1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty and Gerard F. Conway (plus: a 1942 tale by Dwight Swain!)

In April of 2017 I purchased on ebay a lot of four issues of Fantastic edited by Ted White.  Let's take a look at the December 1970 issue of the magazine; you can save some shekels by just reading it at the internet archive.

I'm skipping the Laumer serial, because I haven't read the earlier novels in the series and my interest in Laumer is limited.  I'm skipping Richard Lupoff's spoof of Harlan Ellison because spoofs have little appeal for me.  And I'm skipping Barry Malzberg's "The New Rappacini" because I read it a year and a half ago; I called it "very good," so don't you skip it if you haven't read it yet!   

In his editorial, White talks a little about his relationships with the artists who have appeared in Amazing and Fantastic since he took over the role of editor, among them MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  He also quotes a letter from Ursula K. Le Guin praising himself and Fantastic, and explains what his policy is regarding the types of stories that will appear in Fantastic:

Yes, it sounds like he'll take anything.

Alexei Panshin's column, described as controversial on the cover, starts with a long quote from Damon Knight paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Then Panshin takes Kuhn's idea (that the scientific establishment fruitfully follows a paradigm for a long period, during which minor problems with the paradigm gradually accumulate, until those minor "anomalies" and "counterinstances" are numerous enough that the paradigm becomes weak and vulnerable to overthrow by a new paradigm) and applies it to the SF field.  Panshin thinks the old SF paradigm is in a weakened state, and is under attack by the New Wave, but that the New Wavers have yet to come up with a truly new paradigm that is strong enough to replace the old.  Panshin then describes his own writing career, in which (he says) he tried to write in new ways--he loved SF but didn't want to write melodramas or about technology--that were rejected by the SF establishment.  But eventually he and his fellow young innovators, at first accepted only by Ace Books (which he calls "a rightly despised market that poured out such a stream of material that it would seemingly publish anything") fought their way to widespread acceptance, winning many Hugos and Nebulas.  He then exhorts the SF community to continue changing and expanding, while admitting that there is still room for melodramatic stories about technology.  Panshin suggests replacing the term "science fiction" with "creative fantasy," and throughout the magazine we can see White enthusiastically take up this coinage, using it in his editorial as well as in the intro to Malzberg's story.

Panshin's column is interesting, and as somebody who enjoys the old melodramas and sciencey stories as well as the work of many of the newer writers Panshin mentions, like Disch and Lafferty (and Panshin's own Rite Of Passage), I can look on these old controversies intellectually, with a comfortable level of detachment.

In this issue of Fantastic we find eleven pages devoted to letters and White's responses to them.  There is arguing about drugs, overpopulation, the TV show The Prisoner, and, most heatedly, about ZIP codes and the Post Office (Ted worked briefly in the Baltimore Post Office, we learn.)  I found most interesting the discussion of abortive attempts to include comic art in Galaxy (where Vaughn Bode's Sunspot appeared for four issues) and Fantastic (which included a four-page comic section called Fantastic Illustrated in at least one issue--the comic at the link is so lame it is embarrassing.)  White claims that he was going to have Bode in Fantastic and then the deep pockets over at Galaxy stole Bode away with the promise of quadruple the amount of cash poor Ted could offer.

On to the stories! The Aldiss, Lafferty and Conway stories were new; the Swain is a reprint from a 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

"Cardiac Arrest" by Brian Aldiss

This story (like 20 pages long) feels long and a little tedious.  An American flies to Hong Kong under an assumed name in order to meet a business contact.  On just about every page are italicized and ungrammatical stream of consciousness passages describing the Yank's fantasies and fears of violence and sex, daydreams and nightmares based on his reading of spy novels.  (Aldiss throws in some poetic "wordplay," like combining Mao's name and the word "drowning" at the end of this aphoristic phrase: "the army and peasants are an ocean in which the invaders will drowsetung.")

Before his scheduled meeting, which is unexpectedly delayed, the American meets an Englishman, an RAF veteran of WWII and the Suez crisis, and this guy's German partner in grey and black market business ventures.  The Yank explains that he is a scientist and he has brought with him samples of a virus which renders those it infects immortal--his idea is to defect to communist China and give them the virus; in return the Chinese Communist Party has offered him a big estate.  The American gets involved in a sort of side deal with these two shady Europeans, whose help he suspects he needs.

The defection effort fails when Hong Kong police interrupt the American's meeting with a Red Chinese representative, and the German is killed.  The American and Englishman flee for Europe, the RAF vet at the controls of a Soviet plane.  Disaster strikes, and at the end of the story we learn the answer to the mystery that was nagging me for many pages: why would an intelligent educated American who was not a communist himself want to move to mainland China, which in the story is portrayed as a pretty menacing entity? 

Along with the Walter Mitty/Owl Creek Bridge gimmick, Aldiss tries to do some interesting things in this story based around people's views of their own nations and other nations.  Characters give voice to American and British attitudes about WWII, American views of China, England and Germany, European views of the USA and China (a subplot has to do with the Portuguese surrendering Macao to the communists) and Chinese views of America.  Having fought in Burma in the Second World War, Aldiss has more first hand knowledge of the Far East than the average Anglophone bear--remember his story "Lambeth Blossom" about a tyrannical Chinese empire of the future?  Another theme is that political leaders (and ordinary people as well!) the world over are hypocritical and untrustworthy jerks who may or may not believe the ideological stuff they say and whose actions may not accord with those stated beliefs..

