2015 stories by Gene Wolfe, Cecilia Holland and Barry Malzberg

In 2015 Baen Books published Onward, Drake!, a tribute to David Drake of Hammer's Slammers fame edited by Mark L. Van Name.  Among the twenty all-new tales and essays in the volume are stories by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and Barry N. Malzberg, as well as one by Cecelia Holland, whose novel Floating Worlds I recently picked up.  Always interested in Wolfe and Malzberg's work, and curious to get a taste of what Holland is all about, I obtained a hardcover copy of Onward, Drake! via interlibrary loan to read those three stories.

(Nota bene: You can actually read Wolfe's "Incubator" and Holland's "SUM" for free at the Baen website.)

"Incubator" by Gene Wolfe

Each story in this book has an afterword in which the author talks about his relationship with David Drake.  Wolfe points out that he, Drake, and Joe Haldeman are perhaps the only speculative fiction writers to have been under enemy fire in wartime.  Wolfe also says, that, while SF strives to present worlds that are more or less plausible, that "The future will not be plausible.  It never is.  Thus, the story you have just read."

"Incubator," less than four pages long, is directly and indirectly about plausibility, about to what extent we can believe what we read and hear and see.  Set in a future in which people have apparently transcended traditional biological conventions (there are androids, "shemales" and "woe men" and some of the characters seem to have had three biological parents), all the characters express doubts about specific knowledge, and one dismisses even the possibility of knowledge.  "No one can see reality.  The mind processes a pattern of light reported by the optic nerves.  The mind interprets that."

As for plot, I guess a person goes to a remote building in response to a summons; at this place she is shown a valuable , "The Egg," which is said to contain "all the old humankind."  The sight of it causes her to flee.  In keeping with the story's theme, it is difficult to tell precisely what is going on.  (It is hinted that this egg is cracking and whatever is inside it will soon be unleashed...maybe 100% all natural men and women who will threaten this future of androids and shemales?)

Deliberately inscrutable, I guess a demonstration of the adage "the past is another country" as well as a discussion of the possibility of true knowledge.

"SUM" by Cecilia Holland

Holland's story is almost seven pages long and, to my surprise, touches on some of the same epistemological issues that Wolfe addressed in his story--it starts with two characters arguing over the possibility that their lives may just be illusions or hallucinations, that instead of being soldiers in the Dutch army searching for Spanish spies for Prince Maurice, they might simply be dead or insane.

The narrator, an officer in charge of five men, enters a house to hunt for the Spanish "cloaked investigators" but triggers an explosive booby trap and ends up buried alive under the wreckage of the house.  Most of the text concerns his efforts to dig himself out of the wreckage.  Holland includes references to Ovid and Nicole Oresme (Drake is a Latinist and an Ovid aficionado) and clues in the text pile up until even an uneducated goofball like myself can figure out by the end that the narrator is in fact Rene Descrates, the famed philosopher.

This is a competent thriller type of story; the literary and philosophical content providing an additional layer of interest and fun.

"Swimming from Joe" by Barry Malzberg

I've never seen Spalding Grey's Swimming to Cambodia or the film The Killing Fields so I am probably missing elements of Malzberg's nine-chapter story here.  (Those nine chapters take up only three pages, so I can't be missing too much, I guess.)

The protagonist of this story is a guy named Hammer who was serving with the U.S. military in Korea in 1954 when Marilyn Monroe visited the American troops there and became obsessed with the actress.  Today, in 1969, he is serving in Vietnam and imagines he sees a huge balloon of Monroe floating over the "killing fields."  Malzberg compares Monroe, who was "killed by Hollywood," to Hammer's comrades ("the Slammers") killed by "the War."  (Malzberg loves the metaphorical construction in which institutions or abstract entities kill people--in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963" he says that "the death certificates of all three [Clifton, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth] should have listed science fiction under cause of death.")  More interestingly, Malzberg/Hammer suggest that Monroe's death made her immortal, and that the memory of her is what is keeping Hammer alive "in country."

In the afterword to "Swimming from Joe" Malzberg tells the interesting story of how he first came into contact with Drake--Drake wanted to send a fan letter to Raymond E. Banks and Malzberg's former employers at the Scott Meredith Agency directed Drake to Malzberg.  The two writers became friends--Malzberg says "He may be the closest friend I have."  Malzberg also reminds us that he served in the Army briefly stateside, and plugs "Final War," one of his most famous stories.

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Of these three stories the Holland is the most conventional and the most entertaining--it has a plot you can follow, dramatic tension and jokes, and a puzzle for you to figure out, the kind of stuff most people who read fiction are looking for.  "SUM" has made me think Floating Worlds will be a good read.  The Wolfe and Malzberg stories are sort of what we expect from those less conventional writers, though I think "Incubator" is less satisfying than most Wolfe stories, while "Swimming from Joe" is sort of average for Malzberg.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be returning to the mid-20th century for them.

The Wizard Knight by Gene Wolfe

"A knight is a man who lives honorably and dies honorably, because he cares more for his honor than for his life."

In 2001 Gene Wolfe wrote an essay for Karen Haber's Meditations on Middle-Earth entitled "The Best Introduction to the Mountains."  Haber rejected the piece, but it appeared in Interzone, and Andy Robertson purchased the right to reproduce it on his website, where I read it years ago.  It looks like Robertson's website has gone kaput, but you can access an archived version of the page in question at the link above--that's how I reread the essay earlier this month.  John C. Wright, I see today, reproduced "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" on his website in 2015, introducing it as the second best essay on Tolkien he has ever read and explaining the essay's title.

"The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is very entertaining and interesting, and I recommend it to all fans of J. R. R. Tolkien and/or Gene Wolfe.  Wolfe talks about the pulp magazines and genre paperbacks he loved as a kid, the SF like Thrilling Wonder Stories and the mysteries like Curtains for the Copper by Thomas Polsky.  Wolfe speaks with reverence of his hardcover copies of the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings, which he mail ordered from The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in the 1950s in response to a positive review in that magazine of Tolkien's work by Anthony Boucher.  Wolfe reproduces the letter he received from Tolkien about the etymology of "orc" and "warg," and the inscription he added to each of his three volumes, long quotes from Thoreau, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Howard--Wolfe flaunts his independent thinking by telling us he thinks the Howard quote the best.

If this essay is so fascinating, why did Karen Haber reject it?  I don't know, but maybe the fact that Wolfe uses the essay to denounce politicians and government workers, businesspeople and essentially the entire modern world and the very idea of progress, working from moral and even scientific grounds, played a role in her decision.  The thesis of "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" is that the society of the medievals, in some ways at least, was superior to that of us moderns, that the people of "Christianized barbarian Europe" had a strong sense of "defined duties and freedoms" that bound them together, gave them a sort of universally acknowledged "code of conduct," something of inestimable value that we today, in our world where people are power-hungry, selfish and greedy, lack, and that Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is an important contribution to the revival of such a society, a society in which people can stand "shoulder-to-shoulder," a society of "freedom, love of neighbor and personal responsibility." 

Wolfe tells us in "The Best Introduction to the Mountains" that Tolkien has been a big influence on his work, and specifically points to a novel he was then working on, The Wizard Knight, suggesting that novel (published in 2004) owes more to Tolkien than his other work.  So, as I reread The Wizard Knight over the past two weeks, I had this essay of Wolfe's in mind, and kept my eyes open for signs of Tolkien's influence on Wolfe and of Wolfe's beliefs about what was right about medieval society and wrong about modern society.

