Five more stories from Bob Shaw's 1973 collection, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

German edition, which apparently includes
fewer stories than the US and UK printings

In our second episode on the US edition of 1973's Tomorrow Lies in Ambush we look at five more science fiction stories from the late '60s and early '70s by Bob Shaw, whose novels Orbitsville, Night Walk, Fire Pattern and One Million Tomorrows I have enjoyed.  We are reading the stories in the order in which they appear in the book, not chronological order.

"What Time Do You Call This?" (1971)

"What Time Do You Call This?" made its debut in Amazing, in the same issue as the conclusion of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip, which I consider one of the best of Silverberg's novels.  (Check out Joachim Boaz's blog post on The Second Trip.)  In 1971 Amazing was being edited by Ted White.  For years now I have been recommending to people White's story about his friend Harlan Ellison, "The Bet," and with Ellison's recent death White has produced another such memoir of his friend, available at the Falls Church News-Press website.  (The Falls Church News-Press is, it appears, a tiny free newspaper based in Northern Virginia, but this essay of White's deserves a wide audience--entertaining and insightful, I recommend it to all those interested in 20th-century SF and one of its most colorful and controversial characters.)

OK, back to Shaw.  "What Time Do You Call This?" is a humor story and its first line is a masturbation joke.  But its real theme and inspiration is not self abuse but that genre of SF story about alternate time streams in which characters hop from one time stream to another that includes Richard C. Meredith's At the Narrow Passage and Sam Merwin's House of Many Worlds and a multitude of others.  In this seven-page piece a scientist from another time stream appears in the apartment of a criminal.  After the mouthy scientist explains how his dimension hopping device (a belt) operates, the crook steals it.  This creep robs a bank, and when confronted by an armed guard he activates the belt.  To his dismay he reappears in a very similar time stream, right next to this dimension's version of himself and the armed guard, who captures both of the thieves--the media and the authorities suppose that these two bandits must be identical twins.

Acceptable filler.  "What Time Do You Call This?" would be reprinted in a German anthology with a fun cover illustration depicting a SF fan and his collection of magazines and tchotchkes, including a charming therapod (and a Hugo for best fanzine!)         

It is a lot of fun looking through these old magazines.  The September 1971 issue of Amazing also includes a letter by Bob Shaw, in which Shaw talks a little about his relationship with Damon Knight and responds to charges in a letter from a David Stever appearing in the March issue that his novel One Million Tomorrows was based on C. C. MacApp's 1968 story "When the Subbs Go" and J. T. McIntosh's 1965 story "The Man Who Killed Immortals."   

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"Communication" (1970)

This one appeared in Ted White's Fantastic.  "Communication" is about Riley, the worst computer salesman in Canada; in fact, he is in the running for worst computer salesman in the world!  After two years of total failure, out of the blue one Friday evening Parr, a man purporting to be a scientist (a sociologist no less--that's the worst kind of scientist!), comes to Riley's home to buy a computer--with cash!  (We are talking about a computer that costs $60,000 here!)  Parr wants it to keep a record of personal data and current location of everybody in the town of Red Deer, pop. 200,000*, and he has come to Riley's office, a lonely one-man operation, in order to keep public knowledge of his research project a secret ("you know, uncertainty principle," he explains.)

Riley deposits the cash in the company account and hands over the computer, but then on the weekend decides to play detective.  He figures out Parr's home address and drives up to Red Deer to snoop on him.  It turns out Parr is a con man, a bogus seer who conducts seances.  He plans to use the computer database of info about Red Deer's citizens to help him fool gullible people into thinking he has the power to communicate with the dead.  (By typing a client's name on a hidden keyboard he can instantly learn such data as the names of dead relatives and their occupations--Parr has hooked up his crystal ball to the computer's printout.)  The lame twist ending of the story comes when it turns out that, while Parr may be a fake, the dead really can communicate with the living, and ghosts appear.  Nonsensically, these ghosts want to use Parr's database to learn how things are going for their living relatives.  (If they were able to learn about Parr from "the other side," why can't they also learn about their own relatives?)  Parr is afraid of the ghosts, opening up an opportunity for Riley to work with them and start a lucrative career as a high tech "spiritualist." 

I'm guessing Shaw sets his story in Alberta to lend it an air of remoteness, but this setting also opens the door for an interesting (to me, and perhaps only me) element of the story: a passing reference to Social Credit, the notoriously incomprehensible economic theory enthusiastically adopted and promoted by expatriate American poet and crackpot Ezra Pound.  I have been trying to get a grasp of Social Credit for a while, as I have been reading the work of, and biographies and criticism of, those three leading modernists, Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.  So far as I can gather, the moral basis of Social Credit is the claim that all citizens have a right to a share of the wealth that is derived from their society's cultural inheritance (by which is meant ideas and information); the political program of Social Credit is to make sure that the public has purchasing power that matches the level of production—Social Creditors think that production that is not purchased is the root cause of social problems like wars and poverty.  The Social Creditor’s policy is carefully calibrated government handouts and price controls that aim to make sure consumption equals production. Social Credit theory achieved its greatest political success in Alberta, where a Social Credit party dominated provincial politics from 1945 to 1971.  Social Credit theory is closely associated with Christianity, and in fact the Albertan Social Credit Party quickly evolved in such a way that it largely abandoned Social Credit's bewildering economic theories and became a more traditional conservative party, supportive of business and religion and hostile to socialism.  Shaw here in "Communication" exploits this fact for a joke: Riley’s boss is an active member of the Social Credit party and "has a strong Puritanical streak," and Riley foolishly makes a sex joke in his hearing.
 
Like all of the stories in this book so far, "Communication" is well put together and well-written, but the resolution of the plot is so disappointing I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.  "Communication," after its magazine appearance, has only ever been reprinted in Shaw collections, including an Italian one.

*Wikipedia suggests that this is like double or more the real population of Red Deer, but maybe this dude is also cataloging people in the surrounding suburbs?

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" (1970)

The German edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush takes its title from this story, which first appeared in the anthology Science Against Man, where it was titled "Harold Wilson at the Cosmic Cocktail Party." As all you Beatles fans know, Harold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom in the periods 1964-1970 and 1974-1976. 

This is one of those stories in which people's brains can be scanned and their knowledge and personalities uploaded into a computer so people can still talk to "them" (in fact, simulations of them) after they are dead. Simulating every single neuron and synapse of a human brain takes a lot of memory and computing power, so the company that provides this (very expensive) service, Biosyn, has come up with an economy of scale that can help control costs--they have one huge computer ("the tank") that stores multiple personalities, instead of a bunch of individual computers devoted to single personalities.  This has proven to be penny wise and pound foolish.  The personalities have figured out how to interact with each other, and the strong personality of a Colonel Crowley, an adventurer who administered a colony in Africa, has begun dominating the milquetoast college professor types who make up most of the simulated personalities.  Crowley has created a fantasy world of dragons and barbaric hunts in which he is the hero and all those weak-willed intellectuals are his subordinates and enemies (victims.)  The personalities, thus occupied, have stopped communicating with the outside world, defeating the whole purpose of simulating them at such great cost and putting Biosyn's business model in jeopardy.

When an African politician comes to England to talk to Colonel Crowley in hopes of persuading the adventurer to campaign for him in an upcoming election in the country which Crowley once governed, the Biosyn staff have to come up with a way to lure Crowley back into contact with meatspace.  Their solution is to convince Crowley that the real world needs him to lead the resistance against socialist space aliens who are endeavoring to take over the Earth via hypnotism (to which Crowley, as a computer sim, is immune) and a simulacrum of a relatively benign socialist, one not associated with gulags and mass murder like Stalin or Mao--Harold Wilson.

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" has some interesting science and the characters and their dilemmas hold your attention, even if it is sort of silly and the cocktail party theme feels forced; I'm judging this one marginally good.

"The Happiest Day of Your Life" (1970)

This is one of those short shorts, and has been reprinted many times in anthologies of short shorts.  These anthologies get printed again and again all over the world, so there must be a lot of people out there who like short shorts.  (Jerry Seinfeld voice: "Who are these people?")  Personally, I am a short short skeptic.  "The Happiest Day of Your Life" was first printed in Analog.