I want to like "Cardiac Arrest" because immortality, exiles and emigres, socialist tyranny, and British military history are all interests of mine, but while it is inventive and experimental, it can be hard going.  It is easier to admire the story now than it was to enjoy it when I was in the middle of it and finding it not very clear and not very compelling.  I guess I'll say its virtues slightly outweigh the challenges it presents, and recommend it to people who like a story that is puzzling but which more or less puts all the pieces together by the time you get to the end of it.  "Cardiac Arrest" would go on to be included on the DAW Book of Aldiss, behind an impressive Karel Thole cover and the British collection Comic Inferno.

"Walk of the Midnight Demon" by Gerard F. Conway

I don't think I have ever read anything by Conway before; he seems to be most famous for writing Spider-Man comics starting in the 1970s and TV crime shows starting in the 1980s.  Along with the long list of comic books Conway has penned, Wikipedia offers a writing sample in which Conway complains about how difficult life is for the sons and daughters of Erin:

My grandparents were born in Ireland. They came to America in the late 'teens of the last century and lived a life not very different from the life my housekeeper and her husband live today.... Because they were lower-class Irish, they were the Hispanics of their day...viewed with scorn by the WASP upper class....

Aye, Begorrah!

This story is set in one of those sword and sorcery worlds with witches and druids and people riding on horses and staying in inns and so forth.  Our narrator is Haxx, and in the first scene he is riding across "the death plain" with his buddy Illusiah, who is dying of a stomach injury.  After Illusiah expires and falls off his horse, Haxx subjects us to six or seven flashbacks which are presented out of chronological order.  Haxx and his friends were cursed--as they traveled from inn to inn, everywhere they went people around them would turn up dead.  They consulted various witches in an effort to  find out what was going on, and we get a longish scene of a tarot reading.  The whole story (like six pages) is boring; Conway tries to make it atmospheric with descriptions of faces and scenery and  weather, but these descriptions made my eyes glaze over and the story is vague in every possible way.  In the end we learn that Haxx is a vampire or werewolf or Mr. Hyde or servant of the "Death God" sent to gather souls or some such thing, that he has been killing all these people without any of his friends, or he himself, realizing it until it was too late.

Bad.  "Walk of the Midnight Demon," a pointless exercise, has never appeared elsewhere.

"Been a Long, Long Time" by R. A . Lafferty

A tarot-reading woman figures prominently in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and in Conway's "Walk of the Midnight Demon," and Lafferty's "Been A Long, Long Time" begins with a direct reference to Eliot's "The Hollow Men": "It doesn't end with one--it Begins with a whimper."  The whimper comes from Boshel, an immortal being at the beginning of time who, faced by a dispute between immortals--the rebellion of Lucifer that culminates in the Fall of the Rebel Angels--is unable to decide which side of the War in Heaven to join.  By default, he ends up with the conservative forces headed by Michael, but Boshel's indecision leads to the introduction of randomness to the universe, and it is determined that he must be punished.  Michael puts Boshel in charge of the practical realization of the famous thought experiment that insists that monkeys striking keys at random will eventually type out an exact text of the complete works of Shakespeare.

The immortal monkeys bang away at their unfailing typewriters for billions upon billions of years--the universe expands to its limit, collapses, and begins to expand again.  This cyclical process repeats itself hundreds, thousands, millions of times!  Boshel, and even more so the cleverest of the monkeys, grow frustrated, and that mischievous simian begins bending the rules a little in hopes of finishing up this absurd project once and for all.

This is a fun little story, and characteristic of Lafferty's work, with its folksy dialogue, entertaining jokes, and allusions to Christian thought.  "Been a Long, Long Time" would go on to appear in Brian Aldiss's Galactic Empires anthology and The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy as well as two Lafferty collections, and has been translated into German, Dutch and Serbian.

"The Bottle Imp" by Dwight V. Swain (1942)

For whatever reason (and let's remember that when we read the August 1972 issue's letters column we learned that Ted's control of the magazine was surprisingly limited) the December 1970 issue of Fantastic includes a reprint of a story from the September 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures, Dwight V. Swain's "The Bottle Imp."  On the contents page it is hailed as a "Famous Fantastic Classic" but it is not even listed on the cover--maybe it was a last minute selection.  I don't know that I have ever heard of Swain before; Wikipedia suggests he was an important teacher of screenwriters.  In 1942 Fantastic Adventures published stories by better-known SF writers like Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, and Ross Rocklynne, and why they chose Swain over them is a little mysterious to me--maybe Fantastic had lost the rights to those stories, or maybe they were not the right length?  Anyway, let's give Swain a chance.

Irish-American warehouse worker Tod Barnes is sitting in a crummy bar, lamenting his tragic lot and drinking whiskey and chewing Copenhagen (the kids we called "burnouts" in my high school used to chew that stuff) when a six-inch tall devil appears on his table!  The satanic creature introduces himself as Beezlebub and Tod explains to his new friend that he has been laid off from his job at a tire wholesaler's but can't get a new job because the firm's owner won't give him a release (some kind of war-related regulation is involved) and he can't join the army because of a bum leg and his girlfriend Molly Shannahan has left him for middle-class guy Walter Dale (Tod calls him "one of those office lounge lizards...smooth line, all the trimmings.")