The Wizard Knight is a bit on the long side, over 1000 pages (though I guess the print is sort of big), and was originally published in two volumes, The Knight and The Wizard.  I received the paperback editions of the two books from my brother as a Christmas gift in 2006, and I read them in 2007.  I often thought of the novel over the succeeding years, certain scenes and ideas having lodged in my scattered and fickle mind, but only reread it this year, 15 years after it was first published, the year of Wolfe's death.

The Wizard Knight is a first person narrative, a very long letter written by a man who, as a teenager, somehow found himself in a world of knights, dragons and fairies; the letter is to his brother Ben back in 20th (or I guess early 21st) century America, and describes his career in this swordswinging feudal world, his many interactions with queens, princesses, kings, witches, giants, et al.  Written in the voice of a regular guy, practically a kid, the text of The Wizard Knight is relatively simple and easy to read, but Wolfe is famous for employing unreliable narrators and presenting story elements obliquely, and we readers have to be on the look out for clues in every paragraph.  The narrator starts his fantasy world life when he wakes up in a seaside cave in which a woman is spinning a thread; she calls herself "Parka," and while this has no significance to the narrator, we readers of course recognize one of the Fates.

(Though parcae is Latin, The Wizard Knight owes more to Norse mythology and Arthurian legend than classical literature; I'm actually not that familiar with Norse myth and the stories of King Arthur, so while I caught obvious things like Valkyries and Jotun, I no doubt missed many allusions and references to those literatures.  There is also plenty of Christian symbolism; like Severian in Wolfe's immortal masterpiece The Book of the New Sun, the narrator of The Wizard Knight is a Christ-like figure.  While I am on the topic of references, there is an obvious allusion to Poul Anderson, and I have to wonder how many other, perhaps more subtle, references to SF writers I missed.)

Our protagonist leaves the cave and travels around a bit, meeting people and learning about his new environment.  Many of these people, like a knight, Sir Ravd, who explains to him what makes a man a knight, and a crippled hermit, Bold Berthold, who believes that the narrator is his long lost brother returned, act as mentors, providing explanations of what constitutes good conduct and serving as models of good behavior as well as offering practical knowledge.  The narrator, whom Parka called Sir Able of the High Heart, quickly starts acting like a knight, helping those in distress and fighting scoundrels and bossing around people who fall in between those categories.  This risky behavior is tenable because early on the narrator meets an Aelf Queen, Disiri, and she, seemingly in order to make of him a satisfying sex partner, transforms our hero into a huge muscleman.  Inside, the protagonist is still a boy, and Wolfe makes it abundantly clear that this is an allegory of how many adult men feel when faced with the responsibilities and challenges of adult life, that they are really just boys acting out the role of a man.

"You see our peasants plowing and sowing, and their women spinning and so forth, hard work that lasts from the rising of the sun until its setting in may cases.  But you need to understand that they have their own prides and their own pleasures.  Speak kindly to them, protect them, and deal fairly with them and they will never turn against you." 

In that 2001 essay praising Tolkien, Wolfe envisages a superior future society in which people of different social classes stand shoulder to shoulder, and he cites the example of Frodo and Sam from The Lord of the Rings as a model for such relationships.  The Wizard Knight again and again provides examples of the kinds of relationships one would find in such an ideal society; the sympathetic characters exhibit, with enthusiasm, loyalty and rock solid allegiance across the boundaries of social class, species and worlds of origin, accept without question established hierarchies, the need for obedience to authority, and recognize the mutual responsibilities between lords and vassals.  There are no liberals or members of the bourgeoisie or revolutionary socialists in this novel to make a case for equality before the law or individualism or republicanism or democracy or the redistribution of wealth or anything like that, and those characters who buck the system or fail to live up to their roles within it either reform or suffer grim fates.

After Able leaves Sir Ravd, Bold Berthold and Disiri behind (though they are never far from his thoughts) he travels widely throughout the kingdom of Celidon* on foot, on horseback and via ship, meeting a multitude of people and intelligent creatures, and we witness him repeatedly pledging fealty to royals and barons and kneeling and making sacrifices to gods.  In turn, individuals are always recognizing Able's astounding ability and high destiny and volunteering to be his slaves, servants or followers--these people take all kinds of risks and make all kinds of sacrifices to help and protect Able, and Able demonstrates that he deserves their allegiance and assistance by taking all manner of risks and making all sorts of sacrifices to help and protect his followers and subordinates.

*Tolkien (though he was not the first to do so) famously pointed out that "cellar door" was an English phrase of particular beauty.

One of the challenges faced by writers of sword-fighting adventure tales in which a single guy again and again triumphs in the face of overwhelming odds is making that guy's victories over dozens of foes and escapes from captivity believable to the reader.  Edgar Rice Burroughs, for example, renders John Carter's endless string of victories over huge monsters and armies of swordsmen somewhat more digestible by presenting his hero as an immortal who has been sword fighting for centuries and is thus the most experienced swordsman in the solar system, and by placing him on Mars, where his Earth muscles make him the strongest man on the red planet.  Michael Moorcock's Elric has a magic sword and the help of various supernatural entities, and Howard's Conan has his barbarian upbringing, which makes him superior to any civilized man.

Wolfe here in The Wizard Knight makes Able's successes believable by providing him with an array of magical weapons and a veritable army of supernatural supporters.  He has a bow made from the wood of a magical tree, strung with a thread given him by Parka, so that Able is the greatest archer in the world.  (In one of the novel's many clever and somewhat disturbing bits, the string pulses with the life stories of many individuals, and these stories invade Sir Able's dreams, so that as he sleeps he lives out the lives of many different men and women.)  As the long novel progresses Able is joined by a huge fighting dog from a higher plane of existence (it can grow as big as a horse if roused), a self-important talking black cat (the familiar of a witch who is now dead but not silenced), two sexy vampire-like Aelfmaidens who can get in and get out of just about any place unobserved, making them ideal scouts, spies and thieves, and a super strong ogre whose scales can take on the color of his surroundings, making him an ideal assassin.  (This list of magic weapons and otherworldly comrades is representative, not exhaustive, and I haven't enumerated Able's multitudinous mortal comrades.)

Wolfe loves detective stories, and The Wizard Knight is full of scenes in which Sir Able and we readers are presented a bunch of clues and are expected to figure out who did what and why or the true identity and motives of one of many slippery shape-shifting characters--this includes a murder mystery that features one of those scenes in which people look at the victim's wound and determine whether the murderer was right- or left-handed.

A lot of time is spent on puzzling out the mythology and cosmology of the seven-layered universe Wolfe has devised--how one travels between these worlds, their internal politics and their relations with their adjacent worlds.  In brief, the middle level, Mythgarthr, the home of the humans of Celidon, the evil giants of the icy north (Jotunland) and the evil cannibalistic Osterlings of the east (Osterland), is the most stable level.  Directly above Mythgarthr is Skai, home of gods like the Valfather, tricky Lothur and chivalrous Thunor, and directly below it Aelfrice, home of elves, and below that Muspel, realm of dragons and demons.  Each world was constructed from the refuse left over from the creation of the realm above it, and so each realm is more debased and evil than the one above it.  Able journeys to several of these realms over the course of his adventures, meeting their prominent personalities and trying to figure out the various relationships and identities of these beings as they try to help, manipulate, or fight him.  Ideally, those living in one realm worship the inhabitants of the realm above them, and provide good role models for those below, and one of the many mysteries of the novel, and one of the problems Able has to work to resolve, is the perverse practice of some humans of worshiping Aelfs and of some Aelfs of worshiping dragons.  (The setting of examples and provision of good role models is a major theme of The Wizard Knight; as I recall, this was also a theme of Wolfe's 1999-2001 trilogy The Book of the Short Sun, which featured vampiric space aliens who misbehave in part because of the malign influence upon them of all-too-fallible humanity.)  Complicating matters is the fact that time moves at different speeds in each realm; after Able goes to Skai at the end of The Knight he spends twenty years up there, but when he gets back to Mythgarthr at the start of The Wizard, only a few days have passed for his companions.

