Another six tales from Generation: O'Neil, Toomey, Carter, Sky, Pumilia and Hensel

There are twenty-five stories in Generation, David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1972 anthology of stories by writers lauded as "the most dazzling new stars of science fiction."  Some of these "stars," like Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, Piers Anthony, the mysterious James Tiptree, Jr., and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, went on to have careers highly successful critically and/or commercially.  Others are people I rarely or never hear about.  Let's check out six stories by those relatively minor writers.

"...After They've Seen Paree" by Dennis O'Neil

The wife and I were recently in Dayton Ohio, at Carillon Historical Park, where you can see old locomotives, a plane built by the Wright brothers, lots of old cash registers, and that sort of stuff.  They have an exhibit on World War One which includes a Lewis gun and a 3-inch field gun.  Worth a few hours if that is your thing.

Anyway, the title of O'Neil's story brings The Great War to mind, and, like the song for which it is named, the story is about people who are changed by contact with the big city and with war.  As he does with the title, O'Neil fills the story with literary and historical allusions; Virgil, the Bible, Dylan Thomas, etc.

It is the post apocalyptic future!  Near a ruined city, a tribe lives simply and primitively, having sworn to eschew the evils of the past: the Democratic and Republican parties, TV, booze, etc.  Our protagonist, Norman*, is about to have sex with his cousin Tresa when a Volkswagen microbus with a computer brain kidnaps her and carries her off to the city.

Our hero spends a year reading the forbidden books (combat manuals with silly titles-- this story is supposed to be funny) in preparation to liberate his cousin from the city.  When Norman invades the city he battles the two last remaining U. S. Army soldiers and their battleforce of robot cars; Tresa is still alive, soldiers having kidnapped her for use as a sex slave.  Norman also learns the cause of the apocalypse, a race war which saw a cataclysmic exchange of fire between satellites and ground installations.

Norman brings Tresa out of the city, but she has changed.  Not only did the soldiers' surgical robots fill her breasts with silicone, but contact with the military and with urban decadence has turned her into a saidst who is sexually aroused by violence and a slacker who refuses to work the subsistence farm with the rest of the tribe.  The sweet and innocent Tresa is gone, and Norman considers killing her to expunge the tribe of her corruption (this resort to violence a reflection of his own corruption.)

Acceptable; the story moves at a brisk pace, gives you lots to think about, and the jokes, while not exactly funny, are not annoyingly poor.  According to isfdb, O'Neil has written several novels and over a dozen short stories; most of them seem to be about DC Comics characters.

*Norman is a good name for writers to give an "everyman" character because it sounds a bit like "normal" and "no man."  Ray Davies named the mentally ill office worker in The Kinks Present a Soap Opera "Norman," for example.  

"The Recreation" by Robert E. Toomey, Jr.

A lame gimmick story, less than two pages.  God is just like a short story writer: he creates planets and tries to sell them, does hackwork to make ends meet, gets depressed and turns to booze.  Earth is a planet he has been unable to place; while under the influence of a hangover he revises the Earth, adding humankind--the joke is that human beings are terrible because God made us when he was out of sorts!

Toomey is credited with a single novel at isfdb as well as seven short stories.  "The Recreation" would later appear in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, a book I borrowed from an Iowa library a few years ago.

"Constitution in E Flat" by Paul E. Carter

Carter has eleven short stories listed at isfdb.  In 1977 Columbia University Press published a nonfiction book he wrote about SF magazines which looks like it is probably pretty cool.

"Constitution in E Flat" is set in a future United States overtaken by authoritarianism and decadence. The air outside is too polluted to breathe without nose clips or some kind of filter mask, and the US is involved in a world war on a broad front in Latin America and Africa.  This story takes place in a  noisy club where there are go-go dancers and all manner of drugs are for sale; a composer has set the text of the Constitution to music, and at the club is meeting two government representatives and the head of the Musicians Union to discuss the new composition.  (This is apparently a fantasy world in which people still care about symphonic music.)  One of the government guys expresses skepticism about the composition, and then the other one has him arrested on the pretext that this is evidence of insufficient patriotism.

I guess this story is supposed to remind you of Soviet Russia where government officials are always stabbing each other in the back and art is under the control of the State (the government guy who is not arrested has a sort of Russian-sounding name, "Rikhoff"), and suggest that the American people are becoming deracinated, divorced from their political and cultural heritage (in the final lines a singer sings "Ave Maria" in Latin but nobody in the club understands the words.)  This sounds like the basis for an interesting story, but something about Carter's style made my eyes glaze over and I kept forgetting which authority figure was which; I don't know, maybe it's me.  Merely acceptable.        

