The Future Is Now conclusion: Dixon, Banks, Russell and Goulart

Here it is, the third and final installment of MPorcius Fiction Log's exploration of William F. Nolan's 1970 all-new anthology of SF stories, The Future is Now.  I own the 1971 Playboy Press paperback edition.

"Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" by Terry Dixon

Call me crazy, but "Crotch of Mother Death!"
makes me laugh

Dixon has only three fiction attributions at isfdb, all three short stories in anthologies.  The intro to this story includes a page-long block of text from Dixon himself, who quotes Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Joanna Russ.  Dixon, it seems, intends "Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" as a very hostile parody of New Wave stories (or maybe just bad New Wave stories.)  Dixon, in the intro, suggests the New Wave writers try to shock and impress with violence and sex and with literary techniques which may appear new to SF fans but are in fact old hat, and that they are guilty of inflicting upon readers bad poetry, hollow profundity, current slang and ideas which purport to be revolutionary but are in fact banal.

The four-page story itself illustrates Dixon's complaints, employing a multitude of different typefaces and bad puns and absurdist wordplay and references to religious figures, hemorrhoids, unappealing sex and disastrous mother-son relationships.  Lampooning the excesses of innovative literary and art movements is an old game and not a particularly difficult one, but it can be fun (I enjoyed the beatnik scenes in A Bucket of Blood, for example) and Dixon here made me laugh, so I am giving "Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" a thumbs up!

"Walter Perkins is Here!" by Raymond E. Banks 

Banks, with whose work I am not familiar, has a longish list of short fiction ranging from 1953 to 1970 at isfdb, and then seems to have spent the '70s writing SF porn.  Nolan tells us he made his living as a manager at an electronics firm and of an electronics magazine, and besides SF wrote hard-boiled detective novels.  Sounds like a productive life!

Nolan in his intro warns us that "Walter Perkins is Here!" is "surreal," and it is certainly pointless, generating zero interest and zero emotion.  I hope Banks's pornography is more stimulating than this thing.  In the future everybody carries around a little receiver like an ear bud and can put it in his or her ear to receive sage advice from a supercomputer on every issue great or small.  The computer makes everybody's life smooth by managing careers, sexual relationships, and everything else.

Our protagonist Perkins decides to start ignoring the computer one day, apparently on a whim.  He gets picked up by an ambitious local politician who (somehow) turns Perkins into a celebrity and inspires everybody in the world to stop working and to party all day, every day.  Society will keep on humming because it is the computer who produces food and maintains the roads and so forth.  The pol becomes president.

A waste of time.  For some reason this slice of nothing was included in Abbe Mowshowitz's Inside Information, which I guess is some kind of college textbook on literary explorations of the effect of computers on society, or something.

"The Darwin Sampler" by Ray Russell

Look, it's our old pal Ray Russell with a two-page story.  Nolan's intro here offers a lot of info about Russell; for one thing, our pal Ted White (I actually do like White's fiction and non-fiction, and his work as an editor, so this use of "pal" is not a sarcastic gibe) thinks Russell was Playboy's best ever editor.  Also, Russell wrote the screenplay for X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes!  

In the future of the 1990s, pollution is so bad that scientists have developed a drug that can be injected in people so that they can safely breathe, even thrive on, polluted air.  This drug is administered universally, but nostalgic types want to experience clean air, and procure tanks of oxygen.  They are in for a terrible surprise when they strap on their oxygen masks and their adapted bodies reject the clean air!  Russell structures his tale as a police detective procedural following two flatfoots investigating a death, and we readers don't get the explanation of the setting until the end.

An inoffensive gimmick story that succeeds in its object.  "The Darwin Sampler" was translated for inclusion in Sirius. 

"The Whole Round World" by Ron Goulart

I have always avoided Goulart because I associate him with SF stories that are supposed to be funny as well as books that are adaptations of comics and other media properties like Battlestar Galactica, TekWar, sexy sexy Vampirella and sexy sexy Flash Gordon.  (Women find Flash Gordon sexy, right?)  But today I am embarking on this 68-page story by Goulart in the interest of squeezing every last drop out of The Future is Now.  Nolan spurs me on by telling me that Goulart is like Hemingway and by quoting Avram Davidson's assessment of Goulart as a "mordant" Swiftian who "kills cliches."

