Stories by Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Kate Wilhelm from Orbit 8 (1970)

Let's finish up 1970's Orbit 8 with stories by authors beloved by the critics, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Kate Wilhelm.  Four years ago Joachim Boaz wrote about Orbit 8; feel free to click the link and check out what he had to say and then come back to see if Joachim and I are on the same page or at loggerheads when it comes to these three artifacts of the cutting edge of the SF world that prevailed before we were born.

"A Method Bit in 'B'" by Gene Wolfe

I purchased Orbit 8 in our nation's capital back in February largely because it contains a Gene Wolfe story that appears to be unavailable elsewhere.  Like a lot of people I think Wolfe is the best writer SF has produced, and that everything he does is worth grappling with.

Well, even Homer sometimes nods, and I have to admit I am disappointed in "A Method Bit in 'B'," a gimmicky sort of joke story of four and a half pages.  Our narrator is a policeman in a foggy rural part of Britain where there are moors and a crime-plagued manor house.  He realizes he is not a real person but stuck in a series of cliche-ridden B movies.  Acceptable filler of The Twilight Zone species.

Joachim actually really liked the story, giving it four and a quarter stars out of five and calling it "delightful."  You are going to have to get yourself a copy of Orbit 8 and make up your own mind! 

"Interurban Queen" by R. A. Lafferty

This is a clever tongue-in-cheek utopian story, a glimpse at an alternate universe in which the automobile has been outlawed and America is covered in railways.  It starts with theory--a dude with a big inheritance in 1907 has to decide whether to invest in rubber (for car tires) or in trains that will connect small cities, and he consults the experts, who tell him that the automobile will turn America into a living hell by fostering the development of dense cities and suburban sprawl and by turning everybody into an arrogant jerk:

"The kindest man in the world assumes an incredible arrogance when he drives an automobile...it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind...it will breed violence...it will mark the end of the family...it will breed rootlessness and immorality...." 

After the nightmare world of an America on wheels is described by these naysayers, we witness the edenic America in which poverty has been conquered and everyone has access to beautiful countryside generated by ubiquitous mass transit in the form of trollies.

"We are all one neighborhood, we are all one family!  We live in love and compassion, with few rich and few poor, and arrogance and hate have all gone out from us.  We are the people with roots, and with trolleys.  We are one with our earth."    

This utopia has a dark side: in hiding, all across America, toil men who love cars, men with names like "Mad Man Gudge," who illegally construct automobiles by hand and at night drive these noisy contraptions around.  The government is too soft on these outlaws, so ordinary citizens snatch up their rifles and jump off their trolleys and hunt down the drivers and lynch them.

With its over-the-top rhetoric and concluding scenes of idyllic life and extreme violence, "Interurban Queen" succeeds in being both a genuinely amusing parody of utopian and dystopian fiction and a thought-provoking piece that leads the reader to wonder about the effects of such technologies as the automobile and the locomotive on society and the individual.  Good!

(Joachim and I agree on the quality of this one.)

"Interurban Queen" is widely available, later appearing in the strange anthology known as Survival Printout, a copy of which I purchased in my Ohio days, in the Lafferty collections Ringing Changes and Lafferty in Orbit, and a bunch of other places.

"The Encounter" by Kate Wilhelm

I've been avoiding Wilhelm, Orbit editor Damon Knight's wife, because I wasn't crazy about her 1967 novel The Killer Thing, a tendentious retelling of Frankenstein that denounced strip mining and, in a cheap deus ex machina ending, advocated the human race being conquered by aliens.  But today I'm giving Wilhelm another look.  "The Encounter," the blurbs on the back of the book tell us, is a "boy-meets-girl" story in which we can expect "real horror."  Let's see what this Nebula-nominated twenty-four-page tale is all about.

Randy Crane, an insurance salesman riding a bus in a late night snowstorm, gets marooned in a cold bus station, all alone with a woman illustrator.  Through flashbacks we learn he is a failed writer with an unhappy marriage; he suspects his wife Mary Louise of cheating on him and even of trying to murder him on the ski slopes via a bogus accident.  Mary Louise claims he is a phony who is always putting on masks and who has hidden his real personality deep inside, and, in fact, Randy has seen head shrinkers who have told him he is "schizoid" and "had a nearly split personality."  These flashbacks get more and more shocking as we learn about Randy's service in the Korean War and that his wife, perhaps at his insistence, had an abortion.

In between these flashbacks we observe as Randy and the nameless illustrator try to get the furnace of the bus station to work as the place becomes increasingly, dangerously, cold.  In the start of her story Wilhelm piles on the long descriptions of everybody's clothes and the landscape and so on, making everything very clear, but in the end of "The Encounter" things get somewhat mysterious and confusing.  It briefly appears that the illustrator may not really exist, may merely be a figment of Randy's imagination, and/or that Randy strangles her, but then these suggestions are supplanted by the still more radical possibilities: that the illustrator is some kind of sorceress who absorbs Randy and thereby becomes a more skilled artist, and/or that Randy had a male half and a female half who have been struggling against each other for years, and tonight at the bus station the female half has finally triumphed.  Weird (almost Lovecraftian, really) elements of a flashback to Korea that feature a "chill" that originated  "in the farthest blackest vacuum of space" and a woman who appeared "out of nowhere" during a life or death situation in subzero temperatures hint at the possibility that an alien life form or a witch somehow entered Randy during his war service and that the current snowstorm (and the weakening of Randy's psyche due to his horrible relationship with Mary Louise?) has given the alien invader an opportunity to finally take over Randy or leave his body and destroy him. Whatever the case, when the bus station staff and bus passengers return to the station in the morning only the illustrator is there and she tells them it is her birthday.

In a lot of ways "The Encounter" feels like a conventional mainstream story full of pop psychology with some added feminist overtones; e. g., Randy doesn't really see the illustrator woman--he can't remember what she looks like the way he can remember what his male clients look like; Randy thinks women are manipulative and slutty and to blame for his failed career as a writer; Randy commits and/or hallucinates about violence against women. Wilhelm employs fancy literary techniques, using plenty of symbolism and metaphors.  She links the door to the station through which dangerous cold air comes to the "door" that seals off part of Randy's psyche, and that stream of cold air to the passage of the immaterial alien through Earth's atmosphere.  She also plays with the idea that Randy and the illustrator are failed creators; Randy wanted to be a creative writer and failed, Mary Louise's abortion means he failed to become a father (creator of a child), and during the brief moment we think the illustrator is a hallucination, Randy suggests that by conjuring her up, he has finally successfully created something.  The illustrator, early in the story, laments that she is not a true artist, but after having eliminated Randy she brags that she really is an artist.  (Another theme of the story seems to be woman as parasite.)

The end of the story, in which the alien parasite business is revealed and Randy vanishes, brings the story firmly into the SF realm, and I also suspect all the detailed description of Randy and the illustrator's efforts to get the furnace to work is an homage to or parody of those hard SF stories in which astronauts and scientists struggle to jury rig rocket engines or atomic reactors or whatever.