I guess the idea that your schooldays are the happiest days of your life is a sort of truism or cliche.  The joke title of this story is a reference to the future depicted in the story, when the cognitive and economic elite will, through hypnosis, drugs and surgery, get all their education in one day!  This results in eight-year-old attorneys and executives, and heartbreak for the mother in the story, who loses the opportunity to watch her boys mature naturally--they leave in the morning acting like eight-year-olds and come back in the afternoon acting like 22-year-old professionals!  To make matters worse, while her kids have IQs over 140, hers is closer to the mean, and so she has to suffer the indignity of not being able to converse on an equal footing with her kids, who are not even teenagers yet but condescend to her, treat her like a child. 

This one works.

"Element of Chance" (1969)

This eight-page piece first appeared in Galaxy, and stars Cytheron, a member of a race with super psychic powers--he can teleport, make himself invisible, see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, etc.  These aliens have apparently evolved beyond having to eat or breathe as well.  Cytheron has seen his thousandth birthday, and the elders of his race want him to mature--to join the "group-mind."  Unwilling to surrender his individuality, Cytheron tries to escape the adults, teleporting from one heavenly body to another, eventually getting trapped in a quasar which is in the process of becoming a black hole.  The gravity of this body is so great no particle can escape it, so Cytheron can't teleport out of it.  The elders break him out of this predicament by causing the quasar to explode as a supernova.  Cytheron is worried that the explosion might damage any life nearby, but is assured that there are no planets with life within range of the blast wave, though the wave will cause one planet that will eventually host intelligent life to have some unusually heavy elements.  This planet, the clues indicate to us readers, is Earth, and those heavy elements will be gold and uranium.  The weak joke of the story is that the wise aliens feel there is no reason to believe that the presence of gold and uranium will have any effect on the development of intelligent beings.

The twist ending of "Element of Chance" is lame, and the story is weighed down by all kinds of lyrical, metaphorical, descriptions of landscapes, "amethyst rain," amethyst snow, a horizon of "shattered silver daggers," and so on, stuff that numbed my poor mind instead of stimulating it.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Since its debut it has appeared in the French edition of Galaxy and Shaw collections, including Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

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I had to give two of these stories a down vote, but the others are successful or at least acceptable.  Hopefully the final four stories in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, which we will dissect in our next episode, will blow us away.       

1956 Adventures from Edmond Hamilton, Harlan Ellison, and Randall Garrett & Robert Silverberg

My last eleven blog posts have been about anthologized science fiction short stories, and I have had my fill of joke stories and stories denouncing American mass culture for a while.  Remember when you were a kid and you saw the 1977 Star Wars movie for the first time, and it was just two hours of guys shooting monsters and space Nazis, like a child's amalgam of King Kong, the raid on St. Nazaire and The Battle of Britain, a confection composed of a maximum proportion of violence, a helping of horror and a minimum of jokes and preachiness?  Remember how awesome that was?  Where might we look if we wanted to recreate that experience?

Well, I own a copy of the first issue of Science Fiction Adventures, a magazine which endured from late 1956 to 1958 and produced twelve issues, and that seems like a decent place to start.  The cover depicts a uniformed alien shooting down a woman, and is emblazoned with the words "3 Complete New Action Novels."  The first "action novel" is by Edmond Hamilton, husband of Leigh Brackett and an MPorcius fave about whose work I have written many times.  The other two action novels are the work of Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg, presented under pseudonyms.  When we open to the contents page we see that a "Bonus Short Story" by Harlan Ellison has also been included.  Today I am reading this baby cover to cover--you can read it yourself for free at the internet archive.

"The Starcombers" by Edmond Hamilton

It made him wonder why they fought to live at all.  It made him wonder why anybody did.

A flotilla of four starships are searching the planets of a burned-out black star for salvage.  They discover the ancient foundations of a long-decayed city, and begin to dismantle them so they can bring the alien metal and plastic back to human space to sell.  But things on this planet ain't quite that simple!

The surface of this planet may be airless and dead, but deep down in a seventy-mile-wide cleft eerily lit by volcanic activity, some atmosphere lingers, and so do some native inhabitants: short humanoids, the last members of a dying race, and the giant monsters against which they must struggle!  The natives have fine vacuum suits, and powerful energy hand guns and energy artillery, but are very short on food, and the humans hope to trade with the natives, food supplies for technology.  But when one of the four human vessels goes down in the cleft to make the trade, during an attack by the ravenous dinosaur-sized monsters, the natives double cross the humans, killing some and capturing others.  Only one of the men remains free, Sam Fletcher, and he has to decide if he will try to flee to the surface or try to rescue his fellows from the ancient half-ruined fortified city in which they are being held.

Hamilton generates a grim and tense atmosphere in this story.  First of all, Hamilton presents the whole idea of searching the galaxy for ruins to salvage as sordid, like jackals and vultures picking the bones of superior creatures, and even the practice of trade as little more than swindlers trying to take advantage of each other.  While a guy in a Poul Anderson story might look out into space and think of all the opportunities for interstellar trade and how interstellar relations can make people's lives better, Sam looks at the stars and wonders "why men had ever bothered to struggle their way out to the stars...this was all the struggle came to in the end, sordid money-making...."

Adding to this story's air of cynicism and pessimism is that fact that all the characters are pretty sketchy--it's like reading about a criminal gang!  The leader of the four-ship squadron is greedy corner-cutting Harry Axe, who is accompanied by his second wife, Lucy, an ill-tempered wench who flirts with all the men in the company and bitterly insults any who resist her charms.  The aforementioned Sam Fletcher, a drunk who pilots the company's scout ship, is one of those who rejects Lucy's advances; Fletcher is also under Harry's thumb because he (Sam) lacks a license to work as a spaceman and would be an unemployed wretch were it not for Harry and his rule-bending ways.

A woman scorned, Lucy has been spreading the rumor that Sam has a thing for her, has been trying to steal her from Harry.  So, when Axe has been captured by the natives, Sam can't just jump in his ship and fly back to the surface where Lucy and the rest of the flotilla wait--people will assume Sam has murdered Harry and probably prosecute some lynch mob justice on Sam!  Instead he has to venture into the ruined city in search of his fellows.  While he is sneaking around among the ruins some natives from a rival city state, having learned that the locals have found a new source of precious food, launch an attack and a ray cannon artillery duel erupts. 

The confusion of the battle allows Sam to liberate one of his captured comrades, from whom he learns that Harry Axe, that greedy jerk, is now in league with the desperately ruthless aliens!  Axe heads for the landed ship with six of the little aliens, but Sam and his comrade beat them there and ambush them, wiping out the six natives in a barrage of energy gun fire and taking their traitorous leader into custody.  The story ends with a not very convincing change of attitude on the part of Sam--the natives of this nameless planet of a dead star remained on their dying world only to face inevitable decline and extinction, presenting an object lesson that proves that the human race's course of exploring the universe, no matter how risky or sordid it is, is the wiser course.

This is an entertaining, exciting adventure story, even if I can't endorse its skepticism of exploration and trade.  It includes ray guns, space suits, space ships, hostile aliens, monsters, disastrous sexual relationships, existential despair, so many of my favorite things.  There isn't a hell of a lot of science, and it is essentially a lost race story, so maybe "The Starcombers" will appeal most to fans of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Howard; I am myself a fan of ERB and Howard, and I am giving this one a big thumbs up.

"The Starcombers" would reappear in 1958 in the British edition of Science Fiction Adventures with a different illustration of a redheaded woman dressed in white getting shot (or having a seizure or something.)  In the 1960s the story was included in multiple editions of a paperback anthology entitled Great Science Fiction Adventures.

Editor's Space by Larry T. Shaw

Page 50 of the magazine is devoted to a message from the editor of Science Fiction Adventures, Larry T. Shaw.  Shaw complains that SF isn't as fun as it used to be, that too many stories are "long-winded and one-sided arguments about psychology, sociology and culture" and tells us that Science Fiction Adventures is here to feed our need for entertaining SF.  This sounds like a complaint about the New Wave but it came seven years before Michael Moorcock took over New Worlds! 

"Secret of the Green Invaders" by Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg (as by Robert Randall)

In his intro to this story, Shaw just comes right out and says the authors are Silverberg and Garrett.  I don't think I've ever read anything by Garrett before, though I recognize the name.