"The Whole Round World" starts off as a satire of Hollywood TV production set in a chaotic future world in which the United States military is fighting leftist guerrillas in Latin America; meanwhile, China has just nuked India into oblivion.  A computer predicts that a Tarzan-style TV show will win big ratings so a network exec commissions one, but black activists have just burned down the studio's jungle set (Tarzan be racist, yo), so our hero, assistant Tim McCarey, is dispatched to the walled estate of a rich old guy, Vincent Belgraf; Belgraf is a botany-fan who has a few hundred acres of transplanted jungle on his estate, and it is hoped that the TV peeps can rent some of it for filming.

(Don't worry overmuch about the racial politics of this story, young people--two pages after the blacks burn down the studio lot a white left-wing terrorist group named "The Pallbearers" blows up some android police as well as some private property.) 

Over 50 pages of "The Whole Round World" takes place on the Belgraf estate, and Tim's time there reminded me of Sunset Boulevard.  The estate is inhabited by a bunch of wacky characters, including a gorilla, and the Belgrafs enlist Tim's aide in writing their PR copy.  Forged correspondence plays a role in the plot, as does Tim's being the object of two women's desire.

Vincent Belgraf's nephew Clem, a former "stock-plane racer," aspires to solve the unrest afflicting the United States by taking over the country and crowning himself Emperor.  Once Emperor, Clem plans to solve the unemployment problem through public works projects, primarily the construction of concentration camps where will be interned Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and, of course, Jews: "You really can't have a concentration camp without them."  When Tim arrives Clem is still debating whether blacks should be put in the concentration camps or just exterminated: "...none of the other inmates would want to be in the same concentration camp with Negroes.  You can't blame them for that.  Building separate but equal concentration camps may prove too costly."  Clem needs an army to take over the country, and has been recruiting and training one on the grounds of the estate.  This would-be Bonaparte has already suffered a mutiny among his troops, and during that bit of unpleasantness was so severely injured that his doctor had to transplant his brain into another body--human bodies were in short supply, so, when Tim meets him, Clem's brain is lodged in the body of the gorilla from his uncle's private zoo.

The plot meanders around, focusing on a love triangle: femme fatale Laura, Clem's sister, tries to seduce Tim, but Tim is more interested in Carrie, a secretary who is being blackmailed into working for the Belgrafs.  Finally, there is a second mutiny (not due to any actions of Tim's--Tim does not drive the plot of this story) and Clem is overthrown.

"The Whole Round World" isn't abysmal, but it is a waste of time.  It fails as a humor piece because few of the jokes are funny and the satiric jabs at Hollywood and political extremists are banal and perfunctory.  It fails as an adventure or drama because it is too silly for any suspense or excitement to develop and because Tim and Carrie are characters who lack personality and do little.  The most interesting characters are the villains, Clem, an ambitious man stuck in a gorilla's body who grows increasingly insane as the story progresses, and his horny sister who is always seductively touching her own breasts, because they have powerful motivations and try to accomplish things despite insuperable obstacles, but they don't dominate the narrative enough to make the story engaging.

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Let's rank the stories in The Future Is Now from best to worst and break them into three broad categories of Good, OK and Bad, even if directly comparing stories with very different aims--the traditional character- and plot-driven stories like "Earthcoming" and "Damechild" with brief literary experiments like "Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" and "Belles Lettres, 2272," for example--is questionable:

THE FUTURE IS NOW SCORECARD

GOOD

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

"Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" by Terry Dixon

OK

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

"The Darwin Sampler" by Ray Russell

BAD

"The Whole Round World" by Ron Goulart

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by William F. Nolan

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

"Walter Perkins is Here!" by Raymond E. Banks

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

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Erudite blogger marzaat encouraged me to read The Future Is Now, and I do not regret doing so; I enjoyed some of the stories and if I didn't like some of them, well, they were by authors important enough to the SF field that it is valuable to have some familiarity with their work.

Back in 2014 marzaat reviewed The Future Is Now, and now that I have committed my own opinions to pixels I am curious to see to what extent we agree and disagree on its contents.