There is a lot going on in "The Encounter" and the story shows a lot of ambition, but I think it has a real problem.  The fact that Randy really has vanished by the morning undercuts all that Freudian and feminist stuff; if Wilhelm had had Randy kill the illustrator instead of vice versa, she would have left open the possibility that either the supernatural/SF stuff or the Freudian/feminist stuff was real, leaving the reader to wonder if Randy had really been attacked by and fought off an alien or if he was just a sexist agent of the patriarchy suffering delusions due to war-induced PTSD and the rape culture of our bourgeois society.  But since it is the illustrator who survives and Randy who disappears we have to assume Randy really was the victim of strange alien forces and that his psychological issues and politically incorrect behavior were a reflection of this alien invasion and not shortcomings of the male sex and our capitalist civilization.  So all that stuff about sexism and psychoanalysis is just a pile of unnecessary red herrings.

Joachim liked this one more than I did, rating it "Very Good."  He argues that the SF elements are of secondary importance, I guess thinking what makes the story is all the feminist and psychological components.  I think that because Randy actually dies/vanishes that we can't compartmentalize away or minimize the SF elements--they aren't window dressing but at the indispensable core of the story-- but that those SF elements undermine all the feminist and psychological elements, so I'm only grading this one fair, though recognizing all the effort and technique put into it.

"The Encounter" was included in Nebula Award Stories 7 and is one of the three stories by his wife that Knight chose to include in Best Stories from Orbit, Volumes 1 to 10; the story also appears in the Wilhelm collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions, and was translated into French, German and Polish. 

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The Lafferty is solid, what I would have expected from him, while the Wolfe feels like a trifle and the Wilhelm is an elaborate construction with a near-fatal flaw.

As a whole I think Orbit 8 is a big success, well worth my time and 50 cents.

Four Mind Benders from A. E. van Vogt

Added this baby to my collection
in Carolina in Dec 2014 

Our last three slantastic selections were novels by A. E. van Vogt which erupted into the public consciousness in the wild and crazy "Me" Decade, and perhaps the preoccupation with sexual promiscuity and Kirlian phenomena we saw in those books reflects the 1970s milieu.  Today we're looking at four stories from the period of World War II and the Korean War, collected by the Paperback Library in 1971's The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders.  The people at Paperback Library assert that this volume represents "A Six-Star Triumph!"  

Not everybody is as sanguine about our favorite Canadian as are the good people at Paperback Library; van Vogt has many detractors, probably most famously esteemed critic and editor Damon Knight.  (By the way, the interview of Knight and his wife, Kate Wilhelm of Killer Thing fame, in Charles Platt's Dream Makers is amazingly snobbish, self-pitying, self-important and arrogant.  I think the fact that they read their answers onto a tape while Platt was not present may have relaxed their inhibitions or something.)

We defenders of van Vogt can take comfort in the knowledge that Angus Wilson, important British man-of-letters, is among our ranks; his ringing endorsement of the abilities of the mad man from Manitoba is to be found on the first page of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders.  Now, I've never actually read anything by Angus Wilson, and it sort of sounds like Angus Wilson is one of those novelists whom nobody reads anymore, but I won't let that stop me from cherishing these musical lines:

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"Rebirth: Earth" (1942, as by E. M. Hull)

This story first appeared in Astounding, in the same issue as van Vogt's famous story, "The Weapon Shop."  It was printed with the title "The Flight that Failed" and appeared under the byline of van Vogt's wife Edna Mayne Hull.  Here in The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders we are told it was written in collaboration with Hull.  According to van Vogt scholar Isaac Walwyn, van Vogt probably wrote this story himself with a minimum of input from his wife--the "E. M. Hull" byline was most likely just a pseudonym based on her name.

This is a World War II story, written and published, of course, during the actual war. An American transport plane is carrying a valuable cargo across the Atlantic to England, a cargo so important the result of the war hinges upon its arrival!  A mysterious man as if by magic appears on the plane, saying the air crew needs his help if they are to succeed in their mission.  He carries with him a book apparently published 700 years in the future, a book which indicates that the Krauts won the war and Hitler conquered the world because the Luftwaffe shot down this very plane! When the German aircraft attack, the future man somehow turns the 1940s aircraft into a space ship with devastating ray guns and powerful engines which get it safely to Blighty lickety split!

This is a pretty straightforward story which includes lots of additional layers and complications: the future man isn't from a settled future but from a possible future (it seems like the Nazi-dominated future is the "real" future the visitor is trying to prevent); the future man can only appear if the people on the plane believe in him (like a fairy or something); the future man uses moonlight to get to the 1940s and there are lots of literary-type descriptions of the moonlight glittering off the ocean, being refracted by clouds, coming through the cockpit window, etc; the plane carries not only the (unspecified*) MacGuffin but all kinds of extraneous people like British diplomats and American scientists.

This story is alright, but no big deal.  It reminded me of Terminator and that whole Harlan Ellison brouhaha about it, and also those Roman stories about Castor and Pollux appearing to fight alongside the Roman army.

*I can hear all you comedians suggesting that the secret cargo was the $400 million cash ransom demanded by Mussolini for Albania.

"The Invisibility Gambit" (1943, as by E. M. Hull)

Another Astounding story initially credited to Hull; this one's original title was "Abdication."  It is a sort of crime caper about double-crossing mobsters and business tycoons, told in the first person and set in the far future in the "Ridge" sector of the galaxy, a frontier area where there is much less law and order than on Earth but where ambitious men can make a fortune exploiting newly discovered uranium mines on desolate virgin planets.

The coolest thing about this story is the invisibility suits people on the frontier use to sneak around, and the dangerous frontier setting is also pretty good.  The plot is kind of confusing, with the narrator, Artur Blord, manipulating another Ridge uranium mine tycoon into abandoning plans for retirement and doing Blord's dirty work for him, stealing that guy's girlfriend (scientific tests have certified that she is a perfect female specimen with a 140 IQ), and tricking gangsters into thinking some other guy is Blord with crafty space telegrams.  Maybe we should call this a space noir.

Entertaining, and reflecting van Vogt's interest in psychology at an early date ("...I used my knowledge of the psychology of spacemen...once those kind of forces are set in motion, they can't be stopped"), but not particularly remarkable.

"The Problem Professor" (1949)  

World War II Army Air Force veteran Robert Merritt has a dream: that man conquer outer space!  His wife also has a dream: that Merritt bring home a big fat paycheck! This is a story about how Merritt tries to infect others with his passion for space flight and how he finds that people just don't care.  (This reminded me a little of Barry Malzberg's various novels, like 1971's The Falling Astronauts, in which astronauts are depressed to learn the public doesn't give a shit about the space program.)

Anyway, Merritt, whom his wife compares to a "Washington lobbyist" (it is interesting to see that people in 1949 were apparently as familiar with the phrase "Washington lobbyist" as we are today) tries to gin up support for the space program among Hollywood actors, business people, and scientists, in hopes they will in turn generate interest in senators and the president.  He and his fellow dreamers use various tricks and psychological manipulation to get attention and endorsements.  In the end success is achieved, the government approves funding, and the story's action scene has Merritt becoming the first man in space.  The story ends on a hopeful note, with Merritt confident mankind will soon visit the stars and that even sooner he will be bringing home the dough his wife so earnestly desires.  This is a much more positive and optimistic story than those Malzberg stories, and, with its science lectures and jokes about how ignorant of the hard sciences the average person is, sits comfortably in the classic tradition of pro-science, pro-engineering, elitist hard SF.    