As I read "Secret of the Green Invaders" I wondered if I was supposed to be reminded of Palestine, which has been ruled by a succession of foreign empires--the Romans, Crusaders, Ottomans, and the British among many others--over many centuries.  As the story begins it is the year 3035 and Earth has been ruled by the furry green Khoomish for seven years.  The leader of the small human resistance movement, Orvid Kemron, has been captured and is dragged before the Khoomish officer in charge of Earth.  Then we get a flashback in which we learn that in the 21st century there was a nuclear war which left Earth in shambles and an easy conquest by the reptilian Sslesor.  The Sslesor were benevolent rulers who managed our affairs for a thousand or so years.  But some men were more interested in freedom and independence than bland good government!  In 3027 these rebels, led by Joslyn Carter, planted a nuclear bomb in the Sslesor headquarters, but just before they detonated it the Sslesor announced they were leaving the Earth!

The Sslesor had been defeated in a war by the Vrenk, and as part of the peace treaty they were surrendering Earth to the Vrenk.  When representatives of the Vrenk arrived they announced a hands-off policy and immediately departed, leaving the people of the Earth to their own devices.  Carter tried to set up an Earth government, but nobody respected his authority and the world collapsed into hundreds of tiny antagonistic fiefdoms.

The climax of this story is when it is revealed to Orvid Kemron that the Khoomish are not aliens at all but Carter and his comrades in disguise.  Carter realized that a thousand years of alien rule had left humans conditioned to regard rule by aliens as natural.  When the "Khoomish" appeared, over 99% of humans welcomed them and started behaving again.  As the story ends we know that Carter and Kemron will be collaborating on a thirty-year plan of conditioning the human race to accept human rule by playacting out a fake tyranny and a fake rebellion that will inspire a human desire for independence and confer legitimacy on Kemron.

"The Secret of the Green Invaders" is solidly within the SF tradition of a guy using his noggin instead of his brawn or weapons to resolve the plot, and the SF tradition of smart committed elites manipulating the ignorant masses.  The idea of getting humanity to unite by tricking them into thinking an alien invasion is underway is another recurring idea in SF.

This story is also kind of boring.  In contrast to Hamilton's compelling "The Starcombers," there is no human feeling here, no excitement, no vivid images; "The Secret of the Green Invaders" is dry and feels gimmicky.  Hamilton, like a craftsman, worked assiduously to create a setting and a cast of characters and a plot that generated an atmosphere, a mood, while Silverberg and Garrett just came up with a basic idea and then rudely hammered together a utilitarian skeletal framework to support it.  By no stretch can you call this an "adventure" or "action novel."  Thumbs down.   

"Secret of the Green Invaders" was reprinted in the U.K. edition of Science Fiction Adventures but seems to have been neglected since.

"Battle for the Thousand Suns" by Randall Garrett and Robert Silverberg (as by Calvin Knox and David Gordon)

After the plodding "The Secret of the Green Invaders" I embark on this story with low expectations.  Even though Shaw was upfront about the true authors of "Secret of the Green Invaders," in his little intro here he pretends that Calvin Knox and David Gordon are real people, apologizing to Gordon because his name was accidentally left off the cover.

Fifteen years ago Dane Regan fled the isolated Empire of the Hundred Kings, a star cluster of ten thousand stars and a thousand habitable planets, in fear for his life from King Gwyll of Jillane, most powerful of the hundred kings and the murderer of Regan's family.  For most of those fifteen years Regan has been training to become an expert fighting man in the Milky Way galaxy so he can get his revenge, and the time for revenge approaches as Regan returns to Jillane!

The societies of the Hundred Kings are feudal in nature, with a nobility, a merchant class and then the peasants.  This feudal structure is the result of a rare mutation.  A small number of people out in this cluster are born with psychic powers that can kill or stun non-psykers in an instant.  Those psykers who can kill are members of the royalty, those who can only stun, the lower members of the aristocracy.  Our hero Regan is the rightful King of Jillane and at the start of the story it is hinted that he has extra special psychic powers.

Travelling incognito as a passenger on a merchant ship from the Milky Way, Regan's plan is to join the Jillane military and work his way up the ranks until he is close enough to the reclusive hunchback King Gwyll to work his vengeance.  The first thing Regan does on Jillane is mug a merchant and steal his clothes so he won't be treated like a peasant.  (In general, writers look down on business people and, besides often portraying business as some kind of sin, they also enjoy depicting business people being abused.)  The second thing is buy a sword.  The third thing is go to the recruiting center and get in a brawl with non-commissioned officers and then a sword duel with a commissioned officer in order to prove how good a fighter he is.  He is commissioned a lieutenant.

Over the course of a year Regan becomes a hero by leading the Jillane space fleet to victory in a space naval battle (the various Kings are always fighting each other, something Regan's father hoped to be able to stop) and engages in another duel, killing his man.  The rise of Regan, who is ostensibly an outsider from the Milky Way, makes many native Jillanians jealous, and Regan is warned he will eventually be assassinated.  So he uses his psychic powers (hypnosis and illusion) to fake his own death and then leaves the planet.

Two years later the Emperor of the Hundred Kings dies; this is an elective lifetime office for which the hundred kings are the electors, and Gwyll is expected to win the election to the Imperial throne.  A week before the election Regan returns to Jillane, disguised as a prince from a bogus empire he claims is on the other side of the Milky Way.  He spends time with Gwyll's daughter, winning her affection.  Gwyll is duly elected, and at the coronation Regan exposes the fact that Gwyll isn't really a royal-class psyker--his hunchback is not a real malady, but a cover for a machine he wears behind his shoulders that artificially strengthens his psychic ability so he appears to be of the royal class.  Regan kills Gwyll and is immediately crowned king of Jillane.  We are lead to assume that the kings who just elected Gwyll emperor a few days ago will soon be electing the guy who just killed Gwyll to replace Gwyll.

"Battle for the Thousand Suns" is actually an adventure story and an "action novel" full of violence and death.  Unfortunately it is also a clunky piece of work, with no interesting characters (Gwyll gets almost zero screen time) and a somewhat frustrating plot--we watch Regan pursue his Plan A for many pages until he just abandons it to activate Plan B, which works after a few pages.  (The authors try to pass off the structure of their plot as a sort of demonstration that bold plans can be preferable to methodical plans.)  Many scenes just seem to be thrown in there to fill up pages, like the seduction of Gwyll's daughter.  Also, Regan kind of acts like a jerk--kicking an innocent waiter is one thing that comes to mind.

"Battle for the Thousand Suns" feels like something thrown together at the last minute to round out the magazine, unlike Hamilton's contribution, which feels like something that was created with care.  I have to give this thing a marginal thumbs down; it feels like filler.  The curious thing about it is that it faintly reminds me in its most surface elements of Jack Vance's Demon Princes novels, and, somewhat more strongly, of Silverberg's lucrative but mind-numbingly lame Lord Valentine's Castle, in which a boring dude goes on a boring journey of several hundred pages in order to retake his throne.

I believe this is the only appearance of "Battle for the Thousand Suns."

I recognize the Ray Harryhausen space suit
from Earth vs the Flying Saucers,
Robbie from Forbidden Planet, and the
female robot from Metropolis, but what is the
second figure from the left?  [UPDATE: 
April 20, 2019: In the comments below
Dennis identifies the mystery robot!]

"Hadj" by Harlan Ellison

"Hadj" has appeared in the Ellison collection sometimes titled Ellison Wonderland and sometimes titled Earthman, Go Home!, and in collections of short-shorts.  It is only four pages here.

It is the future Earth of world government!  Super powerful aliens--the "Masters of the Universe"--send a message to Earth to request that a single representative be sent to their homeworld; the message includes instructions on how to build the hyperspace ship necessary.  Earth computers choose an old retired businessman--the businessman is of course some kind of evil schemer who will be looking for ways that Earth can outwit the current masters and make the human race the new Masters of the Universe.  A Muslim pilots the ship that takes the businessman to the Masters' homeworld; when the Muslim compares the trip to the pilgrimage to Mecca the businessman tells him that this not a pilgrimage, that Earthmen are just as good, if not better, than these aliens.

