Destinies, Fall 1980: F Saberhagen, G Benford & D Drake

A while ago I bought a copy of the Fall 1980 issue of Destinies for a dollar.  Destinies was a quarterly magazine in the form of a paperback book edited by Jim Baen; the Fall 1980 issue is the ninth of eleven published issues.  This one has a space war cover by Vincent DiFate and includes a bunch of essays by SF luminaries like Robert Heinlein, Frederik Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, and Joe Haldeman that speculate on the future of war and space colonization and stuff like that; there are also book reviews by Norman Spinrad.  But it is the fiction I will be looking at, stories by Fred Saberhagen of Berserker fame, Gregory Benford-- an actual scientist--and David "Hammer's Slammers" Drake.  James Gunn's name is on the cover but I don't see it on the table of contents.

"Recessional" by Fred Saberhagen 

"Recessional" here in Destinies is illustrated by Stephen Fabian, who contributes two female nudes reminiscent in composition of something from a detective magazine and an effective if traditionally composed mad scientist drawing.  I am a Fabian fan, so these are welcome.  "Recessional" was reprinted first in an anthology edited by Saberhagen himself, and went on to be included in two different Saberhagen collections.

"Recessional" is an allusive and somewhat surreal story, a sort of science fiction crime tale with meta, perhaps autobiographical, elements.  It works, and is pretty economical, so I can mildly recommend it.

Our nameless main character is a science fiction writer who is fascinated by the hard sciences and reads the legitimate academic science journals; he loves jargon and includes lots of science jargon in his fiction.  The story follows him as he leaves a science fiction convention on the east coast and drives west.  We readers get lots of clues that, one, he is passing in and out of alternate universes, places where the United States and his own life are slightly different, and two, that he murdered his wife and threw her into the ocean or (in some other universes) maybe a major river, either years ago or (in some other universes) very recently.  As he travels from coast to coast he sees TV shows and hears radio reports about a new scientific technique that allows scientists to scan dead skulls and pick up images from the bone of scenes the dead person witnessed while alive.  There is some suspicion among the scientific community that the images thus collected may not be quite accurate representations of reality, that what the scientists are seeing may be warped by the expectations and biases of the original, now dead, viewer and by the current viewer who is gathering the images today.  Also, some experts fear that the technique of gleaning the images from the skulls, which involves radiation that alters subatomic particles, may warp reality, may be creating or exposing alternate universes.  The writer also keeps hearing news reports about the police finding dead bodies of women on shores and river banks.  We readers have to assume that it is likely in one or another universe that the cops are going to scan the dead skull of the writer's wife and discover who she is and who murdered her.

"Pick an Orifice" by Gregory Benford

The title makes us expect this is a sex joke story, and that is what we get.  It is the near future and some eleven-year-olds whose fathers are computer engineers get their hands on some powerful new software.  They use it to create wild and crazy pornography, people having sex with vacuum cleaners and animals and monsters and so forth.  Benford goes, a little, into some of the theory of how a computer might model three dimensional objects, and into the social implications of computer-generated cinema--in this story actors and directors become a thing of the past, as a computer can do their jobs, and the kids own copyright to the porn they create and so they make a lot of money when their porn becomes famous.  

Weak (though not actually boring or repulsive) as a piece of fiction, but perhaps prescient when we consider how today AI threatens the work of so many middle-class professionals and people in the entertainment industry as computers increasingly demonstrate the ability to manipulate words and images into coherent documents that consumers will accept as readily as that fashioned by human minds.  We'll call "Pick an Orifice" acceptable.

isfdb suggests "Pick an Orifice" has never been reprinted, making Destinies Volume 2 Number 4 essential for all you Benford completists out there.     

"The Automatic Rifleman" by David Drake

Here we have a story which has reappeared in three different Drake collections.  "The Automatic Rifleman" is too long, moves slowly, and is a little overwritten and silly, with lots of superfluous detail and over-the-top characters, but it isn't actually bad.  We'll judge it acceptable filler.

We've got four characters.  Setting things in motion is a big black dude who is educated and very concerned about pollution and injustice and all that.  He has decided to strike a blow for justice by murdering a Japanese politician who is visiting the United States.  He has two henchman, a short angry "swarthy" veteran and an angry blonde woman, I guess the black guy's girlfriend.  As the story begins these three terrorists arrive at an unscheduled meeting with a fourth individual, a man who claims to have the skills and equipment to ensure they succeed in assassinating the politician.  This guy has an unusual automatic rifle which never leaves his hand.

We get a lot of scenes in which these four macho characters demonstrate how much they dislike each other and try to one-up each other and prove to each other and themselves how tough they are.  The science fiction content consists of the repeated hints that the guy with the strange rifle has participated in many famous assassinations, such as those of JFK and MLK, and that the rifle is alive or a robot, the representative of space aliens who are manipulating Earth history and society through targeted killings of influential Earthers.  There's a long sequence about ranging in weapons, then the scene of the actual assassination attempt, and then the resolution of the conflict between the mysterious man with the advanced rifle and the swarthy guy who has been suspicious of him the entire story.

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Of today's three stories, Saberhagen's is the most ambitious and literary, the one that actually succeeds in depicting a human character and generating some kind of human feeling.  Benford's succeeds in the realistic-speculations-about-the-future game, even though it is a dirty joke story and a get-rich-quick wish fulfillment fantasy.  Drake's tale is a sort of men's adventure version of a Twilight Zone story with its obvious twist and all the padding consisting of macho men trying to psychologically dominate each other with their tough talk and by brandishing guns and knives.  

These stories are not great, but they aren't bad, either, so we shouldn't complain.  One thing that perhaps links the stories together is a sense of 1970s pessimism; Saberhagen suggests SF cons aren't fun anymore and has a broken marriage at its core, Benford's story features broken homes, high energy prices and lonely suburban latchkey kids with nothing to do, and Drake's is all about social unrest and urban terrorism.  

So, an underwhelming and perhaps slightly depressing foray into the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  But we've seen much worse.  Who knows what we'll turn up next among my purchases of the last ten years?  Stay tuned to find out.

Odyssey, Spring '76: T N Scortia, R Bloch, F Pohl, J Pournelle & F Saberhagen

In May I visited an antique store in Carlisle, PA and among the SF-related things I saw--but was too cheap to buy--was the Spring 1976 issue of Roger Elwood's magazine Odyssey, a magazine which published a total of two issues (this being the first.)  Let's take a break from the 1930s and check out five (count them--five!) stories from Odyssey.  Our hero Barry N. Malzberg has a story in the issue, but we'll skip it and read it soon in its book appearance in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, which we've been reading on and off for a while.

"Someday I'll Find You" by Thomas N. Scortia

Here we have a banal twist ending story about how politics corrupts idealistic men.  Oy, if I wanted to read about a corrupt politician who, scared by his falling poll numbers, contrived to unjustly prosecute his rival in the upcoming election, I would just read the newspaper.

A guy has been chief executive of the planet for twelve years. This civilization has small scale nuclear reactors, hover cars, video phones, 3D TV...and a big problem.  In the last decade, due to radioactive contamination, the population of this world has declined from ten million to 150,000!  The Prime Executive's political party has been pouring all public resources into a desperate project--building a space ship that can reach the presumed home planet of a similar alien race whose space probe landed on this planet some years ago. This probe, we readers are made aware, is a NASA probe from Earth, but it must have been launched so long ago there is no telling if the human race is still even alive.

The rival political party thinks the space ship a waste of scarce resources and the idea that the planet from which came the probe fanciful; they propose devoting public effort to setting up a living place in subterranean caverns.  The big election is tomorrow, and it looks like the cavern faction is going to defeat the space ship faction.  So, the Prime Executive's top guy manufactures evidence that the cavern faction's candidate is a thief, and the Prime Exec meets the pro-cavern candidate secretly to try to blackmail him. But cavern boy wasn't born yesterday and records the Prime Executive threatening him and releases this recording to the media.  The cavern people win the election.