Not bad.  "The Problem Professor" was originally titled "Project Spaceship" when it appeared in Thrilling Wonder Stories; that is a better title because the drunken and disillusioned (by his role in developing the atomic bomb) academic is not as prominent a character as the later title implies.  The story is perhaps interesting because while it acknowledges the fears of atomic power felt by many (with its example of the depressed prof), it remains firmly optimistic about atomic power--Merritt has no regrets about the atomic bombings of Japan, having served in the Pacific and thinking those bombings prevented his own death, and he is sure that it is atomic-powered rockets which will carry humanity to the stars.  "To me atomic energy is open sesame to the future."

"The Star-Saint" (1951)

This story has a terrific central idea: it is about a superhero, a superman, but told from the point of view of a mere mortal who envies the superman's powers and is jealous of the way he effortlessly makes women swoon!

Leonard Hanley is the leader of a group of colonists who have just arrived at their destination after a two-year space flight.  Everybody is already a little on edge because the space ship crew has contempt for the colonists, and then when they get to planet Ariel they find that the colony they have come to join has been mysteriously wiped out, the buildings toppled, the colonists who preceded them physically crushed into the soil.  The space ship's captain calls for help, and Mark Rogan arrives.  Rogan is an "alien communications expert," a member of the Space Patrol and a mutant who can fly through space without benefit of a space ship, crossing interstellar distances in the blink of an eye.

Hanley and Rogan take a shuttle to the surface to investigate what happened to the first wave of colonists.  Hanley is wounded in an attack by natives and has to be sent back to the ship; instead of showing concern for her injured husband, Hanley's wife frets that Rogan (a goddamned superman!) might get hurt while all alone on the surface! Hanley becomes determined to solve the mystery on his own without the help of the superman.

I'd like to report that the ordinary man solves the problem without the help of the super-powered mutant, but we all know how elitist these old SF books can be.  (And I bet the new ones, too--I haven't read any Harry Potter books, but I'm pretty sure its the Chosen One born under the Sign of the Whoozit and bearing the Mark of the Wyrm whose coming was foretold in the Sacred Ledger of Legerdemain, and not the school janitor and the lunch lady, who saves the universe from the evil dark one and his minions.)  Hanley screws things up even worse, further angering the natives and inspiring more attacks, and it is Rogan, using his super cross-species communications powers, who makes peace.

As if that wasn't bad enough for our man Hanley, Rogan solves the problem of fostering communication long term between the natives and the human colonists--after all, Kal-El, I mean Rogan, can't stick around Ariel, what with the galaxy being so full of Lois Lanes and Jimmy Olsens, I mean dopey colonists, who need his help.  (The natives of Ariel are rocks and trees who have achieved sentience and the ability to move, and so it's not like ordinary humans can just learn their spoken or written language so they can deal with them--you have to have Mark Rogan-type psychic powers!)  Without coming out and saying it (this is 1951, not 1971) van Vogt makes it clear that Rogan impregnates Hanley's wife so she will give birth to a child with those much-needed communication abilities.  Of course it's not Rogan who will be tilling the fields to feed this little half-mutant brat, but poor cuckold Hanley!

Because it is "out there," includes a super being and psychic powers and excuses a guy's love 'em and leave 'em lifestyle, I think this is the most characteristically van Vogtian of the four stories we're talking about today.  It is also my favorite, because it is the most surprising and weird, and at the same time showcases that most ordinary and universal emotion, envy and jealousy because your spouse has a crush on a famous person with whom you cannot possibly compete.

"The Star-Saint" was first published in the famous issue of Planet Stories with Leigh Brackett's "Black Amazon of Mars."  A good issue!

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Four entertaining classic SF stories.  The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders is a good collection, even if the ones we read today aren't all exactly "mind benders."  The other two stories in the collection, "Proxy Intelligence" and "The Gryb" I read years before this blog was hatched; they were both integrated into fix-ups, the former into Supermind, the latter into The War Against the Rull.

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In keeping with our theme of commoners going ga ga for their society's celebrities, the last page of my copy of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders has a full page ad for a biography of Jackie Kennedy.  Is there a big overlap between classic SF nerds and Kennedy-worshippers?  

Fire Pattern by Bob Shaw

"Secrecy has always been a big thing with you people," Jerome said, voicing a minor criticism as a camouflage for the deep revulsion the Dorrinian's words had inspired in him.

I guess like a lot of people my age, when I was in my teens in the 1980s my family had a copy of Reader's Digest's Mysteries of the Unexplained, a book about paranormal phenomenon.  One of the things which really got to me in the book was the section on spontaneous human combustion.  I wasn't a sailor, I didn't believe in God, and I lived in the suburbs, so sea serpents, demonic possession, and sasquatch didn't scare me, but spontaneous human combustion seemed like something that might be real and could happen to anybody, anywhere.  Around the same time this phenomenon was scaring a young MPorcius, Bob Shaw wrote and published a science fiction novel based on spontaneous human combustion, Fire Pattern.

Published in 1984 and set in 1996, Fire Pattern has the words "science fiction" on the back cover but starts out much like a conventional thriller, one of those books about an ordinary middle-class person facing quotidian life challenges who starts a new love relationship while doing detective stuff and uncovering a conspiracy. Fifty-year-old Ray Jerome is still recovering from the death of his wife and the loss of his job as an engineer.  His current job is as a reporter at a small New England newspaper (British subject Shaw set this novel in the United States, apparently an alternate universe USA in which Americans measure distances in "kilometres" instead of "miles" and call their summer homes "chalets.")  Jerome, who is older than everybody in the office and worked at a trade journal, is always correcting everybody's grammar and writing style and ridiculing people's beliefs in goofy nonsense like spontaneous human combustion.  Circumstances force him to change his tune about fortean phenomena when a case of "SHC" occurs in his little New England town, and the editor of the paper (a forty-year-old woman our hero has a crush on) assigns Jerome to investigate.

Like in any detective story, Jerome talks to the witness, reads background material, visits the morgue, looks for clues in photos, blah blah blah.  You can bet I was relieved when, 75 or 80 pages into the 208-page paperback, we plunge into Van Vogt territory!  Cases of SHC are revealed to Jerome to be botched mind transfer operations originating from Mercury!  For centuries the telepathic Mercurians (who call themselves "Dorrinians"), by the hundreds, have been colonizing Earth by switching bodies with Earth people (and in the process building up a colony on Mercury of Earthlings in Mercurian bodies!)  Jerome finds himself in the middle of a secret war between factions of telepathic Mercurians on Earth, and then, in classic wish-fulfillment fiction style, is transferred to a young healthy body on Mercury!  In the first part of the book Shaw kept reminding us of Jerome's arthritis and poor eyesight, making the move to the Mercury body cathartic.  Even better, the Terran colony on Mercury has a culture of sexual promiscuity--I mean free love!

