autocratic, societies with an 18th or 19th century level of technology (muskets, sailing ships--one elite guy has a revolver.)  Australia still has modern technology, but they aren't sharing it, feeling humanity is not ready for it yet.

The narrative follows a South American scientist (he studied in Australia) and his team; they are on board a ship of the South American Empire, on the quixotic mission of searching for Coney Island, which most of the superstitious Latin Americans of the dark future think is a floating island which travels the world (alright! a New York-centric joke!)  The scientists know better, but keep mum--it is not healthy to cross the astrologers who surround the Emperor.  Anyway, the expedition investigates a primitive settlement in Antarctica.  After some tense scenes reminiscent of accounts of Cook's voyages and scenes in which clues are discovered, the scientists learn that these Antarctic villagers are descendants of the few white people who escaped South Africa alive after the blacks won the race war there which followed the cataclysmic war in the North.  In the final scene a South African diplomat expresses the desire to observe the Antarctic tribe and gloat over the fact that South African blacks are now more advanced than the whites who oppressed them generations ago, while the protagonist worries that another apocalyptic war, this one between the African and South American empires, may be inevitable.

This story is well put together, but I've been exposed to so much anti-racism and anti-war material in my life that the story's "meaning" feels a little banal.  People nowadays might accuse the story itself of being racist: the white Australians still have all the knowledge and technology of the 20th century but refuse to share it with the Hispanics and blacks, the Hispanics are ruled by a dictator and a superstitious aristocracy ignorant enough to not know what Coney Island was, and the blacks have an empire which Vinge suggests is animated by vengeful hate.

Moderately good.

"Over the River and Through the Woods" by Clifford D. Simak

"Pastoral" is the word often used to describe Simak's work, and, sure enough, the first scene of this story features a woman in a farmhouse kitchen canning apples.  Two children come to her door, claiming to be her grandchildren.  As we readers realize at once, and the farmer's wife realizes after looking into their bags, these kids are refugees from the future, when aliens are about to take over the Earth.  The kids have brought anti-cancer drugs, which will presumably extend the life of (great-great-) Grandma, whom future records indicate will die of cancer in 1904, just eight years from the present.  Will all this alter history?  Simak raises the question but leaves the answer up in the air.  

Simak often writes these sentimental things suggesting simple farm life is better than urban modern life, and I guess if aliens were killing everybody in the 21st century, the 19th century would look pretty good.  Otherwise, I'm not really on board with his attitude.  It looks like "Over the River and Through the Woods" has come to be seen as representative of Simak's entire body of work.  Ursula K. LeGuin included it in her anthology designed for use on college students, 1993's Norton Book of Science Fiction, and it is the title story of a 1996 collection of Simak stories.  It first saw light of day in Amazing.  

Acceptable.  I can recommend it more strongly to people who enjoy scenes in which people are astounded by zippers and confused by talk of airplanes and rockets.  ("They talked of plains....and rockets--as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Fourth.")

"Planet of Forgetting" by James H. Schmitz

The last time we met James H. Schmitz he was regaling us with stories about female intelligence operatives of the far future. "Planet of Forgetting," first seen in Galaxy, is in the same vein. (Schmitz is one of those writers whom the cognoscenti tell us we should like because he includes strong female characters, and those of us who don't need to spend any more of our brief lives sitting through tendentious preaching are fortunate in that Schmitz's stories--in my experience at least--aren't satires or lectures but straightforward outer space thrillers with a woman slotted into the super spy role.)

Earth intelligence operative Major Wade Colgrave wakes up on an alien planet with amnesia--how did he get here?  As the story's thirty-odd pages unfold we switch back and forth between Colgrave trying to survive on the planet, which is full of weird animals, and flashbacks to the mission that landed him here.  You see, the evil space empire of Rala was preparing to invade the territory of the Lorn Worlds, an ally of Earth, and Colgrave was carrying to Earth the secret dossier on Rala prepared by the Lorneans when his ship was captured by Ralans.  Instead of just imprisoning or murdering him, the Ralans tried to coax him into becoming a double agent, giving him the opportunity to escape in a lifeboat, dossier in hand.  The Ralans catch up to Colgrave and, with the fortuitous aid of the local fauna, he foils their pursuit.

This is an entertaining Flash Gordon/Star Wars type of thing--Colgrave shoots lots of people with his energy pistol, puts on an enemy uniform as a disguise, is menaced by monsters, that kind of stuff.  We've all seen this sort of thing a hundred times, but some of us (including me) still enjoy it if it is done well.  Schmitz also includes fun gadgets in addition to the various types of futuristic guns, like a space suit that can fly in the atmosphere and a sort of man-hunting drone.  The explanation of how Colgrave lost his memory and the implications of this phenomenon are also good.

A solid adventure/espionage story.  (By the way, Colgrave may be a man, but the lead Ralan agent in the story turns out to be a beautiful woman!)

**********

So far World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series is shaping up to be a great collection.  More from its pages in our next episode.

**********

Thank heavens, no, Mr. Cerf.

Because I have an abiding hatred of everything from the 21st century, when my wife wants to hang out and watch TV I usually insist we watch TV shows that are 20 years old, at a minimum.  One of the individuals prominent in the middle of the 20th century with whom we have become familiar thanks to my idiosyncratic viewing proclivities is Bennett Cerf, an important publisher who was a regular panelist on What's My Line? (Libertarian types might find Cerf's memoir of his relationship with Ayn Rand interesting.)  Cerf had a reputation as a humor writer, and actually published numerous books of jokes.  My wife and I find his renown as a funny man incomprehensible, as his jokes on What's My Line are universally terrible, and the stories in the one of his joke books which we picked up at an antiques mall are practically anti-jokes, anecdotes lacking any punchline, like something out of Jim's Journal.

Anyway, it was a cause of great surprise and hilarity in the MPorcius household when I opened my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series to find Cerf's face smiling up at me from an advertisement for the "Famous Writers School" of Westport, Connecticut.  Whether this ad was included in the book by Ace, or was just used as a bookmark by a previous owner, I don't know, but the ad does include some points of interest to all you SF fans.  For one thing, Rod Serling (whom my wife, a better comedian than Cerf, always calls "Rod the Bod") is one of Cerf's partners in crime at the Famous Writers School, and secondly, a SF author I never heard of before, who nonetheless has a long list of publication credits at isfdb, Robert Lory, credits Famous Writers School with getting his career going.

Submitted for your consideration....

Click the scan below to grok the bright image of Famous Writers School presented to the world by Cerf and his cronies, and then read the Wikipedia article on the school to get a look at the shadowy truth behind the glamour.