"Brega, you've taken an oath, the most solemn oath a woman can take.  You've acknowledged Duke Marder as your liege, and sworn to obey him in all things.  If you break that oath, Hel will condemn your spirit to Muspel, the Circle of Fire.  The sacrifices you've offered the Aelf can't save you." 

The biggest mystery, perhaps, is who the hell Able really is, this man who travels between the seven realms, has been somehow conflated with an American boy, and, due to Aelf magic and Skai magic, has lost many of his memories.  At the same time that Able is like a big kid who is driven by his passions (he tells us he does everything in hopes of being with Disiri again) he is also considered a savior by everybody he meets--everywhere he goes potentates want him to protect their thrones or destroy their enemies; Able is one of the most important people in the history of this universe, and, like Gandalf (and Jesus Christ!) he is a man who, apparently dies but then returns to make the world a better place.
 
In the final third of The Knight, Sir Able and his motley party of human and supernatural companions join up with a large caravan travelling north to Jotunland on a diplomatic mission from the king of Celidon.  The armies of the Caans and Wazirs of Osterland are putting pressure on Celidon from the east, and the king has sent a baron, Lord Beel, to negotiate with the belligerent giants of the frozen north.  The giants of Jotunland are always raiding the human kingdom for slaves; male slaves are blinded and female slaves raped, and such rape is so common that there is a whole population of half-breeds living in the mountainous marches between Celidon and Jotunland, dangerous marauders rejected by the heartless giant society.  (The 13-foot tall giants call these 9-foot tall halfbreeds "The Mice.")  In order to cement a peace deal with the giants that will permit Celidon to focus its military might on the Osterling cannibals, Beel is to present to the king of the giants, Gilling, a bunch of valuable presents, including a gold encrusted helmet and Beel's own beautiful daughter, Idnn.  Idnn wretchedly dreams of being rescued from the horrible fate of becoming the queen of the giants by Able or some other knight, presenting Able, like Beel, a loyal servant of the king committed to the established rules of Celidon, a terrible moral dilemma.

"You say you want to be my follower.  I'll be loyal to you as long as you're loyal to me, but no longer."

In the last hundred or so pages of The Knight, Able becomes a leader of the caravan as it faces disaster, and, up in Jotunland, has a heartbreaking reunion with Bold Berthold, now a slave of the giants.  In the book's climax, Able finds in a subterranean temple the magic sword promised him by Disiri and summons an army of phantom knights; with this army he engages in battle against a titanic dragon and the army of Aelfs who worship the wyrm; victory achieved against the demonic serpent, Able is carried aloft to Skai by Valkyries.

The Knight is a big success; it never feels long, the text is smooth and the plot keeps you turning the pages.  The funny parts are actually funny, and the chilling parts (like the witch scene) are actually chilling, and the sad parts are actually sad.

The Wizard is not quite as entertaining as the first volume.  The Knight feels fresh and fast-paced as we follow Sir Able from one episode to another, exploring new locations and encountering new characters at a pretty rapid clip, the story's tone shifting as Able travels geographically and grows in power and experience; we get many funny, horrible, sad, and triumphant episodes that are too brief to wear out their welcome.  The first half of The Wizard, however, is sort of mired in one location, Jotunland, and with the many characters we met in The Knight, plus some new ones, all gathered there, the narrative gets a little unwieldy.  Sir Able has already achieved his apotheosis, so that sense of growth and progress is not there, and the wisdom-dispensing adult Able isn't as fun or charming as naive-child-in-a-man's-body Able.  We spend less time with Sir Able and a lot more time with his friends and servants as they pursue objectives in one part of Jotunland while Able is in another.  (The text is still technically in the first person, still part of the narrator's long letter to his brother Ben in the modern USA, but much of the conversation and fighting Able relates is based on things people told him and feels like a third-person narrative.)

This long Jotunland section does serve Wolfe's thematic purposes.  Jotunland is a sort of dystopia, a depiction of what a society totally bereft of loyalty and cross-class solidarity and respect for authority looks like--there are constant rebellions, for example, and no family life--the men and women have no love for each other, so the female giants actually live in a separate country!  Overcoming her fear, Idnn does her duty to Celidon and to her monstrous husband, embracing the role of queen of the giants.  Much of the text which deals with Able's companions and subordinates is meant, I believe, to show the positive influence of Able's good example on them--Wolfe's human characters are not static, but grow and change over the course of the long novel, and, reflecting Wolfe's purposes with this book and/or a sort of Christian optimism, almost all the human characters evolve into better people as the novel progresses.  While it helps Wolfe achieve his goals, this section is just not as fun and exciting as the other 700 or so pages of the long novel.

The second half of The Wizard is quite a bit more satisfying than the first half.  Many of those mysteries to which I alluded earlier (who is Able and what is his appointed role in the universe? who murdered the King of the Giants? what are the backstories and motives of the elves of Aelfrice and the demons/dragons of Muspel?) are explained and the subplots they represent resolved.  The cast, joining forces with the Aelfs, the half-human Mice and the female giants, fight their way out of Jotunland and back to Celidon.  Able, driven by a destiny he doesn't himself understand, goes to the capital of Celidon, to the King's court, where he competes in tourneys and gets mixed up in the dangerous intrigues boiling between the corrupt and sadistic king, the king's wife, and the king's sister, a sinister necromancer.  All the characters and interactions in the capital are compelling, and, maybe because Able isn't surrounded by a dozen other people, things move more quickly and more smoothly.

Able gets tossed in the dungeon, escapes to Aelfrice--where time moves more slowly--and when he returns to Mythgarthr he finds that the Osterlings have taken over most of Celidon and sacked the capital!  Able leads the human counterattack against the monstrous armies of the Caans and we get a happy ending for most of the characters (Able, for example, heals blind and infirm Berthold, and Berthold, we are told, will go on to become a prominent knight who will achieve revenge on the giants who crippled him.)

The Wizard Knight is the kind of book that you can read casually, enjoying all the descriptions of weapons and monsters and fighting, all the jokes and horror scenes, but it is also a dense and carefully constructed work with allusions and details and foreshadowing that reward the attentive reader, and the reader willing to go back and reread passages or entire chapters, because sentences that may have barely registered initially set up a satisfying pay off hundreds of pages later, and on a second reading overflow with layers of meaning and emotion.  Strongly recommended.

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. 

**********

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.

The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs

My Americanism was very strong in me--stronger, perhaps, because of the century old effort of our oppressors to crush it and because always we must suppress any outward evidence of it.  They called us Yanks in contempt; but the appellation was our pride.

Let's take a break from our exhaustive exploration of 1970's Orbit 8 to read the first half of the water damaged copy of 1974's Ace edition of The Moon Men by Edgar Rice Burroughs that my brother acquired at some point.  This volume, with its great Frank Frazetta cover and cool Roy Krenkel title page, includes both The Moon Men, first published in serial form in Argosy in early 1925, and The Red Hawk, which was serialized in the same magazine in late 1925.  We'll read The Moon Men today and handle The Red Hawk in the near future.