But the unscrupulous starship party isn't licked yet!  The ship is almost finished, so they decide to just steal it before inauguration day and blast off for the location the boffins have theorized is the probe's point of origin, taking with them all the engineers and technicians left in the world.  The lack of technical people will make the cavern project the voters supported impossible, but the pro-starship politicians just shrug that off--as we can see every day in real life, elected officials in general have contempt for the voters.  The Prime Executive's wife refuses to join him in this treacherous voyage so, demonstrating his abandonment of personal as well as political integrity he drugs her and drags her aboard.

Everybody on the ship goes into suspended animation, hoping to wake up in orbit around a healthy planet they can live on.  The twist ending is that the planet they just left is Earth--the culture that created the NASA probe fell so long ago it has been totally forgotten--those scientists who deduced the probe's point of origin as another system made a major miscalculation.

The plot outline isn't terrible, but it isn't great, and the style is a little tedious, with lots of superfluous description of how a 3D TV works and that sort of thing.  Barely acceptable.  "Someday I'll Find You" has not, it appears, ever been reprinted.

"ETFF" by Robert Bloch

This story is advertised as "ROBERT BLOCH'S FIRST S.F. WORK IN YEARS!" on Odyssey Vol. 1 No. 1's table of contents, and while it is sadly lacking in actual speculations or science, it is directly aimed at the market of committed SF fans, and in fact has almost no appeal to the casual reader who has only dabbled in SF or knows SF primarily from 2001: A Space Odyssey and old Flash Gordon material.

"ETFF" is a long and tedious inside joke story, lacking in plot and character and human emotion, basically a forest of puns rooted in a mountain of flattering references to SF personalities and perhaps less flattering satires of various SF fan demographics.  When Malzberg does this sort of thing (consider Dwellers of the Deep and Gather at the Hall of the Planets) he provides real human feeling and a sharp controversial edge, but Bloch's story here is absolutely frivolous fan service.

Aliens are studying the Earth, and one of them has made a particular study of SF and become a SF fan, and so dons human guise and attends a SF convention in Connecticut.  (Bloch was famous for being the life of the party at such conventions.)  One of the more memorable SF-centric puns comes when the alien, who can heal people just by touching them, is alerted that a hemophiliac girl requires medical help--he says “Take me to your bleeder.”  One of the more vulgar gags has the alien, wanting to thank everyone for being so accommodating, using his miraculous powers to create out of thin air a Hugo award for every attendee; as you know, these awards are shaped like rocket ships, and the alien's wording of the spell, that a Hugo appear “under everyone’s seat,” leads the hard metal objects to materialize, dildo-like, in each and every attendant's anal cavity.  (I guess I am reading this story in the appropriate month.)  

Less memorable are the bog standard jokes that we have heard a million times about how people like to drink booze and how readers and writers have disagreements with editors and publishers.

Of historical interest to us SF fans is the use of fannish slang like “egoboo” and “filk” and caricatures of, among others, Forrest Ackerman (Ackerman is such a film fan he passes up a chance to meet a real extraterrestrial in order to screen Metropolis for the hundredth time) and New Wavers (they are obsessed with sex.)  One of the gags of special interest for you students of gender studies is when the alien attends a feminist panel.  The speaker declares she deserves all the privileges enjoyed by men, and the alien is convinced she is right, and helpfully transforms her into a man.

Thumbs down. "ETFF" is of historical value only.  (Bloch seems like a good guy, and I don't begrudge him writing a love letter to the people and institutions which brought joy to his life, but I'm not going to pretend this is good fiction any more than I am going to pretend a child's crayon scrawls hanging on his loving parents' fridge are good drawings.) 

"ETFF" was reprinted in the 1989 Bloch collection Fear and Trembling, even though the cover blurbs promise terror, personality and plot, none of which are to be found in "ETFF."

"The Prisoner of New York Island" by Frederik Pohl

I lived in New York City during the Giuliani and Bloomberg periods, and when I go back, as I had to this weekend (though only to Brooklyn), things look and feel different in a way that is disinctly disappointing--most strikingly, the Manhattan skyline looks different than I remember, quite wrong, to my mind, unbalanced and undistinguished.  "The Prisoner of New York Island" has a little of this kind of energy.

It is the future, 2076!  The America of the Tricentennial looks very different than that of the Bicentennial!  "The Prisoner of New York Island" follows two people from Arizona, one male and one female, members of a group marriage, as they visit Manhattan, which is largely in ruins, in early July (Pohl has a pivotal scene take place on the Fourth--remember that in 1976 there was a lot of excitement over the Bicentennial of American independence; having been born in 1971, I vaguely recall some of this excitement.)  As the story proceeds we learn through dialogue and exposition about life in this strange future.  It seems that people left the cities because of a plague and because city life was conclusively proven to be causing mental illness.  The visitors from Arizona, Sim and Suley, live on a nudist commune (they wear cloaks that can be translucent or can go opaque to fend off the sun or offer privacy when they urinate in public) where horses and bicycles are the primary means of transport.  Arizona seems to be independent of any federal government and to have little or no government of its own.  Conversely, in the East people still practice monogamy and have government.  Middle-class people who work in New York live in places like New Jersey--Manhattan is the anarchic home of creepy weirdos and lower-class people.

The man who pilots the boat that brings Sim and Suley to NYC from the mainland warns them that the guides who will accost them prefer to be paid in drugs and will

"...bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be, a hundred years ago or more.  They have a great sense of history, not much of what's real."

Sure enough, the guide they employ (they pay him with peyote) wears what I am taking to be pimp clothes or maybe just 1970s clothes ("a flat, broad brimmed hat...a red vest with green leather buttons, bellbottomed green slacks with red stripings") and talks a lot about the Empire State Building (you can walk to the top but it is a two-day trip) and tells tales of the New Yorkers of the 19th and 20th centuries.  Some of the stories don't seem to be creditable (for example, we are told Diamond Jim Brady hung out with "Lillian Held," which I guess is a misconstruing of "Lillian Russell" and/or "Lillian Hellman") and a long scene concerns an argument between this guide and a black kid (the Arizonans never see black people out West) about whether or not sharks live in the flooded Lincoln Tunnel.  The Arizonans give the kid some pot so he'll leave them alone.  (The Arizonans themselves use drugs all the time, shooting up hallucinogens as a pastime and, it appears, to enable them to perform feats of clairvoyance.)

Long distance travel across North America is conducted by solar-powered dirigible, and we learn halfway through the story what has been hinted at before, that the plot of "Prisoner of New York Island" concerns a guy named Charley Four Trees.  Charley had pledged to join Sim and Suley's group marriage, but right before the ceremony was killed aboard one of these "blow balloons" when it crashed over New York in a storm--all hands and passengers were lost.  Sim and Suley have come to find his remains, and they bribe the guide and the black kid and others with still more drugs, harder drugs, to get them to help find some of Charley's remains in hopes they can clone him.  A human interest subplot involves Sim being jealous over Charley.

Both these plot threads are suitably resolved.  The Arizonans and their drug-loving hirelings find the cloak Suley gave Charley as a betrothal present.  There isn't enough blood on it to clone Charley, but Sim is able to collect sufficient genetic material that he can use it in some fashion left to the reader's imagination while he and Suley have sex, so that nine months later a child is born to Suley who bears a resemblance to all three of them, Sim, Suley and Charley.  

A third plot thread, if we want to call it that, one perhaps inspired by the spike in interest in American history experienced in 1976, perhaps an ironic joke on the "bore you out of your mind with talk about what New York used to be" theme, is pretty annoying and pretty inconsequential.  I refer to the drug "trips" undertaken by Suley and the guide.  These "trips" consist of vague and semi-cryptic visions of New York through the centuries, which we readers experience as fragmentary images of fighting during the War of Independence, ticker tape parades, and on and on.  These images are like puzzles Pohl has constructed for us readers--is the man with "strangely ill-fitting teeth" George Washington?  Must be!  And what about the "curious spider-like structures at some of the corners, platforms on four long legs, and in little sheds on the platforms uniformed men pulling levers that moved semaphores"?  I'm afraid this is not ringing a bell, some kind of optical telegraph system?  I hate this sort of abstract, impressionistic, psychedelic, surreal, trippy, nonsense, and we get almost a page of it, and it has nothing to do with the plot that I can see.  

