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.

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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!

1957 stories by Harry Harrison, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, and Robert F. Young

I own eight or nine crumbling issues of Fantastic Universe, a magazine published from 1953 to 1959 by King-Size Publications and then for an additional year or so by Great American Publications.  These SF artifacts were in lots I purchased that consisted mostly of the Ziff-Davis magazines Fantastic Adventures (published from 1939 to 1953) and Fantastic (published from 1952 to 1980); when I bought these lots I didn't realize Fantastic Universe had nothing to do with the Ziff-Davis magazines, partly because over the decades of its life the cover title of Fantastic would evolve back and forth between such variations as Fantastic Stories, Fantastic Science Fiction Stories, Fantastic Stories of Imagination, etc.  I don't feel like this was a regrettable blunder or that I got ripped off or anything (even though the Wikipedia article on Fantastic Universe suggests critics think the magazine a piece of junk)--these magazines have art by people like Virgil Finlay and Emsh and stories by people whose work interests me, like Harry Harrison and Harlan Ellison and Robert Bloch.

Speaking of Finlay, Harrison, Ellison, and Bloch, let's start looking at my copies of Fantastic Universe with the June 1957 issue, which has a Finlay cover featuring an infantile-looking alien who has, apparently, just crashed his flying saucer in small town America.  Is that his mother lying dead by the ship?  Damn, this picture tells a tale of terrible tragedy!

Perhaps one reason the critics are so unfriendly to Fantastic Universe is that (if this issue is representative) it lacks editorials and a letters column; Ted White holds that a magazine should have a personality, a character, and a strong editorial voice and opinionated letters can develop such a personality, as well as creating a sense of community among magazine readers and the pros who put the magazine together.  I have certainly enjoyed the editorials and letters in White's Fantastic.  Well, with no such non-fiction material, let's get right to the stories in the June 1957 Fantastic Universe penned by the four authors whose work I already have at least a little experience with, the "short novels" by Harry Harrison and Robert Bloch, and stories by Harlan Ellison and Robert F. Young.

"World in the Balance" by Harry Harrison

Harrison of course is famous for a number of series (Stainless Steel Rat, Deathworld, Bill the Galactic Hero, and Eden are the ones I have some familiarity with) and influential individual works, like the source material for the Charlton Heston/Edward G. Robinson film Soylent Green.  Harrison's work is diverse in tone and topic, so I can't predict what "World in the Balance" might be like or how I will respond to it.  The fact that, according to isfdb, "World in the Balance" has never been reprinted is not what anybody would call a good sign, however.

Italian-American John Baroni is a grad student in physics at a New England university, and a veteran of house-to-house infantry combat in Italy in World War II.  He and his Japanese-American girlfriend Lucy Kawai and their professor, Dr. Steingrumer, are in the lab conducting experiments on a device that makes things disappear when aliens invade the Earth!  (I'm guessing Harrison deliberately chose the ethnicities of all the characters with an eye to undermining any prejudices readers might have related to WWII.)  John snatches up a bolt-action rifle from the ROTC supply and uses the skills he learned in Italy to sneak into town and see what the hell is going on!

The hideous crustacean-faced aliens are using captured Earth weapons to exterminate police and military personnel (as well as any civilians who resist) and John uncovers why the invaders are able to so effectively achieve surprise on G.I. Joe and the boys in blue--the aliens are masters of cosmetic surgery and have, over the past few years, been replacing people in authority in government with alien impostors!  The chief of police in the town by the school, an alien in disguise, lines up "his" men for a briefing and then mows them down with an automatic weapon!  The Earth has had it, because the aliens have taken control of the world's stockpiles of nuclear weapons before we even knew we were in a fight and they nuke Washington, D.C. and anywhere else human leadership might organize a cohesive defense!

But wait!  All is not (quite) lost!  John realizes that the doohickey he and his fellow physicists are working on is a device that can send you back in time to another time line!  He goes back in time a few weeks and sneaks around the Washington, D.C. area using gruesome means to figure out who in authority is a damned ET and who is a red-blooded Earther and then helps legit government officials to organize a spoiling attack that catches the aliens before they are ready to spring their own surprise attacks.  The Earth in that time line is saved!  Ad for our time line...well, that's the way the cookie crumbles, I guess.

A competent SF adventure story that delivers standard SF fare like malevolent aliens and time-traveling eggheads who get us out of a jam with technology and logical reasoning with a large serving of gore on the side.  You can call it pedestrian, but it went down easy and I liked it.

"Terror Over Hollywood" by Robert Bloch

Psycho-scribe Bloch's story here would be reprinted in the 1965 collection Tales in a Jugular Vein.  The cover of the 1970 British edition of this collection seems to be the culmination of a series of regrettable artistic choices.

According to Wikipedia, Bloch's 1982 novel Psycho II was a harsh critique of Hollywood, and this 1957 story suggests that Bloch's hostility to Hollywood is of long standing.  From the first page of "Terror Over Hollywood" Bloch hammers at the theme that being in Hollywood has a powerfully negative effect on people's morals, that the inhabitants of tinsel town are fake phony frauds, heroin addicts and homosexuals who commit suicide at epidemic rates.  (Makes me glad I have been spending most of my life in such bastions of decorum, decency and mental health as New York City and Washington D.C.!)