1979 stories by John Varley, Tanith Lee, Joanna Russ, and Larry Niven & Steve Barnes

Let's check out stories from 1979 by writers I have some familiarity with: John Varley, Larry Niven, Steve Barnes, Tanith Lee, and Joanna Russ.  The stories we'll read today were selected by Donald Wollheim for inclusion in DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  My copy of the anthology features a front cover by Jack Gaughan (is that the Death Star?) and a back cover blurb from The Cincinnati Post (The Post went out of business in 2007), and was previously owned by a Shelia K. Wise (if I am reading her name rightly), who dated it "May, 1980."

Fellow SF fan Shelia K. Wise, we salute you!

Wollheim's intro to the volume includes a fun little mystery.  Wollheim tells us that he recently "spent an evening with a well-known science fiction writer and his wife whose hobby is world travel."  Another couple "with the same itching foot" was also there.  Wollheim doesn't name the couples, but I am going to put forward as my guess that he is talking about the Vances and/or the Andersons.  (Check out other SF mysteries I have hoped to solve here.)

These couples described to Wollheim visits to "primitive communities," and Wollheim reports that he told them that he thinks visiting primitive people would get pretty boring after a while, one bunch of primitives being much like another. (Microaggression!)  Then he switches gears and warns us readers that if we don't accelerate our development of nuclear and solar energy we will all be living "in mud huts" when the oil runs out.  Wollheim predicts that nuclear power plants on the moon and "solar power accumulator satellites" will arise to keep us all from reverting to primitivism; either that or it's "back to the jungle."  (How does the energy get to Earth from Luna or those satellites?  Wollheim doesn't say.  Let the boffins suss out the details!)

"Options" by John Varley

I read Varley's novel Titan shortly before I started this here blog; I enjoyed it as a sort of Rendezvous with Rama hard SF thing with added sex and violence, but I didn't enjoy it so much that I have ever felt the desire to read the sequels. "Options" is (according to isfdb) set in the same universe as "Overdrawn at the Memory Bank" and Ophiuchi Hotline, both of which I also read before starting this blog and thought were not bad.

"Options," which first appeared in Terry Carr's Universe 9, is about topics we regularly see discussed in the news in 2016: sex changes, body modification, gender roles, homosexuality, women and mothers in the workplace.  It is set on the moon, a moon that has been colonized for over a century but still has a strong kind of pioneer spirit where everybody is expected to pull together as a unified community, perhaps because Luna is in some kind of cold war with the Earth government.  Everyone on Luna is required to work, so there is no slack in the labor pool to take up babysitting duties, so mothers bring their young children into the office with them, which causes some disruption in the workplace. The 28-page story follows a middle-class family of smarties (Cleopatra King, an architect who is currently managing the construction of a food factory, and her husband Jules La Rhin don't watch TV, instead spending their free time reading books) with several kids as they grapple with a rough spot in their relationship.

Sex changes have been available on the bustling moon colony for decades, but few people of Cleo and Jules' generation have taken advantage of this wonder of modern science; 99% of people are content to stick with the sex they were born into, even though the means of changing your sex is safe, easy and reversible.  In Varley's tale sex change doesn't involve surgically reshaping your genitals or pumping you full of chemicals; instead, a brainless clone body of you is grown, a clone with the X or Y chromosomes altered so that the clone body is like a twin of the opposite sex.  They can pop your brain into this clone body and you can explore life as a different sex while your original body waits in storage; if you find you don't care for life as the opposite sex, they can just put your brain back into its original vessel.

While Cleo and Jules' generation has essentially rejected this opportunity, the younger demographic is beginning to embrace it (a newspaper which apparently did not suffer the fate of The Cincinnati Post reports that 33% of people under 20 have experimented with sex changes.)  Cleo becomes intrigued by the idea of she and Jules both switching sexes; as the story progresses it becomes clear that Cleo is at least a little dissatisfied with the traditional female role she plays in the marriage--she does most of the child rearing (including breastfeeding) and she usually is on the bottom when she and Jules have sex, to cite some examples.  She gets breast reduction surgery (symbolically becoming less feminine and more masculine), experiments with lesbianism, and has a male clone body grown for her, a process which takes six months.  Jules resents and resists these changes, and they struggle to keep their marriage alive after Cleo has her brain put in that male body and changes her name to Leo.

"Options" is well-written and well-structured, and reasonably interesting and entertaining.  A story on these topics could have been a horror story that focused on the "eternal battle of the sexes" and the natural fear of radical social and physical change (and, with the character of Jules, Varley does address this angle); instead "Options" is an optimistic piece that embraces all those liberal pieties you heard in college: gender roles are largely socially constructed, change is good, you should broaden your mind and look at things from a new perspective, etc.  Varley asserts that people who have experienced life as both sexes are superior to "one sexers," so I guess the story fits more or less comfortably in the current (2016) zeitgeist, over 35 years after it appeared.

"The Locusts" by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes  

I really liked the last Niven story I read, "Fourth Profession," and I thought all the famous Niven novels, with or without Pournelle (Ringworld, Integral Trees, Mote in God's Eye, Footfall) I read in my youth had cool science ideas and cool settings, but when I reread them as an adult they seemed a little light when it came to the literary virtues, like style, plot and character.  Let's see what's up with "The Locusts," which first was published in Analog.

An overcrowded Earth makes its first efforts to colonize extrasolar planets! A small group of Earthlings lands on barren but habitable Tau Ceti IV, their ship full of frozen bacteria, seeds, and animal embryos with which they will create an Earth-like ecology on the rocky desolate world.  All goes well for two years: grass, trees, fish, and other Earth life spreads across the landscape.  But when the colonists try to create their own families disaster strikes--their kids are stupid hairy apemen!  Heartbroken, parents begin committing suicide in dramatic ways, including blowing up their orbiting space ship!  When the kids (who can only learn like a dozen words of English and are too dim to make their own beds) become sexually mature at age nine and start having sex, the colony is shaken by a violent dispute over whether the children should be allowed to breed, or should be sterilized.

I feel like I am always pointing out how elitist and anti-democratic classic SF is on this blog, and here is another chance for me to do so.  The colonists hold a meeting, and the mass of them favors having the kids sterilized, but the most educated person among the colonists (everybody calls him "Doc") refuses to let this decision stand, taking matters into his own hands and doing the right thing. Doc steals the colony's aircraft and flees with the children to an inaccessible part of the planet, where, to figure out if the kids are truly human, he has sex with one of them and raises a big family.  (Classic SF also has its share of outre sex!)