I guess I'll call "The Prisoner of New York Island" barely acceptable, and, as with Bloch's piece of junk, tell you it may be of historical interest as a snapshot of the SF world in 1976, what with all the references to urban blight and drugs and worries about energy conservation and the environment.

It looks like "The Prisoner of New York Island" has not appeared in any other venues.  I'm reading some rare stories today, kids! 

"Bind Your Sons to Exile" by Jerry Pournelle

Here we have a serious piece of hard science fiction about travelling through the solar system to work on an asteroid mine, a story that also addresses issues of race and class from a conservative perspective.  The story is also a piece of evangelism for the space program, arguing that the solution to such characteristic 1970s worries as pollution and natural resource scarcity or price inflation is to shift extraction and industry off the Earth and so the government should make a priority of space exploration.    

A guy who is half Native American grows up in a crime-ridden California housing project; intelligent and industrious, he manages to escape the local schools with their "timeserving teachers who cared only for quiet in the classrooms and a minimum of work" to attend a middle-class school across town.  From there he got into engineering programs and graduated with impressive marks.  As a credentialed minority he could get a cushy no-show job thanks to affirmative action and quotas, but he has disdain for such handouts--he wants to succeed by his own merits and his own efforts, to be rich but to have earned every penny.  So he signs up for one of the most dangerous jobs in the solar system--working on the first asteroid mine!  When he gets to the rock after a year-and-a-half-long trip, he finds he is the most qualified person there--most smart and educated people don't even consider applying to work in the asteroid belt because it is hellishly hazardous--when our hero arrives he notices many of the old hands are missing eyes, fingers, and/or limbs.    

Our guy is given the job of chief of staff and the task of making the asteroid's operations more efficient.  Lots of text is given over to how the asteroid operates, but a thread of the plot is about our hero learning to get along with other people and build relationships.  When the US government decides to stop supporting the asteroid mine, the mine's leadership figures out a way for the project to support itself, and the asteroid becomes an independent community, a real home to which the main character can truly belong, a community not based on race or ethnicity but on shared experiences, shared goals and shared sacrifice.

Pournelle does a good job with all the technical stuff, and I sympathize with his negative attitude about government workers and unions and all that, and his belief in the nobility of earning everything you have, building an individual identity--not one based on your genetic heritage--and striking out and building something new on the frontier.  As entertainment, however, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" falls short.  The style is merely OK, and the story lacks suspense, surprise, a real climax, and real human feeling--Pournelle's story like an opinionated science article.  Perhaps ironically, I suspect my agreement with the politics of "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is one of the things that makes it feel bland to me--I don't read SF to have my own beliefs validated, but to be entertained and to encounter stuff that is challenging or disturbing or surprising--sure, I denounce the commies, poke fun at the feminists, roll my eyes at the Freudians, and dismiss out of hand the supernatural claims of religious writers, but the alienness of those writers' ideas--if they are decent writers, at least--makes their work strange and engaging, and thus more entertaining, to me.   

Considering its aims, "Bind Your Sons to Exile" is more successful than Bloch's story, which aims to be funny and is not funny, and probably Pohl's, which includes a lot of annoying extraneous matter, but I can't call Pournelle's story good.  The verdict is acceptable but bland. 

Pournelle would include "Bind Your Sons to Exile" in his anthology of stories about living in space, The Endless Frontier.  You may recall we just read Katherine MacLean's 1975 story from that book, "The Gambling Hell and the Sinful Girl." 

"Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" by Fred Saberhagen

Well, I just complained that Pournelle's hard SF story was not challenging, and here we have a contrast, a hard SF story which describes phenomena that are totally wild and hard to understand, at least at first.  

Azlaroc is a heavenly body settled upon by quite a few humans, a place where bizarre phenomena are the norm, phenomena Saberhagen describes in cryptic terms for much of the story, though we eventually get a more-or-less comprehensible explanation.  Azlaroc isn't really a planet or star, though it is of planetary size and shape.  Azlaroc is one component of a three-member system that includes a pulsar and a black hole--the weird energies of these bodies has an effect on atoms and radiation such that every year a layer of altered particles that the settlers call a "veil" falls on Azlaroc and clings to its surface and everything on the surface, including the settlers.  Each veil act as permeable but noticeable barrier between a person shrouded in it and matter which is not under that veil.  Two men who have the same number of veils on them look and sound normal to each other, but if you try to look at or talk to a man carrying around a significantly different number of veils than you do, he will appear blurred and his speech will be distorted.  Food and drink covered in more or fewer veils than are you will smell and taste different.  Once a veil has fallen on you, you cannot leave Azlaroc, but people settle on the place because the veils prolong life.

The reader doesn't grok most of the stuff in the previous paragraph until he is like halfway through the story.  The plot concerns an ambitious rich guy who wants to be the first person to escape Azlaroc, and most of the story is narrated by a guy who accompanies him on his daring quest.    

Somewhat to my surprise, because Saberhagen is not a writer I think about very much at all, I am finding "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" the most satisfying of the stories I have read in Odyssey's first issue today.  It is satisfying to get clues about Azlaroc's bizarre nature and then later learn what is going on, and the quest to escape the place is an actual adventure with suspense and an unpredictable ending that is satisfying when you get to it.

Good.  According to isfdb, "Beneath the Hills of Azlaroc" has not been reprinted, but when I flipped through Saberhagen's 1978 novel The Veils of Azlaroc I detected signs the text of this story formed a portion of that novel. 

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My view is that the more SF magazines the better, so it is sad that Odyssey only survived two issues, but it is not surprising--this magazine is not great.  Four of the five stories we've read today are not good, and there are additional issues.  Typos are a problem--Fred Pohl's name is actually misspelled on the title page of "Prisoners of New York Island."  The art itself is pretty good, but I guess in order to fill up space the exact same pictures are used multiple times--the full-page illustration for Bloch's story, a young woman in panties and a T-shirt with a Star Trek joke printed on it, appears in red on one page and blue on the page right next to it, and the illustration for Pohl's, a collage of the faces of four of the characters in front of a crumbling New York skyline, is printed three times in the space of five pages.

I don't regret reading these odd and rare stories, but I can only recommend one of them to ordinary readers, though I guess the others all may appeal to various niche audiences.

In our next episode we'll look at something that has had a broader appeal and greater influence than today's selections.

Love Conquers All by Fred Saberhagen

"Killing?  How can you call it...if I dig up an acorn am I killing an oak tree?"  But it was no use.  He didn't want to argue with Ann, and anyway it would really be impossible.  She lived in a reality so far from the generally accepted one that Art could see no place to start.  At least he couldn't now, not after a day of strain and wife-chasing and rioting and Black Russians.

Advertising works!  At the end of my Ace paperback of Poul Anderson's Flandry of Terra we saw an ad for Fred Saberhagen's Love Conquers All, a novel first serialized in Galaxy at the end of 1974 and the start of 1975, then published by Ace in 1979.  The book was reprinted in 1985 by Baen with an absurdly generic and lackluster cover.  That Baen edition of Love Conquers All, which, according to the publication page, is "Newly revised," is available at the internet archive, and, thanks to the ability of advertising to reach across four decades, I just read it on this very computer screen.

It is the future of underground maglev trains that carry you from California to Illinois at supersonic speeds, of self-driving cars, of mass unemployment and universal guaranteed basic income and scads of other government handouts.  For close to a century mainstream society has embraced, and the government and other establishment institutions strongly encourage, sexual promiscuity.  The most popular religious institution is the Church of Eros, and reproductions of Caravaggio's Amor Vinicit Omnia are hanging all over the place.  Open marriages are the norm.  People walk around practically nude.  Government regulations make sure performers on TV shows don't show too little skin.  Women who conceal their breasts and make themselves sexually unavailable are considered to be selfish antisocial jerks.  Average people consider pregnancy an ailment to be got over, and it is illegal to have more than two children; third children are called "superfluous" and "unwanted" because, even if their parents want them, they are "unwanted by the world."