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" by Kathleen Sky

As I think I have mentioned before, Gerrold's introductions for stories in Generation by women come off as sexist by today's standards.  In his intro to "One Ordinary Day, With Box" he tells us that there is "certainly" no woman in the world sexier than Sky, and then shares his theory on what a "truly liberated woman" is: "not one who has forsaken her femininity, but one who has accepted it and wears it without falsity."

(For some reason Gerrold refuses to provide us readers any insights into the earthy masculinity and raw sexual magnetism of Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg.)

isfdb tells us that Sky has published five novels (two of them about the trials and tribulations of the crew of the starship Enterprise) and eight short stories, two of them collaborations with her husband (from 1972 to 1982), Stephen Goldin.

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" is an acceptable Twilight Zone-style story.  A greyish man carries around with him, from town to town, a light but bulky black box.  It contains, we are told, not what people want, but what they need.  For example, when a wretched drunk reaches into the box he gets a healthy sandwich (not the cash he wants) and when a boy-crazy teenage girl reaches into it she gets birth control pills.  People, we learn, always reject what they truly need.

This is a good enough premise, but the ending is a little weak.  When the greyish man reaches into the box himself, he just gets another box (the original collapses.)  "One Ordinary Day, With Box" was translated into German for Science Fiction Story Reader 5, and also appeared (like Roger Deeley's The Shortest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told, also from Generation) in Reflections of the Future: An Elective Course in Science Fiction and Fact.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" by Joseph E. Pumilia

We've actually encountered Pumilia before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, when we read "Hung Like An Elephant," which Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley.  That story was also purchased by Gerrold and Goldin, for Alternities.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" is about an immortal creature of pure energy who guards one of the spots where the different universes touch; if energy should leak from one universe to another then chaos could result, stars dying or exploding, the laws of physics breaking down, etc.  The Porter has to fight evil energy creatures who want to break into his universe and cause mayhem, and he faces his greatest challenge when a female energy creature seduces him and tricks him into opening the gate.

This is one of those stories that isn't actually bad, but just sits there.  Acceptable, I suppose.              

"A Sense of Thyme" by C. F. Hensel

This is one of those stories in which Death is an elegantly dressed man who walks with a black walking stick and drives a black Rolls Royce, who comes to you when your time is up and drives you to the train station to get on the train to the afterlife. Are there a lot of people who actually like these kinds of stories?

My mother used to tell us kids that the Santas we'd see in stores and elsewhere were Santa's helpers, and in this story there are numerous representatives of Death driving around in black Rolls Royces, each with a schedule to keep.  The Death in this story was a normal person horrified of death who joined the "firm" at the age of 19 because such a position confers immortality.

Today he is collecting an old woman reputed to be a witch.  She too, he learns, made a bargain to gain immortality and wisdom, many, many, years ago, but then gave up immortality to return to the mainstream of human life:

"It eventually occurred to me, my dear, by virtue of that wisdom gained at such cost, that I was imprisoned.  Trapped....As long as I never aged, I never learned the lessons of age.  I never developed....I became inhuman...."  

This is a sentimental story with lots of descriptions of the witch's beautiful eyes and a long scene in which Death cries and so forth.  I'm kind of shrugging it off, but I suppose some will find it moving and find the story's argument, that being immortal would be lonely and unfulfilling, comforting in a sort of sour grapes way.  Acceptable.

The "C." in C. F. Hensel is short for "Christina," and in his intro Gerrold tells us Hensel is "sexy" and "feminine."  Hensel has three stories listed at isfdb; the other two are collaborations with Stephen Goldin.

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All six of these stories feel like filler.  Too bad!  In retrospect, compared to the rest, the O'Neil feels ambitious, full of allusions and social commentary, while the Toomey looks even more like a lazy piece of junk.

In our next episode I will read the two James Tiptree Jr. stories to be found in Generation, and then I can proudly say that I have read every single story in the collection.  (I read Stephen Goldin's "Stubborn" back in late 2014 when I was flipping through 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.)  Stay tuned!

Return to Alternities: 1974 tales by Jack C. Haldeman II, Robert Wissner, Arthur Byron Cover, and Steven Utley & Joe Pumilia

Let's dive back into that "nova of superb new young writers," 1974's anthology from Dell, Alternities, edited by David Gerrold of "Trouble with Tribbles" fame.