Beezlebub tells Tod that his problems are nothing compared to the trouble he could get him in, and proceeds to demonstrate.  Tod vomits all over the new pants of another bar patron, mobster Steve Kroloski, renowned as "king of the rackets."  A brawl ensues and Tod and Kroloski end up in jail.  When Kroloski's lawyer springs him, the mobster also springs Tod.  Tod is soon involved in the burglary of his old place of employment, the tire warehouse.  Kroloski has Molly Shannahan kidnapped and dragged to the tire warehouse so she can open the combination locked door that stands between the gangster and the treasure trove of rubber.  For good measure he tells her that Tod is a willing accomplice in this grand larceny.

Molly refuses to open the door, and Tod is forced to watch while Kroloski beats his former girlfriend until "even Molly's staunch Irish spirit could stand the torture no longer" and she relents.  I guess the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle really do have it tough!  Beezlebub (whom only Tod can see, of course) takes credit for all the horrible things that are befalling Tod and gloats that Kroloski is going to murder both Tod and Molly to cover up his crime.  Via an elaborate stratagem involving spitting and cutting his own flesh, Tod escapes his bonds, rescues Molly by throwing tires at the gangsters, alerts the police by spitting at burglar alarm wires, and exposes Walter Dale (one of those scornful WASPs, no doubt!) as Kroloski's inside man (the phrase "finger man" is used.)  As the story ends Molly is back in Tod's arms, Tod gets a cushy government job ("warehouse inspector for the tire rationing board") and Beezelbub is exorcised in a dumb twist ending.   

"The Bottle Imp" is a brutal (and somewhat disgusting) crime story full of torture and pain and tobacco juice spitting that exploits people's ethnic and class resentments and fascination with sexualized violence, upon which has been grafted a goofy devil story, I guess as a joke or a justification for printing a weak mystery story in a SF magazine--the imp is actually totally unnecessary to the plot and we are invited to assume it is simply an hallucination.  Thumbs down for Swain, even if he is a member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame, along with R. A. Lafferty, C. J. Cherryh and S. E. Hinton.  (On the upside, I guess this is an interesting historical artifact, a piece of popular fiction about the lives of American working-class civilians during WWII, written contemporaneously with the milieu it describes.)

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More stories from old magazines in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log!     

Three Amazing 1971 stories by Ted White

Working on my recent posts about Bob Shaw's 1973 collection Tomorrow Lies in Ambush I found myself looking through lots of 1971 issues of Amazing, then edited by Ted White.  I like White's work as an editor and as a writer, and so I decided to read the stories by White himself that he included in Amazing in the year of my birth.  (Editors including their own stories in the books and magazines they edit is one of those things that feels kind of sketchy, but it was a common practice and I guess we just have to accept it.)

"A Girl Like You"

Ted's editorial in the March 1971 issue of Amazing is about comics fandom and his role in XERO, a Hugo-winning fanzine that included lots of articles about comics, and All in Color For a Dime, the 1970 book edited by Richard Lupoff about comics.  Ted describes his (not very successful) attempts to promote the book and SF in general on a radio talk show and here in Amazing achieves a little revenge by getting in digs at Little Orphan Annie and "the Silent Majority."  The editorial finishes up with a brief discussion of an article by our pal Barry Malzberg about Scientology.  It seems Barry wrote about his personal experience with Scientology in the November 1970 issue of Amazing and was threatened by the Scientology people with a lawsuit for libel; the editorial finishes with a letter from Malzberg that is apparently intended to defuse the situation (or perhaps it is a joke...I haven't read the actual article so cannot be sure.)

In his little intro to his story "A Girl Like You" Ted tells us it is about a United States that has instituted an apartheid system--the little intros you find in old SF magazines are always full of spoilers.  Anyway, over the course of the eight-page story we follow the terrible history of Mari-Ellen Agnew (oh, brother.)  Her husband, David, foolishly decided to take their armored car out at night, and they were ambushed by blacks.  The car knocked out by an armor piercing shell, Mari-Ellen, David, and the four black servants accompanying them were forced to bail out, and only Mari-Ellen managed to escape with her life.  It is not long, however, before she is captured by one of the people who ambushed them.

Her captor interrogates Mari-Ellen and in a flashback we learn that David risked driving at night because he was fleeing retribution at the hands of the local authorities--David had found Mari-Ellen cheating on him with a major in the Internal Security Police and bloodied the cop's nose and had his black servants throw him, naked, out onto the street.  In the alternate universe Ted has constructed here, middle-class white women have easy lives, and get bored, and so fill their days with drugs and sexual shenanigans, competing to bed the most married men.  ("Status was achieved by the accumulation of a respectable score....")  After Mari-Ellen tells her tale of decadence she falls to the ground and begs for mercy--the black man shoots her to death.