Behind all these pro-casual sex and anti-baby laws and social mores lies fear: fear of the neuroses believed to be the consequence of sexual repression and frustration, but more importantly the fear of the starvation and cannibalism that may result from overpopulation.  But, in the time period of the novel, culture is evolving, with a counterculture developing that is curious about chastity and monogamy, a growing network of Christian churches, and an underground that helps women who have become pregnant a third time escape mandatory abortion.

We might call Love Conquers All a sort of switcheroo story, seeing as it depicts social developments the reverse of those that took place over the course of Saberhagen's life.  At the start of the 20th century the people who set the tone for culture and society, the establishment or the elite or the mainstream or whatever you want to call them, were, at least rhetorically, against sexual promiscuity and abortion and supportive of monogamous marriage, and people who were sexually promiscuous, had or provided abortions, and were felt to have betrayed their families or had unconventional attitudes about sexual relationships, ran a real risk of social or legal sanction.  As the century ground on, through technological and political changes and horrendous wars and revolutions, attitudes about sexual promiscuity and abortion and the family changed, with more and more people and institutions tolerating or even celebrating sexual promiscuity, abortion and the loosening of traditional family ties and new forms of family structures.  In Saberhagen's novel here, for as long as anyone living can remember, the establishment has been enforcing sexual promiscuity and abortion as legal and social norms, but the attitude of ordinary people is changing, reflected in growing interest in sexual restraint and the popularity of TV shows about life in the Victorian era, while radical movements that consider a fetus a person grow in size and influence.

Love Conquers All has some wacky satire elements.  Men in this casual-sex-approving society grope and pinch women as a greeting or farewell, and people snap "chastity" or "triplets!" when in distress like a 20th-century person might utter "fuck," or "damn!"  Exposed to nudity and casual sex almost constantly and discouraged from restraining their sexual impulses, many people find concealing cloaks to be sexually arousing (mainstream mores condemn such opaque attire as obscene--clothes worn for warmth or protection are transparent) and fantasize about monogamous sexual relationships in which desire is held in check; hard core middle-class counter-culture types indulge in steady relationships with lovers they refuse to touch, finding restraint more thrilling than the casual sex with strangers that is the norm.  One minor character is a psychologist, and In a parody of Freudianism he is certain that human actions are driven by subconscious urges to be celibate, that everyone is tempted to not have sex, and that it would be healthy if people gave in to their socially unacceptable desires to avoid sex.  One scene is I guess a joke from Chicago-born Saberhagen for all you sports fans out there--unemployed people are paid per inning to go see the Cubs lose baseball games.  

While these broad satirical elements are present, Love Conquers All is written and structured like a mainstream novel, not like an exercise in humor or a genre adventure tale, and I think we are expected to take everybody's emotional tribulations seriously.

The plot--TLDR version:

A guy who more or less is OK with the current pro-sex anti-baby regime discovers his wife has gone on the lam because she is preggers with baby #3 and wants to keep it.  He chases after her, hoping to find her and convince her to do the right thing and have their child sucked out of her body piece by piece by a robot.  He meets lots of people and has lots of discussions and in the final scene ends up fighting the police to save their third child--it is not certain they will succeed, but we are given indications that escape from mandatory abortion is likely.

The plot--long spoilertastic version:

Art Rodney is an electronics expert living in Cali, now working in industry after a period teaching at a college; he is also a chess master (SF people love chess.)  He is married to Rita, and they have two kids.  Rita has some radical ideas--she is reluctant to have sex with other men, for example.  Her brother George lives in Chicago, and George's wife Ann is really out there, wearing clothes that cover her breasts, for example.  One day Art comes home to find a note--Rita is on the lam because she is pregnant with a third child and knows if the government finds out about her delicate condition she will be forced to have an abortion.  Art may be an ordinary guy who thinks of an abortion as a procedure no more remarkable than having a hangnail removed and considers it more kind to destroy his unborn child than to condemn it to a life of social stigma as a "superfluous" person, Rita is determined to keep the child.  

Hoping to track down Rita and talk some sense into her, Art takes the subterranean super train to Chicago to see George and Ann.  The train's journey is interrupted by a riot on the surface at a Christian monastery; a pro-abortion mob has attacked the monastery in response to rumors about what the Christians are doing in there.  The train is evacuated and the passengers join a group of people fleeing the violence, including a young woman named Rosamond; Art has sex with Rosamond to comfort her.

In Chicago, when a government agent, searching for Rita, whom the Feds know is carrying an illegal child, catches up with Art, our hero gets an inkling of what was going on in that monastery.  Pro-baby activists have come up with a means of removing quite young fetuses from pregnant women and preserving them for later birth in natural or artificial wombs.  Because the mandatory abortion law only allows the government to abort fetuses that are less than nine months old, if a fetus is frozen and hidden from the Feds long enough, it is accorded the rights of a citizen and cannot be casually destroyed, even if it is only a few months old biologically.

Rita has left the kids with George and Ann, who support Rita's bold and risky decision to keep her baby, and escaped into the pro-baby underground.  George, a karate instructor with a black belt, has contacts among the working and lower classes, and Saberhagen gives us detective fiction scenes in which George and Art travel to the seedier parts of town, and we get an idea of how much crime and social strife (the unemployed who live on the dole resent the employed, for example) the world faces.  We also get acquainted with Fred Lohmann, Ann's brother, a kid just out of high school.  Fred wants to work for George at George's dojo, but he's not a good enough a fighter yet, and probably won't become one, as he is sort of lazy and dishonest.  Through Fred's eyes we see what life and relationships are like for young people in Saberhagen's pro-easy sex, anti-procreation world; a flashback to the dawn of George and Ann's relationship serves a similar purpose, but while George has become a responsible small businessman and devoted family man, Fred becomes a dangerously violent criminal.

Art gets mixed up in a riot when counter-protestors from the Gay League, homosexuals and transsexuals who support the establishment, clash with a pro-chastity demonstration by a group called The Young Virgins.  Knocked unconscious, Art wakes up in a secret facility where the anti-abortion activists preserve fetuses; a doctor who is also a Christian priest patches up Art, and they have an argument about abortion after Art by chance stumbles onto a three-month old fetus floating in a life-sustaining chamber, which gives Saberhagen an opportunity to describe how the tiny little girl has very human hands but a head and "gills" that remind Art of a fish.

After he leaves the secret medical facility, Art is arrested because he's been seen with members of the anti-abortion/pro-monogamy underground.  He gets released when he mentions Rosamond to the cops--it turns out Rosamond's father is a bishop of the Church of Eros.  Art and this guy have a philosophical discussion, and then Rosamond, who sympathizes with the underground, takes Art to see the man she is having a chaste romantic relationship with, a psychologist, thinking he may be able to help Art find Rita.  This headshrinker Art to his father, a rich man whose tendrils extend into all sorts of underground and illegal enterprises.  When this rich guy learns about Art's hope that Rita will have an abortion to escape legal jeopardy, he pulls strings to help Art out, or so he thinks.  Due to tragic coincidences and and misunderstandings, Fred is hired to steal Rita's frozen baby from the cooler in which it is living in suspended animation.  George slays Fred's partner in crime in hand to hand combat, and Art, signifying an epiphany and act of redemption brought on by love for his wife, runs off with the cooler, knocking over the detective he met when he first hit Chicago, endeavoring to get to a facility that will protect his unborn son from the government.  While we don't see Art make it to the facility, and can't be positive that Rita, George and Art will escape conviction by a jury of their peers on the charges of illegal baby-making and thug-killing, Saberhagen offers clues that lead us to expect this welcome outcome is likely.  