My copy of Alternities was previously owned by a Fred Thivener, who had one of those cool embossing devices.  One is led to wonder what Fred thought of Alternities, if he "relished and remembered" the stories we will be talking about today.  (Unless I am mixing up one Fred Thivener for another, the man who owned this book was an important person here in Columbus and received a pretty extensive obituary at the Dispatch.)

Fellow SF fan Fred Thivener, we salute you!

"Sand Castles" by Jack C. Haldeman II

This story is a pointless waste of time, and it is 17 pages long!

Two men, astronauts, are stranded on an alien planet after their ship crashes.  The remarkable property of this planet is that, while upon it, the men's thoughts are made manifest--the narrator imagines a dish of ice cream and it appears and he eats it.  His comrade imagines a stack of Playboy magazines and they appear and he cuts out the centerfolds and pastes them into a scrapbook.  The men have to make an effort to make things appear, and have to have extensive knowledge of the thing they are trying to conjure up; it seems that wishing into existence a means of transport back to Earth, or even of communicating with Earth, is beyond their abilities.  If attention lapses, things created in this way can simply fade away.

There are friendly natives on the planet, though they may be simply more creations of the narrator's imagination.  You cannot trust that anything in this story is real.  The natives say things about time ("The concept is fuzzy to us") and facts ("Facts are fuzzy things and are open to a great deal of interpretation....I don't see why you bother with them") that add to the story's pervasive feeling that nothing is real and no knowledge is reliable.

Maybe Haldeman is trying to say something about epistemology and causality, that you can't trust your sense impressions and we have no real reason to believe in cause and effect (maybe this story is Haldeman's response to just having read some Descartes or Berkeley or Hume?)  Haldeman doesn't use the scenario to tell a traditional story--the characters don't learn anything or accomplish anything, and nothing happens to inspire any feelings in the reader beyond frustration and boredom (it is not one of those stories in which the mystery is solved in the end.)  Haldeman just piles on crazy images (aliens hunting with Duncan yo-yos, a horde of three-inch tall people, a 300-pound black man sitting on a throne surrounded by naked girls and wearing a "Gay Power" T-shirt) and boring jokes (a simulacra of the narrator's sister is conjured up and the narrator tries to prevent his fellow castaway from having sex with her.)

Quite bad.  This printing here in Alternities constitutes the sole appearance of "Sand Castles" before the public.  This Haldeman, brother of the Haldeman who produced MPorcius-approved novels like Mindbridge and the enduring classic Forever War, has a long list of publications at isfdb and presumably most are superior to this thing.

"The P. T. A. Meets Che Guevara" by Robert Wissner

Wissner has five credits on isfdb, one of them unpublished because it was to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive Last Dangerous Visions.  That's right, folks, Ellison's indifference and incompetence are keeping 20% of this gentleman's literary output from his fans (if any.)

This story, five pages, is a first-person narrative describing an emergency P. T. A. meeting from the point of view of a father in attendance.  The meeting has been called because of an outbreak of vandalism at the school.  Feminists will note how much of the five pages are taken up by the narrator's assessments of various female teachers' physical attributes and sexual desirability.  There's nothing funnier than jokes about how an old fat woman probably never had sex, am I right?  The SF component of the story is the narrator's fantasy that the troublemaking kids, including his own eight-year old daughter, are revolutionaries who may break into the P. T. A meeting and murder the faculty as well as any parents who resist.

This story is not good, but it kept my attention and inspired some kind of reaction in me, so has managed to claw its way into the lower reaches of the "barely acceptable" category.

"A Gross Love Story" by Arthur Byron Cover  

A look at his credits on isfdb is giving me the idea that Cover is a writer promoted by Harlan Ellison whose work is meant to be funny.  He also has written books in shared universes and TV and computer game tie-ins.  (Damn, I haven't thought about Planetfall in years.)

In 2009 tarbandu reviewed Cover's first novel, Autumn Angels, (he awarded it 3 of 5 stars), which he tells us has a long intro from Ellison.