It looks like for the most part we are seeing eye to eye on the stories in The Future is Now.  One big point of disagreement is Terry Dixon's "Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It."  I actually found it funny, and it seems that marzaat did not.  Marzaat suggests that Dixon's main target in his satire may be Harlan Ellison, which did not occur to me.  Now that I think about it, Dixon's long and self-important introduction to his own story is reminiscent of Ellison, but I'm not sure the actual story is, though I have read only a small portion of Ellison's massive oeuvre.  Marzaat is probably more familiar with Ellison's work than I am.  Marzaat also must be more familiar than I with Alfred Bester; he suggests that the odd prevalence of typographic symbols and pictographs in the stories in this anthology may be due to the influence of Bester.

"A War of Passion" was the first story by Tom Purdom I have ever read, but marzaat has read many of his stories and, in a separate blog post, has an interesting analysis of  "A War of Passion."  Marzaat has actually written a number of posts on Purdom, part of his project devoted to looking at all of Purdom's fiction.

Marzaat's blog is definitely worth a look for SF fans, and he has a wide range of additional interests, offering insightful reviews of books on economics, for example.  Check it out!

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So we bid farewell to The Future Is Now and those photos of dolls (there really never was a story that made the cover feel appropriate, was there?)  In our next episode, another book somebody encouraged me to read via the interwebs!

The Future is Now part two: Boucher, Etchison, Nolan and Purdom

Here's the second of the three installments of our study of the 1970 all-new SF anthology edited by William F. Nolan, The Future is Now.  I own the paperback edition offered to the public by Playboy Press in 1971 with its remarkably unattractive cover illustration, an assemblage by artist Don Baum photographed by Bill Arsenault.

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

Go get 'em, John Carter!

In the intro to this two-page story Nolan lists Boucher's many accomplishments in all spheres of life.  Boucher died in 1968, but Nolan tells us that his widow found this story in his unpublished papers.

"A Shape in Time" is a convoluted and nonsensical and unfunny joke about a female secret agent who travels through time seducing men in order to prevent dysgenic marriages.  She has the ability to alter her body shape, and does so on assignments so that her figure will match the prevailing taste of whatever period she is working in.  The punchline of the story (I believe) is that while on a mission in 1880 she thought the large bustles worn by women of the time indicated that men desired women with huge hindquarters, a mistake which resulted in mission failure.

Lame.

I may think it is feeble, but "A Shape in Time" has been reprinted numerous times in several languages, including in Croatian in Sirius.

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

Back in 2015 I read Etchison's Hollywood-centric story "The Dog Park" and his quite effective "The Dead Line."  In his intro here Nolan talks a little about his first meeting with Etchison at a guest lecture Nolan gave at UCLA.

"Damechild" is a little opaque and overwritten, with long sentences full of details that somehow didn't paint clear pictures for me, but I think I have a grasp of its setting and plot.

Five thousand years ago the Earth was going down the tubes.  A transmission of some kind was received from the Horsehead Nebula, so, to preserve the species, the people of Earth constructed a space ship and stocked it with frozen eggs and sperm and launched it at the source of the friendly message.  After fifty centuries, as the ship finally approached the Horsehead Nebula, the vessel's machinery thawed some of the eggs and sperm and fertilized some eggs, producing a handful of people--they are the only conscious humans in all the universe!  Damechild, fertilized and birthed ten years before the others, was to be their leader, and spends the story acting like their mother, coaxing and nagging and cuddling them.

Damechild received a final message from the Horsehead people--due to a war and some kind of environmental catastrophe the Horsehead civilization was about to be wiped out and would not be able to shelter the human race.  So she redirected the ship to the next closest potential refuge, which is like 500,000 years' travel away.  Damechild doesn't tell the other thawed people of this disaster.  These others become addicted to sensory machines--"The sexual stimulator, the sleep stimulator, the visual stimulator, the auditory stimulator, the hunger-satiety stimulator"--and spend all their time huddled against a wall with electrodes attached to their heads.  Their minds degrade, so that they become lethargic and mentally ill ignoramuses.  At least one tries to commit suicide over the course of the story.

Etchison doesn't tell the story in strict chronological order, focusing first on the demented addicts and then telling us the jazz about Earth and the Horsehead civilization in flashbacks, with the sad final message from the aliens as a kind of climax.  Etchison tries to shock or sadden us with the suicide attempt and the bathetic message, but the characters are so flat and the style so foggy I was not moved.