Kay Kennedy is determined to be a star, and has been so determined since the age of six!  She convinced her parents to move to California and to work themselves to death financing her acting lessons, and since their demise she has (it is implied) been selling her body to important Hollywood types to advance her career.  She has noticed that the very acme of Hollywood luminaries, the top ten or twelve actors and producers and directors who seem to call the shots in La La Land, don't seem to lose their looks or stamina as they age, and she tries to wheedle the answer out of our narrator, independent producer Ed Stern.  As the story unfolds the tenacious Kennedy discovers the truth--Stern is a founding member of that tiny elite, the first beneficiary of the genius of a German scientist who can build a mechanical replica of a person's body that is almost indistinguishable from the original and then surgically remove that person's brain from its natural body and install it in the robot!  Will Kennedy welcome a chance to sit at the top of the charts for twenty or thirty years and then enjoy a retirement that will last centuries, or react with horror at the prospect of never again sleeping, eating, drinking, or having sex?

This story is OK.  I like that the narrator is the villain and his villainy is only hinted at for much of the story, and I like the brain-transplanting German mad scientist angle, but Bloch needlessly complicates things with a lot of talk of how the robot bodies need to go offline periodically and so during those periods Stern has to blackmail criminals who look like the stars into impersonating them, blah blah blah.  (You'll remember that I also thought Bloch needlessly complicated the process of giving people eternal life in his 1951 story "The Dead Don't Die.")  Bloch should have ditched the impersonation angle and focused on the Frankenstein stuff--ofttimes less is more, Robert, less is more.   

"Commuter's Problem" by Harlan Ellison

I've done a lot of commuting in my life!  (Maybe you have, too?)  Thousands of rides on the New York City subway between the Upper East Side and Midtown, and before my apotheosis and after my exile, thousands of miles in automobiles between suburbs and universities and downtowns and shopping malls.  The commute is one of the defining features of 20th-century middle-class life, the subject of song and story.  And here is one of those stories.

Narrator John Weiler (I guess we're supposed to think "wheels?") uses cliches to describe himself and his life: "I'm a commuter--a man in the grey flannel suit, if you would....We keep up with the Jonses, without too much trouble."  Every weekday, and some Saturdays and Sundays, too, he rides the train into Manhattan from Westchester County to work at his office.  "There's something cold and impersonal about a nine-to-five job and a ride home with total strangers," he tells us.  Then one morning he is walking through Grand Central Terminal, his face buried in a report, and he looks up to find he is lost.  He's never seen this part of Grand Central before!  Not only that, but the posters are in a weird foreign language and when he asks people for directions they speak in a weird foreign language!  He gets caught up in a crowd and ends up on a subway car where he sees his odd neighbor Da Campo, the guy who doesn't watch TV and has a bizarre tentacled plant in his garden.   Da Campo is amazed to see Weiler, and vaguely explains that this subway car goes to another planet!

Weiler gets the inside skinny once they arrive at Da Campo's home world of Drexwill twenty minutes and 60,000 light years later.  Drexwill is an overcrowded urban conglomeration that many find uncomfortable, so middle class professionals like Da Campo (real name: Helgorth Labbula) commute to work in Drexwill and live incognito on less crowded planets like Earth.  (The Drexwillians look just like Earth humans.)  With bitter resignation Helgorth takes Weiler to the authorities, where Helgorth himself gets a stern talking to, as has lazy habits and flouting of rules (like the prohibition on cultivating Drexwillian vegetation on Earth) have played some role in Weiler's accidental one-way trip from Earth.  Yes, one-way; the Drexwill government won't let Weiler go back to Earth!  After talking his hosts out of executing him, Weiler finds a job on Drexwill; he realizes he would rather be on Drexwill than on Earth with his nagging wife and stressful job.

This story is just OK, a piece of filler that feels like something Ellison pounded out and submitted without much planning beforehand or revising after pulling that first draft out of the typewriter.  Ellison neither put much thought into the whole system of aliens commuting between Earth and Drexwill, nor put much effort into setting up Weiler's abandonment of Earth--for example, Weiler's wife and job don't seem really that annoying, and in the beginning of the story Weiler doesn't really complain about them.  Instead of writing a story exploring or explaining or dramatizing how suburban life and commuting suck, Ellison just takes this attitude for granted (note the use of tired cliches as a cheap means of telling the audience what to think) and pretends it is the backbone of his pedestrian story about a guy who inexplicably finds himself in another world.  (Bloch in "Terror Over Hollywood" makes an effort to show us how bad life in Hollywood is, here Ellison just tells us how bad life is in suburbiua.)  The story's tone is uneven; the first half of "Commuter's Problem" focuses on Weiler's suspicion and fear of the Da Campo family inspired by their odd habits and creepy garden and feels like a horror story, but all the horror stuff is jettisoned in the second half, which is a nonsensical fantasy that feels like a wacky humor story, albeit one without any jokes or laughs.

Barely acceptable.  I am totally into stories in which guys hate their wives and jobs (I love Henry Miller's exhilarating Sexus, for example) and SF stories in which a guy struggles to survive in an alien milieu, but Ellison just gestures towards writing those sorts of stories here.

However mediocre I may have found it, "Commuter's Problem" was included in the oft-reprinted collection Ellison Wonderland, AKA Earthman, Go Home!

"Ape's Eye View" by Robert F. Young

In the tiny little intro the editor provides for this story we learn that the cover of this issue was inspired by "Ape's Eye View."  Alright, let's learn what that Virgil Finlay illustration is all about!