Larry Niven is a hard science guy; here's the speculative science he and Barnes are serving up for us.  Doc's research in the microfiche library suggests the colonists' children are Pithicanthropus erectus--why are all the kids born on Tau Ceti IV these "small-brained Pleistocene primates?"  Were the colonists infected by a germ from Earth which mutated due to exposure to space radiation on the long trip from Earth, or a germ native to Tau Ceti IV?  Did the planet's greater-than-Earth gravity or longer -than-Earth day cause the change?  In the end of the story a laser message with the news from the Earth of six or seven years ago explodes all these theories--all the babies now being born on Earth also resemble Pithicanthropus erectus!

Doc points out that when grasshoppers have used up the resources in their current environs they give birth to a generation of locusts, a form more adept at colonizing new territory, and opines that the human race, having used up the Earth, has gone through a similar transformation!  Clever and aggressive homo sapiens, with its risky wars and environment-threatening technology, is perhaps less suited to colonizing new worlds than simple-minded, quick-breeding, unaggressive Pithicanthropus erectus!

This story is alright.  The ideas are good, but Niven and Barnes fail to make the characters engaging--they are just names without any personality--or to generate any emotion in the reader, even as the characters experience all kinds of deep primal emotions (the desire to have children, the desire to protect children) and extreme psychological problems (suicide, being disgusted with your own children, knowing you have wasted your life on a doomed mission.)  Moderate recommendation.    

"The Thaw" by Tanith Lee

Regular readers of this here blog will know I am a big fan of Lee's short stories, and "The Thaw" does not disappoint!

"The Thaw," which first appeared in Asimov's, is a first person narrative, written by an insecure young woman, Tacey Brice, a failed artist living in the socialistic future of 2193, when everything from housing to water to clothing is rationed and people who aren't very productive, like our narrator, live more or less comfortably on the dole. Lee writes in a smooth, unpretentious, colloquial style imbued with Tacey's anxiety and lack of confidence; Lee succeeds in making Tacey seem like a real person.

"The Institute" has contacted Tacey: for the last two centuries people of means suffering from incurable diseases have had themselves cryogenically frozen, and the government has decided to revive them. The first test case will be an ancestor of Tacey's from the late 20th century, Carla Brice, "my great-great-great-great-great grandmother.  Give or take a great."  The Institute will provide Tacey a grant if she will serve as a kind of liaison between Carla and the world of 2193, and there is also the possibility of making easy money off the publicity, so Tacey agrees.  (It is significant that Tacey agrees to participate in this project not out of a love of her family, curiosity about the past, to gather inspiration for her art or to further the cause of science, but out of a selfish desire for easy money.)

At the clinic where Carla is revived Tacey meets a young black doctor ("black as space and as beautiful as the stars therein"), with whom she falls in love (though she never tells us his name.)  The "medic" only has eyes for tall, beautiful and confident Carla.  Tacey finds Carla intimidating, and when Carla moves into Tacey's little apartment, Tacey is psychologically dominated by her ancestor--Carla makes a servant of her, and Tacey does all the cooking, cleaning, running of errands, etc, for the 20th-century beauty.  I felt like Lee was suggesting parallels between Carla and some of our traditional ideas about vampires or witches; for example, near the end of the story Carla seduces the black medic, at which point Tacey applies to him the nickname "The Prince of Darkness."

We learn the almost unbelievable truth about what is going on at the end of the story, after Tacey discovers that Carla has murdered and eaten the black doctor. Early in the story, the medic had told Tacey that religious people of the past had worried about what would happen to the human soul during cryogenic storage, but of course 22nd-century people have abandoned such silly beliefs. Well, maybe such beliefs were not so silly! Evil noncorporeal space aliens have found that they are unable to take over the bodies of living humans, but that during cryogenic storage something (the soul, perhaps?) leaves the body, making room for an alien tenant. "Carla" is the vanguard of the alien invasion force!

Full page ad for Tanith Lee novels
from my copy of
1980 Annual World's Best SF

Now that Carla has been given a clean bill of health, the rest of the cryogenically frozen people, over 4,000 of them, will be revived!  Each is inhabited by an alien, and since each alien, when ensconced in a human body, can hypnotize hundreds of humans in the way "Carla" hypnotized Tacey and the black doctor, the E.T.s will be able to enslave the entire human race!

Very good; "The Thaw" is a horror story founded on the very real feelings many of us have around people who are taller, more attractive, smarter, or otherwise superior to us--feelings of insecurity and inadequacy--and on our knowledge that all too often such superior people use their superiority to manipulate and dominate us. As well as Lee's fine writing style, I enjoyed the SF ideas and the religious overtones. I seem to recall that Lee's novel Don't Bite the Sun also depicted an atheistic and decadent future (though that future was one of plenty while "The Thaw's" is one of scarcity) in which a female protagonist discovered hints that the forgotten religions of the past told valuable truths. Another interesting aspect of "The Thaw" is the possibility that Tacey is an unreliable narrator trying to manipulate the reader. In the last few pages of the story it becomes apparent that part of Tacey's project in writing this narrative is to assuage her survivor guilt (the aliens kill humans on a whim, but Carla has promised to protect Tacey, her pet human) and to beg forgiveness from mankind for being a tool of, practically a collaborator with, the alien invaders (continuing the religious theme, Tacey twice suggests that the human race considers her a "Judas.")  Could Tacey, who goes on and on about her shortcomings, be trying to win our sympathy, and diminish her own responsibility for the catastrophe the human race has suffered, by exaggerating her faults?

Highly recommended.

"The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" by Joanna Russ

As you can see, Russ's story got the cover
of the issue, an homage to Magritte by
Ron Walotsky

I'm sure we all remember Joanna Russ, the socialist feminist lesbian college professor. Even though I'm one of those people who think that humanities and social science professors comprise a hypocritical and parasitic priestly overclass which brainwashes students in hopes of constructing a North American Soviet Union in which they will be the commissars, I can't deny that Russ is an able writer and that I have enjoyed some of her stories. Maybe "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" will be a good one.

In his intro to the story Wollheim laments that, while Jules Verne's 150th birthday in 1978 was celebrated enthusiastically (among other things, there was issued "a set of commemorative dishes"!) in Europe, Americans did nothing to mark this momentous date. Russ was the exception; "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" was written in 1978 on the occasion of the anniversary, and published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction with the dedication, "Hommage a Jules Verne" in 1979.

I have to admit that I have little direct familiarity with Verne's work (embarrassing, I know), though I have seen the various movies based on Verne's books showcasing the talents of James Mason, Vincent Price, Kirk Douglas, and Ray Harryhausen, and so have a vague idea of the plots and themes of some of his writing.  Presumably I will be missing all kinds of allusions and references to Verne's oeuvre as I read Russ's story.

