Three more "Extreme Visions" from Redshift: Sarrantonio, Niven, Haldeman

Calibrate the Extremometer!  It's time to check out three more stories from Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, the 2001 anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio which seeks to (according to the jacket) "revolutionize and galvanize the field of speculative fiction."  I liked the three stories I read last time I cracked open Redshift, let's hope I have another positive experience.  

"Billy the Fetus" by Al Sarrantonio

I decided to read Sarrantonio's story to get a sense of what kind of work he was hoping to receive when he sent out his call for "extreme" stories which would "expand the science fiction field."  This is the first story by Sarrantonio I have ever read.

"Billy the Fetus" is a first person narrative written from the point of view of a fetus.  Reflecting the limited educational opportunities available to fetuses, our protagonist Billy has deplorable grammar.  ("Soon as I growed ears I heered things.")  Billy's mother is promiscuous, and Billy gets the idea that the penis of one of her sex partners is a weapon that is trying to kill him.  So, Billy grabs the umbilical cord in his hands (which, he tells us, still look like flippers) and tears it, then leaps out of the womb into the outside world to do battle with his supposed enemy.  He grabs up a convenient revolver and shoots his mother's inamorato.  When "Mammy" expresses unexpected indignation, Billy decides he's not ready for the world and returns to his mother's womb.  He brings the pistol with him; he plans to use it to defend himself should anybody "come in after" him.

What can you say about such a story?  It is "extreme," I'll give it that.  I didn't actually laugh, but I guess it is kind of funny.  Joe R. Landsdale in his introduction calls the story "brave" and its prose "magnificent."  Well... OK.  It's short (between 4 and 5 pages) and it is not bad, and it is definitely original, so I guess it is worth your time.  It isn't an obvious pro- or anti-abortion story, which is what I had expected; somehow the joke on "Billy the Kid" didn't occur to me until I was almost finished with the brief tale.

"Ssoroghod's People" by Larry Niven

I don't really think of Larry Niven as the kind of guy who pens "extreme" stories.  Niven's Ringworld, Integral Trees, Smoke Ring, and Mote In God's Eye, which he co-wrote with Jerry Pournelle, all of which I have reread as an adult over a decade after reading them in my teens, are full of interesting ideas, but I thought them average or mediocre in the style and character departments.

Niven is a prolific writer, so even though I have read lots of his work (besides the novels listed above, I read Oath of Fealty, Footfall, Legacy of Heorot, and Ptaavs in my youth) I had never heard of Draco's Tavern before. "Ssoroghod's People" is a Draco's Tavern story.

This story is about as short as "Billy the Fetus," but it is giving me a very low reading on the Extremometer.  An alien who is over a million years old comes in to the tavern and tells the story of how she watched a civilization rise over the course of millenia, then destroy itself with risky manipulation of its genes.  The story seems to be Niven warning humanity to not tinker with its DNA; or, if it must, to confine such experiments to isolated labs, like on the moon.

"Ssoroghod's People" is fine, but I have the feeling I will soon forget it.    

"Road Kill" by Joe Haldeman

Joe Haldeman is the kind of guy I would expect to write an "extreme" story.  Even if I'm not keen on their collectivist politics, I think Forever War is a great novel and I also really liked Mindbridge.  Haldeman's style, in those novels at least, is "literary," and reflects thinking about life, psychology, society, etc.  Those are also good adventure stories about going into space and dealing with aliens.  Haldeman seems like the kind of guy who, in response to Sarrantonio's call, could write a story which would use surprise or shock to get me to change my way of thinking about some big issue.

"Road Kill" is a description of a movie; maybe it counts as a "treatment."  (I don't really know what constitutes a treatment.)  The movie in the story really does sound like one of those serial killer movies like "Seven," which is the only serial killer movie I think I've watched in its entirety.  A huge fat guy murders joggers and cyclists in secluded woods, a rich guy hires a Desert Storm vet to look for the killer.  The killer is a sci-fi fan and claims to be an alien shipwrecked on the Earth.  We witness him torture and mutilate numerous people before he is finally brought to justice.

This story is like 6 or 7 pages, and I think the best of the three I have read today.  But is it "extreme?"  It doesn't seem to be expressing some point of view on some big issue.  I doubt we can consider the gore extreme in the post splatterpunk era.  ("Seven" and all that Hannibal Lector business was years before Redshift.)  Writing the story as a movie treatment seems like a novel idea, but I think Barry Malzberg did something like that years ago, though I can't recall in what book.  If the story is meant to be a criticism of gruesome Hollywood movies and/or SF fans or the view of SF held by people outside the dedicated SF community, maybe that is sort of extreme(?)

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Let's rank the six stories I've read from Redshift.  The stories have fallen into three groups in each of the two categories; differences within the groups are minor and perhaps illusory.  The Wolfe, Disch and Haldeman stories are all approximately equally good and equally "extreme."