"A Gross Love Story" appears to us as a script or screenplay, consisting mostly of dialogue between characters A and B.  The setting is a graveyard at night, with a castle in the background.  (Despite the castle, the thing takes place in America.)  A and B are graverobbers in the employ of a vampire they call "the doctor" (he also conducts Frankenstein-type experiments.)  The dialogue consists largely of juvenile jokes: B is a "retard" from being hit in the head too often by his mother and consistently says "William G. Buckley" instead of "William F.," while A is a homosexual who was born without a penis and laments that the doctor is a prude who won't let him bring "cute boys" to the castle and declares "I was born without a dick but I wasn't born a homosexual!  Queers are made, not born!"

There is stage direction, like when A and B have to hide behind a tombstone because drunken Irish cop Clancy is walking by.  (Yes, this is the second drunken Irish cop in Alternities.  Erin go bragh!)

They dig up a beautiful young woman, recently dead, and B falls in love with her and is inspired to have sex with the corpse, but halfway through foreplay loses interest when he learns the girl was Clancy's sister, a slut.  Like the doctor, B is a prude and wants his first time to be with a virgin.

Bad, but so audaciously and single-mindedly childish, vulgar and insensitive to today's protected classes that I think it merits elevation to the "barely acceptable" category.  It is sort of like an intentionally crude and offensive underground comic, and I think those who appreciate that sort of thing may appreciate "A Gross Love Story."

"Message of Joy" by Arthur Byron Cover

This is a first-person narrative of an insane person living in a future Earth which suffers overpopulation and mass unemployment and is run by a sort of totalitarian government which pacifies the populace by handing out marijuana.  Our narrator is rebellious, and is (or at least he believes he is) wanted by the government for starting a riot during which many people were killed.  The story includes copious use of slang and colloquialisms made up by Cover, like "flippers" for feet and "fin" or "claw" for hand.

All of a sudden, while laying in bed, high, the narrator comprehends the secret of perfection and happiness, represented in the story by a brief tune: Dum-de-la-dum.  He goes out on the street to try to share the secret of perfection with people.  People are not interested.  He hires a prostitute and murders her, then starts fights on the street until knocked unconscious.  The End.

There's a glimmer of something happening here (I can imagine Malzberg doing something like this), but not enough to be worth your time.  Thumbs down.

"Womb, with a View" by Steven Utley

Utley has a long list of short fiction and poetry at isfdb, though I have never read him before.

"Womb, With a View" is about a gynecologist who bent over a patient, "separated her labia and peered up her" and found himself gazing upon the star-spangled blackness of deep space!  Is he insane?  No, his nurse sees the same thing!  Then small flying saucers start flying out of the poor woman!  Alien invaders put a space warp in this poor woman's reproductive organs!

This is a gimmicky trifle of a story, but it is competent.  Acceptable.

Utley is big in Germany

"Hung Like an Elephant" by Steven Utley and Joe Pumilia

We are used to reading SF stories that ask questions like: What would it be like if aliens invaded the Earth?  What would happen if the Earth colonized the Moon?  What might life be like on a planet with extremely high gravity or in the zero gee of space?  What will government, the family, religion, the environment, war, and crime be like in the future?  Well, Steven Utley seems to specialize in asking the question, "What if something impossible happened to somebody's crotch?"

The narrator of this story wakes up one morning to find that his phallus has fallen off and been replaced by the "lemon-sized" head of an elephant. For good measure, his navel has been replaced by a mouth which sings 1950s rock and roll.  He discovers his penis crawling around the bed like a bewildered worm, and he puts it in a jar.

(Remember when Rael and John met Doktor Dyper and then that giant bird?  Damn, that was really something.)

The narrator's girlfriend, thinking him joking, storms out, and his doctor has no idea what to do.  Religious people debate whether he is a miracle, a guru, or the devil, and a freak show tries to hire him.  Our hero decides that he is just the latest of the jokes God has been playing on the human race, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Battle of Little Big Horn, events impossible which insist on happening anyway.

Too long and disorganized, this one slips below the "acceptable" criteria to earn a marginal negative rating.

"Hung Like an Elephant" was co-written with Joseph Pumilia.  A quick glance at his isfdb page suggests Pumilia has mostly written "weird" stuff, by which I mean Lovecraftian horror, Robert Howard-style fantasy, and erotic horror.

Interestingly, both "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb, with a View" were translated into German; they never appeared in English a second time.

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Alternities is shaping up to be a quite odd and quite poor anthology.  But we still have five stories to go, including stories by perhaps the biggest name authors in Alternities. Maybe in our next episode, when we talk about those five pieces, we'll find reason to revise our opinion of this unusual project of David Gerrold's.