I feel like it is likely I missed something, because "The Extraordinary Voyages of Amelie Bertrand" feels like a pretty pedestrian tale.  Our narrator is a Frenchman in the 1920s.  Walking through a passageway that links different sides of a train station, he has a bizarre vision of a jungle.  A woman snatches his arm and tells him that at a certain time of day (this very time!) if one enters the passage he or she will be transported to one of many other, alternate, realities.  The woman, the Amelie Bertrand of the title, describes briefly her various trips to a dozen or so other universes, where she spends years having adventures, only to return to this train station at the same moment she left, unaged.  The narrator determines to go on just such adventures himself.  The End.

This is a very ordinary story--while not bad, it is slight; there have been a million "doorway to other universes" stories, and this one doesn't describe the adventures in those other universes, just devotes a few lines to describing each of the other worlds.  Does Russ bring anything new to this shopworn genre?

Well, there are "meta" elements.  These include a direct reference to Around the World in Eighty Days and an oblique reference to George Orwell (it is suggested that "Airstrip One" may be one of Mrs. Bertrand's otherworldly destinations.)  The Airstrip One reference made me wonder if Russ was suggesting that Bertrand was travelling to worlds that were based on famous books, an idea used by Robert Heinlein in Number of the Beast and A. Bertram Chandler in at least one of the later Grimes stories.  I also wondered if the "real" world of the narrator and Bertrand might be a fictional world and not our own.

The story has some feminist and diversity politics overtones.  Bertrand has exciting adventures (e.g., working as supercargo on a whaler in the Pacific for two years) in the alternate universes, adventures she, as a middle-class woman, can't have in the "real" world.  She also shows no regrets about leaving her husband for years at a time.  It is also perhaps significant that Russ's narrator describes the heroine as "plump" and "by no means pretty," a contrast to most SF heroines.  One of the most extensively described alternate universes, a moon colony in 2089, is a sort of identity politics utopia--the finest mathematician of the time is a woman, and her colleague, a black man, is a leading physicist.

Acceptable, but no big deal.  Verne experts and Russ's devoted fans will probably get more out of it than I did.

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While the Russ is leaving me a little cold, super-editor Wollheim made good choices with the other three tales.  The Lee has the most literary and entertainment value--style, character, human feeling, and a wild surprise ending--but the stories by Varley and Niven and Barnes both have solid speculations about science and make an effort to explore the psychological and sociological ramifications of those ideas and present human drama.  And all four of these stories are ripe for some kind of gender analysis, each touching directly on women's relationships with their families and/or with society.  

In our next episode more stories from DAW's 1980 Annual World's Best SF; this time by writers with whose work I am not very familiar.

1971 stories by Larry Niven, Joanna Russ and Stephen Tall

I recently purchased a coffee-stained copy of the hardcover edition of Donald Wollheim's The 1972 Annual World's Best SF.  This Book Club Edition has a Frazetta cover with a weird color scheme that celebrates the beauty of the human body, exudes confidence, and includes a wacky robot in the background.  Let's check out some stories first published in the year of my birth!

"The Fourth Profession" by Larry Niven (1971)

This story first appeared in Quark/4, which I also purchased recently. Wollheim, in his intro to "The Fourth Profession," calls Quark "probably the farthest out of the 'New Wave' original collections."

As Wollheim hints, "The Fourth Profession" isn't really very New Wavey.  It is a very good traditional SF story, with aliens, science, a guy developing super mental powers, and a "humanity is on the brink of exploring the stars" sense of wonder ending.  I really enjoyed it.  Niven writes it in an economical style, without any extraneous distractions, but still manages to include clues and foreshadowing and interesting astronomy, chemistry, psychology, and religion, as well as speculation on how interstellar merchants might behave.

"The Fourth Profession" has a sort of detective story structure, beginning in medias res, the morning after a bartender, our first person narrator, served an alien at his bar. Through flashbacks and an interview of the bartender conducted by a Secret Service agent curious about the extraterrestrial, we gradually learn what happened last night at the bar.  The aliens are purveyors of pills that alter the brain chemistry of those who eat them, giving them memories--by eating the correct pill you can, almost instantly, become an expert in a complicated topic like a foreign language or the history of a civilization, or learn a complex skill, like how to pilot a spaceship or how to build a fusion reactor.  The pills can also alter your personality.  The alien fed the narrator and the bar's waitress some pills, and the three main characters, bartender, waitress and government agent, scramble to figure out what the pills did to them and what the alien's purpose in giving them out was.  They begin to suspect the aliens are absolutely merciless (considering civilizations like our own that have not achieved interstellar flight to be no better than animals) and that the human race is in grave danger!  In the final part of the story the bar is again visited by an alien, and our narrator uses his wits and the abilities he has gained from those earlier pills to save the day and set the human race on the course to an heroic future.  

The story I read before this one shook my faith in the written word, as I chronicled in my last blog post.  But Larry Niven has restored that faith!  "The Fourth Profession" is a very entertaining, well-structured and well-executed tale--Wollheim (and Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker, editors of Quark) were wise to publish it!  

"Gleepsite" by Joanna Russ (1971)

I've spent way too much time (in what the kids call "meatspace") with leftist college professors to relish reading fiction by one.  But when I took a chance on Joanna Russ's Hugo-winning "Souls," I found it was actually a pretty good story!  Let's see if lightning strikes twice.  "Gleepsite" first appeared in Orbit 9, and in his intro Wollheim suggests we read it multiple times.

This five-page story is a little opaque, but let's try to figure it out.  (I did read it twice!)

The setting: a future Earth in which the air is a deadly acid poison, and people now live in buildings retrofitted to be airtight.  Ninety-seven percent of the population is female because the authorities deemed men to be "inefficient."

The characters: Two middle-aged women, twins, who work in a travel office on the 31st floor of a skyscraper, and our narrator, some kind of shape-shifting creature who can breathe the poison air.

The plot:  Our narrator, at night when few people are in the skyscraper, accosts the twins and tries to sell them a device.  This device, consisting of a ring and a necklace, allows you to experience preprogrammed daydreams and even (I think) transmit your own daydreams to others; in practice the device seems to conjure up vivid and realistic illusions.  The narrator convinces the women to purchase the device, and then opens an airtight window and, sprouting bat wings, flies out into the deadly atmosphere.

"Gleepsite" is all about illusion and deception and how forms and identities are malleable and names are changeable, are arbitrary.  (As Wollheim indicates in his intro to the piece, there is no clue what "gleepsite" means.)  The narrator creates illusions and peddles an illusion-generating device, deceives and manipulates her customers, and starts calling them by names that are not their own, but which she thinks appropriate.  Thanks to the narrator, the twins will soon be creating illusions of their own and themselves acting deceptively (breaking the law in their use of the device.)