Despite his improved physical health and active sex life, life on Mercury is no picnic for our hero!  He misses Earth and finds that he doesn't really get along with the natives, who can be arrogant, dismissive, and selfish.  But the wish-fulfillment fantasy continues when it is Jerome (earning the title "Dances with Dorrinians") who saves the Mercurian civilization and then helps the Mercurians secretly conquer the Earth with their telepathic powers! Like in so many anti-human/anti-Western science fiction stories (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Killer Thing, Hero's Walk, Childhood's End, The Forever War, The Cosmic Rape, etc) we are expected to cheer on the aliens as human free will is extinguished and the Earth becomes some kind of utopia under the imperialism of the extraterrestrials.  If these Mercurian psykers hadn't hypnotized all of us, we'd all have died in a nuclear war caused by humanity's failings!  (Like my college professors, these SF stories never want to blame the Soviet Union for the Cold War, but instead blame the West or some abstraction like "tribalism" that places equal blame on the corrupt and racist bourgeois democracies and poor Uncle Joe's misunderstood, well-intentioned and hard-pressed worker's paradise.)  Jerome's reward for putting the Mercurians in charge of his fellow Earthlings is getting his memory of all he has learned about SHC and Mercury erased, getting his mind put back in (a healthier version of) his old body, and getting married to that sexy newspaper editor.          

Even if the ending disappointed me, there is a lot to like about Fire Pattern; it is a very entertaining read.  Shaw is a skilled writer, and the plot is good.  Because the cover illo and blurbs make no reference to outer space, I was truly surprised when the whole Mercurian telepath angle was sprung on me, and surprised again when Jerome ended up on Mercury in an alien body.  I had expected Shaw to explain spontaneous human combustion to be the work of callous big business or wealthy predatory physicians or something like that (sort of like what Pohl did in Drunkard's Walk.)  And because Shaw shows how self-important the Mercurians are, and has them keep bragging about how ethical they are (the Mercurian doth protest too much, I thunk), in the last few pages, when Jerome has to make his big decision, I thought there was a real chance he would side with the people of Earth over the invaders.

A curious element of the novel was its anti-computer, anti-technology attitude.  Computers put Jerome out of work, a computer that checks grammar is to blame for Jerome's fellow journalists' poor grasp of the English language, and Jerome thinks recording interviews via shorthand is more effective than using a tape recorder.  Mercurian engineering is inferior to that of the Earth, but the Dorrinians' superior mental abilities mean it is they who conquer us, without us even knowing what is happening!

Maybe I've got Van Vogt on the brain, but another thing about Fire Pattern I found interesting was possible links or similarities to that wild Canadian's work.  Besides all the telepathy stuff, the hidden secret aliens, and the secret conspiracies, I found Fire Pattern's explanation for spontaneous human combustion to be very similar to a striking scene in one of Van Vogt's better stories, "Secret Unattainable."  I also wondered if the ways Jerome was always criticizing other journalists' grammar and word usage was some kind of oblique reference to how Van Vogt's writing is famously confusing and clumsy.

Do I wish Fire Pattern was a ringing endorsement of human independence and loyalty to the Earth? Of course I do.  But since it is a well-written, well-constructed, and surprising novel, I still enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the other Shaw books I own.

Four stories by Thomas Disch from 1966

It's time to finish up with my 1971 US edition of the Thomas Disch collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.  (I read and blogged about the title story back in early 2014.)  All four remaining stories first appeared in 1966.

"5 Eggs" (1966)

This one first appeared in the anthology Orbit 1, edited by Damon Knight.  It's a good one, and is a good example of what I think of when I think of a characteristic Disch story; it is full of references to Shakespeare, Ovid, and Botticelli, it includes a sentence in Latin, a broken heart and a pathetic tragedy, as well as a central ironic joke.  It is only eight pages long, but Disch constructs the story as largely a bunch of flashbacks and documents, instead of a straightforward narrative.

The plot, in linear fashion: A wealthy ornithologist meets a beautiful alien woman and they have an affair, she living with him for two months.  She is a cruel lover who deliberately hurts him psychologically and physically, but he finds her irresistible and they become engaged. She leaves him just before the start of the party he is throwing to celebrate their engagement.  He takes some consolation in the fact that she has left behind five eggs, and instructions on how to hatch them.  Presumably, these are the product of their relationship.  The cruel alien has played a trick on the ornithologist, however, contrived a way to fool the housekeeper into including the eggs in a salad which he and his friends ate at the sad party meant to celebrate his engagement to the only woman he has ever loved.

A superior piece of work, the plot, structure, style, emotional impact and economy all remarkably good.  Five stars for "Five Eggs"!

"Three Points on the Demographic Curve" (1966)

This one first saw light of day in SF Impulse, a short-lived British magazine, edited by Harry Harrison for most of its existence.

It is the year 2240!  Government and Science! have been grappling with the problem of overpopulation for ages.  People live in tiny cubicles, children are raised in government barracks manned by robots, and, like in that Genesis song, the authorities have reduced human height!  But the Earth is still running out of room.

So, the authorities don't really mind when a Dickensianly-named guy from the future appears in a time machine and starts kidnapping children by the thousands, to repopulate a future Earth depopulated by war:

Prosper Ashfield was not a happy man.

As a youth, he had dreamed, as almost every young man dreams, of being the Last Man on Earth. Unlike other young men, Prosper had the good fortune to realize this ambition.

(Again we see the understated humor I enjoyed in "Genetic Coda.")

Prosper's plans fail, because the 23rd century kids have been ill-equipped by their education to rebuild society... these kids can barely walk, much less construct a new civilization.  Having been raised by robots, they love machines, so Prosper goes back to 1790 and sells them to a Scottish businessman, who puts them to work in a factory. Disch explains that Prosper is to be credited with the sharp increase in population at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

With 1790 and 2240 as Disch's first two points, the third is in the far future, when Prosper, the last man, goes into suspended animation, instructing his robots to try to "reverse entropy" and wake him up if they succeed.  His robots managed to make a time machine, so given enough time, maybe they can accomplish this similarly audacious task.

"Three Points on the Demographic Curve" is not bad, but I felt like the plot fizzled instead of delivering any kind of emotional payoff, surprise, or funny punchline.

"Invaded by Love" (1966)

This story was first published in New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, which is considered a sort of flagship of the New Wave.  It takes place in New York City, which of course pulls at my heartstrings!  To think that I used to live among all the places mentioned, the UN, Rockefeller Center, Tudor City, Sutton Place, St. Patrick's Cathedral. How many hours did I spend, sitting on a park bench or standing on a street corner, eating a slice of pizza or a bagel, admiring just these very buildings, watching the world go by.  That was the Technicolor period of my life, sandwiched between black and white stretches like Dorothy Gale's dream of a life of adventure in another world over the rainbow.

Enough about the Rise and Fall of MPorcius--back to "Invaded by Love."  It is the late 1970s!  An alien preacher has come to Earth, and used high tech hypnotism, the distribution of drugs (little yellow pills), and appeals to traditional Earth religious sentiments to get most of humanity to join his "Universal Brotherhood of Love."  War and violent crime essentially cease, but people also stop slaughtering cattle, fishing, and exterminating insects, leading to widespread hunger and economic crises.

Our main character is the head of the UN, who, like in so many SF stories, is some kind of world chief executive, the commander in chief of a hegemonic military (in this story the UN has a moonbase with an arsenal of nuclear missiles.)  I feel like during my entire life (I was born in 1971) that Americans have considered the UN a sort of debating society attached to a charity, an institution we take about as seriously as the Red Cross or the YMCA, but in these SF stories Americans are always willingly relinquishing their independence and power to some foreigner (in this story an Australian) because he's UN Secretary General.