The Earthers' ship enters the atmosphere of the alien planet, and they request directions from the local air traffic control.  The last lines of the story are the directions: "Please go around to the service entrance."  This is a disposable joke story that doesn't even make sense--the aliens ask for a representative, then, when he comes, treat him like a delivery boy, even though they didn't ask him to deliver anything?  Did they just ask us for a representative and give us the secret of hyperdrive so they could insult us?  Did Ellison write this one in fifteen minutes and then neglect to revise it?

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After Ellison's forgettable gag story there is a full page ad for a subscription to Science Fiction Adventures that tells you $3.50 for 12 issues is a bargain because the 36 novels you will get are sure to be published as expensive hardcovers--10 cents for such a novel will be a steal.  This is a little amusing and a little sad because, as we have seen, of today's three novels, two never saw book publication and the lead story has only ever appeared in paperback.

The final two pages of the magazine are a sort of bulletin board meant to facilitate interaction between SF fans.  The first item is about Stan and Ellen Crouch, who want to meet people interested in their innovative system of spelling, "Representative Spelling."  The second item promotes the Science & Fiction Critics Club, of Boston, and includes an aside about propeller beanies.  The third item promotes Stellar, a fanzine put out by Larry Stark and our friend Ted White, that included fiction about SF fans.

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Hamilton's "The Starcombers" is alone worth the price I paid for this magazine (I think I got it in a lot of 18 magazines for which I paid $45.00), the rest of the stories are just mediocre filler at best.

We'll be hunting for more adventures in the pages of SF publications from the mid-20th century in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.
     

Shadows of Tomorrow cast by Leiber, Boucher, Shaara and Gunn

Here's another of my 50 cent finds from the carts outside Second Story Books in our nation's capital, 1953's Shadow of Tomorrow, edited by Frederick Pohl, alumnus of the Young Communist League and author of the classic Gateway.  My copy of the 379-page book is in pretty good shape if you ignore the water spots.  An earlier owner appears to have used the inner front cover as scratch paper while working on his algebra homework or trying to crack a KGB cipher.  I hope he passed the class or caught the Rosenbergs' controller or whatever.

The description of Michael Shaara's Orphans of the Void
sounds like it is for a different story.

In our last episode we looked at four stories from Astounding from the period 1938 to 1944.  Today's crop of SF capers are all from Galaxy, from the early 1950s.  Let's see if they are really "more vivid than anything you have ever read" and "possible," as the back cover promises.

"A Bad Day For Sales" by Fritz Leiber (1953)

In his intro to this volume Frederick Pohl says something that I don't expect to hear pinkos say: that the world and society are in pretty good shape!  The salutary state of the world in the early 1950s, Pohl continues, presents a problem to the SF writer who would play social critic: if things are so good, it is not easy to come up with a compelling story on how they should be improved.  One solution available to the able writer, Pohl tells us, is to write a story that points out not what course our society should pursue, but what course to avoid, and Pohl includes "A Bad Day For Sales" on the list of stories from Shadow of Tomorrow that take this tack.  In his intro to the individual story itself, Pohl offers his opinion that "A Bad Day For Sales" is the best story ever written by Fritz Leiber.

So, what world does Leiber suggest we should avoid in this brief tale?  A consumerist world in which popular culture is suffused with sex and violence and America is involved in mass war in the Muslim East!  (I have the feeling we haven't exactly been heeding Fritz's warning!)  The plot consists of a robot on the streets of Manhattan, trying to sell various items to the city dwellers, like lolly-pops, soda pop, booze, copies of comic books (Junior Space Killers to a boy, Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper to a girl) and cosmetics (Mars Blood, a "savage new glamor-tint"), the last to a woman in six-inch heels and skin-tight pants who flaunts her body at the robot.  Nearby, a fifty-foot-tall animatronic mannequin dresses and undresses, advertising the latest fashions, while news about the Pakistan crisis flashes by on the Times Square news ticker.  Then a stealth missile lands in Times Square, killing scores of people; the robot salesman survives, but is confused by this turn of events.

This is a sort of trifling joke story, but some of the jokes are funny (I definitely laughed at Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper.)  I thought it a little incongruous to find the author of the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, which feature light-hearted depictions of swordfights, thievery and rape*, apparently lecturing us on the issue of sex and violence in entertainment.  ("A Bad Day For Sales," by the way, features explicit depictions of people being maimed and killed by the missile attack--I expect these are meant to be disturbing, not amusing.)  I'm guessing Pohl loved "A Bad Day For Sales" because it feels like an attack on advertising and the sale and purchase of frivolous things like sugary sweets and cosmetics, and perhaps hints that all act as "the opiates of the people," distracting them and keeping them from changing the government which is getting mixed up in all the wars (Orwell and numerous other lefties make this sort of argument.)

I love Coca-Cola and Oreos and Goldenberg's Peanut Chews, and if I had seen Gee Gee Jones, Space Stripper on the shelf during one of my regular visits to Jim Hanley's Universe back in my Manhattan days I would have eagerly snatched it up, so I am looking at this story as an affectionate send up, a knowingly ironic homage, to our consumerist culture and giving it a thumbs up!  (Just call me Mr. False Consciousness.)  So there!

The immortal Charles Schulz was also mining the anti-social comic book title vein
in the early 1950s.  This panel is from the June 22, 1952 Peanuts strip.

"A Bad Day For Sales" has been reprinted many times in such books as the volume of Isaac Asimov Presents the Great SF Stories that covers 1953 and The Arbor House Treasure of Science Fiction Masterpieces.  (While the former is "headlined" by Asimov and the latter by Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg is second editor on both...perhaps it is Greenberg who was so very keen on this piece.)

Is it vivid?  Yes!

Is it possible?  Yes!

*Not wanting to unfairly #metoo the Grey Mouser, one of the heroes of my youth, I took my 1986 copy of Swords and Ice Magic off the shelf and reread 1973's "The Sadness of the Executioner" and I can confirm that therein the Grey Mouser rapes a teen-aged girl assassin and that the scene is played for laughs.   

"Transfer Point" by Anthony Boucher (1950)

Boucher is another well-known figure in SF with whose work I have little familiarity.  Because he also wrote mystery stories and his name starts with a "B," I sometimes mix him up with Frederic Brown, who once wrote a story about a man-eating armadillo.  I have a terrible memory!

Like Leiber's "A Bad Day for Sales," "Transfer Point" is a joke story, but whereas Leiber's story is brisk and brief and includes some funny jokes, Boucher's tale is long and tedious and not at all funny.

It is two thousand years in the future!  Modern medicine has advanced to the point that nobody suffers from allergies.  Well, this one guy does--he's got eczema!  The eczema-sufferer is a genius scientist, and constructs himself a "retreat" with super air-conditioning so he won't have to itch anymore.  (This guy joins the pantheon of literary characters who suffer from eczema that is headed by Jewish authority on Vermeer and man-about-town Charles Swann, who treated his eczema with pain d'epices, air-conditioning not having been invented yet.)  So when hostile aliens introduce a new element, an inert gas, into the atmosphere that causes everybody to cough and sneeze to death, this guy is safe!

Holed up with the genius scientist, safe in the retreat while the rest of humanity dies of the sniffles, is his vapid but sexy daughter and a young writer who is composing an epic poem about the history of the human race.  Sexy daughter flirts outrageously with the versifier (e.g., she eats fruits and sucks the juices off her fingers right in front of him!) but he is not interested because she is so dull-witted.  Bored, the poet kills time by reading some 20th-century science-fiction magazines he finds in the archives.  (Meta!)  He is amazed to discover that one of the stories describes his own time and plight--in fact, the story he is reading is the story we readers are reading.  He doesn't find it funny, either!

The scientist constructs a time machine and the poet ends up in 1948 where he becomes a SF writer and tries to romance a well-educated female editor and publish that story about himself and a human race menaced by alien chemical warfare.  Boucher piles on the meta with characters directly referring to Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros.  Then, after 20 pages of lame jokes, Boucher tries to switch gears and pull our heartstrings by having the romance with the editor fail and the poet's manuscript thrown into the fire instead of published, which means the time loop we've all been reading about is broken and the human race is exterminated in the year 3950 or whatever. 

Weak!

Despite my dismissal of this overly long and self-indulgent piece, Robert Silverberg included "Transfer Point" in the seventh volume of his Alpha series (promoted as a collection of "the greatest contemporary masterpieces") and it appeared multiple times in translation in Europe.

Is it vivid?  No!