***

While a few of the most critically acclaimed (I'm thinking of Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty here) and most influential (like J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis) SF writers are committed Christians, most SF writers are religion-hating leftists or libertarians, so a SF book that takes seriously arguments against abortion is a rara avis.  Taking a different tack like this is a good idea, but unfortunately Saberhagen, whom wikipedia tells me was a practicing Catholic, is not as talented or innovative a writer as fellow Catholics Wolfe or Lafferty, and Love Conquers All is pretty mediocre when it comes to style and plotting.

The novel is too long.  Individual scenes are too long, and some long sections are pretty superfluous; for example, the flashback to George's first meeting with Ann, Fred's job interview with George, and a meeting between the head of the Chicago Family Planning department and the head of the Gay League.  Scenes with George featuring karate are, I guess, supposed to add violence and excitement to the story, and the scene of the homosexual activist's meeting with the government bureaucrat has an expository purpose (they talk about overpopulation) but since the early karate scenes don't involve Art or Rita, and we know George is not going to get killed or maimed, they don't really add any tension or thrills, and the exposition in the scene with the leader of the Gay League is redundant--we have already been subjected to exposition about overpopulation.  (The fight scene at the very end is admirably brief, the stakes are high, and Rita and Art are there, so that scene is a success.)  If Saberhagen was able to write these unnecessary scenes in such a way that they were funny or moving or included beautiful images or striking metaphors, we might not mind that they do not serve the plot and slow the pace of narrative, but Saberhagen's style is merely competent, not inherently enjoyable.  Saberhagen's ideas may have been better served in a shorter form--maybe the Galaxy version is substantially shorter?  

Another of my gripes with Love Conquers All is that Art is not a strong character--he is buffeted hither and thither by others and by luck.  We are told he is an electronics expert and a chess master but does this stuff ever matter to the story, does it ever add interest to the novel's 270 pages?  No, it does not.  It is Rita who should have been the main character, because it is Rita who experiences the big emotions and makes the big decisions and takes the big risks: she loves her unborn baby and so is determined to save it, but her efforts to do so put her at odds with her husband, whom she also loves, and put herself, her husband, and her kids at risk because she could wind up imprisoned by the government or even harmed by rioters or criminals.

(I recognize that the fact that Art sort of lamely goes along with his corrupt society and other people he knows until the very end when he makes a big decision and explodes into activity, risking it all to do the right thing, suits the story's Christian themes, but it doesn't make for an exciting extended narrative.)   

Merely acceptable.  Obviously you should read this if you are interested in portrayals of abortion in SF, SF by Christians, or specifically in Fred Saberhagen's career and thought, but I doubt it is the type of thing that conventional SF readers will be thrilled by. 

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The last eight pages of the 1985 edition of Love Conquers All available at the internet archive consist of a three-page excerpt from Poul Anderson's Game of Empire and four pages of ads.  One is for another  Saberhagen novel, one about a genetically engineered superior race; it seems this, like Love Conquers All, is a revised Baen edition of an earlier work of Saberhagen's.  The illustration suggests the superior race is of people who can fly, which I have to admit is a pretty clear sign of superiority.

One ad is for one of Keith Laumer's Retief novels.  Remember back in 2019 when I read the collection Nine by Laumer and its introduction by Harlan Ellison?  I should read more Laumer soon.        

The next ad is for John Willett's Aubade for Gamelon, which I guess is another superior race novel.  There is a rose on the cover, which, frankly, doesn't strike me as so superior--I mean, I have a rose bush in my own yard, and I am not exactly a superior specimen.  This novel is hilariously blurbed by Robert Bussard, whose bio on the ad is longer than the totally generic and uninformative blurb he provided.  Sad.

The last ad is for Killer by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner, a book I can actually recommend, as I read it years ago and enjoyed it.  A good violent adventure/horror story set in ancient Rome.

 

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1968 SF stories by Fred Saberhagen, Fritz Leiber, H. H. Hollis and Terry Carr

I have already written three blog posts about Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1969 and its terrific John Schoenherr cover, covering a dozen of the stories it offers.  But I think there may still be some goodness to be wrung out of this fruit!  Today we'll read four stories from its pages, tales by Fred Saberhagen, Fritz Leiber, H. H. Hollis and Terry Carr, as we continue the exploration of the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library that has taken up my last five blog posts.

"Starsong"  by Fred Saberhagen 

This story, one of Saberhagen's many Berserker stories, first appeared in Fred Pohl's If.  Saberhagen often bases his stories on famous works of literature or myth or events in history, and this story is a beat for beat retelling of the tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.  

Ordell Callison is the greatest musician in the human space empire.  He marries the beautiful Eury.  As you well know, artistic types tend to be decadent libertines, and Ordell and Eury fit the mold.  One of the little games they and their hangers-on play is tag, each of them flying around in a little one-man space ship; when a man catches a woman's space ship he boards her ship and has sex with her.  Ordell and Eury are participating in one of these space sex games, as they did all the time before they were married, but now they want to play the tag part but not the sex part.  For some reason they didn't tell this to their fellow debauchees, so when Eury is caught by some guy he expects to be able to fuck her and doesn't believe her when she refuses and he gets a little rough.  Eury manages to escape his clutches and, back in her ship, in a panic, flies into a nebula.

In this nebula is a Berserker space station; the Berserkers, as you probably know, are machines programmed to exterminate all life.  This Berserker base is a laboratory that conducts experiments on captured humans, its main line of research is integrating human brains into Berserker computer systems.  So the base is mostly "crewed" not by purely mechanical robots, but by cyborgs, human brains stuffed into robot bodies; these brains are imperfect clones or natural brains in various states of insanity and are thus very suggestible.

Ordell goes to the lab and uses his top tier musical abilities to befuddle the foggy human brains of the cyborgs so they will facilitate his rescue of Eury.  All goes according to plan for a while, but, just like in the traditional Orpheus story, the rescue attempt miscarries on the very cusp of success.

Saberhagen's space warfare retelling of the tale of Orpheus is imbedded in a horror-story-style frame story involving a brain surgeon who assesses the human brains liberated from the lab when the Berseker base is captured by human space navy boarding parties.

I am prejudiced against parodies and spoofs and retellings and reimaginings, and was not impressed with this story, much of which comes across as contrived and silly.  Barely acceptable. 

"Starsong" would go on to be included in quite a few Berserker collections.

   

"The Square Root of Brain" by Fritz Leiber 

In the same way the narrow corridors of a traditional Dungeons & Dragons dungeon are riddled with spiked pits, spring-loaded crossbow bolts and green slime that falls on you from the ceiling, these SF anthologies are laced with joke stories that can unexpectedly spring on the intrepid explorer and make a mess of his expedition.  Wollheim and Carr warn us that "The Square Root of Brain" is a "sharply satiric look at human achievements," and I'm inclined to skip it, but will press on, buoyed by the knowledge that Leiber's "Lean Times in Lankhmar" is one of the very funniest of SF stories.  

At a Hollywood party, in a series of rooms decorated with psychedelic drapes, modernist furniture, and teen-aged starlets in tight dresses, a bunch of people swap incredible anecdotes (a guy claims to have been abducted by aliens, a woman says she remembers her past lives, etc.) and share conspiracy theories.  The text of the story is broken up by block-quoted entries from an encyclopedia--these entries are nonsensical or clearly fictitious.  I guess these encyclopedia entries, and the fact that in the last paragraphs the modernist chairs turn out to be spacecraft, is our clue that this is an alternate universe and the crazy anecdotes and conspiracy theories, in the depicted universe, are likely true.

Despite the warning, I fell in the trap.  The jokes in this story are not funny, it offers no human feeling and no arresting images, the anecdotes and theories are not original, and there is no suspense or tension or even interest.  Gotta condemn this one.  Bad.

"The Square Root of Brain" debuted in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and Moorcock even included it in Best SF Stories from New World 4, another anthology I own.  Do Moorcock, Wollheim and Carr really think this lame story is good?  Maybe they promoted it because it is (sort of...I guess) an attack on American imperialism and racism?  Or maybe they wanted to do their friend a solid and knew Leiber's name on a book would help it sell because Leiber truly has done very good and quite popular work?  Well, who knows?  One thing I do know is that isfdb does not list "The Square Root of Brain" as having appeared in any English Leiber collections, though it has been reprinted in a French collection.