The Australian UN guy, Seneca Traquair, is one of the few people to refuse to take the little yellow pill, and he resists the alien's demand that Earth immediately disarm.  The alien tries to hypnotize him, then kidnaps his son, but Traquair continues to resist, to the point of gunning down the alien in his office and nuking his orbiting space ship. But resistance is futile; the single alien missionary with one ship is replaced by an army of aliens with an armada of ships, and humanity is overwhelmed by their hypnotic power:

From the moment the invaders landed, the converts ceased to have wills of their own, lives of their own.  They were absorbed in the Ground of All Being and obeyed the Universal Will.     

Even Traquair succumbs, and rushes to embrace and obey Earth's new arachnid ruler.

I feel like I've read or seen a million of these SF stories in which "peace-loving" aliens put the screws to the Earth and make us violent humans behave; the film The Day the Earth Stood Still and the novels Hero's Walk (by Robert Crane) and The Killer Thing (by Kate Wilhelm) come to mind, as do Cosmic Rape / To Marry Medusa by Theodore Sturgeon and Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, which actually have the same "collective consciousness" angle that Disch hints at here in "Invaded by Love." Those five works all seem to be cheerleading for the human race to be dominated by an alien empire, but Disch, by likening the aliens to missionaries (like most SF writers, Disch is hostile to religion) and drug pushers, stressing the Big Brother aspects ("He [Traquair in the final pages of the story] loved his Father and did what he was told") and the starvation caused by the alien's love cult, appears to be more skeptical of alien imperialism.  While Clarke and the rest denounce Western imperialism by engaging in a somewhat hypocritical wish fulfillment fantasy in which extraterrestrial imperialism of the Earth is good, Disch (similar to how I think Wells does in War of the Worlds) denounces Western imperialism by having Earth stand in for the colonized and aliens stand in for the colonizer.  Going further than all these writers, the pessimistic Disch has the Earth be conquered and human freedom eliminated without whitewashing (or celebrating) this tragedy.

Not bad.

"Bone of Contention" (1966)

This story first was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

In the future, apparently related to a revival of interest in the culture of Ancient Egypt, many Americans cease interring their dead relatives and instead have them preserved in lifelike poses and leave them sitting around the house.  An older couple has over half a dozen such preserved corpses in the house, and the husband is getting sick of it; he'd like to sit in the rocking chair in the den currently occupied by Uncle Maurice, who died twenty years ago!  The wife loves her (currently bloodless) blood relatives more than she loves her husband, it turns out, and murders him when he tries to have Maurice carted off to a (in this future society, gauche and declasse) Christian cemetery.  A forgiving soul, she does have her husband preserved and sat in a new armchair right next to Maurice.

This story is OK.  I guess it suits the tone of macabre jocularity cultivated by Hitchcock in his TV appearances.

*********

British 1967 edition of the collection,
which does not include "5 Eggs" or
"Three Points on the Demographic Curve"

So, I've read every story from the 1971 edition of One Hundred and One H-Bombs.  It is a worthwhile collection, and the Harry Harrison introduction is also of interest.  But this exploration of SF history was not without its costs.  In the course of reading my copy, the dried glue of the spine gave up the ghost and my 160 page book now consists of a cover and 80 loose sheets, which I will have to entomb in one of those clear plastic baggies.  Rest In Peace, One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.    

The Crack in the Sky by Richard A. Lupoff

Only the windborne sand and aerial particles hurled into the sky by a century of industrial felons moved, and overhead no bird glided in search of hunter's prey or carrion.

Back at Christmas time I read Richard Lupoff's Sandworld.  My blog post about Sandworld hardly qualifies as a rave, but the novel wasn't so foul that it kept me from purchasing a copy of 1976's The Crack in the Sky when I spotted it on the shelves at the Omaha Half-Price Books.  The weak cover illustration apparently depicts a (symbolic?) giant bird piercing a sphere used for storing red paint.  I have to admit that for a few hours I thought the cover showed some kind of evil faucet, perhaps a representation of the easy access to narcotics hinted at in the advertising text.  When our friends in Britain and Italy printed The Crack in the Sky under variant titles they saw fit to provide it more literal cover illos.  

The Crack in the Sky is kind of like a poorly written response or pastiche of Thomas Disch's very fine 334, a fix-up from 1972: we follow several characters over interweaving plot threads and learn about a dystopian future world which is largely an extrapolation of trends that worried people during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It is the year 2000, and the environment has been destroyed; almost all the vegetation in the world is gone, the air is full of poison and grit, the oceans are black, and all animals bigger than an insect are extinct.  The surviving human population lives under huge domes--the dome in Northern California, where most of the novel takes place, houses thirty million people and stretches for over a hundred miles, covering Bodega Bay, Mount Oso and Santa Rosa.  (This is one of those books which rewards a familiarity with California geography.  Whenever I read one of these I wish it was set in New York, where I know where everything is without resorting to a map.  334 is set in New York, of course.)

There is very little work, and the government, which controls just about everything, provides food (algae) and housing, so people have sex and use drugs and watch prolefeed TV all day.

While Lupoff addresses many issues in The Crack in the Sky, from racism and politics to religion and literature, and the novel's main bugaboo is pollution, overpopulation comes a close second. The domes are crowded.  When the domes were first built one-family homes were seized by the government and split up into tiny apartments and public schools and similar large buildings were turned into dormitories.  Twenty years later masses of people are still living on the streets.  To control the population level, the water is laced with contraceptives and very few people (one hundred people a year in the U.S., chosen specially by the master computer) are permitted to have children. When the characters aren't having banal political discussions (e. g., one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter) or engaging in tired cultural criticism (e.g., discussion of gender stereotypes and "the old, old story of gaining personal esteem by contrast with the degraded") they are imparting history lectures about how the British are to blame for overpopulation because they brought modern medicine and sanitation to places like India, or how only crazy religious fanatics and people obsessed with individual freedom could oppose mandatory birth control.  I found it hard to tell how much of this stuff Lupoff endorses, and how much was him satirizing such views.

Lupoff pads out the novel (to 200 pages!) with multitudinous references to his literary interests.  He manages to shoehorn lots of material about Edgar Rice Burroughs into the book, as well as references to George Orwell's 1984 and talk about underground comics like Yellow Dog and comics creators like R. Crumb, Greg Irons, S. Clay Wilson, and George Metzger.

The plots and characters of The Crack in the Sky are not very interesting:

• Marco Hyndal, a Chicano, after robbing a taco stand (the vendor is dismissed as a pimply-faced "petit bourgeois") is invited into the high ranks of a rising religious order that hopes to take control of the dome and repair society.  

• Jomo Silver, a black comic-book fan, leaves his group marriage (to Gonzalez, Min-yi and Jacobson) over an argument about racism and hooks up with other African-American comix aficionados and helps them put out samizdat documents for Marco's religious order.

• Oliver Gonzalez, a Chicano police lieutenant, pulls strings and saves Silver from being sent outside the dome (a death sentence) when Silver gets attacked by crooks--just like when I was attacked by bullies in junior high, the authorities make it their practice to punish all participants in a fight, including the victim!  