"Ape's Eye View" is an explicit homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs's immortal creation, Tarzan.  One day a meteor lands in a small rural town; apparently coincidentally, a local childless couple takes in a foundling soon after.  This kid looks odd and is a terrible student and wretched athlete, and is bullied by the other kids and, as a teen, is disgusted instead of intrigued by the opposite sex.  Shortly after achieving adulthood he vanishes when a large "entity" appears out of the sky and, eye witnesses report, consumes him.  Our narrator, a schoolmate of the weird foundling, his thought processes triggered by coming across a copy of Tarzan of the Apes, surmises that this kid was a shipwrecked alien and that mysterious "entity" was a rescue ship come to bring the kid back to his home planet.

This is a modest but successful story that looks at the Mowgli archetype from a different point of view.  Of the four stories I am talking about today it is the most original and the one that feels least like filler rushed out the door to make a buck.  I like it.  It looks like it was never published elsewhere, however.

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While not great, these stories aren't all that bad.  We'll explore more of Fantastic Universe in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log. 

1961 stories from Julian F. Grow, Reginald Bretnor, Robert F. Young and Fredric Brown

I've talked about how much I like my copy of Judith Merril's seventh edition of The Year's Best S-F before, the book's size and shape and fonts and illustrations.  And I've written about a bunch of the stories it presents, including the Fritz Leiber, Cordwainer Smith and John Wyndham pieces and the selections by Rome, Bone, Feiffer, Glaser and Russell as well as, in a different book, the story by Mack Reynolds. Today let's delve further into this volume for which I paid 35 cents in Davenport, Iowa and look at stories by Julian F. Grow, Reginald Bretnor, Robert F. Young, and Fredric Brown.  (I have gotten a lot of mileage out of those 35 cents!)  All four of these tales were first published in 1961.

"The Fastest Gun Dead" by Julian F. Grow

Grow has only seven credits at isfdb, and five of them, including "The Fastest Gun Dead," are in the "Dr. Hiram Pertwee series."  The story at hand today is the first in this series, and appeared in If.

A humorous story that is played more or less straight and has technology at its core, I'm calling this one marginally good, a little better than "acceptable."

Our narrator for "The Fastest Gun Dead" is the aforementioned Hiram Pertwee, a physician in the Wild West.  Our hero is Jacob Niedelmeier, who moves to the little western town in which the tale is set from New Jersey, the greatest state in the union!  Why would anyone leave the Garden State for the land of six-guns and scalpings?  Well, our man Jake has come to make his fortune prospecting gold.  Unfortunately, as Doc Pertwee tells us, Jake is a "boob" and a "ninny" who finds no gold and gets a job as a store clerk.

Years go by, and one day Jake, out on a walk in the hills, stumbles on a skeleton...of a space alien!  The alien was armed with a laser pistol, a weapon that detects the brainwaves of those who would seek to kill the bearer, and aims and shoots all by itself!  By carrying this self-directed weapon around, and talking like the big man he actually is not, Jake becomes the best gunfighter in the territory, killing many tough galoots with funny names like "Fat Charlie Ticknor" and "Redmeat Carson."

The weakest element in the story is how Jake's career as top gunslinger comes to an end.  I guess the pistol's brainwave detectors can only detect aggressive thoughts in the left side of a brain, so when a left-handed cowboy tries to kill Jake the space gun doesn't work.  I wish Grow had come up with something better with which to end his story, as "The Fastest Gun Dead" cruises along very smoothly all the way to the last page and then hits this pothole and one of the wheels flies right off into the ditch.  Perhaps because of this problem the story has not been anthologized outside of Merrill's anthology here and its British equivalent, which is somewhat confusingly entitled Best of Sci-Fi Two. 

"All the Tea In China" by Reginald Bretnor

In her little intro to the story, Merril praises Bretnor for being one of the members of the respectable intellectual elite and literary mainstream, like Anthony Boucher, who has been working to improve the reputation of SF; Merril tells us that until recently "s-f reading was something almost everybody did, and practically nobody talked about."  (The relationship of SF to mainstream culture is one of Merril's themes throughout these intros.)

"All the Tea In China," from F&SF, is a kind of shaggy dog story, a bunch of meandering details that add up to little, in the form of a piece of rural folklore.  When, as a poor New England farm boy, our narrator's grandmother caught him blackmailing another kid, she scares him straight by telling him the story of one of his no-good great-great-uncles, a Jonas.  Jonas was a successful man of business but had few friends because he was malicious and made much of his money by blackmailing people.  A series of events involving a shipment of goods from the Far East and Jonas's attempts to strong arm a woman into marrying him lead to Jonas negotiating with Satan himself.  The narrator and Jonas both commonly utter the cliche "not for all the tea in China," and the climax of this story is when Satan offers Jonas "all the tea in China" in heavy wooden chests.  When Jonas accepts the deal the multitude of chests falls from the sky and crushes Jonas.

I can't recommend this thing.  The final joke is lame and doesn't have any connection to the story's theme that you shouldn't blackmail people.  Endorsing my dim view of it, no editor has anthologized it since Merril did.

"The Dandelion Girl" by Robert F. Young

Here is a story that first appeared in a mainstream publication, The Saturday Evening Post, complete with a Norman Rockwell cover celebrating diversity.  When we last saw Young he was lamenting America's automobile and TV-obsessed culture; let's see what he sold to what was once one of America's most influential publications.