"Sword Game" by H. H. Hollis

We really are exploring today, oh my brothers--here's a story from some guy I never read before.  H. H. Hollis was a Texas lawyer (real name: Ben Neal Ramey) who wrote SF on the side for fun; he has 16 fiction entries at isfdb.  "Sword Game" is probably his most successful story, appearing in several anthologies after its debut in Galaxy and garnering a Nebula nomination. 

"Sword Game" is another unfunny joke story.  A math professor is able to create tesseracts, which in this story at least are cubes inside which time passes very slowly because they exist in the fourth dimension as well as the three ordinary dimensions, or something like that.

Anyway, the prof starts having sex with one of his students.  He hasn't been enjoying being a professor anyway, so he and the girl join a circus and take to the road--the girl, before attending college, worked in a carnival as the woman who scrunches up into a basket and dodges swords that pierce the basket.  On stage the girl climbs into one of the prof's tesseracts, which appears as a translucent cube, and he thrusts a sword through the cube and through his girlfriend--spectators can see that the point of the sword sticking out the other side of the cube has her blood on it.  In a way I don't quite understand the girl doesn't die even though the blade of a sword has passed right through her torso because she is entirely within the tesseract so time passes very slowly for her while the weapon, its hilt being outside the cube, experiences time at the normal rate.  When the prof withdraws the bloody sword the girl heals instantly and climbs out of the cube in perfect health. 

This girl is vapid and they have nothing to talk about and the prof soon tires of her.  So he murders her in a way he thinks will be undetectable.  Telling her he needs to practice, he has her get into a tesseract in private, then he stabs her with a short Roman gladius--the point does not stick out the other side of the cube.  He breaks off the hilt of the sword so the blade is entirely inside the cube--presumably she has been slain.  Then he shrinks the cube down to a convenient size, and uses it as a paperweight on his desk when he resumes his career as an academic.

Many years pass.  The prof develops a friendly relationship with a promising student who looks much like him when he was young.  The student is fascinated by the tesseract and figures out how to open it.  Before the prof can stop him, the student opens the tesseract and the girl jumps out--for her only a few seconds have passed.  She is alive because when she didn't recognize the sword entering the cube she squirmed to dodge it.  She thinks the student is the prof and embraces him, and the lovers imprison the old geezer of a prof in the tesseract, where he will live until the collapse of the universe.

A plot along these lines--evil mad scientist takes advantage of a daffy female and then gets his comeuppance--could definitely work, but, instead of writing it like something you'd find in Weird Tales, Hollis presents it as a joke; there is lots of feeble topical humor about the mores of kids in the late Sixties, for example.  We're calling this one barely acceptable.          

"The Dance of the Changer and the Three" by Terry Carr

The point of this story, which first appeared in the anthology The Farthest Reaches, is to present some truly alien aliens and to demonstrate that different cultures cannot really understand each other.  Our narrator is one of the few survivors of a mining expedition of like fifty people sent to inhospitable planet Loarr, where the natives are beings made up mostly of energy that look like nebulas or snowflakes and communicate by changing their patterns and colors.  Their traditional art form is the "wave dance."  The narrator was the diplomat on the mission, and had time to get to know the Loarra people and their art pretty well, and to give us some insight into Loarra culture, provides us his translation of the most prominent Loarra wave dance, something like a folk tale or heroic myth, maybe akin to our Iliad or the tales of King Arthur or something.  The narrator stresses repeatedly how his translation is imperfect and he has to resort to words like "water" and "sky" even though on Loarr, a gas giant, there really is no water or sky.

The wave dance epic concerns three heroes who go on a quest to "avenge" the "suicide" of another character.  Our human narrator has to use the words "avenge" and "suicide," words which do not make much sense in the context of the aliens' story, because we Earthers have no words that correspond to the concepts that the Loarra story is really about.  In my opinion "commemorate" and "metamorphosis into the next stage of life" would be better translations.  Anyway, the three heroes meet a very old Loarra, one who is so old he is mostly matter now instead of mostly energy.  The old timer tells them a secret that is incomprehensible to human minds, and using that secret the three heroes enter the vortex from which life first emerged on Loarr and create a new life which they promptly devour.  This meal, we are told, is the most significant part of the Loarra epic.

At the end of Carr's story, after we have read this fragmented translation of the Loarra national epic, we learn the story of the mining expedition.  The humans met the Loarra, learned to communicate with them, made friends with them, got permission to mine, and then mined for over three years.  Everything seemed to be going just fine.  Then one day the Loarra, indestructible energy beings, suddenly attacked the helpless and unarmed miners and killed all but six of them.  When the narrator, who had been friendly with the natives for four years, asked them why they had murdered his colleagues, the aliens assert that they are not angry and don't mind if the humans take the ores off planet and don't want the humans to leave; they killed most of the humans "just because" and cannot predict whether they will or won't launch such an attack again.

"The Dance of the Changer and the Three" succeeds in making its point that the universe is inexplicable and life is meaningless and so forth, but it is not very engaging--it is kind of boring, to be honest.  It tells a story you can't understand, and keeps telling you that you won't be able to understand it, so all the descriptions of conversations between flickering beings feel pointless.  Maybe on a technical level the story is "good" because it inspires the reader to share the diplomat's frustration at being unable to make sense of the universe and hopelessness at realizing we have no control over our own fates, but I have to give it a thumbs down because reading it is not an entertaining or enlightening experience.

Editors evidently love this story--it has been reprinted many times in anthologies like Robert Silverberg's Deep Space and magazines like Vertex.    

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Oy, I feel like this has been a tough expedition.  I may have to reread some SF stories I already know I like in order to renew my faith in the utility of carrying on with the performance art project we call MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Well, see you next time, space fans...if there is a next time.

Berserker by Fred Saberhagen (Part 2)

This week I finished up my 1967 copy of Fred Saberhagen's Berserker, a collection of stories about huge space faring robots bent on exterminating all life in the galaxy.  The volume contains eleven stories that first saw light in the Fred Pohl-edited magazines If and Worlds of Tomorrow; I tackled the first five in our last installment, and in this post we'll look at the remaining six.

"What T and I Did" (1965)

In "Stone Place" we learned that the berserkers had captured human admiral Johann's fiance and brainwashed her into hating Johann.  How did the berserkers come up with such a diabolical scheme? In "What T and I Did" we meet the traitorous man who gave the genocidal robots the idea! In return for this advice, the berserkers put the traitor in charge of other human captives, whom he sadistically abuses.

When the berserker is damaged at the big battle described in "Stone Place" the traitor suffers a head wound.  One of the other human captives on the berserker is a genius surgeon, and he patches up the traitor's skull, and takes the opportunity to try to turn the sadistic creep into a good person by tinkering with his brain!

Cleverly, Saberhagen tells the story in a nonlinear fashion, from the point of view of the post-brain-surgery traitor (much of it in first-person present tense, like it's a Malzberg story or something!) When he wakes up from the surgery he remembers very little, and he learns the truth about himself and his actions along with us readers.

This one is pretty good.

"Mr. Jester" (1966)

This one is a broad farce, I suppose intended to be funny and make the point that humor is an important element of life.

Planet A has an elected government, but it is what you might call "big government." There's a Minister of Diet, for example, who is always telling people what to eat, and the government has what we might call a Fairness Doctrine or Equal Time rule which mandates that all the political parties have equal access to the airwaves.  Even more alarmingly, the government of Planet A enforces a utilitarian seriousness and sobriety on the population.  Citizens are expected to contribute materially to society, and humor is considered a distracting waste of time.  As the story begins, a comedian who tried to make people laugh is sentenced to solitary confinement at a lookout station on the edge of the star system!