This is sort of a crazy story.  Like Ed Bryant's 1970 story "In the Silent World," which we read in our last episode, you could say the story is white liberal "virtue signalling," a story in which the writer tells you our society is racist and assures you he is against racism but doesn't have the space or energy to actually say anything interesting about race relations or the African-American experience or anything like that.  (Feminists will wonder why both stories have women protagonists--are our male authors portraying white women as the primary perpetrators and/or victims of white racism against blacks?)  But while Bryant's story is bland, White here produces what feels like an exploitation piece full of gore and salacious sexual content.  We hear all about Mari-Ellen's injuries--the burns on her hands from climbing out of the burning car, her painfully sprained ankle, and the gunshots that end her life; the final sentences of the story feel like something written by Clive Barker as White describes the path of each of those three bullets through Mari-Ellen's body: "...cutting across a shoulder blade like a hot knife, then tearing into her spine where it fragmented."  As for sex, there is all the talk of promiscuity and infidelity, and then the description of David, having discovered her with the Major, smacking Mari-Ellen in the face and then putting her over his knee and spanking her--Mari-Ellen finds this punishment sexually arousing: "[the spanking] warmed her loins for her in a way she had previously never known."  Just before she is shot Mari-Ellen urinates on herself in fear.

It is hard not to think White wanted to write a fetishistic horror story about violence against women and used fashionable hatred of the Nixon administration and opposition to racism as a kind of fig leaf to justify his production of this gruesome piece of pornography.  Thumbs down, I'm afraid. 

Unsurprisingly, "A Girl Like You" has not appeared elsewhere.

"Growing Up Fast in the City"

The May 1971 issue is Amazing's 45th anniversary issue, and Ted's editorial gives a fun and opinionated history of the magazine and its place in SF history.  (Sample opinion: Ted says that Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler are "better writers than any sf has yet produced.")

"Growing Up Fast in the City" is a first-person narrative; our narrator is a sixteen-year-old boy who attends lots of "rallies" which end up being violently broken up by the police.  He comes to these rallies prepared with a drug that serves as an antidote to the nausea induced by the cop's "Sick Gas" as well as a crowbar, and generally leaves the events with a girl he has picked up--his practice is to have sex with these girls in a convenient alley.  Our hero doesn't confine himself to the ladies however; there are references to circle-jerks with other boys and a confession that one of his most enjoyable sexual experiences was receiving fellatio from another boy.

Our story begins at one of those rallies; Ted includes some slang I guess he made up (people over 18 are called "Voters" and adolescents are called "Intermediaries") to suggest this is the future or another universe or something.  Our narrator is cynical: it is not clear what the rally is for or against, and we are later told he goes to these rallies for "kicks," not out of some political conviction.  This rally was meant to be secret, but the police immediately show up and our narrator theorizes that the organizers of the rallies tip off the cops because all the violence maintains the high tensions that drive the organizers' own popularity.

Our narrator picks up a girl and they flee when the police move in to disperse the rally--he uses his crowbar to break into an emergency exit from the New York City subway, going in through the out door, as it were.  Back at her apartment they smoke "hash" and have sex and the girl, 14, explains that girls like to be romanced, that for a female to enjoy sex she needs to have some kind of feelings for the boy.  Throughout the story White suggests that our narrator is maturing, and in these apartment scenes hints that he is less interested in casual sex than he used to be and may actually be falling in love with this girl.  But the end of the story informs us that they never saw each other again; the narrator tried to find her, but she must have moved or maybe even been killed.  He has had sex with many girls since then, but he has never felt about any like he does about her.       

The sex in the story is, presumably, meant to be titillating (the girl also relates how a cop at an earlier rally tore her dress and tried to get her to perform oral sex on him) but Ted is also trying to pull the old heart strings here and say something about life.  I'll call this one acceptable.  "Growing Up Fast in the City" has never been reprinted.

"Junk Patrol"

White's editorial in the September 1971 issue is about the failure of the American SST program.  (One of my memories of New York in the '90s, cherished lo these many years of beige suburban existence, is unexpectedly spotting a Concorde parked at JFK from across the Bay from the Wildlife Refuge where I was on one of my birdwatching walks.)  Ted laments the defeat of the SST program in Congress, arguing that the development of faster transport would have been a boon to the human race and complaining that the environmentalist arguments against SST were disingenuous, while the spokespeople who supported the SST argued their case incompetently.

White finishes his editorial by griping that the publisher shortened his novel Trouble on Project Ceres by chopping off the first two chapters.  (It sounds liker poor Ted was having a tough month.)  Ted informs us that these two chapters will be published in the fanzine Granfalloon, and gets a small measure of revenge by subtly suggesting that we readers only make the effort to buy Trouble on Project Ceres after first seeking it at the local library!

After Ted's excursions into splatterpunk and sexual coming-of-age drama, I was pleased to find that "Junk Patrol," the cover story of this issue of Amazing, fits the traditional narrow definition of SF: this is a story about men donning space suits and risking their lives in orbit over the Moon!  I don't have any objection to SF stories that ask "What would it be like to be a murder victim?" or "What would it be like to have gay sex?" but I sort of got into SF because I was interested in questions like "What would it be like to live on a colony on the Moon?"  (People like Nabokov and Proust can handle all my impending death and homosexual relationship literary needs.)  I was further pleased to find that Ted has some pretty interesting SF ideas to impart to us in this one!