             Is It Good?                                          Is It Extreme?
Best      What We Did.... (Koja & Malz.)        What We Did... (K & M)        Extreme!
                                                                         Billy the Fetus (Sarrantonio)
             Viewpoint (Wolfe)                                                
Good    Road Kill (Haldeman)                        Viewpoint (Wolfe)                             
             In Xanadu (Disch)                              In Xanadu (Disch)      Somewhat Extreme
                                                                         Road Kill (Haldeman)                                   
Avrge  Ssoroghod's People (Niven)
            Billy the Fetus (Sarrantonio)               Ssoroghod's People (N)  Not Extreme 

If this sample is representative, Sarrantonio has done a good job; none of the stories was poor, and 5 out of 6 have recognizably extreme elements.

Redshift includes 30 stories; it is possible I will read more of them. 

 

Three "Extreme" stories from Redshift: Wolfe, Disch, and Koja & Malzberg

Despite the fact that I own piles of books I have yet to read, I recently purchased seven SF books at the Des Moines Central Library book sale, where adult fiction books were 10 cents each.  Among these books was Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction edited by Al Sarrantonio, a big fat 2001 anthology of original stories.

In his introduction to the book, Sarrantonio praises Harlan Ellison and Dangerous Visions to the skies, even using the phrase "Ellison Revolution," which he shortens to ER.  (If only I had thought to shorten French Revolution and Russian Revolution to FR and RR back in my college days; it would have saved some wear and tear on my typing fingers.)  The stories in Redshift are meant to be as "dangerous" as those in Ellison's famous and influential 1967 anthology; Redshift is supposed to be the Dangerous Visions of the 21st century, pushing the envelope, influencing SF for the next 25 years, that sort of thing.

Today I read the three stories in the book by authors I already appreciate, Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch, and Barry N. Malzberg, authors who are all deeply interested in the history and traditions of SF as well as "mainstream literature," and who have successfully (in my opinion, at least) brought high literary standards to their science fiction.  Let's see how "extreme" and "dangerous" these stories are.

"Viewpoint" by Gene Wolfe    

I first read "Viewpoint," a novelette of 40 pages, in my trade paper edition of the collection Starwater Strains, which appeared in 2006.  I was surprised by how forward, even blatant, it was in presenting its conservative/libertarian political arguments.  "This is like the lead story in an anthology curated by the NRA," I thought after I read it.  Everybody knows Wolfe is "on the right," as they used to say on "Crossfire," and I am basically sympathetic to what he has to say in the story, so I wasn't offended, just surprised at how "upfront" he was about portraying his political beliefs.  Now that I know Wolfe was commissioned to write an "extreme" or "dangerous" story, it makes a lot more sense.

The story starts in a big city, I suspect New York, I guess in the near future.  We find that the police (even the robot police!) are corrupt, the streets are crawling with drug dealers and violent beggars who threaten people with broom handles, and store clerks are angry jerks who act like they don't want to make a sale.  The government has seized all rifles, and frowns on the exercise of self defense.  Government agents insist that people don't really make or own money, all money is in fact the property of the government, and any you keep after taxes is just what the government has decided to let you have.  Everybody has a little screen on his forehead; the number of stars on the screen indicates your social class.

A country boy who lives off the grid in a log cabin in the woods of Pennsylvania, Jay, is in town.  He needs money, and in an office is handed a hundred thousand dollars in bills.  He is warned not to put the money in a bank, or the government will figure out a way to seize it.  What is Jay getting paid for?  To be on a reality TV show; the TV station will announce that he has the money, show a photo of him, and then the drama will be if he can survive the inevitable attacks he will suffer from desperate creeps and career criminals.  (They install something in his skull that allows them to film through his eyes.)  As it turns out, the government is a bigger threat to him than anybody else.  The story ends with Jay hiding in the woods, pursued by government soldiers.  Just as Jay is about to shoot a female soldier he sees a phantom of a Revolutionary War rifleman, and wonders if his hallucination will appear on the viewing public's TV screens.

This is a decent story, and Wolfe does all the violent parts and the espionage/crime stuff (trying to hide from surveillance and escape pursuers) well.  With its long list of complaints about the government and TV, the fact that the women in the story are sneaky and use their sex appeal to manipulate men, and that the black characters speak poor English, I think it is fair to say that the story is "extreme" or "dangerous" - it surprised me, and I can imagine it would offend or disappoint Democrats and left of center types.  On the other hand, it appeared in David G. Hartwell's Year's Best SF 7 and was voted 8th best 2002 novelette by Locus readers, so it seems like a substantial portion of the SF community embraced it.  And as far as technique is concerned, it is a traditional plot and character driven story.