The title of "The Dandelion Girl" immediately made me think of the hyacinth girl from T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, but the first line of this story name checks Edna St. Vincent Millay.  Forty-four-year-old Mark is on a vacation in the woods without his wife (she has jury duty!) when, on a hill with a picturesque view,  he encounters a beautiful woman of twenty-one with "dandelion hair" who reminds him of Millay.  Young tries to get a poetic vibe going in the story's first paragraphs, telling us about the autumn leaves ("burning gently with the first pale fires of fall") and the wind in Mark's face and all that.  We also get to hear again and again about Mark smoking his pipe and how his hands are trembling or tingling, depending on what Young is trying to convey.  After his first meeting with Julie we learn that one of Mark's favorite poems is Millay's "Afternoon on a Hill."  (Go ahead and read it--it is very short.)

The woman, Julie, claims to be from the future when all these woods are part of a huge city.  Her father invented a time machine and she comes back to this hill every day.  Mark and Julie meet on the hill over three successive days, talking about Bishop Berkeley and Einsteinian relativity, and Mark falls in love with her.  Julie fails to appear for two days, and when she reappears tells him her father has died.  Also, she doesn't know how to maintain her father's illegal unlicensed private time machine and it probably only has enough juice for one more trip and maybe not even that!  The last thing she says to Mark is that she loves him.

Anyway, Julie doesn't appear again, and Mark is depressed and starts neglecting his wife.  Then a few weeks later he finds a clue and realizes that his wife is Julie, that she must have used her last time trip to go back to the 1930s when he was her age so she could meet him and marry him.  Somehow Mark didn't recognize his own wife's face or voice or personality because she was twenty years younger, even though he knew her when she was that age.

I have to give this thing a thumbs down; it is sappy, overwritten, and tries too hard to appeal to an educated mainstream audience with all that extraneous Millay and Berkeley and Einstein business, and the idea of a guy not remembering what his wife looked like or sounded like when he met her 20 years ago has me rolling my eyes.  If you'll allow me to put on my feminist hat, I'll tell you that "The Dandelion Girl" appeals to the desire of the typical man to have sex with a woman half his age, and to the common man's lament that his wife doesn't look like she did when he met her--the problem with this aspect of the story from an entertainment point of view is that Mark is absolved of all guilt for having these anti-social thoughts, so the story has no tension or edge, there is no meaningful interpersonal conflict or interior psychological conflict, none of the risk or nastiness which makes stories of sexual impropriety compelling.   

Despite my groans, people, foreigners in particular, seem to like this story, and it has appeared in Young collections (including as the title story of a Japanese Young collection) and anthologies of stories about time travel.

"Nightmare in Time" by Fredric Brown

You guessed it, another teeny tiny story from Brown.  This one is the teeniest, taking up just like a third of a page!  "Nightmare in Time" first appeared in a men's magazine, Dude ("the magazine devoted to pleasure"), I guess a sort of Playboy knock off.  At time of writing, the internet archive provides free access to three issues of Dude from the late '50s; these offer pictures of topless young ladies, off-color cartoons, and fiction, including stories from people we have talked about a little here at the blog, Harlan Ellison and Michael Shaara.

Anyway, this story is something akin to a palindrome, the few dozen words that make up the tale's first half being repeated in reverse order to create the second half; Brown does this to simulate the operation of a machine that can make time run backwards.  I don't appreciate these kinds of technical tricks. 

"Nightmare in Time" has appeared in many places and in many languages, often under the title "The End."

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Not the best batch of stories, but it's all part of our SF education.  More SF short stories in our next episode!

Final ABC: Vonnegut, Wyndham and Young

The day has arrived!  Finally, we will finish up Tom Boardman Jr.'s 1966 anthology An ABC of Science Fiction, a book which presents a story for each letter of the alphabet, each letter represented by a writer whose last name begins with that letter.   There are only three stories remaining, because we are skipping "X" (lame limericks written under a pseudonym) and "Z," Roger Zelazny's "The Great Slow Kings," which I read back in 2014--it totally fits in with the recurring theme of this anthology that human beings are terrible and with the general jocular or satiric tone of the book's stories. 

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (1961)

In grammar school we read "Harrison Bergeron" and at the time I was a little surprised to be reading a story in a school textbook that seemed to be either making fun of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution or criticizing the doctrine of equality or both.  "Harrison Bergeron" first appeared in F&SF and has been reprinted many times and even filmed several times.

It is the year 2081 and thanks to constitutional amendments (of which there are over 200,) the government ruthlessly enforces equality by mandating various handicaps.  Smart people have to wear ear pieces that disrupt their thoughts with piercing noises, strong and agile people have to wear weights that slow them down and wear them out, attractive people must don hideous masks, etc.  The plot concerns George and Hazel Bergeron, whose son, Harrison, is the strongest and smartest man ever born and who has been arrested.  G and H are watching ballerinas on TV--the ballerinas, weighted down and distracted, are fumbling all over the place.  Suddenly Harrison, having escaped, bursts into the TV studio, declares himself Emperor, throws off his handicaps and those of the most gifted of the ballerinas and demonstrates how beautifully two talented people can dance.  Then the government official in charge of the handicapping agency, a woman, arrives and shoots down the self-proclaimed Emperor and his lovely Empress.