The narrator seems to have a lot in common with traditional depictions of the Devil: her bat wings, her shape-shifting nature, her seductive and dishonest bargaining, the way she corrupts the twins, and the use of the word "hell" to describe the post-apocalyptic Earth.  If we accept the fire and brimstone apocalypse at face value, it certainly makes sense for the Devil to be there, right?

But in a story about illusion, deception, and daydreams, does it make sense to accept the setting (or anything?) at face value?  Especially when we remember that one of Russ's most famous stories, "The Zanzibar Cat," is a nonsensical story in which the story itself is a fabrication of one of its characters?  I am boldly going to suggest that the setting and plot of "Gleepsite" are the daydream of a person who might find a world with almost no men congenial.  Russ herself may be such a person-- consider that (Wikipedia is telling me) she was a lesbian and anti-pornography activist, and that in "Souls" she portrays men as creeps and heterosexual sex as something disgusting. The text of "Gleepsite" itself paints men in a pretty negative light, not only suggesting they are "inefficient" but, by referring to how women in pre-apocalyptic days would dance on tables for the pleasure of male viewers and engage in prostitution, portraying the typical man as an exploiter of women.  A clue that suggests to me that the setting is not "real" but a fictional construct conceived by the narrator for her own gratification is that parts of it read like an incomplete draft of a story, with dates and minor characters' names yet to be filled in ("In the year blank-blank, when the great neurosurgical genius, Blank, working with Blank and Blank, discovered in the human forebrain....")

"Gleepsite," appears to be, in whole or in part, an insoluble puzzle.  It is hard for me to recommend it based on conventional criteria; I can't tell you it is fun or entertaining or beautiful or anything like that.  But as an unusual, mysterious, dense and thought-provoking piece, I think reading it has been a worthwhile experience.

"The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" by Stephen Tall (1971)

I didn't recognize Tall's name; isfdb indicates he published something like 20 stories and a single novel. ("Stephen Tall" was the pen name of biology professor Compton Crook.) "The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" is one of Tall's series of stories about the exploration ship Stardust.  One collection of Stardust tales, The Stardust Voyages, has the phrase "In the great tradition of Star Trek" emblazoned on its cover.  Even though I had never heard of its author, "The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" was a cover story for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and this wasn't the only time Tall's name would appear on the cover of a magazine like F&SF or Worlds of If.  I guess editors considered him a draw.

I wanted to like this traditional first contact story, and the plot is fine, but I found the story poorly structured.  There are too many boring scenes of people sitting around having boring conversations, and too much time is spent introducing these characters and setting the scene.  The beginning feels like the start of a novel.  It makes sense to spend a dozen pages introducing us to characters and setting in a full-length novel, but this story is less than forty pages, so those 12 pages feel like too big of an investment, especially since there is really no payoff--the characters' personalities don't have any real impact on the plot and they don't change over the course of the story.

Speaking of personality, the characters feel a little silly, too flat, too stock, too obvious.  There's the sophisticated English gentleman who has impeccable taste in clothes and always keeps a stiff upper lip; the gruff and cynical guy who lost a leg on an earlier mission; the sexy wife of the narrator who is a talented musician as well as a scientist; and the eccentric artist who has a "sixth sense" which provides her with uncanny insights.  The Stardust is staffed with the best scientists in the galaxy, and we hear again and again how each member of the crew is the best in his or her field--every character in this story is a genius!

The plot: Stardust is in orbit near Luna, listening to a mysterious and untraceable transmission of alien music.  None of the ship's technology can figure out where the transmission is coming from, but the crazy painter has an intuition that she expresses in her latest painting, a canvas depicting the constellations.  The evocative music is, she senses, coming from the direction of Ursa Major's tail, so thither flies the Stardust. The transmission turns out to be the swan song, dirge and S.O.S. of an alien civilization whose sun is about to go nova--the Stardust arrives just 33 hours before this intelligent species is about to be exterminated!  The narrator's sexy wife communicates with the aliens via the universal language of music (she is a guitarist) and the Stardust takes aboard the recorded history and culture of the doomed aliens, and a box full of tiny larval aliens, to be planted on a suitable planet so this noble race will not truly expire, but be reborn on a new world.

This story isn't exactly bad, but it stretches 15 or 20 ages of material to double that length--there are no villains or challenges for the geniuses to use their genius to overcome, so we end up with an  idea/mood story whose idea/mood is "how would you act if your civilization was doomed?" with lots of superfluous character descriptions appended to it.  (This story would work at least as well if the Stardust was a one-man rocket.)  Maybe the story works better as part of a body of linked stories?  I sure hope every single Stardust story doesn't spend the amount of time introducing the characters and the ship that this one does!

"The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" reminded me a little of something Heinlein or Anderson might do (supercompetent people, themes of nobility in the face of adversity, a sense of the tragic, a "liberated" attitude about sex) but lacks any style or intellectual or ideological commitment: Heinlein and Anderson usually use a story to speculate about the future, give you advice on how to run your life, and/or express their beliefs about society, economy, religion, or the government.  Tall's story doesn't do anything like that.

Acceptable, but I don't think it belongs in this book of "Best" stories alongside the well-crafted Niven or the challenging Russ.  Maybe Wollheim thought he needed a space ship story to balance the volume's more experimental content?

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None of these stories is actually bad, and the Niven is a gem, so we have a good start to The 1972 Annual World's Best SF.  Three more selections from the volume (by Michael Coney, Poul Anderson and Christopher Priest) in our next episode!

Orbit 4 stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and Vernor Vinge

On Labor Day I stopped in at Half Price Books to take advantage of the 20% off sale, and one of my finds was a copy of 1968's Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight.  I like the cool green cover, with its resonant hints of alien planets, electricity, electronics, and the ocean deep.

There's no actual intro to the book as a whole, though on the first page there is a blurb from Publishers' Weekly that, without saying "new wave," comes across as celebrating that vaguely-defined phenomenon and Orbit's role in it: "Most of the stories typify the emerging new domain of science fiction, with its emphasis less on the 'out-there' than on the 'right-here, right-now.''  In the next sentence they give their prime example, the included Harlan Ellison story.

"Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" by Harlan Ellison

My man tarbandu has made mention of this story a few times at The PorPor Books Blog, and I was glad to have a chance to read it myself.  "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" has appeared in numerous other venues, including The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, where William Stout (I love Stout's dinosaur illustrations!) gave it the comic book treatment.