It is the 21st-century, and ingenious mankind has generated an atmosphere on the moon, and surrounded the entire moon with a thin plastic sheet that helps maintain atmospheric pressure.  On the surface are little towns and farms; our narrator, Sam Davies, is a farmer, and also a member of the "patrol."  In this story he and other patrolmen are ferried by a spaceship out of one of the entry/exit holes in the "pliofilm envelope which girds the Moon" into space, where they go on a spacewalk in order to collect giant conglomerations of twisted machinery that are approaching Luna--these hunks of junk are the mysterious evidence of a lost alien civilization.  Normally such artifacts are collected and taken to the lunar surface for study, but the pieces captured today are so huge, actually bigger than the spacecraft that brought the patrolmen out to them, that the men direct them towards Earth, where they will go into orbit and be studied in space.  Davies commits a blunder, cutting his suit and foot on a jagged piece of metal projecting from one of the colossal artifacts, and he and his comrades scramble to save his life.

White's fiction often contains "meta" elements and SF community in-jokes (you'll remember that there is a minor character named Terri Carr in White's By Furies Possessed) and in this one Davies refers to old pulp magazines and, more jarringly, the leader of his patrol is named "Jerome Podwill" (two "l"s.)  The real life Jerome Podwil (one "l") painted covers for many paperbacks, including some we've talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log, like Raymond F. Jones's The Cybernetic Brains and Ray Cummings's Tama, Princess of Mercury.  Like two years ago I almost bought A. Bertram Chandler's Empress of Outer Space because I loved the Podwil cover, but I held back.

I love a good story about astronauts dealing with zero gravity and space suits and all that, and I'm relieved that I can unabashedly recommend one of today's stories.  Thumbs up for "Junk Patrol!"  Despite my approval, "Junk Patrol" would never again be published.  Shouldn't there be an anthology of stories about people who get holes in their space suits?

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These three stories, even though I think one is pretty good, all feel like White threw them together quickly in response to some emergency, like he lacked a story of just the right length or tone for the next issue and its deadline was breathing down his neck.  I hope he didn't rush them into production because he needed the money!  (I have heard that editors who publish their own stories in the anthologies or magazines they are editing get to pay themselves for the stories.)  "Junk Patrol," with its astronaut hardware, inscrutable extraterrestrial artifacts and little science lectures, is a perfect fit for a venerable, pioneering SF magazine and beyond reproach; the other two stories we read today are a little questionable, though I guess sex sells, and, unless you can get the taxpayer to foot the bill as Michael Moorcock was able to with New Worlds, an editor has to keep an eye on those circulation numbers.

In our next episode: more crazy stories from old magazines available at the internet archive!

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."   

.

"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.

*********

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?

**********

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.

**********

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.
     

Triton by Samuel R. Delany

"There was this man, you see, from some sect she called the Dumb Beasts--I mean, if there is such a sect.  But considering all that happened, how do you tell if any of it was real?  I don't know big their endowment was...and maybe the 'endowment' was part of the 'theater' too." 

Recently Joachim Boaz, Fred Kiesche, Winchell Chung and I had a conversation via twitter about the Mitchell Hooks cover of Samuel R. Delany's 1976 novel Triton.  Martin Wisse spoke up, urging me to read the novel tout suite.  I didn't have anything in particular planned after The Future Is Now, so I figured, why not? 

Triton appears to have been more successful than a lot of the books I talk about on this blog, going through many different printings and editions and being included in a Book-Of-The-Month Club omnibus edition called Radical Utopias along with Joanna Russ's The Female Man and Suzy McKee Charnas's Walk to the End of the World.  Joachim Boaz harbors doubts that I will like the novel, and it is true that I thought Delany's Nova and Empire Star were just OK, but the copy on the back cover of my edition, an eighth printing that does not include Frederick Pohl's name on the cover (Triton was a "Frederick Pohl Selection" and the first printing was labelled as such) but does include a reference to the 1979 Tales of Nevèrÿon, makes it sound awesome:

On the other hand I have an aversion to utopias and the novel's table of contents and other front matter, like a half-page epigraph from British anthropologist Mary Douglas's Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology, make we wonder if Triton isn't the kind of extravagant New Wave artifact that Terry Dixon so recently warned me about.  Well, let's just read Triton and see if it passes the MPorcius test (some, no doubt, will prefer to see this excursion as an inquiry into the possibility of MPorcius passing the Delany test.)

The first (brief at 24 pages) chapter of Triton introduces us to the city of Tethys, which lies on Neptune's largest moon, and the book's themes, which revolve around the fact that real knowledge is very difficult to come by--we can almost never really know anything for sure--and that communicating real knowledge is very difficult--defining and describing things accurately is practically impossible.  In this chapter Delany foregrounds various weird religious sects--some mendicants and others dangerously violent--and a troupe of bohemian performers who live off government endowments and present one-of-a-kind spectacles to more or less randomly chosen individuals they run into in Tethys's "unlicensed sector," a neighborhood where the law is not enforced.  The one-person audiences of these "micro-theater dramas" are drugged (surreptitiously, without their prior consent) to foster "better access to the aesthetic parameters" of the troupe.