Like The Moon Maid, The Moon Men begins with a brief frame story set in the late 1960s in which the narrator talks to a man, "Julian," who can remember his past incarnations, including "past" incarnations that "took place" in the future!  One of the first things Julian of 1969 tells the narrator is something I have been wondering about since I finished The Moon Maid--what happened to evil genius Orthis, who took a lead role in designing Earth's first interplanetary ship and then sabotaged it on its first flight?  You'll remember that in the 2030s Orthis became leader of the revolutionary totalitarian Kalkars, and built high tech weapons which enabled the Kalkars to destroy the last lunar city to resist Kalkar rule, monarchical Laythe.

The Julian living in 1969 tells us in Chapter I of the The Moon Men that in the 2040s Orthis, having become ruler of the moon, designed and built a space fleet and in the year 2050 that space fleet, manned by 100,000 Kalkars and 1,000 Va-gas, conquered the Earth!  Earth, you see, was ripe for the picking because the world government, based in London and Washington, had slashed its military budget and enacted severe gun control and sword control policies:

It was a criminal offense to possess firearms.  Even edged weapons with blades over six inches were barred by law.    

Both Orthis and Julian 5th, hero of The Moon Maid, died in the last battle of this war of conquest when their flying warships met in battle, leaving Nah-ee-lah, princess of fallen Laythe and heroine of The Moon Maid, a widow.  These Moon books of Burroughs's are a catalog of tragedies!  Julian 5th's death was in vain, doing nothing to stop the conquest of mother Earth by the evil Kalkars, though without Orthis to lead them the Kalkars have no ability to build or maintain modern technology.

I'm guessing these are Juana, Julian 9th and
General Or-tis

The Moon Maid was in part an allegorical retelling of the Bolshevik Revolution, depicting the high tragedy of evil revolutionaries who bamboozle the public and overthrow a benevolent monarchy.  Well, The Moon Men pursues the next stage of this theme, presenting us with an allegorical description of sordid and humiliating life under communism, of a world of misery presided over by cruel, corrupt and incompetent brutes who justify their misrule with hypocritical sloganeering about brotherhood and community!  (Wikipedia suggests that The Moon Men was begun in 1919 as a story about life in Russia under the Communist Party dictatorship and that Burroughs developed that material into an interplanetary adventure story at the behest of his publishers.)

From Chapter II to the final chapter of The Moon Men, Chapter XI, the novel is narrated by Julian 9th, born in Chicago in 2100, and he paints a bleak picture of twenty-second century life!  Earth's lunar rulers forbid reading and writing among Earthlings; religion, even the very mention of God, is verboten, and marriage is illegal.  The skyscrapers, locomotives, and other infrastructure of modern life have fallen into ruin due to lack of maintenance--technological knowledge has degraded to a medieval level, and the Kalkars can't even manufacture more cartridges for their rifles, and so must maintain strict fire discipline!  Economic conditions are morbid; there is no money, so Earth people trade by barter and all commerce must take place in public under the eye of the tax collector, who seizes an arbitrary portion of each transaction.  As for social life, Earthwomen hide in their hovels rather than run the risk of being expropriated by lustful Kalkar officials.  Some Earthling mothers euthanize their female babies so that they will not have to suffer such a dreadful fate, and there are plenty of Lucrece-style suicides among Earth females.

The plot:  When Julian 9th is twenty years old the lazy and inefficient Lunarian officer who has been commanding the soldiers of the Chicago sector is replaced by a mixed race (part Lunarian Kalkar, part Earthman) go-getter, a real hands-on tyrant, General Or-tis, a descendant of the evil scientist Orthis!  Or-tis lays eyes on Juana, the beautiful girl Julian just recently fell in love with after rescuing her from feral dogs, and bends the apparatus of the state to the task of stealing her from our hero.  A parallel plot concerns a traitorous Earthman, a spy and informer; he reveals to the Kalkar authorities the clandestine religious services attended by the people of Julian's community as well as their possession of such forbidden artifacts of the good life of pre-Kalkar days as a crucifix and U. S. flags; thanks to this jerk (who is hoping the Kalkars will let him have Julian's beautiful mother) innocent people are arrested, tortured and murdered.  In the last three chapters Julian 9th launches a campaign of revenge against his community's oppressors and leads an uprising against the Chicago-area Kalkar authorities; Or-tis and the spy and various other petty tyrants are killed, but the Kalkars crush the uprising and Julian 9th himself is executed.  Juana, pregnant with Julian's child, does manage to escape--I think she is the only character with a speaking part who survives the grim and bloody tale of Earth's horrible future told by the Julian of 1969.

There are lots of SF stories that depict life in an authoritarian/totalitarian society, but The Moon Men, a relatively early example of the genre, has some interesting peculiarities.  For one thing, many of those other dystopian books are warnings about the dangers of science and high technology and depict the government exploiting all manner of electronic surveillance and communications devices and advanced psychological techniques.  (The Chinese Communist Party may well be bringing these sorts of horrors to life today and exporting them to other oppressive regimes.)  But here in The Moon Men, Burroughs presents totalitarianism as leading to severe economic and technological backsliding; rather than coolly efficient manipulators, the government tyrants in this book are indolent and stupid brutes who employ the simplest and least systematic methods.

I'm looking forward to seeing if this interaction,
depicted by Emsh here and Frazetta on later
editions, occurs in The Red Hawk--nothing
like this happens in The Moon Men! 

The Moon Men is also, for a SF novel, very patriotic and very sympathetic to religion.  American flags, apparently artifacts from World War I, are inspirational relics to opponents of the Kalkar regime, who go by the name "Yanks" and call their philosophy "Americanism."  There are plenty of SF stories that attack socialism and collectivism or advocate private property and individualism, as Burroughs does here, but casting my mind back for other SF examples of a sentimental patriotism that is specific to the United States and not just an advocacy of the market economy and representative government that transcends national boundaries, the only comparable specimen I am coming up with is in Gene Wolfe's "Viewpoint," from 2001.

Julian and his compatriots meet in secret at a concealed church for monthly ecumenical services where Catholics, Protestants and Jews are all welcome.  (Students of depictions of Jews in genre literature may find The Moon Men a worthwhile read--at the same time readers of high-brow literature might encounter expressions of skepticism and hostility to Jews in such places as T. S. Eliot's 1920 volume of verses, readers of the pulps would find in Argosy Burroughs's depiction of a sympathetic and courageous Jew, a victim of thuggish anti-Semitism and governmental tyranny who makes common cause with the Christians in his community and loses his life in the fight for that cause.)  I found Burroughs's positive view of religion here particularly interesting because I always think of Burroughs as a religious skeptic, based on his treatment of religion in the Barsoom books, in which John Carter strives to expose the diabolical conspiracy behind Mars's bogus religion.

In The Moon Men Burroughs seems to be presenting an ideal vision of America (and religion), a place where people are brave and band together across ethnic and religious boundaries to fight for individual liberty and fair play. 

The Moon Men is also recognizably a Burroughs story, and we have a protagonist in Julian 9th who, like a Tarzan or John Carter, is stronger than everybody else and fights evil people and vicious beasts with his bare hands, cracking their bones and tossing them this way and that in his efforts to defend himself, his beloved and his friends.  Unlike Lord Greystoke and the Warlord of Mars, however, Julian presides over a tragedy, his family and friends and followers, and himself, ultimately overcome by their enemies, and, with the sole exception of Juana, killed.