Out there at the limits of the system the comic meets a berserker, this one a 40-mile wide sphere.  Like the comedian, this berserker is a misfit among its kind: a technical error has left it ignorant of the details of its mission--it doesn't quite comprehend what life is or how to destroy it.  The comedian takes command of the berserker and has it construct a troupe of comedy robots.  One of the robots is modelled on Jack Benny ("an Earthman of ancient time, a balding comic violinist..."), others are caricatures of Planet A politicians.

With the threat of the berserker cowing the government, the comic returns to Planet A and he and his robots give a performance on worldwide TV that humiliates the government and has the whole planet laughing.

I won't call this story bad, but it didn't make me laugh and in general I am not a fan of absurdist humor.

"Masque of the Red Shift" (1965)

Saberhagen gets mentioned on the cover again, maybe because of the provocative title?

In preparation for reading "Masque of the Red Shift" I reread Edgar Allen Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" at gutenberg.org. In the Poe story (which is very short) some decadent aristocrats secrete themselves in a fortress while the countryside is ravaged by a horrible plague.  In the fort they have parties all the time, but then a mysterious figure appears among the revelers, a figure which carries the plague and represents death, the fate which even the wealthiest and most sophisticated of us cannot escape.

In Saberhagen's story we again encounter the Emperor of Esteel, brother of the hero Johann--we first met these guys in "Stone Place."  The Emp, worried that his brother threatens his power, has Johann put into suspended animation, but tells the public that Johann has died of plague.  The Emp and fifty or sixty of his courtiers are partying like it's 2999 on his flagship when a berserker robot, disguised as a brainwashed human rebel captured by Johann, sneaks on board.  In true horror fashion the berserker disguised its robot by ripping the skin off the rebel and putting it over a robot body.  Yuck!

The skin falls off the robot, the truth is revealed, and the robot massacres almost everybody on the flagship before the Emp blows it away.  Then Johann is rejuvenated, and sacrifices himself to save his brother and a few civilians by drawing away the berserker into a "hypermass," a thing like a black hole.  (Wikipedia is telling me that the term "black hole" was not in general use until a few years after this story was written, and first appeared in print in 1964.)  The "red shift" in the title refers to how the apparent color of Johann's ship changes when viewed from the flagship as it accelerates into the hypermass.

This one is OK.

"Sign of the Wolf" (1965)      

This story takes place on a planet colonized by humans centuries ago, but which fell into primitivism after a cataclysmic war.  The humans still living on the planet are barbarians with no technology beyond the spear, who think the ruins of their space faring ancestors are temples or gods themselves.  When a berserker attacks the planet a shepherd boy witnesses the long-buried hi-tech defenses come to life.

I thought this one slight, but entertaining..

"In the Temple of Mars"  (1966)

This one quotes extensively from Chaucer's "The Knight's Tale." Saberhagen is into recycling classic stories from history and literature, I guess.  (Robert Silverberg has done similar things, basing Man in the Maze on Sophocles's Philoctetes, Downward to the Earth on Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and writing several times about Gilgamesh.)

The Emperor of Esteel has a new flagship built, the most powerful star ship ever constructed by humanity.  Because he is a twisted pervert the Emp has an arena and gladiator slave quarters built into the ship so he can watch men fight to the death.  Before the ship is delivered to him (he is still out by that hypermass in his old flagship) it is infiltrated by two factions of people with their own theories as to how the ship should be used.  One group secretly wants to use the new supership to try to rescue Johann, whom they believe may still be alive, orbiting the hypermass.  The second group is even more perverted than the Emp--these freakos worship the berserkers as embodiments of Mars, the Roman god of war!  They secretly want to use the super ship to make sure Johann, the greatest of all foes of the berserkers, is destroyed once and for all.

Luckily, the pro-Johann faction, among them Mitchell Spain, the writer and space marine we met in "Stone Place," prevails.  When the berserker-worshippers try to take over the ship, Spain and his friends release the gladiators, promising them their freedom if they defeat the hijackers, and they make short work of the cultists.

In a scene in which Saberhagen expresses his optimistic view of humanity (and I suspect his Catholic belief in free will), the berserker-worshippers use a mind ray on a gladiator that is meant to drive him insane with hate so he will massacre his friends. The love of a woman gives him the strength to overcome this evil influence.

Not bad.

"The Face of the Deep" (1966)

In this, the last story in the collection, Saberhagen tries to give us the "sense of wonder" classic SF authors often try to achieve.  Johann is in orbit around the hypermass, moving faster than the speed of light.  At such speeds, and under such tremendous gravity (the hypermass has more mass than a billion Sols), the ordinary rules of physics are out the window.  The berserker ship that is behind him tries to shoot him down, but in this weird environment energy guns and explosives fail to operate properly.

Johann admires the scenery, dust clouds and rocks and lightning and all that, and contemplates the nature of God.  After some days or weeks alone a rescue team from that new flagship arrives to save him.

This story is alright, but it doesn't really work on its own--it feels like the denouement of a novel, a sort of philosophical resolution after the action climax.  (Presumably, most people who read it in If back in the '60s were familiar with the earlier stories featuring Johann and the berserkers.)  Of course, the action climax was back in "Stone Place," 80 pages ago, so "The Face of the Deep" feels a little flat and anti-climactic.

Because we follow Johann and his brother through "Stone Place," "Masque of the Red Shift," "In the Temple of Mars" and finally "The Face of the Deep," Berserker sometimes feels like a fix-up, a novel made by stringing linked stories together.  But the tale of Johann is interrupted by two stories which have nothing to do with Johann, "Sign of the Wolf" and "Mr. Jester" (with the latter in a totally different tone), and one story, "What T and I Did," which mentions Johann but in which he does not appear.

Another oddity is the brief introductions before each story, which really serve little purpose other than to expand the importance of the Carmpan.  The Carmpan also get top billing on the back of the book.  Yet, actual Carmpans only appear in one of the stories, and in my opinion they are more or less superfluous in that story.

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I thought these six berserker stories, with the possible exception of "Mr. Jester," all worth reading as entertainment, and except for "Sign of the Wolf," each has something odd and memorable about it, be it the references to Poe, Chaucer, and Jack Benny, the hypermass, or the bifurcated personality and unusual story structure of "What T and I Did."

It is true that I have pointed out quite a few things I didn't care for in individual stories and some weaknesses of the volume as a whole, but for the most part I enjoyed the book and feel comfortable recommending Berserker to classic SF fans.    

Berserker by Fred Saberhagen (Part 1)

Years ago, while living in New York, the wife and I drove out west to visit in-laws, and in Minnesota I purchased the 1967 paperback edition of Berserker, the first volume in what is perhaps Fred Saberhagen's most famous series.  I read a few of the stories and, not particularly impressed, put the book aside for years.  Recently I have mentioned my decision to give Saberhagen another look, and this week took Berserker off the shelf with the plan of reading it in its entirety and assessing it anew. Today we'll cover the first five of the eleven stories in the 190 page volume.

For Ballantine's Berserker (U5063) Saberhagen added brief introductions to each of the stories that serve to link them together and provide a little background on humanity's colonization of the galaxy and relationship with the peaceful Carmpan, a cerebral race unprepared for the berserker onslaught.

"Without a Thought" (1963)

Originally published with the title "Fortress Ship" in If, "Without a Thought"'s first paragraphs tell us what we need to know about the berserkers: they are huge robots programmed to exterminate all life and equipped with enough firepower to destroy the entire surface of a planet in 48 Earth hours, built by the score a bazillion years ago by now-forgotten warring space empires.  The berzerkers act unpredictably, and thus are difficult for humanity's space navies to outfight.

Two human starships confront a berserker we are told is the size of my home state of New Jersey! If the robot gets past them it will destroy a human-inhabited star system! But it takes three human ships to defeat a berserker, and the third ship is four hours away! Can they stall the berserker until help arrives?

Yes! The berserker is testing out its mind-paralyzing ray! To assess the effectiveness of the ray, it challenges a human pilot to a game of checkers!  But the human figures out how it can fool the berserker into thinking the mind ray is not working--he develops a logical system much like a computer program that teaches his semi-intelligent alien pet how to play checkers!  This buys enough time for the third ship to arrive!