On its face, "Harrison Bergeron" appears to be a ferocious, over-the-top attack on radical egalitarianism and government efforts to achieve equality.  But when we look at the wikipedia page on Vonnegut we see that he was a socialist who thought Americans too quick to denounce communism.  I think we have to entertain the strong possibility that "Harrison Bergeron" is not a warning against government interventionism but a lampoon of such warnings, that Vonnegut here, like the New Yorker with its controversial cover illustration in which Barack Hussein Obama is burning the Stars and Stripes and his wife is carrying a Kalashnikov, is painting opposition to government that actively pursues "social justice" as ridiculous.

The outlandish nature of some elements of the story--Harrison is a seven-foot tall fourteen-year old who breaks chains with his bare hands, and he and his Empress discover the ability to fly--seems to support such a reading, as does the name of the Handicapper General, Diana Moon Glampers; while her first and middle names obviously reference the hunter goddess who shoots people as a means of punishing hubris, her last name reminds one of labor leader Samuel Gompers.  Maybe Vonnegut is presenting to readers a satiric view of how he believes supporters of limited government see themselves (as god-like individualists) and their opponents (nagging, autocratic and irrational people, especially women.)  It may be notable that Harrison Bergeron, the super-strong genius, tries to use his superior abilities to overthrow our republican society and make himself Emperor, like the kid in Pohl's "The Bitterest Pill;" lefties think we need a powerful public sector to keep private individuals with superior resources from lording it over others. 

Obviously this story suits the themes of An ABC of Science Fiction that people are jerks and the future is going to suck, and like so many stories picked by Boardman it is some kind of satire.  But unlike many of the other pieces in this book it is actually funny and offers hope, whether we take it at face value (Bergeron and his Empress win a brief victory over the government and give voice to the greatness of which a free humanity is capable) or as a satire of anti-socialist beliefs (by showing that opposition to government is so silly that socialism, as Marx would insist, is bound to succeed in the end.)

Well-written, fun and thought-provoking, maybe the best story in the book.  (I like to be the guy who goes against the conventional wisdom, the guy who prefers Gilligan's Island to A Night at the Opera and Led Zeppelin to the Beatles, but "Harrison Bergeron" is irresistible.)

"Close Behind Him" by John Wyndham (1953)

John Wyndham is widely admired, though you may recall that I dumped on his 1955 novel The Chrysalids, AKA Re-Birth, when I read it in long ago 2015.  Let's see if this story, first seen in Fantastic, and since reprinted in many Wyndham collections and horror anthologies, is more to my taste.

"Close Behind Him" is not a science fiction story at all, but a supernatural horror story, more or less a vampire story.  It is good, though, so thumbs up.

Our protagonists are a pair of burglars, Smudger and Spotty, who bust into a big old house whose owner lives alone, but periodically holds some kind of well-attended, sinister occult meetings.  The owner attacks them like an animal, biting and clawing instead of defending his life and property with a weapon, and Spotty kills him with the pipe he carries to deal with homeowners who give trouble.  When they abscond from the house the thieves find that Spotty is being "pursued" by red bloody footprints which match his own footfalls, each appearing a few yards behind him as he takes a step.  Smudger murders his colleague, hoping to escape this paranormal pursuit, but then the steps start following him.

Wyndham's story is mysterious enough that for a while we readers can suspect that justice is being served, that the burglars, as punishment for committing murder, are being harried by something akin to the Greek Furies (I've kind of got the Furies on the brain because of my recent reading of T. S.  Eliot's The Family Reunion and still more recent reading of Lyndall Gordon's discussion of that play in her book T. S. Eliot: An Imperfect Life.)  Back at Smudger's home this theory is exploded.  The bloody footprints gradually appear closer and closer, and, after two days of suffering a life-sapping anemia and dreams of a black hovering manlike form, Smudger dies.  The doctor who looks in on the burglar is present when Smudger expires, and, as he leaves, Smudger's wife sees that the footprints are now following the medical man.  Why is the monster chasing the doctor?  Presumably it is just a hungry beast, not any sort of avenger of wrongs.

This story is well-written and has a good basic concept, but I think the confusion over the monster's character--what exactly is it and what "rules" does it follow?--is a weakness.  There are early clues that the homeowner is some kind of male witch or maybe a werewolf, but then the importance of blood and Smudger's dreams and anemia put you in mind of a vampire.  The doctor thinks Smudger is just suffering hallucinations born of a guilty conscience and knowledge of lines from Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner, but we know he is wrong because Spotty and Liz (Smudger's wife) also see the footprints, and that they are real because Liz wipes up the blood.  None of these classic templates--Greek Fury, witch, lycanthrope, vampire, hallucination--really fits what is going on and Wyndham doesn't supply any clear explanation of what is going on.  I guess the monster is just a "ghost" that does whatever would be scary at the moment?           

Still, a decent piece of work.

"Thirty Days Had September" by Robert F. Young (1957)

Early this year I read Young's "The Ogress" and found it to be an entertaining enough adventure story with a sort of high-concept premise ("what if the gods and monsters of ancient myth were real, super-beings created by the collective psychic energy of primitive superstitious people, and on other planets there are primitive villagers who unwittingly create these dangerous creatures and the Terran government needs to send out hunters to destroy them?")  Hopefully this story will be at least as good.