Rudy, a recently discharged soldier, comes to a decrepit gothic house looking for his former fiance, Kris, whom he still loves and wants to marry, even though he hasn't seen her in eight months.  The house is full of hippies, and Kris, like the rest of them, spends most of her time out of her mind on drugs.  Rudy moves in, and helps to support the hippies by running errands, bringing in money, and serving as a presentable public face for the hippie colony, things which none of these perennially stoned goofballs can really do.  Significantly, because "love" is so much a part of the hippy "brand," Ellison shows that the druggies have lost the ability to love or care for each other--their sexual needs are like those of animals,

Ellison describes the house the way you would describe a haunted house, all weird noises and shadows, and goes beyond showing that drug use has turned the hippies into useless, filthy decadents: in an oft-foreshadowed final dream sequence/metaphor, the hippies appear as vampires, werewolves and other monsters.  Drug addiction has turned them into parasites, cannibals, who infect others with their evil: Rudy eventually succumbs and starts taking drugs himself, leaving behind his productive life (before his time in the service he had a job as a mechanic) and his sincere and human love for Kris.

This story is pretty good; it is certainly vividly and economically written, with each sentence serving the story's purpose and being worth reading with care.  As an attack on the drug culture and a warning to stay off drugs, I suppose many people would dismiss it as a sort of SF version of Reefer Madness.  Though I am sympathetic to Ellison's message here (I'm as square as they come and never drink or use drugs), and Ellison's writing is far better, "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" did remind me a little of that over-the-top anti-gun story by Davis Grubb, "The Baby-Sitter." Both stories employ horror fiction conventions to issue a heavy-handed condemnation of what their authors consider a social evil, in the process exaggerating the seductive power of the vice that has inspired their ire, and diminishing the agency of individuals.

Mild to moderate recommendation.

"One At a Time" by R. A. Lafferty

It has been a while since I read any R. A. Lafferty, so I eagerly took this chance to do so.  Lafferty is sui generis.  When you read a SF story in which a guy is swinging a sword at some other guys, it is easy to say "this story is an attempt to emulate Burroughs" or Howard, or Tolkein, and to assess the story's success by comparing it to those beloved classics.  But what can you compare a Lafferty story to?  Damon Knight, in his intro to the story, suggests "One At a Time" is like an "ethnic" tale, Irish most probably, but also argues that Lafferty's stories are probably best described as "tales unlike other tales."

Sour John, a rowdy hard-drinking type who hangs around in bars in port cities, "collects odd ones."  So when he hears an "odd one" is hanging around Barnaby's Barn, he hurries over to the tavern to meet him.  The odd one is McSkee, who eats tremendous quantities of food and drinks vast volumes of booze--he's breaking all the local records!  Sour John spends the evening with McSkee, wandering the city, fighting and whoring, living it up--for Sour John and McSkee it is such hearty, simple pleasures that make life worth living, and McSkee can handle more of such pleasures than any man alive.  Sour John tries to figure out McSkee's secret, and McSkee is quite open about it: he has learned how to put himself into a kind of hibernation, to slow down his body and literally die, and then wake up again, years or decades later. McSkee has lived for ages, but only one day at a time, each day separated by many years.

This is a fun story, and you have to suspect Lafferty is somehow referring to such central elements of Christian thought as Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, as well as exhorting all of us to live every day to its fullest.  The story perhaps contains hidden depths.

"One At a Time" would later appear in the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I own, but which is currently in storage along with most of my books.

"Grimm's Story" by Vernor Vinge

In a time that feels long ago, I guess early 2003, when I either had money or was behaving as if I had money, the wife (then my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Western Europe, staying in a hotel in London, with a friend of hers in Denmark, and with a friend of mine in Portugal.  On planes and trains I read Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky.  It was the first science fiction novel I had read in a long time, and I rather liked it.  With its interest in human freedom and technological and social change, it reminded me of SF I had read in my youth.  Some time later I read The Peace War, but thought it was just OK; I remember thinking it addressed the same issues and had the same tone as a bunch of other SF work, including Deepness in the Sky, and being disappointed because I had been hoping for something new.

It had been approximately a decade since I'd read any Vinge when I bought Orbit 4, so I decided to check out the longish (over 50 pages) Vinge contribution, "Grimm's Story."  Isfdb told me that "Grimm's Story" is a component of a fix up novel called Grimm's World, which was later retitled Tatja Grimm's World.  If the cover illustrations of this novel were any guide, the story was about a sexy girl who has a battleship--that part of MPorcius's mind which is still 13 years old thought that sounded pretty good.

"Grimm's Story" is a traditional type of hard SF story.  In this category of story, which presumably has a name that I don't know, the author imagines a planet or planet-like environment which has some physical difference(s) from the Earth--the gravity or temperature or chemical composition or whatever are significantly different.  The author speculates on how civilization and/or the ecosystem would evolve and adapt in such an environment.  This alien world is then used as a setting for an adventure story in which the protagonists must journey from point A to point B and accomplish some mission; this journey provides the author opportunity to describe different facets of the world he has designed.  Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is sort of the archetype for this type of story, but I think Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer and Larry Niven's Ringworld and Integral Trees books, and even Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, John Varley's Titan and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville qualify.

The planet in this story is a vast ocean with lots of little islands, inhabited by humans who are descended from Earth colonists who lost their high technology ages ago.  The planet is severely lacking in metal deposits; iron and aluminum are very rare, and as a result technological development has been slow.

Hard science fiction stories often glamorize scientists, engineers and merchants, and show contempt for religion and government, and Vinge delivers on these expectations.  Our heroes are an astronomer and the crew of a publishing enterprise that makes money by putting out girlie magazines and a journal of science articles and science fiction stories.  (Remember how, in his alternate world in Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov called science fiction "physics fiction?"  In "Grimm's Story" the people call science fiction "contrivance fiction" or "c.f.")  These businesspeople make their own paper and print the magazines on a huge ship that travels around the planet, delivering the periodicals.  Vinge describes the chemical and mechanical processes by which this is done, which will no doubt thrill some readers and bore others.

The astronomer, Svir Hedrigs (I just realized that when you say it out loud in the German or Scandinavian accent it seems to demand it sounds like "severe headaches") is sitting in a bar with his little pet monster that has psychic powers (hard SF is ostensibly based on real science, and yet somehow often includes characters with psychic powers, just like extravagant action-based space fantasies like Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000) when the tall and beautiful woman who runs the publishing ship, Tatja Grimm, appears and seduces him.  Grimm uses her womanly charms to persuade Hedrigs to join the publishing company on a perilous secret mission.  This mission is to infiltrate the impenetrable fortress in the capitol of the most powerful nation in the world, which is ruled by a murderous tyrant.  This dictator has the world's only complete collection of the aforementioned science fiction magazine, and he is planning to sacrifice this literary treasure to the gods!  This crime against humanity must be stopped!  The only way to rescue the magazines from the fortress is to use Hedrigs's little psionic monster to fool the guards.