An atypical specimen of the Burroughs oeuvre and an interesting piece of SF history that addresses issues of politics, economics, religion and racism current in the 1920s and still current today, The Moon Men is quite engaging.  We'll see how Burroughs wraps up the Julian saga in The Red Hawk soon.

1970 stories by Liz Hufford, Robert F. Young, Robert Margoff & Andrew Offutt and Carol Carr

Let's continue our exploration of Orbit 8, the 1970 anthology of all new stories edited by Damon Knight.  I have a quite worn copy of the 1971 paperback edition published by Berkley, for which I paid 50 cents at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.

"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" by Gene Wolfe

I read this in 2015 in the Wolfe collection Storeys from the Old Hotel and really liked it.  Joachim Boaz also read it in 2015, when he read Orbit 8, and he liked it.  I read it again today (it is only six pages) and I have to say it is a great science fiction story (it speculates on how the technology and politics of the future will affect human lives) and a great horror story (it is sad and disturbing.)  It is unanimous--you should read this story.

"Tablets of Stone" by Liz Hufford

Hufford has only three credits at isfdb; this is the first.

A spaceship has to land for emergency repairs on a planet with an overpopulation problem.  Because of the overpopulation problem, sex and pregnancy on this planet are taboo.  But one of the lonely space crew members manages to win the heart of the pretty girl who is the ship's liaison at the spaceport--they fall in love and she stows away on the ship so they can be be married and live happily ever after.

In its last paragraphs this five-page tale is revealed to be a gimmicky horror story.  The woman, who looks human, never told the spaceman that the females of her planet give birth to dozens of children at once, and that they mature at a very rapid rate.  When she produces a brood of approximately fifty infants the ship's captain realizes that this additional population will overtax the life support systems of the ship and kill everybody on board.  The young lovers commit suicide and the space crew have to hunt down the fifty babies and exterminate them.

Acceptable.  It looks like "Tablets of Stone" was never reprinted anywhere.

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" by Robert F. Young

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" is a New Wavey title, and the story is written in the present tense and includes lots of odd symbols, but Young offers a strong plot and writes in an economical style and addresses themes that are more or less traditional--weird aliens, travel through space and time, and the way so many men must choose between family life and freedom.  Here Knight offers us another quite good story; like Dozois's "Horse of Air" and Wolfe's "Sonya, Crane Wesselman, and Kittee" it is readable but has an edge, offering controversial content and surprises.

Some centuries in the future mankind has colonized the galaxy and encountered huge creatures who live in space, the asteroid-like spacewhales.  These creatures can travel not only through space but through time.  Their strong exoskeletons make perfect hulls for space craft, and so hunters called Jonahs invade the whales and blow up their brains so that their internal organs can be removed and replaced with cargo holds, crew quarters, electronic equipment, etc.

The conversion of dead spacewhale corpses into space ships takes place in orbit over Altair IV.  Over the centuries the human colonists of Altair IV have evolved in such a way that the planet is now some kind of matriarchy, as the women are much longer lived and substantially more intelligent than the men.  Women on Altair IV are also very beautiful and subject to voracious sexual appetites--they take many lovers or administer drugs to a single husband so he can perform sexually again and again in a single day. 

The protagonist of the story is John Starfinder, a former Jonah who now works on converting the dead whales.  He is also one of the few men on the planet who has one of the gorgeous Altair IV women all to himself, which can be looked upon as a blessing or as a burden.  When Starfinder starts receiving psychic messages from the whale he is helping to convert into a spaceship--it is still alive because it has a second brain which was only damaged, not destroyed, its captor failed to discover it--our hero (?) has a big decision to make.  He can kill the whale and stay on Altair IV, where for the rest of his life he will be dominated by a woman who will long outlive him, or he can make a deal with the whale, healing its brain, liberating it and partnering with it in an exploration of the universe and history.  Starfinder is a history and literature buff (his interest in the liberal arts is appropriately/ironically the result of a disastrous run-in with a spacewhale early in his career) and he relishes the idea of travelling back in time to witness first hand the glory that was Rome.

I found the climax and resolution of the story surprising, even shocking, in a way that was satisfying--Young does not pull his punches, but follows his themes to their utmost conclusions.  Joachim didn't care for "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams;" maybe because its treatment of male-female relations, and its shocking climax, offended his feminist sensibilities?  Personally, I found "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" to be compelling.  Not only does Young fill it with good SF ideas, surprises, and the kind of difficult sexual relationships I always find fascinating, but includes many direct and indirect allusions to the Bible and to Moby Dick.  Thumbs up!

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," I see, is one in a series of stories about John Starfinder and his relationship with spacewhales; it would later appear under the title "The Spacewhale Graveyard" in a 1980 collection of the Starfinder stories called, appropriately enough, Starfinder.

"The Book" by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt

Offutt is a famously odd character, the subject of a great New York Times article by his son Chris; Chris Offutt has also written an entire book on his father which I have not yet read.  I have read several things by Andrew Offutt and opined about them here at the blog; in general I have found them full of problems but somehow have enjoyed them anyway.  I am not very familiar with Margroff, though I know I read one of his collaborations with Piers Anthony, The Ring, back in the 1980s.

"The Book"'s protagonist is a cave man living in a milieu that is characterized by loneliness, abuse, murder, cannibalism, and, I fear, incest--men live alone and the strong steal weaker men's wives and children and sometimes eat their own children and (it is hinted) have sex with their own children.  Men who are old or ill kill their own wives so that the wife will keep them company in the afterlife.

Our hero (?) is different than other men.  When young, he was the strongest of men and dominated all the other men in the vicinity.  More importantly, he has in his cave an artifact of ancient or alien origin in the form of a book.  The book projects ideas and even desires into his mind, guiding his actions, often in ways that contravene his inclinations.  The book seems to be trying to civilize the cave man and his race, for example, informing him of more efficient hunting methods, nudging him to get other cave people to look at the book, and convincing him to put an end to that whole "kill your wife to bring her to the next world" business.

One odd element in the story is that the high tech book seems to want people to eat each other's brains.  Probably this is Margroff and Offutt invoking those famous planarian maze experiments that seemed to suggest (erroneously, it has turned out) that some creatures can gain the memories of those animals that they eat.

I kind of like this one, because it is so crazy and you have to try to figure it out (and it is not too hard to figure out.)  As with "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," Joachim and I disagree over this one and I again wonder if maybe it is because of the story's depiction of male-female relationships--in this story women are stuck in subordinate roles and defined by their relationships with men and with children.

It looks like "The Book" has only ever appeared in Orbit 8.  Offut produced quite a few short stories, but it doesn't seem that any collections of his short fiction have ever been published.         

"Inside" by Carol Carr

Carol Carr is the wife of Terry Carr, the famous editor.  She has six fiction credits at isfdb.  "Inside" would reappear in an anthology edited by Terry Carr, as well as one edited by Robert Silverberg.

This is one of those stories that has a vague, dreamlike, hallucinatory feel, a story full of mysteries that are perhaps impossible to figure out.