It's the early Sixties--the early 2060s!  When salaryman George Danby was a kid he was one of the last people to be taught in a school building by a robot teacher because his little rural town couldn't get TV reception; his own nine-year-old is taught over the television like all the kids nowadays.  But George doesn't think it is quite the same, and when he sees a refurbished fourth-grade robot teacher in the window of an antique shop, he is moved to buy it.  He's buying it to help his kid study, and to help his wife Laura with the cooking and sewing, of course--he's definitely not buying Miss Jones because of those blue eyes and that hair that "made him think of September sunlight..."! 

Some SF stories speculate about future societies which are radically different from the society in which the writer lives; Heinlein has people on the moon with new marriage practices, Delany and Lee have societies in which getting a sex change is trivially easy, Sturgeon has the planet where incest is the norm, Wolfe has his future of illiterate immortals, and on and on.  And then there is the SF that just depicts the society in which the writer lives but with futuristic trappings.  In "Thirty Days Had September" Young depicts a caricature of the 1950s with robots thrown in so he can air his rather conventional gripes about postwar America.

Miss Jones is not a hit at the Danby household because it criticizes the TV shows Laura and the brat watch all day--the siege of Troy, the aftermath of the war of Eteocles and Polynices, and the tragedy of Romeo and Juliet, all reimagined as Westerns--and because the private companies who operate the tele-education system have filled viewers' heads with anti-robot-teacher propaganda.  The brat even kicks Miss Jones, damaging it so it limps.  Late one night, after he's had a few beers, George sits with his arm around Miss Jones while the machine recites some original lines from Romeo and Juliet--it's one of the happiest moments in George's life!  But Laura comes out of the bedroom and catches them, and insists George return Miss Jones to the antique store.

But this story has a happy ending!  Laura's dream is to replace their Buick with a Cadillac, so she does not complain when George starts working nights at a hot dog stand to make some extra money.  Laura will probably never find out that the owner of the hot dog stand has purchased Miss Jones to perform as a member of his wait staff!

Young in "Thirty Days Had September" calls out the citizens of the land of the free and the home of the brave for their obsession with automobiles and TV Westerns, their consumerism, and, I guess, the fact that most of them aren't kicking back after a long day working at the office or cooking, cleaning and raising the kids at home with volumes of Homer, Sophocles and Shakespeare.  Young suggests that postwar America is a society in which life is meaningless.  One of the problems of his story is that Young doesn't suggest where people should find meaning or where they found meaning before the rise of America's car- and TV- oriented consumer culture.  The average person is not going to find meaning in life reading ancient Greek and Renaissance English literature, and Young doesn't mention some of the obvious things that have given meaning to the lives of ordinary people in the past, things like religion or working with their hands.  Miss Jones obviously represents the more meaningful rural life of George's past (half a dozen times we are told she reminds him of "September"), but how that life was more meaningful is left unsaid; maybe Young thinks it is obvious?

One way people imbue their lives with meaning is through loving relationships with their family members, and Young does address this, perhaps obliquely.  Laura and the brat, avatars of consumerist TV and car culture, are obviously not going to offer opportunities for meaningful love relationships, but perhaps Miss Jones, a robot, is.  Young includes many descriptions of Laura and Miss Jones's physical appearance, and while both are described as attractive, Laura is described primarily in sexual terms (she's had her breasts augmented, for example), while Miss Jones is more wholesome--we do hear about the rise and fall of her breasts as she mimics human breathing, but mostly we are told that her face and hair and so on remind George of "September."  In one weird metaphor George looks at Laura in her pajamas, which have images of automobiles printed on them, and imagines she is allowing the cars to "run rampant over her body, letting them defile her breasts and her belly and her legs...."  Are we supposed to think consumer culture has ruined sex, made sex disgusting?  Maybe we are supposed to see Laura as a shallow, materialistic and status-obsessed creature who is only good for (debased) sex, and Miss Jones as a sort of Beatrice figure, a beautiful but chaste woman who will lead George to a spiritually fulfilling life?  (That's Lyndall Gordon's influence on me again--Gordon has a whole riff on how, after his disastrous marriage to the unstable Vivien Haigh-Wood, whom he married because he wanted to lose his virginity, Eliot sees the respectable and even-tempered Emily Hale as his own Beatrice figure.)  My Beatrice theory would be stronger if Young actually mentioned Dante or Virgil, which he does not do.   

If we strip away the sex stuff, the tone and theme of this story is reminiscent of Ray Bradbury's work--the hostility to TV and cars, fear that books will vanish, nostalgia about small town America, sentimental depiction of a relationship with a robot, etc.

Not bad; like Helen Urban's "The Finer Breed," "Thirty Days Had September" is perhaps an  interesting historical document that reflects the complaints of intellectual types about 1950s America, and it is perhaps also worthy of the attention of students of SF for its depictions of women and sex (feminists could easily do a whole madonna-whore analysis of this story) and for its invocation of "serious" literature.

First printed in F&SF, "Thirty Days Had September" has been reprinted in numerous American and foreign anthologies, many with a robot theme.

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It is good to leave An ABC of Science Fiction on a high note after some of the rough patches we had to go through there in the middle.