• Min-yi, an Asian woman, is a former social worker who is skilled at meditation, massage and lesbian sex.

• Janet Jacobson, a beautiful Jewish genius, works as an actress on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Adventure Hour and as a computer programmer. She is on the team that decodes messages from space aliens.

That's right, space aliens!  Transmissions from space that were received decades ago are finally deciphered during the period of the novel.  Perhaps having read Arthur C. Clarke, Kate Wilhelm, or maybe one of a hundred other SF writers who assure us we'd be better off if aliens were telling us what to do, the U.S. government organizes a major operation ("Project Help") to transmit a message to the aliens begging them to fix our environment.  They call in some communist scientists from the USSR and the People's Republic of Japan (!) to help; this gives Lupoff a chance to put into the mouths of the Marxist scientists the contempt for the common people and electoral government we find so often in SF, and for the US eggheads to agree:

[Communist scientist:]"Your mayor appears to be nothing but a buffoon.  But in your system, even a buffoon is allowed to stand for public office.  Tell me, do they ever win?"

[American scientist:]"Do they ever lose?"

Before Project Help can really get underway Marco, Jomo and their religious order buddies attack the science facility and murder most of the scientists; Janet survives and goes abroad to help the commies with the Project.  America becomes divided into two hostile camps, the pro-Project establishment and a powerful insurgent faction that says the Project is a waste of resources that won't work anyway.  When it looks like the anti-Project voters are going to win the presidential election the pro-Project incumbent prez cancels the election and civil war erupts.  The novel ends with a fire destroying the Northern California dome and killing everybody in it.

The Crack in the Sky is not very good. We've all seen domed cities, pollution, overpopulation, group marriages, planned economies, etc. before, and Lupoff doesn't add anything new that I can see to these well-worn widgets and doodads from the SF toolbox.  He doesn't have the kind of engaging and distinctive writing style that a Wolfe or a Lee or a Disch or a Vance has that lets him get away with working with elements we've seen a hundred times already, and he doesn't give us characters or a plot worth following.

The best part of The Crack in the Sky is how it opened my eyes to some underground comics I had never heard of before.  I know Lupoff's fiction has enthusiastic supporters (mostly for two books I haven't read, Space War Blues and Sword of the Demon, apparently) but so far I have found his work as a critic much more valuable than his work as a novelist.

Unless you are some kind of pollution and overpopulation obsessive, I'd suggest avoiding The Crack in the Sky.

Quark/3 (Part3): Harrison, Stanley, Veitch, Bailey, & Vickers

Here we have the concluding episode of my epic reading of Quark/3, a 1971 anthology of experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Delany and Hacker endeavored to present in Quark/3 stories that were not mere "popular entertainment" or "adventure stories" by "commercial science fiction writers," but rather risk-taking work of speculative fiction that was "politically dangerous" and meaningfully addressed "social, psychological and technological crises" evident in the early 1970s.

The first third of the book contained two good stories, those by R. A. Lafferty and Delany himself, while the second third limped along on the strength of an OK story by Kate Wilhelm and a slightly better tale by Josephine Saxton.  What awaits us in this final third? 

"Ring of Pain" by M. John Harrison

I recently read Harrison's first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, and thought it alright, nothing special.

In "Ring of Pain" a man wanders through a Central England devastated by war, scavenging food from the ruins.  Not a single building is intact, and not a single live person is to be seen.  Is he the last member of the human race? 

No!  He meets a woman, who is overjoyed to no longer be alone.  She talks of having children with the main character, and our protagonist responds by vomiting and fleeing!  He wants no part of continuing the human race, finds abhorrent the idea of being the Adam of a new civilization which will, no doubt, repeat the grim and catastrophic rise to industrialism and then industrialized, world-shattering war.  The woman eventually catches up with him, and he tries to win her over to his view that they must not procreate.  He fails to convince her, and finds himself unable to resist having sex with her.

The brief final scene I didn't quite understand.  I think a military unit, riding tanks and armed with rifles and bayonets, appears, and somehow this leads to the woman cutting off her breasts.  Or perhaps the main character is reflecting that even the sight of an armored squadron would not discourage the woman from wanting to have children, though if she had her breasts cut off then he would no longer desire her.

This is an acceptable story, even though it is written to be intentionally difficult to follow; there are lots of sentence fragments, I guess to convey the feeling of a world that has been smashed to bits, and get you into the mindset of people who have lived through such a catastrophe.  

"To the Child Whose Birth Will Change the Way the Universe Works" by George Stanley

American-born Canadian poet Stanley won the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award in 2006.  "To the Child..." is a two page poem, an adaptation of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. All you classical scholars out there already know that Eclogue IV was widely interpreted in the Middle Ages as a sort of prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Having been indifferently educated myself, I can't read Latin, but, in preparation for reading Stanley's piece in Quark/3, I took my copy of the Penguin Classics 1980 edition of the Eclogues off the shelf and read Guy Lee's translation of Eclogue IV.

Virgil's poem was written around 40 B. C. (or B. C. E., as we are saying nowadays) to express hope that a marriage alliance between the two successors of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), would end the long period of instability and civil wars that had been wracking the Roman world.  Virgil is praising the prospective child of the union between Mark Antony and Octavian's sister: with his birth will come a new beginning which will see the end of fear and the "iron race" replaced by a "golden" one.  

Stanley updates and Americanizes the poem.  The birth of the child will end the "machine age," and where Virgil mentions Achilles, Stanley mentions George Washington.  Virgil suggests that, with the child as his subject, his poetry will surpass that of Linus, Orpheus and Pan; Stanley says his verse will be the superior of Hart Crane's and Lorca's.

Maybe Stanley sees the assassination of JFK as analogous to the assassination of Caesar, and the 1960s, with such contentious events as the Civil Rights movement and race riots, Vietnam War protests and all the trouble around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as analogous to the civil wars and other crises suffered by Romans during the Late Republic.  I can't tell if Stanley is referring to any specific person or event as ending the crisis period, the way Virgil does; a clue that isn't getting me very far on google is that this poem is dedicated to a Brian DeBeck.

"A Sexual Song" by Tom Veitch

Veitch has only three credits at isfdb, one of them a story he co-wrote about Greedo of Mos Eisley Cantina fame.  Veitch has written numerous comic books, including Star Wars comics. 

This story is even more surreal and less coherent than Hill's "Brave Salt."  "A Sexual Song" begins "He dressed in moth skins torn from a beaver's diary..." and in the second paragraph we get, "Print culture seems to be dying this morning because the dead men who occupy those zones cannot provide nourishment to tribal electricians...."  The entire story is like this, incomprehensible nonsense, like the product of playing Mad Libs.  I guess the plot is about a sexual encounter in a post-nuclear war world in which everything is mutated and crazy.

Painful.

"Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" by Hilary Bailey

Bailey, when Quark/3 was published, was married to Michael Moorcock.  This is the first thing I've read by her; she seems to have been quite productive, though much of her work falls outside the SF genre.

After some kind of catastrophe the British populace resorts to living in government-built underground complexes.  Each complex is isolated from the others.  A female technician in one complex discovers a secret means of communicating with other complexes, and starts a surreptitious correspondence with an old acquaintance living in another complex.  The entire text consists of their letters, and through them we learn how human beings are reacting to being confined in the sterile and depressing complexes.  There are many women who insist on having children despite the discouragement of the authorities and a lack of resources.  Children and adolescents get into all kinds of mischief, creating extra work for the technicians and mechanics.  Family relationships collapse and there are pathetic attempts by lonely people to secure some kind of human comfort; the long distance love affair of our two main characters is one example.