A girl wakes up in a bedroom--out the windows can be seen mist, and when she opens the door she is confronted with empty blackness.  She sleeps, and wakes up to find a corridor leading from her door has been added to the house.  Every morning, for a month or so, new rooms and furniture, and eventually inhabitants--servants and people who eat in the dining room and act like they are at a restaurant--are added to the house.  The servants badger the girl but ignore her responses; the girl assiduously avoids the diners, but their conversations provide us readers clues that suggest that our nameless protagonist was an insane and/or depressed married woman who committed suicide.  Maybe she is now a ghost or in the afterlife or something like that, or maybe this is all just the fantasy or delusion of an unhappy and/or mentally ill individual, a reflection of her hopes for solitude and fears of and disappointments with her family and friends.  On the last page of the five-page tale the servants and diners disappear, and the story ends on a faint note of triumph--the girl/woman has successfully closed herself off from the world and from other people.

At first I was going to judge this one "acceptable," but while copyediting this blogpost I found myself again trying to figure "Inside" out; this is one of those stories that, the more you think about it, the better it seems, so I guess I'll call it marginally or moderately good.  Maybe it is just a psychological story of a troubled individual who rejects the world, or maybe it (also) is a feminist thing, an allegory of the lives of women who inhabit a world they didn't create and to whom nobody listens when decisions are to be made.  This allegory seems a little shaky, as in my own life experience it is wives and mothers who control how a house is furnished and decorated, but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

**********

Taken as a group, these four stories are pretty good; I certainly liked most of them more than did Joachim.  (Am I becoming a softie?)  Orbit 8 is looking like a strong anthology, and we still have six stories to go, including pieces by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty.  Fifty cents well spent!

Three 1950s "novels" by Damon Knight

Ah, Damon Knight, famed editor, critic, and short story writer, for whom the SFWA (which Knight founded in 1965) renamed their Grand Master Award some 25 years after its inauguration.  I've had mixed feelings about Knight's criticism and fiction, which means I have no idea how I am going to react when I set out to read something by him.  Today we'll be taking just such a leap into the dark not once, not twice, but three times!  Before me I hold a Berkley Medallion 1969 paperback edition of Three Novels, a collection which first came out in hardcover in 1967.  I recently received this volume, with its quite effective Richard Powers cover, from internet science fiction gadfly extraordinaire Joachim Boaz, one of something like 100 SF books he sent me recently.  This copy, which a stamp on the inside cover is telling me somebody, maybe Mr. Boaz himself, maybe Chip or Joanna Gaines, maybe David Koresh--hey, you never know!-- purchased at "Book Rack" in a shopping mall in Waco, Texas for 97 cents, has only 184 pages of text, so maybe the three included works, all from the 1950s, should be classified as "novellas" or "novelettes" instead of novels, but, hey, who's counting?  I will be reading the "novels" in the order in which they appear in this book, which is not the order in which they were published.

Rule Golden (1954)

This is a gimmicky story that applies to the personal level the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction deterrence, something we talked about a lot in my history and poli sci classes at Rutgers in the late '80s and early '90s.  Rule Golden is set in the future of the early 1970s, when videophones are widely used, and is a first-person narrative; our narrator is Robert James Dahl, a Midwestern journalist who brags about how great his paper is and acts like a tough guy.  Knight practically tells us the story's gimmick on the first page of the story, and then he writes page after page (this thing is like 75 pages in this edition!) about Dahl investigating this strange phenomenon.  Rule Golden is like a boring detective story, with lots of mundane places and people for the detective to examine or outwit before resolving the mystery to his satisfaction.

In brief, Dahl discovers that the United States government has taken captive a lone space alien named Aza-Kra who has come to Earth to spread an airborne catalyst that changes your genetic code so that you suffer (psychosomatically) any damage you inflict on another creature.  For example, on the first page of Rule Golden an abusive husband kicks his wife in the ass, and suffers pain in his own ass! (Comedy!*)  Knight gives lots of examples of this, including prison staff and butchers feeling unhappy or ill as a result of their work--we eventually learn that the engineering works on animals higher than insects, so carnivores like lions and tigers are going to go extinct.  Dahl meets Aza-Kra in the army base, and the creature tells him he is from the Galactic Federation of peaceful civilizations and they want the Earth to join but right now we humans are too violent so he is here to genetically engineer us so we behave.  Dahl helps the E. T., which can read minds and instantly put people to sleep, to escape to Europe, the Middle East and Asia, where he spreads the catalyst.  (The substance has to be spread wide quickly, or there will be a period, before the catalyst has made its way to Moscow and Peking, during which North America and Western Europe won't be able to defend themselves from an attack by the commies.) 

Knight tries to add tension to the tale by having Dahl wracked by doubts--is Aza-Kra telling the truth or is he just trying to soften us up so the aliens can conquer us--and by describing how Dahl and his alien buddy evade the authorities in country after country.  This stuff serves to make the story longer (have I told you this thing is like 75 pages?) but does little to make it more compelling.

Because there is no way to enforce the law, and no way for private individuals to protect their property, the world falls into anarchy, with people stealing, vandalizing, trespassing, and crossing borders as they see fit.  (Aza-Kra's genetic engineering doesn't make people feel bad about burning down the crops I spent a season growing or the business I spent a lifetime building.)  The cities are deserted and famine develops, but a fleet of spaceships arrives to hand out food and to revive Aza-Kra, who was near death from eating inadequate Earth food.  Aza-Kra is revealed to be not a professional explorer or diplomat, but a sort of artisan ("I am ordinarily a maker of--you have not the word, it is like porcelain....") who volunteered to risk his life amongst us humans.  (I guess carpenter would have been too obvious.)

Rule Golden appeared first in Science Fiction Adventures, and in 1960 was included in Groff Conklin's Six Great Short Science Fiction Novels.  I'm afraid I cannot concur with Conklin's generous assessment!  This story is so long, and uses so many tired elements (like mind reading and a Galactic Federation pacifying us against our will) that the novelty of the newish idea can't carry it, especially since Knight reveals the gimmick on page one.  Knight also doesn't address the moral issues related to making people behave by crippling them, removing their ability to choose between good and evil, as Anthony Burgess does in A Clockwork Orange.

Weak!  Maybe this story should have been like 10 pages?

*This reminded me of the Corsican brothers from The Electric Company.  That was a good show, with Joan Rivers narrating Letterman and Morgan Freeman as Dracula and narrator of those Spiderman shorts that starred a version of Spidey who never talked!   

Natural State (1954)

I guess you could say that this one is about the urban-rural divide.  It is the year 2064, most cities have collapsed, with only a few of the biggest, like New York and Chicago still standing, totally shut off from the countryside.  The cities have what we would recognize as modern societies, with TV shows and hover cars and social hierarchies and people going off to work every day, but things are getting tough economically--most people work multiple jobs and the lack of contact with the world beyond the city limits means there is no supply of essential raw materials, like metal.  Soon even mighty New York may collapse!  Another problem: the urban population is waning, while the rural population, whom the urbanites think of as unsophisticated rubes, grows, and soon the people of the countryside will be able to militarily or culturally take over the world and urban culture will go extinct!

The rulers of New York propose a solution--trade with the rural population, who presumably will be eager to purchase motor vehicles and telephones and TVs and power tools.  This will provide a source of metal and other much-needed resources, and spread urban culture to the ignorant hicks, preserving the sophisticated way of life enjoyed by city people.  They send out into the countryside the most popular actor on NYC TV, Alvah Gustad, with a hovercar load of trade goods to open up trade with the country folk.