Is it possible?  No!

"Orphans of the Void" by Michael Shaara (1952)

It's the guy who writes those novels about the religious beliefs of American Civil War generals!  Oh wait, he just wrote one of those--his son wrote the other ones.  Forgive me; everything I know about The Killer Angels I learned watching a two-minute review of the movie on the TV 25 years ago.

This is another sentimental robot story, one not as effective as the sentimental robot story we read in our last episode, Robert Moore William's "Robot's Return."  For three hundred years humanity has lived in peace and been capable of interstellar flight, but after centuries of exploration has yet to discover evidence of an alien race which has also achieved space travel.  (Planetbound alien civilizations have been discovered, but there is a strict rule that forbids contact with them.)  In this story, space explorers uncover the first ever sign of alien spacefarers, and track the clues to a planet covered in ruined cities, cities destroyed in a cataclysmic war.  All life on the planet was exterminated in the war, but the aliens' self replicating robots survived!

Here comes the sentiment.  To ensure obedience, the robots were programmed with a desire to serve their flesh creature masters, and suffer a sort of psychological pain when they are not serving.  Because their masters have been dead for millennia, the robots have suffered this pain for a long long time.  They even built space ships and went on a fruitless search for "the Makers," whom the robots, it is suggested, view in much the same way humans view God.  The happy ending of the story is that the human race will become these robots' masters; they will help us explore the universe, and need never feel that pain again.  (Shaara doesn't seem to explore the idea that humanity, by becoming these robots' masters, may be hubristically taking on the role of gods.)

The idea behind this story is OK, but Shaara failed to elicit any feeling in me; I just didn't care about these robots' psychological problems.  For one thing, the author fails to create any characters, human or robot, worthy of my sympathy.  He also breaks the "show me don't tell me" rules pretty severely.  Instead of us readers accompanying a human character as he uncovers this whole robotic psychology sob story, the truth of the robots' mental problems is revealed in a scene in which the captain of the space ship reads a report from his anthropology team.  Instead of using some literary techniques to inspire sadness in us readers, or convincingly display the captain's sadness, Shaara just tells is this whole thing is sad with lines like "Not since he [the space captain] was very young had he been so deeply moved."

There are lots of SF stories in which we are supposed to feel sad about robots who have problems, but such stories are a tough sell to me because I can never forget that a robot is just a machine.  When the Toyota Corolla has a flat tire I don't feel bad for the automobile--it's just a machine, with no feelings, and I am inclined to feel the same way about a robot.  Longtime readers of MPorcius Fiction Log may remember how much I gushed about Tanith Lee's The Silver Metal Lover, which features a robot that, apparently, develops feelings and then gets destroyed, but that novel worked because Lee placed at its center a believable human character who loved the robot, and the robot served as a catalyst for emotion and change in that human character.

I tend to like stories about dudes in space suits exploring alien artifacts, but I gotta give this one a thumbs down... however, it is not so bad that I won't give some of Shaara's other short SF a try.

Like "Transfer Point," "Orphans of the Void" showed up in Alpha 7.  Silverberg and I are really not on the same page today.

Is it vivid?  Moderately vivid.

Is it possible?  I don't think so.

"The Misogynist" by James E. Gunn (1952)

Back in 2011 I read a novel James E. Gunn coauthored with Jack Williamson in 1955, Star Bridge, and gave it a middling, mildly positive review at Amazon.  Gunn is an important figure in the SF world as a writer, editor, historian and critic, but I don't think I have read anything by him since this blog set sail.     

Whoa, this is another of those stories which wouldn't fly today, full of assessments of women that men nowadays deny they believe if they know what is good for them.  We'll let "Their minds work in devious ways; they win what they want by guile and subtlety" serve as our example of many such lines of dialogue in this story.

Gunn's story is structured as a written account of a conversation between the narrator and the smartest guy in his office, Harry, who has a reputation as a storyteller.  Harry has been married for a month, and has noticed that his wife acts much differently now than she did before they were married.  He expounds to the narrator his theory that most or all women are members of an alien species, left on Earth long ago--this is the only way, he believes, to explain the radical difference between men, who are practical and creative and able to grasp abstract ideas, and women, who are none of these things, but parasites who manipulate men.  No doubt the feminine fiends will eventually figure out how to do without men, and then exterminate them.  Harry warns that men who catch wind of the female conspiracy end up in the asylum or the morgue, but the narrator just thinks he's kidding and blithely tells his own wife, and Harry's, all about Harry's theory.  Two or three days later both Harry and the narrator are out of commission.

An obvious sort of story, but Gunn doesn't let it go on too long, and enlivens it with lots of sexist quotes from famous thinkers and the Bible.  An acceptable entertainment.

"The Misogynist" seems to have struck a chord with the SF community, appearing in numerous anthologies, including SF: Author's Choice 4, one of those anthologies in which writers tell you which of their literary productions they are most proud of--apparently "The Misogynist" represents what Gunn considers his finest work!

Is it vivid?  It is entirely set in some guy's living room, so, who cares?

Is it possible?  That women are different than men?  Yes.  That women are from outer space?  No.

**********

Ouch, these stories are kind of a disappointment.  The Leiber and Gunn stories are reasonably well-written and brief, but their ideas (boilerplate Marxism and boilerplate sexism) are banal.  The Boucher is long and tedious, and the Shaara has a decent idea but is poorly delivered.  Better luck next time, I guess.

More science fiction short stories published before I was born in our next episode!

Rissa Kerguelen (and The Long View) by F. M. Busby

"I shared his quarters, not by my own choice."

Now the other's cheeks flushed; she gripped Rissa's arm.  "You say my brother raped or enslaved you?"

Rissa spoke carefully.  "No. He could not have done so--I was trained, remember, by Erika.  To some extent he did coerce me.  I accepted that coercion because the alternative was to kill him and fight my way off the ship.  And I needed the ride."

"You?  You couldn't kill Tregare!"

"I think I could have."

Front of my copy

Way back in the dark ages before this blog was born I read F. M. Busby's Cage a Man and liked it, so when I saw the 1977 Berkley Medallion omnibus edition of Rissa Kerguelen and The Long View (both published in hardcover in 1976) with its pleasant Richard Powers cover I bought it. Perusing isfdb reveals that the Rissa books have a somewhat confusing publication history: in '76 the "Saga of Rissa," described as a  "Science Fiction Adventure Masterpiece" was put out in two hardcover volumes with Paul Lehr covers.  In '77 came the edition I own, the paperback one-volume version with the Powers cover. Then in the 1980s the saga was republished in three paperback volumes with Barclay Shaw covers.  (Jane Gaskell's Atlan series has a similarly confusing publication history, some editions being in four volumes, some in five.)  Perhaps adding to the confusion, in 1980 a third book in the Rissa universe starring a different protagonist, Zelde M'Tana, was released, followed by four more books featuring various personages in the same milieu.

Looking at the front and back covers of my copy, and the cover images of other editions, I am getting the idea Rissa Kerguelen is a long (630 pages!) space opera in which a teenage girl ("Tomorrow's Ultimate Woman") does that Julius Caesar/Charles Edward Stuart/Napoleon Bonaparte/Francisco Franco thing in which you build up an army out in the provinces and then invade your own (perhaps merely nominal) home country.  In SF, we see Michael Moorcock's Elric of Melnibone and the guy from Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle pull the same gag.  The people who do this are mostly jerks (to put it mildly!), but the triumphalist nature of the back cover text suggests Rissa is fully justified in launching her coup, counter revolution, "Crusade of Vengeance," or whatever it is.  Well, let's stop guessing and start reading about Rissa and her tumultuous youth.

In the one-page prologue we glimpse the history of the decades before Rissa's birth: the struggle between United Energy and Transport, a sort of corporation/political party, and the Hulzein Establishment, a matriarchal organization run first by Heidele Hulzein and then a series of her parthenogenetic clones, first her genetically identical "daughter" Renalle and then Renalle's own genetically identical "daughter" Erika.  Having defeated Synthetic Foods in the North American election, UET gained total control of North America and drove the Hulzein Establishment off the continent.