Tethys is a place where things are not as they seem and communications cannot be trusted, and these two dozen pages are rife with examples of hidden knowledge revealed, deceptions, and garbled or meaningless communications.  The city is covered with a "sensory shield" that alters (prettifies) the appearance of space and Neptune from Triton's surface; artwork is torn down from a wall to reveal further, fragmented, layers of artwork and texts (Delany uses the word "palimpsests") that our protagonist interprets from his perhaps vague memories of seeing such texts before; one religious sect assigns its members new names that consist of long strings of random numbers, another trains its members to precisely mumble absolutely meaningless sequences of dozens of syllables, and yet another forbids its members to speak.  Our protagonist is tricked into attending a performance of the aforementioned troupe, and he is not sure if a fight he witnesses is part of the performance or an actual violent encounter.  One of the odd cults we hear about may not be real at all, but an invention of the troupe's leader, a woman named "The Spike."  Sexual ambiguity is one major component of this theme of malleable and unknowable truth; besides the woman with the phallic name, the troupe's ranks include a "hirsute woman" with a horrible scar indicating "an incredibly clumsy mastectomy" whom the protagonist mistakes for a man, and who may have actually been portraying a man earlier in the performance.

Our protagonist is Bron Helstrom, a traveler from off-colony come to study and practice "metalogics," a type of "computer mathematics."  Bron was born and grew up on Mars, where he worked as a prostitute who served women before coming out to the colonies on the satellites of the gas giants.  Delany scrambles up all our 20th-century expectations about gender in this book; examples include the characters in the novel who have names traditionally associated with the opposite sex, and the fact that most of the cops in Tethys are women (in the last quarter of the novel we learn that women in the time of the novel, the year 2112, are as tall and as strong as men, maybe due to rapid evolution, maybe because 21st- and 22nd-century adults are equally affectionate towards female and male infants, whereas parents for thousands of years prior lavished attention on boys and neglected girls.)  Bron is an intellectual traveler as well as a geographic (astronomic?) one--in the past he studied to join one of those bizarre religious sects before abandoning it (he couldn't memorize those pointless chants) and currently he is friends with an elderly homosexual, Lawrence.  Bron always rejects Lawrence's regular sexual advances, and the septuagenarian acts as a sort of mentor or guru, dispensing wisdom to Bron; in particular, Lawrence talks about how all people are "types."  (Identity--what makes you who you are, whether who you are is natural or artificial, and how malleable who you are might be--is another of the novel's themes, and there is much discussion of people's names and ID numbers and a taboo in Tethys on talking about your parents, a taboo ignored, like most customs, in the unlicensed sector.)

We meet Lawrence in the flesh and learn about Bron's home life in Chapter 2.  Bron lives in a "single-sex unspecified-preference co-op" with both straight and gay men.  (There are several types of co-ops and communes on Triton and Delany gives us a whole rundown of what proportions of the population live in each type.)  Lawrence is teaching Bron vlet, a complex war game, and the chapter revolves around a match between them. (You'll notice that Mitchell Hook's at-first-glance fine but generic painting on the cover of the novel is in fact very specific, incorporating chess pieces, as well as the kinds of mirrors and goops an actor might use in preparation for a performance, direct references to some of Triton's plot elements and themes.)  Watching the game are other residents, including the handsome and well-educated diplomat Sam, and a retarded man who goes by the nickname Flossie, whose mental shortcomings are partially alleviated by computer finger rings, and his ten-year-old son Freddie.  (Freddie presents one of the several opportunities Delany takes advantage of to hint to us readers that in Tethys it is normal for children to have sex with each other and with adults.)  As befits a SF utopia (we all know how SF titans Robert Heinlein and his pal Theodore Sturgeon felt about the subject!), most of these people hang around naked, and even go to work naked on occassion.

 
In keeping with the novel's themes of incomprehensibility, the rules of vlet are astoundingly complicated; below is the "modulus by which the even more difficult scoring system...proceeded."

The vlet match is interrupted by a power outage that temporarily disables the sensory screen and allows the inhabitants of Triton to see the real sky for once.  The second chapter of Triton ends as Bron does research in a computer directory on The Spike, learning her real name and reading critical analyses of her work; again Delany pushes home his theme of inscrutability as we learn that The Spike's writing is deliberately opaque, and, while widely commented upon, actually seen by very few people (Bron is one of the lucky ones!)

In the third chapter we see Bron at the office, where he uses metalogic to program a computer to make predictions (or something--Delany here, as elsewhere, is deliberately obscure.)  He meets a new employee, Miriamne, a woman who is "his type," and gives her (and us) a nine-page lecture on metalogic, much of which is difficult going; I think this fairly represents the salient part:

Areas of significance space intermesh and fade into one another like color-clouds in a three-dimensional spectrum.  They don't fit together like hard-edged bricks in a box.  What makes "logical" bonding so risky is that the assertion of the formal logician that a boundary can be placed around an area of significance space gives you, in such a cloudy situation, no way to say where to set the boundary, how to set it, or if, once set, it will turn out in the least useful.  Nor does it allow any way for two people to be sure they have set their boundaries around the same area.  

Bron hopes to seduce Miriamne, but soon learns she is a lesbian (for now, at least.)  Luckily, she lives in the same co-op as The Spike, with whom Bron (as he reluctantly admits to himself) is infatuated, and facilitates the beginning of Bron's brief sexual relationship with The Spike.  Then we get some sitcom/soap opera business from Delany--Bron is jealous, thinking The Spike and Miriamne may have a relationship, and so he acts in such a way that Miriamne loses her job.