   
Maybe this story would work for someone who is less cold-hearted than I am?  The plot isn't bad, it's the execution which isn't working for me--neither the emotional landscape of the people nor the physical landscape of the ship is sharp or interesting.  (Chad Oliver, whom I usually think is not very good, did a far better job of conjuring up human feeling and vivid images with his own disastrous-colony-ship-from-a-doomed-Earth story "The Wind Blows Free," which we read recently in another Nolan anthology.)   I'll rate "Damechild" barely acceptable.  "Damechild" was translated into German for a 1977 publication.

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

In the intro to his own story Nolan uses the lame gimmick of a conversation with himself, Nolan the writer pitching his "nutso" and "wild" story idea to Nolan the editor.  Ugh.

This story is pretty bad, a sort of surreal or psychedelic series of boring jokes following a sort of parody of a traditional SF plot.  It is the future (I think the 21st century) and everywhere you go robots and machines, including the furniture, talk to you and give you nagging medical and psychological advice.  Recreational sex is with a machine; sex with another person is a seldom-practiced religious rite whose purpose is procreation.  The world is run by an industry that sells (or just gives away?) drugs, and most people are addicted to the drugs.  Our hero is in the advertising department of the ruling drug company.  Nobody who actually works for the drug company actually uses the drugs--if you use them, you are thrown "outside."  Our hero is kidnapped by rebels and taken outside; at first he thinks the rebels are all drug addicts, but the opposite is the case--the rebels want to end the drug company's rule and they never get high.  They also believe in recreational sex between human beings.  Our hero enthusiastically joins the rebels.  The end.

A total waste of time.  A bad story that results from a sincere effort can be funny or interesting, but this story is lazy and frivolous; it is almost a show of contempt to the SF fans who spent money on this book.

Like "Jenny Among the Zeebs" and "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!," "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" would be republished in both Alien Horizons and Wild Galaxy.  I guess somebody must like these stories if they keep getting reprinted.

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

I don't think I've ever even heard of Purdom before.  He seems to have made his living as a kind of technical writer, but, over the decades since the late 1950s, produced quite a few SF stories.  In Nolan's intro here he lists Purdom's interests: "urban planning, arms control, wines, politics and the city of Philadelphia."  It sounds like a Temple University professor's dating profile.

"A War of Passion" is kind of ridiculous.  In the future, mankind has colonized many planets, and people can live for centuries via brain transplants, and can have their brains augmented, though brain augmentation leads to oversized skulls.  As people get along in years (like when they are 700 or so), most lose interest in sex, and even order bodies which lack sex glands so they can focus on other things.  Some people think the abandonment of sex is the abandonment of humanity, and so there is an espionage war between the sexless people known as "elders" and the "normals" who retain interest in sex.

Our hero Vostok is 1200 years old and working for the sex-loving normals.  He is on a mission, the object of which is to have sex with Makaze, a young (268 years old) woman who has lost interest in sex because the elders were using her to seduce normals and get them to have scandalous S&M sex with her.  (I think.)  All that violent painful sex has conditioned Makaze to fear sex.  Vostok is desperate to have sex with her because if he doesn't the normal leadership may wrongly suspect that he himself has lost interest in sex and is a spy for the elders--the normals would quickly move to eliminate such a spy.  Vostok's mission is particularly difficult because he has had seven brain augmentations and his head is grotesquely oversized, so Makaze finds him repulsive.

Anyway, there is an explicit sex scene which readers nowadays would likely consider rapey, a sex scene which is several pages long.  While he is having sex with Makaze, Vostok worries that the normals are about to launch an attack on him, and he must decide whether he should climb off Makaze and take control of his robotic defenses or keep banging away at her.

I guess this story is supposed to be funny, like Nolan's "Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" a parody of all those SF stories (like van Vogt's) about secret organizations of geniuses fighting a twilight war behind the scenes or about revolutionaries fighting an oppressive state, but Purdom's prose is pretty deadpan.  I'm very reluctant to call "A War of Passion" good, but because it is so crazy and feels original I'm going to judge it acceptable.

"A War of Passion" would later appear in Sirius.     

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Ouch, four weak entries.   Well, we still have four stories to go.  Maybe The Future is Now can redeem itself?