1979 stories by S. P. Somtow, Orson Scott Card, Richard Wilson & Richard Cowper

Cover of the hardcover edition

Let's read four more stories from Donald Wollheim's 1980 Annual World's Best SF.  Today let's look at stories by people with whom I am not very familiar.

"The Thirteenth Utopia" by S. P. Somtow (as by Somtow Suchartikul)

Some of us barely have the energy and dexterity to roll out of bed every morning and make the espresso for the wife without burning down the house.  And then you have those heroes who are fluent in multiple languages, compose symphonies and ballets and operas, are intimately familiar with the major American poets, and publish dozens of novels and scores of short stories.  S. P. Somtow (who published much of his fiction under the name Somtow Suchartikul) is just such a hero.  "The Thirteenth Utopia," one of his earliest published stories, is the first in a long series of stories known as the "Inquestor" series, and first appeared in Analog.  I have never read any of this dynamo's work before; let's see what's up with him.

(Earlier this year Joachim Boaz gave a middling review to Somtow's award-winning first novel, Starship and Haiku.)

Unfortunately, "Thirteenth Utopia" fits into two categories of stories which make me groan: the "guy visits hippy utopia and goes native" story, and the "we humans are violent and would be better off if we were conquered by aliens" story.  I've had to wade through a lot of these sorts of stories in my career as an SF fan, and I try to avoid them, but sometimes they ambush me.  These stories are just as much silly wish fulfilment fantasies as all those stories in which a guy fights monsters and/or in wars and marries a princess (John Carter) or beds lots of women (Conan.)  But while those Burroughs or Howard stories offer excitement, adventure, tension, horror, and an allegory of life as a struggle in which the good person (John Carter) or selfish ubermensch (Conan) can achieve lofty goals, perhaps improving the world or at least enjoying himself, most of these hippy utopia stories and "please conquer us, E.T." stories simply offer tedious lectures and bitter denunciations of the human race from an author who considers himself better than the common run of humanity.  If I need to offer a list of examples, consider these from just off the top of my head: Theodore Sturgeon's Cosmic Rape and "The Skills of Xanadu;" 75% of the Chad Oliver stories I have read, Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, Robert Crane's Hero's Walk, J. Hunter Holly's The Green Planet, and the movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.  You can probably think of more; hell, I have probably written about more on this blog and since forgotten them.  

"Thirteenth Utopia" is set in a universe in which there are many human-inhabited planets, most part of a sort of empire that is constantly embroiled in wars. The story's protagonist is an Inquestor whose job is to go to planets that are disconnected from the empire and are rumored to be utopias. He has already been to a dozen utopias, discovered their fatal flaws, and acted to overthrow their utopian regimes and integrate the planets into the space empire so their human and material resources can be used in all those wars.

His thirteenth target is Shtoma.  Here, everybody lives in harmony with nature, is in touch with their feelings, and has a lot of promiscuous sex.  There is no mental illness, crime, or war.   All the earlier utopias the Inquestor encountered had a rottenness at their core, their surface happiness based on a foundation of atrocious exploitation or murderous totalitarianism, but on Shtoma no flaw is to be found. There must be a flaw, the Inquestor knows, because man is a fallen creature, is himself fundamentally flawed. Then the Inquestor learns the truth--this planet's population has lost (the bad?) part of its humanity because the system's sun is alive and radiates into the people its "love," "cleansing" them.  As usually happens in these utopian stories the visitor goes native, and the Inquestor does not return from whence he came but joins the people of Shtoma in their happiness.

Why Wollheim thought this one of the best SF stories of 1979 is beyond me.  There are no new ideas and the style is unremarkable.  Is there any chance Somtow, in a subtle way that my sensors failed to detect, is attacking the tired and boring subgenres of which this story is an example?  (After all, the Inquestor is a man of passion and deep feelings who has lived a life of service to a cause and of adventure, while the people of Shtoma seem pretty frivolous and shallow.  Even so, gotta give this one the thumbs down.  

"Unaccompanied Sonata" by Orson Scott Card

Orson Scott Card is famous and important, what with that Ender's Game which everybody talks about all the time.  I've never read Ender's Game because I feel like I already know the plot and the surprise ending just from exposure to pop culture. Years ago I did read a short story by Card, a horror story called "Eumenides in the Fourth-Floor Lavatory," which I thought was effective, but I never went back to read any more of Card's work.  Well, here is my chance to further investigate Card's body of work.

"Unaccompanied Sonata" first appeared in Omni, and I was surprised at how good it is; it probably is one of the best stories of 1979!

Christian Haroldsen is a genius born into a static, technocratic, totalitarian world of the near future.  The government gives every child a battery of tests and can determine with almost perfect accuracy what job a person is best suited for and will make him most happy; each person is trained for and assigned this dream job, and everybody in the world is happy!  Haroldsen is found to be a musical prodigy and is groomed for membership in the tiny isolated elite of creative people known as the Makers.

One of the laws Haroldsen must follow is that he listen to no other music, only his own; his only influences are to be natural sounds, the wind in the trees and the calls of birds and such.  When he breaks this rule around age thirty he is punished, assigned the job of delivery truck driver and forbidden to ever make music again.  When he does make music (on an ancient piano in a bar) he is again punished, this time severely (his fingers and thumbs are severed with a laser beam!), and assigned to work on a road construction crew.  When Haroldsen makes music yet again, this time singing, he receives the ultimate punishment--he becomes a government agent, a Watcher, tasked with enforcing all these terrible laws against the Makers!