What Gustad discovers is that the 150 million people living in the rural landscape are not a bunch of ignorant rubes--they are living in utopia!  Most of their time is spent sitting around working on little hobbies like whittling and needlepoint or putting on theatricals and having dances!  The basis for this life of leisure is genetic engineering; they breed and grow everything they need, a gimmick we would see decades later in Harry Harrison's West of Eden and Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000.  The country people don't need cars and airplanes, because they ride beasts and giant birds around!  They don't need mines or factories or construction equipment because they have plants that grow knife blades, bulbs that grow into houses, and giant turtles whose shells grow in transparent layers that can be easily peeled off to act as a sheet of unbreakable glass!  They don't know how to read because they have bred talking birds that can recite entire books!  (This last is a little reminiscent of one of my favorite Gene Wolfe stories, "The Doctor of Death Island," in which people abandon reading because of the development of talking books.)

That's Gustad in his hover car,
trying to sell power tools to the
country folk

The country folk don't need or want what Gustad is selling, but their intellectual class is interested in examining him, and they employ a creature which cripples his hover car (by eating an element of its power pack) to strand the New Yorker 1,000 miles from Gotham.  The locals (including a pretty lady who can actually read!) want Gustad to join their happy society, and in the same way that Dahl in Rule Golden has to decide whether or not to cleave to the alien Aza-Kra, Gustad here in Natural State has to choose sides.  Fortunately for the reader, this story is better in every respect than Rule Golden--the characters and their relationships are more compelling, the technological stuff is more interesting, the jokes are more amusing.

When it looks like their idea of fostering trade has failed, the rulers of NYC try some serious skullduggery, what the kids call a false flag operation, in an effort to start a shooting war between the rural people and Chicago--the New Yorkers plan to steal all the metal from the Windy City after the country folk depopulate it!  This scheme fails, and instead of attacking Chi-town the country people turn on the city that never sleeps and liberate the citizens of the Big Apple from the tyranny of books, TV shows, and a steady work schedule.     

Competent!

Natural State first appeared in Galaxy, in an issue you can read at the internet archive, in which Knight's story is adorned with some pretty good illustrations by Emsh.  Natural State was included in anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg, Frederick Pohl and Georgess McHargue, and was even expanded into a longer novel, Masters of Evolution, which appeared as half of an Ace Double. 

I love the Emsh cover to All About the Future with its sexy spacesuits
and diagrams of a rocket ship and a heavy pistol --gorgeous!

The Dying Man (1957)

Dio is a planner living in a post-scarcity future in which people are immortal and invulnerable to wounds and disease--they also have the power to levitate, which is pretty good (I have long wanted to float everywhere like the fighters in DragonBall Z.)   Everybody has lived so long that most people have actually forgotten the concept of death!  To keep existence from getting boring, planners like Dio rebuild the cities in different styles every year.

Planners are members of the student class, the intellectuals and scientists who read and keep records and figure things out.  Most people, it appears, are "players," members of a frivolous unproductive leisure class.  Claire is just such a player, and she and Dio are having a love affair when it becomes apparent that Dio's body has somehow lost its invulnerability and immortality.  He falls ill, recovers with the help of an army of students who study him to figure out how to create and administer medicines that have not been needed for centuries.  He begins to grow old, his body changing in ways that the rest of humanity finds alarming.

The story, which at like 40 pages is considerably shorter than Rule Golden and Natural State, largely concerns Dio and Claire's reactions to Dio's body experiencing natural human aging and death.  Dio's creative work evolves, becoming more mature and sophisticated--in fact, too sophisticated for his contemporaries, with the result that the city he is responsible for designing is abandoned.  He also embraces ancient ways of doing things, working with his own hands instead of through machines--he carves a reproduction of Michelangelo's Dusk* from stone with a chisel, for example, and grows his own crops with which to bake his own bread.  (I know this guy's feels--I ground the beans for my wife's coffee yesterday.  Sure, sure, I used the Mr. Coffee 12-cup Electric Coffee Grinder with Multi-Settings--I didn't say I was a luddite!) 

The Dying Man is also considerably better than the "novels" with which it shares this collection.  I'm biased because I like stories about immortality and its effect on individuals and societies (the aforementioned Gene Wolfe story, "The Doctor of Death Island," is about immortality as much as it is about reading), but beyond that, The Dying Man has real human feeling, real human characters, engaging settings, and no goofy jokes.  The science behind immortality was also well done.  This is a piece I can really recommend.

The Dying Man first appeared under the title Dio in Infinity Science Fiction, where it is billed as "Damon Knight's Best Short Novel."  This issue of Infinity is available to read for free at the internet archive, and features not only numerous fetching illustrations by Emsh (these include a generous helping of Claire's chest!) but a story co-written by Harlan Ellison and Algis Budrys and, in the book review section, discussions by Knight of novels by Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke.  This issue of Infinity is full to bursting with stuff by and about some of classic SF's biggest names!

Dio would go on to be reprinted numerous times, including in Groff Cronklin's 5 Unearthly Visions and Robert Silverberg's Alpha 4.  I actually own both 5 Unearthly Visions and Alpha 4 which means I own three copies of this story.

*Knight has Dio call it Evening, but my art books and Wikipedia are calling it Dusk.

**********

Back in 2014 Joachim Boaz read and wrote about this collection, presumably this very same copy.  (His post and the comments, in which people recommend their favorite Knight stories, are worth your time.)  I know it would be more fun to disagree with Joachim or to have my own off-the-wall idiosyncratic take on these stories, but I'm afraid Mr. Boaz and I are in basic agreement about the contents of Three Novels.  Maybe I am a little more forgiving about the two weak pieces?  I was definitely more forgiving than Joachim when I read Beyond the Barrier, a book Joachim thought so poor he dared me to read it! 

(I'm not always so kind to Knight!  I read a collection of five of his short stories entitled Off Center and declared most of them "Bad!," "Weak!" "Lame" or even worse!)

More 1950s SF from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

City at World's End by Edmond Hamilton

"But the main problem will be morale, Hubble."  He thought of Carol, as he added, "I don't believe these people can take it, if they find out they're the last humans left."

When I recently saw the Fawcett Crest 1974 paperback edition of City at World's End on the shelf at a used bookstore, buying it was what the kids call a "no-brainer."  First of all, it's by MPorcius fave Edmond Hamilton. Second, there's the beautiful Paul Lehr cover.  I even like the lowercase aesthetic they are pulling here--this theme is continued on the inside, with the chapter headings printed in a fun lowercase font.  I'm always tickled when it looks like the publisher made an effort to produce a book with some kind of design vision in mind. (The chapter headings in City At World's End seem to be in the same font I enjoyed when it was used by our friends at Belmont for their volume containing Kris Neville's Special Delivery and Dave Van Arnam's Star Gladiator.)

Fawcett really goes the extra mile in selling this book--the first page tries to convince you that City At World's End is a serious examination, even a prediction, of a possible future for the human race!  They go so far as to quote "eminent biologist N. J. Berrill," whom Wikipedia is leading me to believe was like a British version of Jacques Cousteau!  Awesome!

It is the middle of the 20th century, in America's Middle West, where, in Middletown, home to 50,000, Kenniston, a scientist, is walking to his job at an industrial laboratory.  Almost nobody who lives in Middletown knows that the lab is an important component of America's defense establishment!  But somebody knows, and that somebody (the identity of whom Hamilton leaves mysterious, but I'm guessing this somebody has a name like "Josef" or "Zedong") detonates one of those new super-atomic missiles that everybody has been talking about right over Middletown!  But instead of vaporizing the town, the explosion shatters the very fabric of space and time and transports Middletown and all its inhabitants millions of years into the future, to when the sun is weak and red and the land is dry, desolate and cold!