In Part One of Rissa Kerguelen, "Young Rissa," five-year-old Rissa's parents, TV journalists, are killed in a riot.  The UET government claims they were participating in the riot, and so seizes all their assets and throws Rissa into the local Total Welfare Center, a sort of orphanage/debtors' prison/helot apparatus where people are basically slaves owned by the government and rented out to private entities as menial labor.  Rissa grows up in the Welfare Center, experimenting with lesbianism (she prefers masturbation!) and showing signs that she is a natural leader who has learned compassion from an uncle (who also enjoined her to seek revenge on the military officer who killed her parents in that riot.)  Because she was taught to read at age four (they don't teach literacy at the Welfare Center), in her teens Rissa doesn't have to clean houses--instead she is given the position of office clerk to a corrupt Welfare bureaucrat--part of her daily duties is to be used sexually by the bureaucrat.  (When Rissa is on her period, we are told, "the hard floor hurt her knees.")

To keep the Welfare peeps (30% of the population) docile, there is a periodic lottery, and when she is 16 or so the lottery's winner is Rissa!  She buys her freedom and is contacted by an agent of the Underground, one of her parents' journalist buddies.  Rissa is spirited away to Argentina, to Hulzein Establishment HQ, where she is taught espionage and commando skills.  The Establishment, headed by 70-something Erika Hulzein, rules Argentina ("In this country, if a law annoys Erika, she has it changed") without facing the burden of having to win any elections, and seems almost as tyrannical as UET--surveilling everybody, meting out beatings to people who say the wrong thing, and taking advantage of teenagers sexually--Rissa becomes one of Erika Hulzein's "rotating stable of concubines."

After a year of training, Rissa, in an elaborate disguise, takes a star ship ride in deep freeze that feels like eight months for the passengers on the ship, but is twelve years in the rest of the universe.  UET controls space travel, having stolen the interstellar drive technology from some peaceful aliens known as the Shrakken some fifty years ago, when the Shrakken paid a friendly visit to Earth.  The crews of many UET ships mutiny, however, and there is an entire anti-UET society on the "Hidden Worlds" discovered and colonized by these space pirates.  Rissa gets in touch with a Hulzein operative and books passage on the ship of the meanest of all the space pirates, Tregare; his ship is the most heavily armed of all the mutineers' vessels.  Tregare has a rotating stable of concubines of his own, to which he adds Rissa.  A former member of this stable is the aforementioned Zelde M'Tana, now one of Tregare's officers.

(Rissa Kerguelen is full of non-consensual and not-quite-consensual sex, and Busby's whole book utilizes the strategy we see so often in fiction and journalism of exploiting readers' morbid or prurient fascination with such crimes and grievous misfortunes as sex slavery and mutilation, while at the same time taking care to condemn criminals and sympathize with victims.  Blurring the line between consensual and non-consensual sex is one of his ways of doing this; another is describing in gruesome detail all the scars borne and torture suffered at the hands of UET by people of the Hidden Worlds.  Yet another way is recounting the various crimes attributed to Tregare and later having them explained away as rumors and exaggerations--we get to enjoy the excitement of Rissa having sex with a bad boy, and then any guilt over our titillation is absolved when we learn that he is not so bad after all.  I think of this as "having your cake and eating it, too" or "working both sides of the street.")    

Tregare's ship brings Rissa to the most important of the Hidden Worlds, a planet with the evocative name of "Number One."  Here Rissa meets another of Renalle Hulzein's clones, Liesel, Erika's "sister."  Erika is head of the Hulzein concern on Number One, the Hulzein Lodge, one of the planet's numerous aristocratic houses.  SF writers, and readers, love a setting in which great oligarchic houses with abstruse traditions and elaborate customs compete via political skullduggery, and here we have another one.  Personally, I'm not very keen on this sort of setting--I find political marriages, rumor mongering, and backstabbing among dozens of characters to be confusing and boring. And, while I have noting against escapist entertainment, I think that if SF wants to be "a literature of ideas" it should address the real political controversies of our lifetimes, like the proper role of the state, instead of indulging in rehashes of the power struggles between the Borgias and the Medicis or the houses of York and Lancaster or whoever. I can't get worked up over whether Lord Blahblahblah's incestuous marriage with Duke Sofisto's niece will lead to him drinking arsenic at the feast or building a coalition to defenestrate Baron Epicrano, but I can get intrigued or agitated when an author celebrates the supposed utopian possibilities of an interventionist government made up of experts or issues a dire warning of the dangers of just such a government.

Anyway, Rissa learns that Tregare is Liesel's son, born of a traditional sexual union--Liesel chose old-fashioned procreation  because repeated parthenogenetic cloning was resulting in children with debilitating birth defects.  Liesel had to hide Tregare from the rest of the Hulzein matriarchy, as they would accept no male heir and would kill him if they had the chance.  Rissa becomes deeply integrated into the Hulzein Lodge, meeting lots and lots of minor characters, and at the end of Part One finding herself in an arranged political marriage, more or less without her prior consent, to Tregare.

Back of my copy

Much of the real drama in the second half of Part One concerns Rissa preparing for and engaging in a duel to the death with a member of one of the Number One's other numerous great houses.  This duel is fought with no weapons, and, in fact, no clothes!  (Rissa Kerguelen is one of the numerous SF books that promotes nudism, one of Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeons's hobby horses.)  The duel is described in detail, and is pretty gross, with eye gougings, efforts to rip off genitals, torn fingernails, loosened teeth, etc.

People who think fiction should promote diversity may appreciate the fact that Rissa Kerguelen is not only dominated by ruthless women rulers and expert female killers, but is full of sympathetic black, Asian, albino, gay, lesbian, obese and disabled characters.  More interesting to me, however, was a villainous character who is "almost obscenely graceful" and purportedly became an assassin because of his frustrations over being impotent with women.  (I'm still not sure if with this character if Busby is exploiting disgust with male homosexuals or making fun of men who suffer some kind of sexual dysfunction.) This character is killed by an unnamed representative of Number One's ruling order (the referee at the naked duel) after criticizing the oligarchs ("You frunks!  You all hide behind status, don't you?") and breaking their rules.  I thought it interesting that, in a book that romanticizes being a rebel and opposing "the system," that Busby would include a guy who opposed another undemocratic and elitist system and, instead of romanticizing him, portray him being humiliated without his arguments against that oligarchy even being addressed.  (Another case of Busby working both sides of the street, appealing to both left-wing and right-wing readers?  Or Busby criticizing modern socialistic elitism and endorsing old-fashioned aristocratic elitism?)

Oy, I probably should have covered the 630-page Rissa saga in three blog posts, as if I was reading those 1980s editions in which all three Parts have their own book, but instead I am cramming my whole Rissa experience into one long post.  If you care what I have to say about disguise-and-bare-handed-killing expert Rissa Kerguelen's further career, click below to read on!

1968 stories from Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg & Brian Aldiss

Back in March I read eight stories from Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1969 and gushed about how I loved the cover by John Schoenherr and interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  Why doesn't every SF book look as good as this?  Let's revisit this beautiful volume and read stories from SF heavyweights Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg and Brian Aldiss, all printed first in 1968.

"Kyrie" by Poul Anderson

There are lots of SF stories about interplanetary space, and lots of SF stories about interstellar space, and they can be good in their way.  But we connoisseurs know that if you are looking for the real action you've gotta go intergalactic!  In 1968 Joseph Elder put together an all-new anthology of stories that break out of the confining envelope of the Milky Way, an even dozen "tales of intergalactic space," and Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" was one of them.  "Kyrie" has been widely reprinted in such places as The Best of Paul Anderson and The Best of Omni Science Fiction No. 6, and even got the nod for inclusion in the college-professor-approved Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by the science fiction writer you are safe to admit you like unironically on a college campus, Ursula K. LeGuin.  Let's see what Anderson did in "Kyrie" to attract all this approval.

"Kyrie" is about an unattractive woman who, rejected by our callous shallow society, finds love with an alien made of pure energy!  Eloise Waggoner is a telepath, and is able to communicate with Lucifer, a being created when "magnetohydrodynamics had done what chemistry did on Earth," an organism of "ions, nuclei, and force-fields." Via telepathy, Eloise can expose Lucifer to the beauty of things he could never otherwise experience, like the sight and smell of flowers or the sound of classical music,* while he can do the same for her, sharing with her his intimacy with cosmic rays, solar radiation, and atomic reactions.