In fact, the ruthless and manipulative Tatja Grimm has even bigger fish to fry than preserving old issues of her world's analogue of Analog.  She ends up using Hedrigs and his little hypnotic pet to overthrow the tyrant and make herself Queen of that powerful country.  As it turns out, Grimm isn't just the sexiest woman on the planet, but the smartest human being.  She thinks that, at the head of the world's strongest economy, she can advance technology to the point that people can fly to a neighboring planet!  And why does she want to fly to that planet?  Because she is lonely and hopes that on that other planet is a man smart enough for her to love!  On the last page of the story Grimm says:

"...I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had.  For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most...a man."    

Was that sound I heard feminists' heads exploding?

I thought this story was pretty good.  I love the idea of a huge centuries-old ship, and thought the idea that they were on a quest to save old SF magazines pretty adorable. And I thought Vinge did a decent job with Tatja Grimm, a sort of anti-hero with mysterious motivations about whom we learn more and more as the story progresses. Now I want to find that fix-up novel and see what happens to Grimm and her quest for love!

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I'm quite happy with this edition of Orbit--all three of these stories are entertaining and interesting.  (I read the included Silverberg story, "Passengers," some years ago and liked it, as well.)  I'll be reading more of the anthology in the future to see what else Knight served up the SF readers of 1968.

Orbitsville by Bob Shaw

"As far as I can tell, the object out there...the thing we have discovered is a space ship over three hundred million kilometres in diameter!"

Bob Shaw's Orbitsville, which first appeared as a serial in Galaxy in 1974, has received enthusiastic acclaim.  In 1975 it won the British Science Fiction Award for Best Novel. The book's cover is awash in high praise from such institutions as The Times Literary Supplement and from such luminaries as our buddy Edmund Cooper.  I recently acquired a copy of the 1985 Panther paperback of the novel, and this week I read it.

From its first page I was convinced that Orbistville was worthy of its renown; Shaw has a good writing style, and quickly seizes the reader's attention with compelling characters, brilliant images and a tense, suspenseful scenario.

The pollution-ravaged Earth of the future is ruled (apparently informally) by a cruel and capricious female, Elizabeth Lindstrom, President of Starflight, the firm which has a monopoly on interstellar travel.  In a time when most women take advantage of technology that can render them perfect physical specimens, Lindstrom is content to be hideously ugly and exude a disturbing odor. One of her space ship captains, Vance Garamond, is told to babysit Lindstrom's nine-year-old son for a few hours, but he botches the task--the brat falls and cracks his skull.  Knowing he faces summary execution by the erratic and autocratic President, Garamond bolts from her palace, collects his wife and son, and they flee the Earth in his exploration ship.  Unfortunately, there is only one other habitable planet known to exist in the universe, and Lindstrom basically runs that one as well.

The early part of the novel is plotted like some kind of high seas adventure story set in the 16th century-- the star ships even have to deal with interstellar weather in the form of ionic winds, and Garamond uses an ancient map to find a third habitable "planet." This is when we shift into Larry Niven territory; the heavenly body Garamond discovers is a Dyson sphere over one AU across which someone dubs "Orbitsville." The inner surface of the thing has an Earth-like atmosphere, artificial gravity, and is covered in supernutritious and easy to cultivate grass.  There is enough room on the bucolic inner suface of Orbitsville to accommodate the population of the overcrowded Earth a billion times over--Garamond has discovered a paradise, and suggests the entire human race move into it and that money and private property be abolished.

Lindstrom's space fleet catches up to Garamond's ship, but she has to put her lust for revenge on the Garamond family on hold, because Garamond is a world-famous celebrity.  (Shaw doesn't make it very clear, but even though sometimes Lindstrom acts like Queen of the galaxy and murders people with impunity, apparently there is some kind of Earth government and she has to take it, and public opinion, into consideration.) Lindstrom, who fills the role of evil businessperson we so often see in fiction, decides she will continue to charge people for transporting them across the galaxy, and immediately begins shipping in colonists to Orbitsville (or as she calls it, "Lindstromworld.")  Unlike the many college professors I've met in real life who are feverishly hunting for grant money when they aren't railing against capitalism from their gorgeous Manhattan apartments and Hamptons summer homes, Garamond practices what he preaches and refuses the monetary rewards Lindstrom offers him for finding this paradise.

Am I crazy, or is that Pete Townshend
in that space suit?

The third and final act of the 187-page book has Garamond off exploring a different part of Orbitsville's star system.  One of Lindstrom's minions sabotages his ship (oh naughty sneaky), dooming it to a fatal collision.  We get some solid traditional hard SF scenes as the scientists and engineers in Garamond's crew take up their computers and welding torches and rebuild the ship in eight hours so they can survive the crash.  They crash inside the Dyson sphere fifteen million miles from the settlement, and from the wreckage build a squadron of propeller planes so Garamond can make his way back to Lindstrom and get his revenge on her!  He expects the trip to take over two years!

Orbitsville is quite good.  The adventure stuff, the science stuff, and the character stuff all work.  Garamond is obviously the hero and Lindstrom obviously the villain, but both are interesting and nuanced, with Garamond causing many of his own problems and putting other people at risk with his negligence and selfishness, and Lindstrom idiosyncratic and even a little sympathetic in her broken-heartedness over the death of her son.  (She reminded me of Medea, a woman both evil and wronged.  This is another of those SF books which would be an interesting subject for feminist analysis; Garamond's wife is also an interesting character.)  Shaw cleverly sets up parallels between Garamond and Lindstrom: both seek revenge, and even as Garamond resists Lindstrom's authority, Garamond's own crew resists his.

The actual meat of the story, the space travel and alien artifacts, reminds me of something Poul Anderson or Larry Niven might write, but Shaw's writing style and characters are better, making for a really enjoyable piece of work.  And people who think "government is the only thing we all belong to" and find Anderson-style libertarianism tiresome will be thrilled with the last chapter, in which the formerly out-to-lunch government suddenly reasserts itself with the aid of that iconic hero of the center left, the investigative journalist, and throws Lindstrom in prison.  In an italicized epilogue we are told colonization of Orbitsville leads to absolute equality and a homogenization of mankind; Orbitsville is a trap set by ancients designed to domesticate adventurous and aggressive societies like our own.

Recommended.

The Weapon Shops of Isher by A. E. Van Vogt

"These men," she said, "go around surreptitiously using transparencies.  The first thing they discover is if you're wearing a weapon shop gun.  Then they leave you strictly alone."