(I wondered if this business with Miriamne was a nod to Proust; Marcel famously acts crazy because he is jealous of Albertine's lesbian affairs.  A number of times I thought I detected hints of Proust in the novel; late in the book The Spike is directing a performance of Phedra, presumably the same play by Racine that plays a prominent role in the second volume of In Search of Lost Time.  Marcel's confusion when seeing Phedra and his changing opinion of the performances mirror some of Delany's own themes about knowledge here in Triton.  The very template of Triton--a long story about varying types of love and sex among intellectual/artistic types set against a background of international diplomacy, intrigue and war--is similar to In Search of Lost Time.) 

Bron is then chagrined to learn that The Spike's troupe is leaving the colony in a matter of hours.   

All through the first three chapters, looming in the background and bubbling under the surface, has been vague talk about a war between an Earth-Mars alliance ("the worlds") and the colonies on Luna and the moons of the gas giants ("the satellites.")  Neither Bron nor us readers know much about the war, save that Triton has been trying to stay out of it and everybody assumes Triton will soon be dragged into it anyway.  The war moves closer to center stage in Chapters 4 and 5 as Sam goes to Earth on a diplomatic mission and brings Bron along with him, but we learn absolutely nothing about the negotiations (or whatever) that take place on Earth, and, as far as the war is concerned, apparently it is just a matter of espionage and tariffs and the like, a cold war with no space fleets or marines or anything of that nature.  Delany keeps hammering home his same themes, and early in the trip Sam reveals to Bron a secret--now a black man, Sam used to be a white woman.  Chapter 4, another short one, consists of the trip from Tethys to Earth--I always like reading this sort of thing, the author describing how people experience and cope with lift off and the view of space through the ports and low gravity and all that.

In Chapter 5 Delany does more traditional SF stuff I always enjoy, as Bron, who has always lived under domes and breathed artificial atmospheres, for the first time breathes natural air and walks under an unobstructed sky on the surface of mother Earth!  (This stuff brought to mind Arthur C. Clarke's Imperial Earth, another novel from 1976 about a guy who travels from a gas giant satellite to Earth.)  Bron also gets tossed into jail briefly, and I always find descriptions of being imprisoned oddly compelling.

Later editions appeared under
the title Trouble on Triton

Bron only spends a few pages in jail, but Delany gives us many pages on Bron's date with The Spike, who, by coincidence, is also visiting Earth for the first time.  Whereas in Chapter 1 The Spike stage managed an elaborate performance for Bron, here in Chapter 5, on their date to a fancy restaurant, to which they are transported by a flying limo staffed by four naked female footmen, Bron draws on his experience as a prostitute on Mars (when accompanied women on similarly fancy dates many times) to stage manage an event for The Spike.  I won't be providing any more examples, but rest assured that on every page Delany bombards the reader with his themes of the impossibility of pinning down true facts and transmitting reliable knowledge to others.  Bron declares his love for The Spike and asks her to spend her life with him (marriage is illegal on Triton) but she rejects him.

Just as Bron returns home in Chapter 6 the war gets hot and Triton is right there in the middle of it.  Tethys is battered, with buildings collapsing and some minor characters killed.  Minutes before the devastation (apparently wrought by saboteurs) Bron receives a somewhat garbled letter from The Spike in which she says she doesn't like him and never wants to see him again.  It is here in Chapter 6 that Delany's purposes become, perhaps, a bit more clear and direct.  It is revealed that there are Christians and Jews in Tethys, and they are denounced as troublemakers, Delany suggesting Judaism and Christianity are religions that drive people insane or perhaps appeal only to insane people.  Lawrence, our mentor and guru, is one of the survivors, and Bron makes to him a speech that I guess is Delany's paraphrase of his view of typical 20th-century male thinking: women don't understand men, and men are individuals who have to stand apart from society, which is the domain of women and children, in order to protect that society.  Lawrence calls Bron a fool and tells him such thinking is a perversion that was once almost universal but that now only afflicts one in fifty men and one in five thousand women, and gives a feminist speech about how women for thousands of years were not treated as human beings and men are to blame for all the wars.  (Did this thing go through so many printings because it was being assigned to college students?)  And, by the way, the war is over and the satellites have defeated the worlds, in the process massacring 75% (or more) of Earth's population.

Italian edition

Bron jumps up and runs through the rubble-strewn streets to request a sex-change operation.  After a ten-page lecture and a brief operation (in Tethys a sex change is same-day surgery, no appointment required) he returns to his half-ruined co-op (his room is in the not-ruined half.)  Did Bron become a woman because he got "woke" and didn't want to be a beneficiary and perpetrator of patriarchy?  That is what I expected, but Delany is not so easy to predict.  Back home, Bron tells Lawrence that he still believes all that stuff he told him about men being lonely heroes who have to protect society, that it is those one in fifty men and one in five thousand women who keep our race going.  Bron became a woman to bolster the tiny number of women who have those traditional values, and hopes to be the perfect woman for the sort of heroic old-fashioned man he (thinks he) used to be!

Chapter 7 takes place six months after Bron's sex change.  Bron runs into The Spike again (it's a small solar system) and she again rejects his proposal that they spend their lives together.  Bron makes friends with a fifteen-year-old girl whose regular recreation is sex with 55-year-old men, and this kid tries to help Bron find a man, but Bron has no luck.  I think maybe Delany is using Bron-as-woman-with-traditional-values to show how our 20th-century values make (in Delany's opinion, at least) healthy and happy relationships almost impossible.  The chapter, and the novel proper, ends without Bron's sexual life being at all resolved, though we do see a number of ways that Bron's becoming a woman has changed his/her own psychology and altered how people around him/her feel about and interact with Bron.