So, can I recommend An ABC of Science Fiction?  Well, it looks like I judged eight stories "good," ten stories "acceptable" and eight stories "bad."  That sounds like a pretty good average, to be honest.  People considering purchasing a copy have to also take into account the type of stories Boardman favors; despite the advertising text on the first page, An ABC of Science Fiction is not really representative of the whole range of SF, much of which is optimistic and fun.  This anthology has a high proportion of joke stories and satires--there are few realistic stories or hard SF engineering-based stories or adventure-type stories or utopias--and a high proportion of pessimistic stories--there are lots of stories with criminals as protagonists and lots of stories in which human society is outwitted, defeated, or actually collapses, and few stories in which people solve problems or triumph over obstacles.  Sometimes in SF we find stories that criticize our society by providing a contrasting example, or that show that people can grow and societies can change--there are quite a few SF stories in which the agent of the evil corporation joins the noble rebels or in which the soldier of the racist military joins the aliens to war against his own people or in which goody good aliens teach or force us naughty naughty humans to behave.  Most of the stories here in An ABC of Science Fiction, however, present no such hope--we are bad and doomed, and maybe on our way to hell we will infect other races with our evil--this thing is all Goofus and no Gallant.

OK, let's rank order the stories.  I am confident in my judgement of in which of the three categories each story belongs, and less confident of the proper rank of each story within its category.  Life is short, and I am not going to devote a lot of time to figuring out if the lameness of the limericks of "B. T. H. Xerxes" outweighs the odiousness of Damon Knight's "Maid to Measure" and should pull it down to the very bottom of the heap.

GOOD

"Harrison Bergeron" by Kurt Vonnegut
"The Fence" by Clifford Simak
"Let's Be Frank" by Brian Aldiss
"No Moon for Me" by Walter M. Miller
"Project Hush" by William Tenn
"X Marks the Pedwalk" by Fritz Leiber
"Thirty Days Had September" by Robert F. Young
"Close Behind Him" by John Wyndham

ACCEPTABLE

"Homey Atmosphere" by Daniel F. Galouye
"Day at the Beach" by Carol Emshwiller
"Love Story" by Eric Frank Russell
"The Awakening" by Arthur C. Clarke
"The Conquest by the Moon" by Washington Irving
"He Had a Big Heart" by Frank Quattrocchi
"In the Bag" by Laurence M. Janifer
"The Finer Breed" by Helen M. Urban
"The Great Slow Kings" by Roger Zelazny
"Pattern" by Fredric Brown

BAD

"Family Resemblance" by Alan E. Nourse
"Final Exam" by Chad Oliver
"Mute Milton" by Harry Harrison
"The Bitterest Pill" by Frederik Pohl
"I Do Not Hear You, Sir" by Avram Davidson
"The King of the Beasts" by Philip Jose Farmer
Three Limericks by B. T. H. Xerxes
"Maid to Measure" by Damon Knight

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More short science fiction stories from my shelf of anthologies in our next episode!

The Future is Now part one: Young, "Anmar," Meredith, and Corwin

Our last three blog posts were about SF stories which first appeared (in America, at least) in our most pretentious skin rag, Playboy.  I read them in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, published in 1966 by Playboy Press.  In the comments to the first installment of this three part series, SF fans George, marzaat and I talked a little about Playboy Press's SF line; when I revealed that I own 1970's The Future is Now, edited by William F. Nolan, marzaat expressed dissatisfaction with the volume.  This piqued my interest, and I decided to read the book myself.  Marzaat actually has a review of The Future is Now, but I am going to hold off on reading it until I have read the book's twelve stories and recorded my own thoughts about them over three blog posts.  In the final post, I'll talk about to what extent marzaat and I agree or disagree about the stories.

The Future is Now is not an anthology of stories from Playboy, which is what I thought it was when I bought it.  Rather, it is a collection of all new stories edited by Nolan and published by Sherbourne Press in hardcover in 1970.  The paperback Playboy Press edition I have was put out in 1971 and has a strange and unattractive cover that reminds me of that famous recalled Beatles record sleeve and perhaps is suggesting the stories therein are about overpopulation.  In his intro Nolan talks a little about the history of all-new SF anthologies, and the decline of the SF magazines, suggesting that the future of short form SF lies in books such as The Future is Now and not in magazines.     

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

I recognize Young's name, but for some reason I've never read anything by him.  The intro to the story lists Young's influences and the various blue collar jobs he's held over his life.

"The Ogress" is one of those SF stories which explains the scientific facts behind an ancient legend.  (Just recently we read Ray Russell's story about the truth behind the story of the Fall of the Rebel Angels, and last year we got a scientific explanation from Edmond Hamilton for Norse mythology.)  You see, Grendel was real, a "superbeing" created by the collective mental energy of the superstitious local peasantry.  (Yahweh and Zeus, we are told, were also real for a time, until their creators became more sophisticated and ceased to believe in them.)  Unsophisticated people across the galaxy occasionally create such gods and monsters, giant-sized raiders who murder people and destroy property, and to deal with them the institution known as Galactic Guidance sends out expert hunters, the Beowulfs, who are armed with powerful firearms called Dammerungs.  The plot of "The Ogress" follows the hunt of one such superbeing, a female monster, by one such Beowulf.  Interspersed with the account of the hunt for the ogress are flashbacks to earlier hunts.

This is a decent adventure story.   

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by "Frank Anmar"

I don't recognize Anmar's name, but I have read things by him, because this is a story by Nolan using a pseudonym.  Tricksy!  The title makes me worry it is going to be a dumb parody story.  I don't want to endure another piece of junk like "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!"