This story is OK, but it feels contrived and gimmicky, like Saberhagen came up with the cool idea of how to teach the pet checkers, and then built a story around this idea. (Can't the berserker just talk to the human to figure out how well the mind ray is working?)  The way the berserker toys with the humans instead of just shooting them down, even though Saberhagen explains that this is research and an effort on the part of the berserker to remain unpredictable, feels like the irrational behavior of a Bond villain who decides to let 007 live after capturing him.  Of course, "Without a Thought" fits well into the SF tradition of stories in which an engineer-type uses science and logic on the fly against the clock to save the day.

"Goodlife" (1963)

This story is much more successful as a human drama and an adventure tale than "Without a Thought."  Two people, a man and a woman, are captured by a berserker when it destroys the ship on which they are passengers.  Inside the berserker they encounter a young man who has lived his entire life inside the genocidal robot!  A test tube baby, created from the DNA of earlier captives, he has never seen a human in the flesh before, and habitually obeys the berserker, who calls him "Goodlife."  (All other life is "badlife.")  While the robot studies his two new captives and plots to breed the female with Goodlife, the man and woman plot to disable the berserker from within and win Goodlife over to their side.

"Goodlife" works as a sort of horror story, as it gives us glimpses of the psychological effect the berserker war has on people and thrusts them into the bizarre environment of the berserker's interior.

"Goodlife" first appeared in Worlds of Tomorrow, which, like If, was edited by Frederik Pohl.  In fact, I think all the stories in Berserker appeared in Pohl-edited magazines published by the Galaxy Publishing Corporation.

"Patron of the Arts" (1965)

This one appeared in If.  A space ship full of famous art works flees the Earth because the berserkers are approaching.  The ship is captured by a berserker and the crew is killed while resisting.  Two passengers who do not resist survive, including a depressed artist whom we are told is weary of life.

The artist tries to paint an abstract representation of the berserker's "essence," a canvas "of discordant and brutal line...aflame with a sense of engulfing menace!"  The artist laments that the berserker will destroy all the famous paintings and sculptures on the ship.  He is then surprised to learn that the berserker is not going to destroy the art--the art is already dead, he is told, and thus destroying it is not part of the berserker mission.  The berserker is not going to kill the artist, either; the robot, detecting the artist's own unhappiness with life and interpreting his painting as praise for the berserkers, sets the artist and the art ship free so that "other life-units can learn from you...."  Shocked, the artist, as soon as he is out of the robot's clutches, rips up the painting of the berserker's essence and announces his intention to become a better person: "I can change.  I am alive." 

Titian - Man with a Glove

The most memorable scene in the story is probably when the artist, thinking the robot is going to destroy the artworks, has to decide whether to let the other human survivor, an ugly young woman, get away in a one-man life boat, or fill up the escape pod with Titian's Man with a Glove, which Wikipedia is telling me takes up about nine square feet.  I always find references to traditional high culture in classic SF, like the Chinese bowl in "--We Also Walk Dogs" by Robert Heinlein or all the references to classical music in Poul Anderson's Avatar interesting.  What is their agenda in mentioning these works of art?  To signal to the reader that "I am sophisticated, even if my work appears in these goofy pulp magazines!"?  To stand against the trend towards abstract art and rock music?  Saberhagen in  "Patron of the Arts" has the artist compare his abstract painting to Titian and feel ashamed of his own work, which he later destroys.  Who appreciates the abstract canvas?  The murderous robot!  Maybe we should see "Patron of the Arts" as a denunciation of modern art as inhuman and an insult to the high tradition of Western art.  

Saberhagen's choice, and the character's choice, of Man with a Glove also prods us to play such parlor games as "If you were on a desert island with one work of art..." or "If only one work of art would survive the apocalypse, what would it be?"

"The Peacemaker" (1964)

"The Peacemaker" appeared in If under the title "The Life Hater."  Like "Without a Thought," it is a story that portrays a single human outwitting a berserker to buy time.  "The Peacemaker" also tries to trick readers and hit us with a surprise ending.

A berserker is bearing down on a human planet on the edge of the galaxy!  The government is scrambling to build warships, but will they have time?  A lone man, "something of a pacifist," goes off in a one-man ship to "talk of peace and love" with the genocide machine!  The berserker and the pacifist have a little debate, in which the human tries to convince the machine that it should not destroy life, but serve it, and serve humanity in particular, humanity being the highest form of life, as evidenced by the complexity of human cells.

The berserker asks for a cell sample, ostensibly to see if human cells really are so complex.  In reality it uses the information from the cell sample to develop a biological warfare agent!  The berserker says it is convinced, and will now serve humankind, and sends the pacifist back to his planet infected with the biowarfare agent, expecting the human to land and infect the entire planet.  But the joke is on the berserker!  The pacifist has cancer, and provided the robot with a cancer-stricken sample, so the infection is curing him instead of killing him!  And his proximity to the berserker allowed him to gather valuable recon that will help the hastily assembled defense destroy the mechanical menace!

This one feels a little contrived, but is OK.

"Stone Place" (1965)       

"Stone Place" was published in If, and is the first berserker story promoted on the magazine's cover.

"Stone Place" is long (40 pages) and at times drags.  For me there is too much political jockeying stuff between various human factions; I generally find court intrigue to be boring.  There is also a prophecy based on mathematical calculations (shades of Asimov's psychohistory); I find that kind of thing tiresome.  This prophecy is pronounced by the first Carmpan to appear in an actual berserker story (the Carmpans have been mentioned in the intros, which are written in the voice of a Carmpan.  So far these intros have been superfluous.)

A large portion of this story was inspired by the Battle of Lepanto of 1571.  In "Stone Place" a dude named Johann, whose brother is the ruler of the Esteel Empire, is given command of a coalition space fleet.  In the 16th century a guy named Don John whose brother was King of Spain was given command of the fleet of the Holy League.  In "Stone Place" one of the space marines is a poet named Mitchell Spain; he loses an arm in the battle.  In the 16th century the great novelist Miguel Cervantes served as a marine at Lepanto, where he lost an arm.  And there are other clear parallels evident to the reader of "Stone Place" who is familiar with the Wikipedia articles on Lepanto and Cervantes.

Some people may enjoy picking out all the elements in the story inspired by the real-life naval campaign, but I find this kind of thing irritating.

There were things I liked about "Stone Place," however.  I liked the scenes in which Mitch Spain and his marines invade berserkers and fight battle droids, and I liked how the berserkers, in an elaborate piece of psychological warfare, brainwash Johann's beautiful fiance Christina de Dulcin (you heard that right, Don Quixote fans) so she will hate Johann and fall in love with Mitch Spain.  

Also noteworthy are the story's religious and philosophical overtones.  The all-seeing, all-knowing Wikipedia tells us Saberhagen was a practicing Catholic. (Has some English prof out there written his or her dissertation on 20th century American Catholic SF writers? It seems a fertile field of inquiry; for one thing you could compare people like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty, and Saberhagen to the famous British religious writers of speculative fiction like Tolkein, Lewis and G. K. Chesterton, about whom I assume much has already been written.)  Johann is religious, and he is a hero and a decent sincere guy.  His brother the Emperor of Esteel believes in mechanistic determinism, that "everything [is] determined by the random swirls of condensing gasses," and he is a ruthless and decadent sex pervert who finds life empty and contemplates suicide.

Which brings us to determinism (and free will) as a major theme of the story.  There's the aforementioned Carmpan prophecy, and Christina's love for Mitch-- is her love "legit" even if it is the result of the enemy's tinkering with her brain?

The good parts of this story are good, but I think it could have been streamlined a little.

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These stories are all worth reading; though they do have weaknesses, I'm not quite sure why I was so disappointed in them years ago.  Well, tastes and moods change-- now I am looking forward to finishing Berserker and finding the next two or three volumes of these stories in used bookstores.