Cayle's face hardened.  "Could I borrow yours?" he asked tautly.  "I'll show those skunks."

The girl shrugged.  "Weapon shop guns are tuned to individuals," she said.  "Mine wouldn't work for you.  And besides, you can use it only for defense." 

The Weapon Shops of Isher, first published in book form as a hardcover in 1951, is a fix-up of three stories from the 1940s, "Seesaw" and "The Weapon Shop," which appeared in Astounding, and "The Weapon Shops of Isher," which saw light in Thrilling Wonder Stories. (Back in late 2013 I read the version of "The Weapon Shop" which was reprinted in M33 In Andromeda in 1971.)  Early this week I read the Ace paperback printing of the novel (# 87855) from 1969 with the quite cool cover illustration by John Schoenerr.  The Weapon Shops of Isher has been reprinted many times, and served as the inspiration for numerous impressive illustrations; two of my faves are below.

Seven thousand years in the future the Solar System is ruled by the House of Isher, which sits atop a corrupt and decadent bureaucracy.  The young Empress Innelda is the latest in this long line of tyrants, and she is not happy with the status quo.  Her family has ruled for over four thousand years, but for some three thousand of those years a second power center has existed which has served to limit the depredations of the Isher government: the Weapon Shops.  The Weapon Shops sell to honest citizens small arms which are "the finest in the known universe," ray guns with integrated force fields that are proof against the government's own ray guns.  Thusly armed, a person is more or less safe from both government interference and from the many criminals the incompetent and corrupt police force is unable or unwilling to control. Dedicated to a policy of non-aggression, the Weapon Shops won't directly overthrow the government, but act as a check on its many abuses.  Over time the weapon makers hope to educate the masses and improve public morals such that a more just government will evolve.  Innelda hopes to repair her Empire by radical action, first destroying the Weapon Shops and thus increasing her own power, and then instituting reforms of the government and culture herself.

Based as it is on three separate stories, this novel follows three main plot threads; these are somewhat interwoven, but for the most part the tales of C. J. MacAllister, Fara Clark and Cayle Clark are confined to their own chapters, and the narrative periodically switches between these threads.

The heart of the novel, and its philosophical core, is the tale of Fara Clark, which was told in the 1942 story "The Weapon Shop." Fara, a small businessman in a small town, starts out the novel as the most dedicated of adherents to the Empress's cult of personality, and gradually learns of her, and his society's, corruption and decadence.  As a result he becomes a customer and supporter of the Weapon Shops.  It is in these chapters that Van Vogt presents his philosophical points ("The Right to Buy Weapons is the Right to Be Free" and "People always have the kind of government they want") and the most realistic and literary character in the novel, Clark himself.

The MacAllister plot thread, I am assuming from "Seesaw," is the briefest, and serves to ground the story in the present day and add the climactic "sense of wonder" these old SF works often strive for.  Empress Innelda hopes to crush the Weapon Shops, which prevent her from achieving totalitarian power, but the Shops are rendered practically invulnerable by technology far superior to that of the government, like their teleporters and force fields. At last the Empress' scientists have developed a form of energy that can blow away the Weapons Shops.  A bizarre side effect of the use of this new energy is to suck a man from the past, 1951 to be exact, into the present of the novel. This poor sap, reporter C. J. MacAllister, finds himself in a Weapon Shop, charged with so much "time-energy" that, should he touch anything that isn't properly insulated, he will explode with enough force to destroy the Earth.

The Weapon Shop personnel put MacAllister in an insulating space suit and sending him bouncing back and forth through time.  In a way I could not begin to understand, MacAllister acts as the weight on one end of a lever ("seesaw") of time energy, with the colossal generator that powers the Empress's new war machines on the other end. While MacAllister shifts back and forth in time, so does the generator building, which appears and disappears at intervals, buying time for the Weapon Shop boffins to develop a defense against the Empress' new weapon.  With each bounce MacAllister is hurled further forward in time or further back in time, until he is floating in space in time periods during which the Solar System is long decayed, or yet to be born.  In the mind-blowing final paragraph of the novel, we learn that it is the explosion of MacAllister at the dawn of time that created the Solar System in the first place!

The lengthiest sections of the novel come from the 1949 novella, "The Weapon Shops of Isher."  These chapters serve to add action and sex to the novel, and follow Fara Clarke's son, the somewhat listless Cayle, who has been living at home in his twenties but refuses to work at his father's repair shop.  Cayle leaves his family's little home town for Imperial City, where he experiences first hand how exploitative and inefficient the government is.  For example, while flying to Imperial City he is robbed by the crooks that the government monopoly airships tolerate (because the government gets a cut from the thieves.)

Cayle is a "callidetic," which means he is very lucky (shades of Larry Niven!) and the Weapon Shops' high council suspects he will become important in their struggle with the Empress.  They assign a resourceful and attractive woman, Lucy Rall, to watch over him, and Cayle, a hick from the sticks, definitely needs someone to watch over him in that hive of scum and villainy we call Imperial City!  Lucy and Cayle fall in love while she shows him around town, and then she spends a lot of time and energy doing detective stuff, trying to find him once he's been kidnapped.  Lucy discovers that Cayle has been put to work at "The House of Illusion," an establishment that amounts to a bordello that caters to older women who desire the company of young men.  Lucy infiltrates the House of Illusion, but before she can rescue Cayle he gets shipped to the frontier world of Mars to work as a laborer!

In the end, Cayle, hardened by his experiences in the big city (like being whipped in the House of Illusion) has the audacity to get his ass back to Earth and into the Imperial court, where he makes cunning use of time travel to neuter the Empress' new super weapon, save the Weapon Shops, make himself rich, and marry Lucy.

My favorite parts of the novel, beyond the material in the original "The Weapon Shop" story, are probably the descriptions of life in the decadent metropolis of Imperial City.  Van Vogt tells us all about the futuristic devices (energy drinks, hand-held lie detectors and x-ray machines, air taxis, solar power, etc.) there and the innumerable skyscrapers, like the 80-story-tall men's clothier which occupies three city blocks.  There you can buy a swimsuit or a ski parka, and then use them on the artificial indoor beach or ski slope encompassed within the store's vast acreage.  The House of Illusion scenes are also quite good.  Van Vogt succeeds in making the strange Empire of Isher come to life.      

The Weapon Shops of Isher is a classic of Golden Age SF, full of crazy ideas and plot twists that are all a lot of fun.  It is also recognized as an important text in the history of libertarian SF, having been inducted into the Prometheus Hall of Fame in 2005. Definitely worth the time of the classic SF fan.

Next up, the second novel of the Isher saga, The Weapon Makers.