A convincing and interesting milieu, actual characters and emotion, and a smooth writing style; Bailey brings to Quark/3 some things which have been in short supply.  After some of the pieces I've endured in Quark/3 it is certainly a relief to encounter a well-written story with some genuine human emotion and a clever SF premise that hearkens back to the tradition of the epistolary novel.  I am proclaiming the oasis that is "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" the best story in the anthology!

"The Coded Sun Game" by Brian Vickers 

The isfdb indicates that "The Coded Sun Game," which is the longest story in Quark/3 (over 60 pages!), constitutes 50% of Brian Vickers's SF output.  Under ordinary circumstances I wouldn't devote the necessary time and energy to reading a 60 page story by a guy I never heard of, especially in an anthology which is full of weak stories, but I am on a mission, and I'm certainly not going to give up with the finish line in sight!


"The Coded Sun Game" is convoluted and difficult, and at times I found it hard to attend.  The narrative is a sort of stream of consciousness of a being who is delusional, suffering from "psychotic hallucinations" that are "compounded of past perceptual experiences."  The narrative is full of pop music references (the names of bands and singers, like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and lines from songs like the Doors' "Light My Fire" and The Who's "See Me, Feel Me," pop up at random) and lists (of oil companies, of modern artists, of cities) and is periodically interrupted by science lectures (psychology, biology, solar astronomy) and medical reports.

Paul is a young man (perhaps an alien, perhaps a fallen deity) suffering from the aforementioned "psychotic withdrawal visions."  He is living with an English family near the ocean: Clive Noland, a doctor, his wife Barbra, an artist, and their sexy daughter Michelle.  Paul watches TV, walks on the beach, swims in the pool, has sex with Michelle.  His mental problems seem to be linked to solar radiation; a medical report says his symptoms reach their peak at midday, and the text is full of references to color, sunspots, and solar flares.

The story gets more confusing as it goes on.  In the second half more characters are introduced, and, like in a time travel story, Paul seems to be reliving scenes but as different characters, talking to and fighting with younger versions of himself from the first half of the story. 

I've spent some time flipping through this story, rereading passages and trying to figure it out, but I don't really get it.  Still, I didn't find it offensively bad.

Fun fact: Until I read this story I wasn't familiar with the British slang term for transistor radio, "tranny" or "trannie."  You can imagine my initial puzzlement at the phrase, "Beatles strangled by a trannie."

**********

So there we have it, Quark/3.  It wasn't an easy ride, but let's look at the bright side.  I read a pile of stories by writers totally new to me, and among them are Hilary Bailey and Josephine Saxton, whom I will definitely read again (also, it is notable that the Bailey and Saxton stories have never appeared in any other book, so I'd never have encountered them otherwise.)  Richard Hill's and James Sallis's stories are so crazy I am spurred to read their contributions to Again, Dangerous Visions.

Taken as a whole, the stories were less propagandistic and more experimental in style and form than I had expected.  Gordon Eklund's anti-war story and Kate Wilhelm's overpopulation story felt tired, but most of the writers really did try to do something strange and/or new.   

Finally, let's rank the fiction to be found in Quark/3.  Hilary Bailey comes in first, with Lafferty and Delany close behind, and Saxton a distant fourth.  Then we have a pack of OK tales, followed by a mass of weak stories, and then three certifiable disasters.

QUARK/3 FINAL STANDINGS
Hilary Bailey                            "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth"
R. A. Lafferty                          "Encased in Ancient Rind"
Samuel R. Delany                    "Dog in a Fisherman's Net"
Josephine Saxton                     "Nature Boy"

M. John Harrison                     "Ring of Pain"
Kate Wilhelm                           "Where Have You Been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?"
Brian Vickers                           "The Coded Sun Game"

Gordon Eklund                        "Home Again, Home Again"
Virginia Kidd                           "Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside"
Joanna Russ                             "The Zanzibar Cat"

James Sallis                             "Field"
Richard Hill                             "Brave Salt"
Tom Veitch                              "A Sexual Song"

Quark/3 (Part 2): Sallis, Dorman, Wilhelm, Hill, Saxton and Kidd

For some reason (dementia?) I decided to forgo my usual practice of reading one or two stories from an anthology and then consigning the book to the inaccessible recesses of my overstuffed bookcase; instead I am reading every page of Quark Slash Three, the early 1971 issue of a quarterly devoted to experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Unsurprisingly, R. A. Lafferty was the star of the first leg of my journey into Quark/3, though editor Samuel Delany put in a creditable performance as well. I thought Gordon Eklund's contribution was conventionally bad, while college professor Joanna Russ managed to find a special way to inflict a bad story on me.  Who will be today's standouts as I read the second third of Quark/3?

"Field" by James Sallis

James Sallis mostly seems to write crime stories, as well as books about American music (his bio at the end of Quark Stroke Three indicates he was working on a book on country and western music.) I've never read anything by Sallis before.

"Field" is, I guess, a series of prose poems.  First off we get a bunch of bizarre images and sentence fragments in both first and second person.  On the first page we get "Where this morning the charred bodies of all the women I've loved come floating down the stream outside our window," a line I heard in my mind in the voice of poet Jason Irwin.  This flight of fancy made me laugh, but most of the sections aren't that funny, alas.

One paragraph is a "to do" list with most of the items crossed out, another is the instructions of how to convert your snowmobile into a lawnmower ("Tighten bolts 1-8. (See Diagram 3.)")  There are vignettes about sophisticated writers who live in cramped apartments and can't pay their bills and can't stay true to their lovers.

Not good.

"Vanishing Points" by Sonya Dorman

This is a two page poem about the world being destroyed in a nuclear war: "the world winds up into a cloud...into one massive atom / O man of fire."  At least that is what I think it is about.  There's also a lot about fish and animals, the stars, etc.
  
This poem is listed as "Vanishing Point" on the table of contents, but the title is plural in the actual text. 

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" by Kate Wilhelm 

Years ago I read Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, one of those books in which aliens who share the author's politics force evil humanity to behave, putting an end to our racism, imperialism and strip mining.  I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read more Wilhelm; this must be the first short story I have ever read by her.

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" is a series of brief scenes from a dystopic future, with Wilhelm covering all the typical boring complaints like overpopulation, pollution, TV, consumerism, urban terrorism, international war, etc.  The plot is presented to us out of chronological order, and is a little ambiguous, but I think I have pieced it together.

The world is in turmoil, and little Billy's father, a scientist, testifies to Congress that because of overpopulation, humanity will go extinct unless the government kills half the population ASAP.  His plan is rejected by an influential Southern senator, so Billy's dad conspires to poison the water supply (or something of that nature) to prune the population without the government's OK.  Dad gets caught and imprisoned and lobotomized (or something; Wilhelm keeps everything vague.)  Billy grows up and gets a job at a consumer products firm, while things gets worse around the world, with increasing violent crime, war, and overcrowding.  Billy's father is released from prison and moves in with his son, and, before long, hangs himself.  There is also a subplot I didn't quite get about how Bill is hallucinating that he can shift himself to a world without other people.  I'm also not sure if the sections about Billy as a kid caught up in a riot and the parts about Bill leading a pop band are depicting alternate realities or just different periods of Bill's life. 