City at World's End is one of those books in which a crisis leaves the common people, at best, at a loss, and more often ready to panic or riot, and, since the leadership they need is not forthcoming from the political class (the mayor of Middletown is short and "pudgy" and at one point described as "a crushed, frightened little man"), real men have to take charge.  Kenniston and his boss Hubble are just such men, as is a local businessman who owns a big trucking company and was some kind of logistics guy during "the last war," which I assume must be World War II.  The eggheads explore the creepy landscape beyond the newly transported town and discover a deserted domed city.  With no source of coal, everybody will freeze to death if they stay in their houses, so the scientists and the trucking magnate organize and lead an exodus out of Middletown and into the domed city--the dome will (they say) help retain heat.  This domed city also has hydroponics tanks the scientists will be able to get running again so nobody will starve, and a shaft leading to the Earth's core, presumably built by the original inhabitants hundreds of thousands of years ago to tap its heat; unfortunately today the core is quite cool.

In hopes that there are people elsewhere on the Earth, Kenniston figures out how to transmit messages with some equipment found in "New Middletown," and eventually some people who have heard the transmissions arrive.  But these people aren't Earthers--they are the descendants of humans who left Earth millennia ago to colonize the galaxy; these people now rule the entire Milky Way from their capital in the Vega system, and they have brought some of their alien friends with them! One of these alien races looks (as you can see on the cover of the issue of Startling Stories in which City at World's End first appeared) like over-sized teddy bears!  And another like humanoid cats!  The human Vegans, representatives of the Governors of the Federation of Stars, study old Middletown and do administrative work while the ursine Capellans and feline Spicans--these furry people are technical adjuncts attached to the mission--help get the atomic power and plumbing and so forth in New Middletown running again.

City At World's End is dated in a way that 21st-century readers may find interesting, amusing or aggravating.  For example, the Earthwomen characters, when they are on-screen (which is not too often), are always going hysterical, weeping, or complaining and just generally getting in the way.  The leader of the Vegan expedition, Varn Allan, is a woman, a slim and cold-hearted blue-eyed blonde (sexy!), who eventually crumbles under the strain and admits she wishes she had been a party girl instead of volunteering for the Federation space navy.  And if the mayor formerly known as Warren Wilhelm Jr. is right, and most people want a mayor and wider government with dictatorial powers, they won't be happy to see the mayor of Middletown portrayed as an ineffectual boob who outsources all leadership duties to scientists and businessmen and the Vegan Federation governors depicted as imperious, contemptuous and callous jerkoffs.  On the other hand, the novel has a hopeful anti-racist message--the adults of Middletown are initially suspicious of, even repulsed by, the non-human aliens, but their children immediately embrace them, and of course in the end they turn out to be very nice and helpful.

The big, furry Capellan sounded like a blood brother to every repair technician on old Earth.

He [Kenniston] discovered one day that he was working beside the humanoids as naturally as though he had always done it.  It no longer seemed strange that Magro, the handsome white-furred Spican, was an electronics expert whose easy unerring work left Kenniston staring.

Under their fur, these freaks from other solar systems are just like us!  (Like getting stuck on a far-future worn-out Earth that has been abandoned by humanity, humans working and fighting side by side with aliens is a recurring theme in Hamilton's work.) In fact, the 20th-century humans have more in common with these furry weirdos than with the humans of the far future, because the furries, as relatively young races, still have a passionate independent streak and a love of their home planets, while the future humans, who have had atomic power and space travel for millions of years, are a bunch of cold and obedient drones who do whatever the government tells them and have no feeling whatsoever for the Earth!

This comes out when it is revealed that the Governors of the Federation of Stars are ordering the Middletowners to move from the dying Earth (a phrase Hamilton uses repeatedly, inevitably reminding one of Jack Vance's famous stories, the first of which were published the same year as the magazine version of City at World's End) to some more economically viable planet for their own good, whether they like it or not.  The people of Middletown resist, but Varn Allan and her conniving male subordinate, who wants her to fail so he can take her job, insist that Federation word is law and the Earthlings must move. In contrast, the furries share the Middletowners' "provincial patriotism" and would like to loosen the hold of the Federation on their own peoples (they themselves have been forcibly evacuated from beloved homeworlds in the past.)  So the Cappellans and Spicans give Kenniston some legal advice--he has the right to go to Vega to argue Earth's case.  What gives the Earth a legal leg to stand on is the fact that a new process has been proposed by which the cool inner core of a dying planet like Earth can be ignited so the planet can flourish again, even with a weak red sun.  So Kenniston rides the ship to Vega with his furry pals and the haughty hotty Varn Allan, on a quest to get permission to have the process tested on the dying Earth's core.  (I know, this now sounds a little like Gene Wolfe's 1980s Book of the New Sun and its fifth volume, The Urth of the New Sun, doesn't it?)

On Vega Four we get one of those Earth-on-trial scenes that we encounter in SF pretty regularly; Robert Heinlein's 1958 Have Space Suit--Will Travel and James Blish's 1961 The Star Dwellers, books I have read, come to mind at once, but I know there are plenty of others--among those I haven't read is a Jack Williamson fix-up called The Trial of Terra which Joachim Boaz wrote about back in 2011.  The rulers of the galaxy decide that the violent and rebellious 20th-century Earth people must be taught to obey, and that the core ignition process is too dangerous anyway, so Kenniston's request is denied.  Luckily, the scientist who developed this planetary core ignition theory has his ship and staff all juiced up and ready to go, because Kenniston convinces him to defy the Federation Governors and take him and his furry friends to Earth and try the process anyway!  Varn Allan tries to stop them but Kenniston just kidnaps her and drags her to Earth, where everything turns out great for everybody, except Allan's scheming lieutenant, I guess.  Even Kenniston's fiance Carol, relieved she can move out of the dome city and back to her old house, is willing to free our hero from their engagement so he can explore the galaxy (and space babe Varn Allan's pants!)    

I like the plot of this one, and Hamilton seems to be putting some extra literary effort into it; compared to much of his other writing, there is more human psychology (how people respond to the story's bizarre events--resorting to prayer or to the booze, threatening to riot or blaming scientific progress, etc) and relationship material (among her many complaints, Carol is angry that Kenniston kept his real job at the lab a secret from her, and fears their future together is doomed because she loves stability and the old comfortable things while he is fascinated by the new), more fancy images and turns of phrase, and more literary devices like personification and metaphor ("...past the playground that looked as forlorn as though it knew the children were going, never to return.")  The stuff about how government is incompetent and callous and full of selfish self-important jerks, the distinction between young passionate societies and old staid ones, and the anti-racist stuff, add additional layers.

A good novel.  City at World's End brought to mind the much longer and apparently (I haven't read either of them) much more ambitious / pretentious novels of Samuel R. Delany (1974's Dhalgren) and Stephen King (2009's Under the Dome) which, I think, have similar premises.  Might those novelists have been familiar with City at World's End and influenced by it?

City at World's End seems tohave been a hit with readers and has been reprinted again and again since its first publication in 1950 in Startling Stories; you can read the original printing complete with 1950 illustrations at the internet archive.  (This is a pretty impressive issue of Startling, with work by Leigh Brackett, Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, Doc Smith, Virgil Finlay and Frank Belknap Long, and letters from Robert Silverberg--who praises Norman Daniels' "The Lady is a Witch"--and Isaac Asimov--who jocularly complains that in a recent issue his name was misspelled and makes a tepid joke about the tame sexual content of van Vogt's "The Shadow Men," an early version of The Universe Maker, a British publication about which I said nice things on Amazon in 2012.)