"In Xanadu" by Thomas M. Disch

In this 14-page story, dead people's consciousnesses are uploaded into a virtual world constructed by the Disney company.  Unfortunately, the uploading process is not very efficient, and many memories are garbled or lost in the process.  And you are at Disney's mercy, or the mercy of computer hackers; a man is uploaded into the virtual body of a woman, for example.  In the end the main character hopes for death (as I have found Disch characters are apt to do.) 

The story isn't bad.  I laughed at some of the jokes.  But is it "dangerous" or "extreme?"  Disch dismissively criticizes religion, environmentalism, and feminism, and at greater length and perhaps more subtly, consumerism.  And, of course, Disch suggests that death is to be welcomed, even if religion is a scam.  He reminds you how cultured he is with his references to philosophers, French cinema, and high brow music.  "In Xandau" also has a sort of New Wave feel, with its many one page chapters, its barely-there plot, and the whole death and computers angle.  I guess it is about as "dangerous" and "extreme" as the Wolfe story; it is certainly more challenging when it comes to technique and literary pretension, but it is also diffuse and intangible compared to Wolfe's hard-hitting, in-your-face writing.

"What We Did That Summer" by Kathe Koja and Barry N. Malzberg

I don't know anything about Kathe Koja, but Will Errickson at his cool horror blog raves about her.  (I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to admit that when I googled her name and all the photos came up I said, "Whoa, this chick is pretty good-looking.")  The premise of her novel The Cipher sounds like it could be great, and lots of people seem to think it is great.  Maybe I should keep an eye open for it when I hit the used bookstores and libraries.

I've read lots of Barry Malzberg's work, but most of it before I started this here blog.  I have several reviews of Malzberg books up at Amazon.  Malzberg's work is almost always "extreme" in one way or another, so I was curious about what he would come up with here.     

Well, "What We Did That Summer" is 10 pages long, and it scores very high on the Extremometer; in fact Koja and Malzberg may have left my buddies Tom Disch and Gene Wolfe in the dust.  For one thing, even though the story is full of dialogue, there are no quotation marks.  For another, I'm not sure what happened in the last paragraph.  But most important are all the other paragraphs, which are depressing, disgusting, and distrubing.

An impoverished prostitute who lives in a shack and lives on mac and cheese she can only afford when it is on sale is drinking cheap beer with one of her long term johns.  This guy has been her customer for ages, and they "hang out" regularly, but they barely even seem to like each other, bickering bitterly through the whole story.  You get the feeling they are stuck being friends with each other because they have totally screwed up their lives and nobody else will put up with them.     

The man had a strange adventure when he was 16 years old, thirty years ago, and he tells the woman the story, despite all her interruptions and complaints (about his poor sexual performance and the callous way he has treated her all these years, among other things.)  The man, along with a friend, those thirty years ago, came upon three girls in a field, naked girls who essentially dared them to have sex with them.  The girls are somewhat odd, with weird accents and strangely shaped bodies, and the boys later dub them "the aliens."  Several times over the course of a month they have sex with these three girls, long sessions in which the boys are permitted to do "whatever they want" with the girls. Of course, this is like a dream come true for the horny teenagers, but eventually the protagonist wonders if perhaps they are taking advantage of the girls, if they are maybe mentally ill, and what they are doing constitutes abuse or rape.

Tonight is the thirtieth anniversary of the climax of this strange adventure, when a fourth odd person or "alien," a man with a strange hat and a sort of necklace, confronted the two boys.  The alien man wore no clothes, and the boys see he has no genitalia.  The alien man explains that the boys must pay, without specifying what that payment should be, and then vanishes.  Thre boys never see him or the three girls again.

His story concluded, the man tells the woman he wants to show her something, and pulls down his pants and starts masturbating.  The woman hides her eyes, but he insists she look.  Then comes the confusing final paragraph.  It seems possible that the woman is suddenly experiencing the memories of the three alien girls.  Or, perhaps, she is just being reminded of her own life, how men have treated her so badly, like an alien, how in her life sex, instead of something joyous or life affirming or expressive of love, has been something desperate and horrible.

"What We Did That Summer" is not a fun read, but it is a strong story and I think Koja and Malzberg delivered what Sarrantonio was looking for when he was commissioning "extreme visions."  The story paints a pretty bleak picture of sexual relationships, includes what some might consider "obscene" images, and shows contempt for one of our finest literary institutions, the quotation mark. 

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So, three good stories, each of them containing elements that will likely surprise or even shock the reader: Wolfe's unapologetic condemnation of a corrupt government which infringes property rights and the right to self defense, Disch's dismissal of religious and liberal pieties and embrace of death, and Koja and Malzberg's disturbing depiction of sexual relations and men's treatment of women.

I will probably read some more stories from Redshift in the future, and also seek out some more short stories by Koja, or maybe one of her 1990s novels.