German edition; check out
the typeface

After the novel proper we have the two appendices.  Appendix A consists of SF criticism, some in the mouths of characters from the novel, that mentions Heinlein, Gernsback and Bester and celebrates the possibilities of SF, its superiority to "mundane" fiction because of its "extended repertoire of sentences" and "consequent greater range of possible incident" and "more varied field of rhetorical and syntagmic organization."  (Delany really slings the academese here.)  Delany likens the relationship of SF to mundane fiction to the relationship of abstract art and atonal music to "conventional" art, something I had never considered.  (I just recently was talking to commentor and blogger Lawrence Burton about A. E. van Vogt's belief that what distinguishes SF from regular old fiction is the fact that the "good" reader of "good" SF has to bring something to the material, because the author has deliberately left something out, providing the reader and opportunity to use his imagination to build upon the material or presenting the reader an obligation to figure out the material--isn't this something like what people commonly say about abstract art?) 

It is nice to hear Delany championing SF after so often reading Malzberg bemoan the field's decline, imply it is a slum he had to resort to after literary markets were closed to him, and lament the way SF killed Henry Kuttner, Cyril Kornbluth and Mark Clifton (in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963.")

Appendix B is a brief biography of Ashima Slade, one of the most important intellectual founders of metalogics and an associate of The Spike's, and a person who had multiple sex changes.  Slade was born in 2051 and killed in the war on the day Bron had his own sex change operation.  In keeping with Delany's themes throughout the book, many facts about Slade's life are unknowable and in a footnote it is made clear that evidence presented in this biography is not trustworthy.  Also, Delany reveals to us something potentially very important that he has kept from us for 350 pages--the lingua franca of the year 2212, the language spoken by all people on the satellites and 80% of people on Earth, is "a Magyar-Cantonese dialect," suggesting a radical political and cultural change between our own time and Bron's that we didn't know about as we followed Bron's story.  This is comparable to the revelation late in Starship Troopers that Rico is non-white, one of the Heinlein passages Delany talks about in Appendix A.

A later British edition

In a recent blog post I compared Ted White's By Furies Possessed to Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, wondering to what extent White's novel was a response to or inspired by Heinlein's.  (In a 2016 talk that I highly recommend to SF, pulp, and comics fans, pointed out to us in a comment by Paul Chadwick, White talks about how important Heinlein was to him as a youth.)  I think it might also be useful to ponder how much Triton may have been influenced by Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress--both are about a colony on a moon where people have new innovative familial and sexual relationships, and both involve a war between the colonials and the Earth--and I Will Fear No Evil, in which a man's brain is implanted in a woman's body?  Delany has no doubt thought seriously about Heinlein's body of work--he wrote the intro to the edition of Glory Road I read some years ago and in his Appendix A here in Triton talks about important sentences in Starship Troopers and Beyond This Horizon, sentences which obliquely tell the reader about the imagined future world of the novel.

Four years and two states ago I read Delany's Empire Star and admired its structure and the evident hard work Delany put into it, but I didn't find it very fun.  My feelings about Triton are somewhat similar.  Delany is working ably in a literary tradition (I've already compared Triton to Proust) with a story that strongly pushes its themes and includes clever devices, like speaking in different voices and effective foreshadowing (the attack on Christianity on page 245, for example, is foreshadowed on page 2 in a way that is quite effective).  He also works masterfully in the SF tradition (I've already mentioned similarities to Heinlein), filling his book with hard science and social science, presenting speculations on what space travel and interplanetary war might be like, and giving us an inhabitant's eye view of a society radically different from our own, one with no marriage in which only 20% of women have children, people live communally, sex involving children is normal, there is a government that provides services to the unemployed and supports a diplomatic and defense apparatus but (somehow) collects no taxes, there is income inequality and social distinctions but (so they say) no money.  (Instead of money everyone has an amount of "credit" based on his or her job; Delany hints that in practice this "credit" is just like money but with the added "benefit" that it makes it easier for the government to keep tabs on you.  How the beggars and artsy fartsy recipients of government endowments we meet in Chapter 1 fit into Tethys's economy I do not understand.)

An early British edition--I'm afraid there are no dog fights in the novel

There are all these good things to say about Triton, but somehow the novel lacks excitement and fun despite all the war and espionage business, lacks feeling despite all the love and sex and death elements; Triton feels a little too cool and a little too intellectual.  Delany, to me, comes across as a skilled technician whose work is built on a strong foundation of thought and knowledge, who lacks some kind of (difficult for me to define) emotional fire or breath of human life.  Or maybe Delany and I are just on such different wavelengths that I can't receive the spark or passion he is transmitting?

Triton is well put together and thought-provoking, but it is easier to admire than to love, one of those books that I'm enjoying more now as I think back on it that than I did while actually in the process of reading it.  Mild to moderate recommendation from me, though it is easy to see that Triton is exactly the kind of SF book that will hold a powerful appeal for some but be prohibitively tedious and opaque to others.