"Unaccompanied Sonata" is well-written and even moving, and brings up several uncomfortable questions about art and our lives.  To what extent should art be original, and to what extent do we accept derivative work as successful art?  Does (high) art really make us happy, or does it challenge us in ways that are disturbing and can actually make us less happy?  If a planned economy could be made to work and a totalitarian government put in the hands of people who are not corrupt or vindictive, would we all be happier with far less freedom than some of us today consider absolutely essential?  I am always against censorship, planned economies, technocracy and limits to individual freedom, but Card (in this story, at least) questions my values in a way that is more intriguing, and less boneheaded or insulting, than most suggestions that we need more government and less freedom.

Powerful and disturbing; strongly recommended!

"The Story Writer" by Richard Wilson

I've never read anything by Wilson, but isfdb lists three novels and about one hundred short stories published stories by him, ranging from 1938 to 1988.  Looking at the covers of his novels, I am lead to suspect Wilson is one of those guys who writes wacky stories full of silly jokes and inflicts broad satires of politicians on his readers. I try to avoid this sort of thing, but as I have suggested, sometimes my spider sense fails me and I get ambushed.  Well, this blog post is about exploring new territory, so let's get on with it!

"Story Writer," which first appeared in Destinies, a sort of periodical in book form edited by Jim Baen, appears to be one of Wilson's most famous short stories: it earned Wilson a Nebula nomination and is the title story of the 2011 collection of Wilson stories put out by Ramble House, a publisher all classic genre lit fans should keep an eye on.

"The Story Writer" is a sappy, sentimental, self-indulgent and pandering tale of 42 pages about a pulp writer who made enough money churning out western and detective stories and then TV scripts to retire in his fifties, who then starts hanging out at flea markets, banging out stories on the fly on an old typewriter for customers. I can see why "The Story Writer" would appeal to Nebula voters, what with the way it romanticizes writers and name drops so many old pulp writers and genre characters.  (The Nebulas, of course, are chosen by professional writers.)  The story is also full of details about what it is like to hang around flea markets and antique stores.  As followers of my Twitter feed know, the wife and I spend a fair amount of our free time at flea markets and antique stores, so I guess I am the target audience of this story in more ways than one, but somehow this stuff left me cold--I don't read SF to see my own boring life reproduced.

Anyway, a mysterious man comes to the flea market and the protagonist writes a story about how the mystery man is one of an alien race hiding on Earth, sought by the government, while the writer himself is the hero foretold in the aliens' prophecy.  He goes to another dimension, and then to Washington, D. C., to hash out a modus vivendi between the humans and the aliens.  So we have a weak story serving as a frame for a feeble story.

The plot is absurd, banal and tired, and the style isn't any good either, long-winded and boring, with long lists of items and of people and of song titles that are supposed to make you nod knowingly when you recognize them, a monotonous chain of metaphors when one metaphor would suffice, and plenty of superfluous prattle about the protagonist filling his pipe or drinking root beer or whatever.  And then there is the poetry....

Bad!

No, no, please, no....

"Out There Where the Big Ships Go" by Richard Cowper

As Joseph Banks and William Bligh could tell you, sometimes you explore new territory and find fascinating new specimens, and sometimes you explore new territory and your friends get eaten by cannibals.  But we can't let these setbacks discourage us from our odyssey of literary exploration; our motto must be "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield," even  if "the world, which seems/To lie before us like a land of dreams/So various, so beautiful, so new,/Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,/Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain," and your foreign minister cares so little for transparency and national security that she lost or stole thousands of official communications and half of the twenty electronic devices full of confidential info she used.

Richard Cowper seems to have a pretty good reputation among the internet SF community (check out Joachim Boaz's posts and links here and tarbandu's review of a Cowper novel here) so maybe this story will salve the wounds I suffered at the hands of Richard Wilson.

"Out There Where the Big Ships Go" takes place in a post-Space Age future; during the lifetime of many of the characters the last of Earth's spaceships returned to Earth, never to leave again.  Because of a lack of fossil fuels (I guess, or maybe some other reason), international commerce is conducted via high-tech sailing ships.  Our main character is Roger, a 12-year old boy staying at a Caribbean resort with his mother (this whole set up, the story's tone, and various small details, like a maternal kiss, reminded me of Proust;could Cowper be consciously emulating In Search of Lost Time?)  Roger meets a beautiful woman, and the captain of that last space ship, a man of great wisdom, and in the second half of the story we readers learn about that last voyage and how it changed the world.  You see, the crew of that last voyage encountered peaceful and immortal aliens who play an elaborate skill-based board game, somewhat like go. When the game was introduced to the Earth, mankind became devoted to the game and imbued with its zen-like wisdom, ending wars and poverty.  A little sappy and utopian, maybe, but Cowper's style and delivery sell the story.

Charmingly written, this is a pleasant, entertaining piece.  Quite good.

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So we've got two winners here, from Card and Cowper, a below average story from Somtow, and a story by Wilson that is so poor I'm guessing Baen and Wollheim published it mainly to honor an old hand who started in the genre fiction racket way back when (Wollheim in his intro notes Wilson was one of the Futurians) and devoted his life to it.  Looking back at them, I see three of the four stories are about ways of creating a happy human society, and question whether happiness should even be mankind's primary goal.

In our next episode, more science fiction short stories selected by a celebrated editor--these will be from the 1960s.

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?