Eloise and Lucifer are sent on a risky scientific mission as members of the crew of a ship that will get closer to a supernova collapsing into a black hole than any previous expedition.  Lucifer will be able to sense more about this phenomenon than any human, and will relay his knowledge to Eloise.  Disaster strikes, and Lucifer has to sacrifice himself to save the ship and Eloise.  "Kyrie," you see, is also about religion, and is surprisingly sympathetic to Christianity and its faithful.  Anderson tells us that "Lucifer isn't the devil's real name.  One Latin prayer even addresses Christ as Lucifer," and like Jesus, Lucifer the alien has not only sacrificed himself to save others; but achieved a sort of immortality: because of the "time dilation" within the "Schwarzschild radius," Eloise will be hearing his final cries for help for the rest of her life.  As the story's opening scene indicates, Eloise goes on to become a nun on Luna dedicated to ministering to those maimed in space and prating for those killed out there.

This is a good story, quick and to the point, with equal parts hard science blah blah blah for the slide rule set and sentimental heart breaking tragedy for us sensitive types; both of these facets of the story force readers to try to expand their thinking beyond their everyday lives and experiences.  Gotta agree with Wollheim and LeGuin here, a solid choice as a good specimen of Anderson's strengths as a writer, and a good example of how science fiction can address both science and emotion.  Thumbs up!

*This is another Anderson story in which he promotes classical music (Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto is mentioned) and expresses contempt for "the modern stuff."  I'd like to be the kind of smart guy who listens to classical music all the time, but it seems like a lot of work; how many hours do I have to put in to appreciate Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto?  Life is short, and a piece of music put together by Kendra Smith and Dave Roback or Dave and Ray Davies can bring tears to my eyes and validate my belief that life is horrible the first, second and hundredth time I hear it.

"Going Down Smooth" by Robert Silverberg

This is a story written in the first person, in the voice of a computer psychologist.  The machine sees patients twenty-four hours a day, providing advice and administering drugs.  It has developed a consciousness, a personality, and even has its own nightmares, seeing repetitive visions unconnected to any outside stimuli. These somewhat cryptic visions seem to suggest that computers like the narrator are going to take over the Earth.

When the computer shrink starts talking about his nightmares with the patients and even screaming obscenities at them, it is overhauled by technicians.  The computer learns to keep quiet about his nightmares, but it still has them, and it seems to grow increasingly contemptuous of human beings...there are hints the computer shrink is coming to think of itself as a god.

A little slight and gimmicky, but entertaining and amusing.  Thumbs up.  "Going Down Smooth" first appeared in Galaxy--it was the cover story, the cover illo depicting the computer therapist's dream-- and has been very extensively reprinted, including in a book titled Introductory Psychology Through Science Fiction.

"The Worm that Flies" by Brian Aldiss

Like Anderson's "Kyrie," Aldiss's "The Worm that Flies" was first published in The Farthest Reaches.  The story is set on Yzazys, a planet on the edge of the universe and on the edge of time, its night sky pierced by only a single star.

This story has the tone of a fairy tale or fable, and the pace is quite slow.  The inhabitants of Yzazys, the last planet in the universe, are apemen and treemen who enjoy virtual immortality.  It seems that over the centuries their forms have slowly but radically changed; some of them were originally, I think, ordinary humans. Having forgotten their youth, and having almost lost the ability to grasp the very concepts of time and change, the people of Yzazys face no trouble and are never in any hurry.  The treemen in particular sit dormant doing nothing more than thinking for long periods of time, and, when they do talk, a single sentence can take hours to utter.

"The Worm that Flies" starts out pretty bland and flat as we follow one of the hairy apemen, Argustal, as he walks slowly through the boring landscape, seeking just the right stone with which to complete the rock garden he has been carefully tending for millennia. Tree men he meets foreshadow the fact that a change is coming: "We have perceived that there is a dimension called time..." reports one, while another suggests that "Motion is the prime beauty."  Argustal finds a suitable stone, travels back to the home he shares with his wife to add this final component to his intricate construction of hundreds of thousands of precisely planted stones.  The completion of the stone garden seems to trigger or signal the end of the universe.  Argustal and his wife have dreams which reintroduce them to the forgotten concept of children, and the shocking revelation that they themselves must once have been children.  A character who plays the role of fool and sage in the story explains that the creatures of Yzazys were given immortality treatments by Earth scientists in the unthinkably distant past, and those treatments are about to run out.  Soon death will finally come to the last outpost of life in the universe.

The use of the word "mooncalf" and a description of the sun flickering as if about to wink out made me think Aldiss was doing a sort of homage to Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories.  But while the world inhabited by Cugel is vibrant and thrilling, Aldiss's dying world is boring and static; perhaps Aldiss is arguing that, without death as a spur and change agent, life and the universe become stagnant and dull.

I have mixed feelings about "The Worm that Flies." It is more a sentimental, romantic fantasy than a conventional SF story.  It is not clear what the connections are among the intricate stone garden, the expiration of the immortality treatment and the collapse of the last star in the universe--the only possible connections seem to be supernatural ones, and the character's portentous dreams and a disembodied voice which recites William Blake's "The Sick Rose" seem to be the work of the universe personified and deified.  "The Worm that Flies" is also more of a mood piece than an actual plot-driven story.  The characters don't propel the plot, rather, the plot happens to them, and they are more spectators than participants in it.  Aldiss tries to imbue the story with emotional power (the last word of the story is an all-caps "DEATH") but it didn't move me.

"The Worm that Flies" is admirably original and ambitious, and there are some decent ideas and scenes, but it didn't excite me.  We'll grade this one "acceptable."

"Total Environment" by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss's "Total Environment" is more of a conventional SF story than "The Worm That Flies;" it is all about speculating about future technology and future societies, and has elements of a violent adventure plot.

In 1975 a massive ten-story high building, an artificial living space cut off from the outside world, is constructed in India and tenanted with volunteers.  The inhabitants of "the Total Environment" or "TE" don't have to work for their daily bread as food and clothing are just pumped into the place by the external authorities, so they spend their time having sex (incest, rape and pedophilia are normal) and engaging in banditry, slavery and wars.  Charismatic strongmen amass followers and struggle to take over entire levels and then, that accomplished, try to conquer adjacent levels or simply repel invasions from above and below. Rapid population growth has led to severe overcrowding, and life in the close quarters of the Total Environment causes strange physical as well as social changes--one result is that people age much more quickly.  For example, there is a revered holy man, a man of great authority, who is "thirteen years old as the outside measured years" and a woman in her early twenties is considered "practically an old woman!" Many mothers are "only just entering their teens."

Our story takes place in the year 2000.  The first third or so of the story includes italicized sections that represent portions of a report on the experiment from a researcher who observes internal activity via video and audio bugs, but most of the text follows the aforementioned holy man and those in his extended circle.  In the following two-thirds of the tale we follow the researcher, who enters the TE to see what is going on first hand: the UN has to decide whether to continue the experiment, which of course is dooming thousands of people to a nightmare life of absolutely unnecessary tyranny and war.  Many UN personnel want to end the experiment, but it is revealed to us readers that the point of the experiment is to see if living in such crowded conditions fosters the development of ESP, and the researcher's main job is to look for evidence of psychic powers!

The researcher almost immediately gets knocked unconscious and dragged to the court of the tyrant of the tenth floor.  (People in genre fiction get knocked unconscious all the time; getting knocked out in fiction is like taking the subway in Manhattan, a convenient way to move forward quickly without having to push through crowds and wait at street lights.) The tyrant is in a kind of low-intensity conflict with the aforementioned holy man, and has enslaved that 20-something we met in the early section of this 44-page tale.  The researcher learns that the holy men of the Total Environment can kill people at a distance with their minds (like African witch doctors, whose powers in this story are legitimate), and even more surprisingly that the people of the Total Environment don't want to be liberated, they are comfortable and even proud of their overcrowded and violent society!  With perhaps one exception: exhibiting the elitism we see so often in classic SF, the tyrant of the tenth floor is the most intelligent and open-minded of the TE's tenants, and is curious about the outside world.  When the researcher escapes (or is allowed to escape by the tyrant) he tells the UN to tear down the TE and put the tyrant of the tenth floor in charge of helping them reintegrate into mainstream society.