Not very good, but better than the Eklund, the Sallis and the Russ.

"Brave Salt" by Richard Hill

I've never even heard of Richard Hill before.  A gander at Hill's file at isfdb suggests that he retired from writing SF after he had a story accepted by Harlan Ellison for Again, Dangerous Visions.

This story is a surrealistic farce in twelve chapters (that's right, 12 chapters in ten pages) about a low-IQ hotel pool lifeguard who participates in a sort of Bay of Pigs style attack on Haiti.  It almost reads like Hill made it up as he went along, or perhaps used the surrealist technique of "automatic writing."  "Brave Salt" is full of references to pop culture figures like Jim Backus, Charlton Heston, and Merv Griffin, and feeble jokes about sex and drugs.  The most memorable joke: members of a band are having anal sex on stage while singing "I've Got You Babe," and then somebody bumps into their amplification equipment and the band is electrocuted to death.

Craziest of all, in the intro to his story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Hill floats the idea of expanding "Brave Salt" into a full length novel!

Suddenly Joanna Russ's story isn't looking so bad.

"Nature Boy" by Josephine Saxton

I've read Saxton's odd contribution to The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but this is the first fiction I have read by her.

This is a story about a mentally ill 40-year-old man who lives with his wealthy mother on a country estate.  He suffers delusions and unbidden, obsessive "daydreams," and feels driven to make "sacrifices" to woodland deities. We learn that he murdered a little girl some years ago in the woods; the tension in the story comes when he takes a walk into these very woods and meets another little girl--will he murder her as well?  The theme of the story seems to be human callousness and cruelty; the little girl and the mental case both kill small animals.

This is a moderately good mainstream crime or realistic horror story; the fact that the murderer believes in spirits, including the spirit of the girl he murdered, perhaps counts as SF content.     



Advertisement for The Science Fiction Book Club

Bound in the center of the book is an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club, highlighting the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, but also offering a dozen other books at low low prices.  One wonders how many of these books would pass the Delany/Hacker test of "meaningfully addressing crises" and "being politically dangerous."  (I have a feeling my man ERB wouldn't be passing this test.)

"Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside" by Virginia Kidd

Kidd is a very important literary agent, but I never have read any of her fiction.   

"Balls" is the biography of a successful Hollywood screenwriter who is obsessed with Walt Disney and Disney productions.  I guess this is a satire of American culture and society, perhaps in particular of Hollywood; at one point the protagonist declares, "I'm a real American success."  It feels tired and tedious, long and boring.  As you expect in a story about a Hollywood habitue the screenwriter has numerous divorces and sees a shrink.  Maybe Kidd is trying to tell us that Americans live in a fantasy world and are disconnected from the real world, that they care more about TV and celebrities than flesh and blood people they know.  Also maybe Americans are obsessed with success and happiness, but work too hard to really enjoy success and achieve happiness.

The SF content consists of the writer having the delusion that the universe is sending him (essentially useless) messages or signals via everyday sounds or hallucinatory images.  For example, the writer tells himself he should be happy, as he has "got it made," and then he sees a vision of a topless girl; this is a "tit maid."  A phone rings unexpectedly in the therapist's office and the doctor answers it, "Hello." Our hero figures this is a message in reverse, that the universe is saying to him, "Oh, Hell."

Weak.

*************

Cripes, doesn't look so hot, does it?  The Saxton story is marginally good, the Wilhelm is OK, the rest are poor or bad.

Well, there are several more selections in Quark/3, maybe in the third and final leg of my journey the anthology will make a comeback.

How many of these "great" science fiction stories have you read?

This is what the last page of my copy of Edmund Cooper's The Last Continent, Dell 4655, printed in 1969, looks like.  I love these kinds of ads, with just the title and author; your mind is filled with wonder at the possibilities of what each book could be about.  Like young Marcel in Proust, looking at the train schedule and fantasizing what a town is like based only on its name, you can construct characters and a plot in your mind for each book that, who knows?, may be more exciting than what the book truly contains.

I also like to wonder why the titles are presented in the order they are, and why one book is more expensive than another.  Did A. Bertram Chandler piss somebody off?  Were his books poorer sellers than Emil Pataja's?  I've never even heard of Emil Pataja!

<UPDATE JAN 30 2014: I read a book by Emil Petaja, who doesn't necessarily spell his name the way Dell does in its advertising.>

I have read five of the listed books, but I'm not willing to say any of them are great; I'm counting three OK/averages and two lame/Idon'tgetits.  Opinions do differ, though, as we shall see.

Deathworld 3 by Harry Harrison
I've read this twice and enjoyed it both times, but damned if I can remember anything about it.  It's an adventure story in which guys on horses kill astronauts that land on a planet, then an agent goes to the planet to make peace with the horse riders, or something like that.

The Cosmic Rape by Theodore Sturgeon
Earth people are cursed with individualism, but luckily an alien entity, the Medusa, comes to Earth and connects all our minds together.  There are lots of these collective consciousness stories out there, like Clarke's Childhood's End, Holly's The Green Planet, the anime Neon Genesis Evangelion, and so on.  The Cosmic Rape was later published under the title To Marry Medusa.  Joachim Boaz liked this a little more than me, and gave it 4 stars out of 5; I think it deserves an "acceptable/average" score of 3.   

The Killer Thing by Kate Wilhelm
Earth people are cursed with a lust to exploit the environment and primitive natives, but luckily some aliens with a powerful space navy come along and force us to behave.  There are lots of these "we are a bunch of jerks and would be better off if there were nice aliens to tell us what to do" stories out there, like Robert Crane's Hero's Walk and the film "The Day the Earth Stood Still."  Back in 2008 I wrote a hostile review of Killer Thing on Amazon.

The Status Civilization by Robert Sheckley
I read this many years ago and remember thinking it was a boring bunch of cliches: the tyrannical Earth government sends a guy to a prison planet where he fights a robot in the arena and then leads the resistance, or something.  Joachim Boaz at sfruminations read it years after I did and thought it a brilliant satire.  What can I say?  Maybe I'm dense.

Spartan Planet by A. Bertram Chandler
This is one of the many books chronicling the career of space navy officer John Grimes.  I've read a bunch of these, totally out of order, and liked most of them.  As I recall, this is the one in which Grimes comes upon a planet where all the women are hidden in a secret lab, and an entire civilization has developed consisting solely of men who, not even knowing women exist, turn to homosexual behavior for love and sexual satisfaction.  Grimes's ship includes female crew members, and the whole society undergoes a revolution when they show up.  This would be a good book to read if you were writing a dissertation about attitudes towards gays in SF.   

*******

Five out of 19 doesn't sound like a lot, but the page says if you ordered five or more of the listed books from Dell then shipping was free, so I am considering five to be a passing grade.  And until I hear differently, I am considering myself king of the science fiction mountain for having read five of the books from this list - feel free to report how many of these books you have read in the comments, especially if you have read six or more and are in a position to dethrone me, or think I'm out of my mind and some of these books really are great.