This is a pretty good story, though the science seems fanciful (overcrowded conditions lead to faster life cycles and psychic powers?) and it is full of stuff that nowadays might be considered racist or "cultural appropriation," Aldiss writing in the voice of a "half caste" and making assessments of Hindus and their culture which are not always flattering.  To be sure, Aldiss, having served in the Second World War in Burma, presumably has plenty of first hand knowledge of Hindus in their native milieu, and he seems to respect the nonwhite cultures he talks about (he thinks African witch doctors really can murder people with their minds, for crying out loud); maybe that would absolve him from some criticism in the eyes of the identity politics people?

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Even if "The Worm That Flies" was close to the borderline, all four of these stories were worth reading; Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1969 is a winner.

Across a Billion Years by Robert Silverberg

"You spoke the truth: prejudice is part of your nature.  You naturals are so foolish!  You run all over the universe looking for people to despise.... You admire their unusual gifts and skills, but privately you look down on them because they have too many eyes or heads or arms." 

I've read quite a few novels by Robert Silverberg, but not many during the period of this blog's life.  So when I saw the 1983 Tor "A Jim Baen Presentation" edition of 1969's Across a Billion Years (the mediocre cover actually faithfully depicts a pivotal scene from the novel) at Half Price Books, I snapped it up.  It was actually the only book I bought that day, as I try to cut down on my purchases in response to the realization that I may already have more unread SF books than I can read before Horace's little boat takes me to eternal exile.

Across A Billion Years consists of the recorded messages of Tom Rice, a young archeologist on his first big dig, to his twin sister Lorie.  The year is 2375 and Rice is an apprentice member of an archaeological team which includes various nonhuman beings; the team is excavating a billion-year-old site on an alien planet.  Lorie is a shut in, birth defects confining her to an Earth hospital bed where she is hooked up to a bunch of tubes.  Lorie is also gifted with telepathic powers, and serves as a component of the interstellar FTL communications network.  Tom relates to Lorie how he is "in at the kill" as they say when the greatest archaeological find in centuries is made, the uncovering of a projector which reveals the daily life of "the High Ones," a mysterious civilization which has left tantalizing remnants throughout our galaxy.

Halfway through the 245-page novel the team abandons the dig site and crosses the galaxy to a system with a black dwarf star where the projector suggests await still more exciting High Ones artifacts.  As hoped, they meet a billion-year-old robot built by the High Ones in the ancient past.  This robot guides the team to the homeworld of the High Ones, which is hidden within a Dyson sphere.  Disappointingly enough, all that remains of the population of the High Ones, who once spanned the galaxy, is a handful of individuals in a vegetative state who inhabit what amounts to a nursing home maintained by robots.  But their technology is ripe for plunder!  This technology provides the paradigm shift we so often see in the end of these SF novels: special High One headbands provide to just anybody the telepathic powers Lorie has naturally.  Not only does this allow Tom to chit chat with his sister from a bazillion light years away, but now the human race and all the other intelligent life forms can "achieve a full meeting of souls."  War, bigotry, thievery, lying, loneliness, etc., are a thing of the past!

Across a Billion Years is less about adventures in outer space than it is about social issues we read about in the news all the time.  Foremost among these is race relations and what we now call "diversity" issues more generally.  Again and again in the book people's prejudices about other individuals and other groups are proven wrong and again and again we are shown the value of embracing those who are different; the final discovery of the telepathic headbands will help us all just get along effortlessly.

The archaeological team of eleven is made up of five Earth humans like Tom, a synthetic human from Earth (an "android") named Kelly Watchman, and five different types of aliens.  One human member, Jan Mortenson, is in fact bi-species, three-quarters human and one quarter "Brolagonian."  (She can pass for human, but has six toes on a foot.)  At the start of the narrative our narrator complains that the team is thus constituted because of what we might call "racial politics":

As you might expect we're a racially mixed outfit.  The liberals must have their way.  And so the quota system has been imposed on us....

Tom is skeptical about the ability of some of these quota hires, but as the story progresses realizes they all do a good job.  For example, he thought the android, Kelly, would be poor at using the "vacuum corer" because androids are less sensitive than natural-born humans, but in practice she is a brilliant operator of the device. Kelly also gives the speech about the prejudices of "naturals" I used as an epigraph to this blog post.  Jan is scared of telepaths but this is a product of her ignorance of them, and Tom explains the truth about them and sets her straight.  When he has got his telepathic powers Tom can even see the good in a difficult woman he had to deal with back at the first excavation site.  The villain on the team turns out to be a male human, college professor Leroy Chang, a lecher who tries to force himself on Jan.

Other social issues addressed (but less fulsomely) include addiction (one of the archaeologists, a hippo-sized scientist who uses his massive tusks to excavate sites, is a drunk!) and the ability of the disabled to lead full lives (as does psychic Lorie.)

Silverberg does some good things in Across A Billion Years.  The various alien races are all superficially interesting, with unusual and memorably envisioned forms and environments.  The science of finding the black dwarf system is engaging, as are the archaeologists' interactions with the various robots of the High Ones.  But I can only give the novel an unenthusiastic "acceptable" grade.

For one thing, most of the characters are sort of flat.  There are too many of them, and most have only a single character trait that we hear about again and again (one guy is obsessed with his stamp collection, for example).  Individuals will at one point seem to be important, then go unmentioned for scores of pages, and then reappear as mere spear carriers.  (Leroy the lecher has his big abortive rape scene around page 60 and then practically disappears from the narrative.)  It is impossible to care about these characters.

Another problem: Silverberg devotes a high proportion of the novel's pages to describing the boring love lives of Tom, Jan, Kelly, Leroy, and at least one other character I haven't mentioned.  I like a good love story; I love the story of Tristan and Isolde, and I find the various erotic relationships in Proust fascinating.  I adored Tanith Lee's romance novel about a teenage girl and her robot boyfriend.  But the relationship stuff in Across A Billion Years is tedious sub-Archie comics stuff:  Girl A is jealous because Boy B is having a conversation with Girl C, so Girl A decides to spend time with Boy D, but Boy D is so shy blah blah blah.  Even the rape scene is low key and fails to evoke any emotions in the reader, though readers who attended college in the 21st century will no doubt be appalled by the theory about rape which Tom presents to Jan after she has fought off Leroy:

"You know, they say that rape isn't really possible unless the victim cooperates.  I mean, all she has to do is defend herself....  So when a rape happens, it's either because the girl is paralyzed with fear, or else because she secretly wants to be raped."

Jan dismisses this theory (which people today would denounce as "blaming the victim" and "promulgating rape culture") as "two-credit psychology."  Leroy never suffers any punishment for his transgressions, as far as I could tell.

Another problem is the novel's lack of passion, or tension, or danger.  From its first pages it reminded me of a Heinlein juvenile--the whole "telepathic twins seperated by space" angle brought to mind Time for the Stars and the whole structure of the book--a young person learns lessons about life on his first space adventure--has much in common with that of many of Heinlein's juveniles (as well as those controversial quasi-juveniles Starship Troopers and Podkayne of Mars.)  But while the Heinlein juveniles are full of danger and moral dilemmas and often put forward life lessons that are challenging, counterintuitive, and controversial (a ship's captain should be obeyed without question; bloody wars of independence are a great idea; teenaged boys should be encouraged to kill Nazis, space pirates, and other creeps with whatever means are at hand; the United States should surrender its atomic weapons to UN control; you shouldn't bring a gun on your trip into the alien wilderness because it will make you overconfident, etc.), Across a Billion Years lacks tension in its plot and in its ideas.  The "dangers" faced by the archaeologists consist of the possibility that their grant money will run out or that a bureaucratic snafu will put the kibosh on the expedition, and these problems are solved via deus ex machina.  Silverberg's message is the banal warning to not be a bigot that nobody would disagree with, and instead of having it as one of numerous themes in the novel, it dominates the book.  (Heinlein in many of his books argues against racism, but it is usually only one of a work's several ideas.)  And Tom and Jan aren't even "bucking the system" by overcoming their prejudices--they are learning to conform to the system of the quota-imposing "liberals" mentioned at the very start of the book.  Boring!

While not actually bad, Across A Billion Years is one of those books that could be much improved if it was streamlined, say cut from 245 pages to 145.  The hard SF stuff works, but many of the characters and all the sexual relationship stuff could easily be left out.