Well, it is not quite a parody, but it is a dumb joke story that pokes fun at rock music and modern art and has the kind of attitude about sex that nowadays would be considered evidence of "rape culture."  The plot is like that of an off-color sitcom with wacky schemes that fail and mistaken identity hi-jinks.

Our narrator, Hoff, is the Earthling PR man for the Red Dogs, a Martian rock group.  (Martians, called "zeebs," can interbreed with Earth humans, but are physically different from us; most importantly for this story, they have four buttocks instead of two.  These are the kinds of jokes Nolan offers us.)  Hoff uses lots of slang, which is a little annoying.

Hoff has launched a PR stunt--one of the four Red Dogs will marry the Earth girl who writes the best application essay.  While this stunt is underway, an artist, a pretty Earth girl, serendipitously shows up and provides Hoff an opportunity for another stunt.  This artist, Jenny, specializes in making plaster casts of people's asses, and she wants to make casts of the Red Dogs' asses; Hoff has the idea of using the casts to produce chairs to sell to the Red Dogs' fans.  The Red Dogs are shy, and only agree to let Jenny make their casts in a darkened bedroom, one at a time.

The main plot of this unfunny and nonsensical story revolves around the fact that in the darkened room one or more people had sex with Jenny, a virgin before she met Hoff and the band, and is now pregnant, and Hoff has to figure out how to deal with this potentially troublesome situation.  It doesn't make any sense that Jenny doesn't know who had sex with her, because she called the bandmembers into the dark room one at a time, and Nolan further cheats us readers by leading us to believe that only the Red Dogs got casts of their asses made, and then later revealing that Hoff and the band's manager also had casts made.  Why would Jenny want casts of the asses of the band's PR guy and their manager? 

Bad.

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" would be republished in two collections of stories by Nolan, 1974's Alien Horizons and 2005's Wild Galaxy.  I see that these collections also include "Gorf! Gorf! Gorf!" under its alias "The Day the Gorf Took Over."  Tricksy!

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

I got interested in Richard C. Meredith when Joachim Boaz wrote about his novel We All Died at Breakway Station but I couldn't lay hands on that novel and so instead read the first two of Meredith's three Timeliner books, At the Narrow Passage and No Brother, No Friend.  For some reason I never got to the third one, but tarbandu read all three.  Like Nolan, Meredith has an association with Playboy, Playboy Press having put out an edition of the Timeliner books.  Nolan here tells us interesting little tidbits about Meredith's academic, business and writing careers.

Back cover of my copy

Nolan lists Astounding among Meredith's influences, and "Earthcoming" does have an Astounding feel to it.  There is lots of hard SF talk about orbits and astronomical distances and the chemistry of space drives and so forth, and the story integrates the point of view of a hostile alien seeking to infiltrate the Earth, like what A. E. van Vogt does in the classic "Black Destroyer" (1939) and "Asylum" (1942), both Astounding cover stories.  (I read the original magazine version of "Asylum" today to refresh my memory of it, and was amazed to find a hotel named "Constantine's" figures prominently in it, while Meredith's "Earthcoming" features a planet called "Constantine!"  Coincidence?  Well, the evil aliens in "Asylum" are the "dreegh" and the good aliens the "lennel," while the evil aliens in "Earthcoming" are the "druul" and the good aliens the "luntinasel."  Both stories include cargo ships, van Vogt's captained by a Hanardy and Meredith's captained by a Haledon.  Lots of coincidences, or sign that this is an homage to our favorite Canadian?)

Earth, allied with some friendly aliens, is at war with evil parasitic aliens, the druul.  Meredith's story takes place on a cargo ship bringing valuable fuel from beyond the solar system to Earth for our war fleet.  Unfortunately for us, one of the crew members of the cargo vessel has had his body invaded and taken over by one of the druul, and, if this druul can get to Earth, it can release a hundred spores which will in turn take over a hundred more humans!  In less than a year all of Earth could be under the control of the druul and the human race kaput!  "Earthcoming" is written in the third-person, but our main character is the alien, and we learn all of his inner thoughts and various doubts as he struggles to accomplish his mission and deal with aspects of the personality of the man whose body and mind he has hijacked.  Most of the text, it feels like, is devoted to the technical issues of steering the ship, but Meredith also describes in gory detail the many injuries suffered by the characters.  The story ends when the druul, in the battered body of the human, crash lands on Earth.  As he has touched ground in an uninhabited arctic wasteland and his host body is incapacitated, I think we are supposed to understand that his spores can reach no hosts and thus Earth is safe.

This story is actually pretty good.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

Corwin is a famous and important broadcaster and Hollywood screenwriter of whom I had never heard; it seems he did a lot of work with government entities and the United Nations creating radio programs designed to "build world unity" and that kind of thing.  In the early 1980s he published a best-selling book attacking American culture.

"Belles Lettres, 2272" is a lame joke story.  I feel that Corwin is one of those men who was a giant in his day but will be quickly forgotten, in part because much of his work is in an obsolete medium, so it is perhaps appropriate that much of the humor of this story derives from the idea that people in the future won't remember much about the major figures or artistic productions of our time.  The form of the story is that of a letter written from one computer to another which includes extensive quotes from a third computer (a poem by said computer) and a fourth computer (an analysis of the poem.)  The story includes lots of pictographs or logograms that, I guess, we are to believe are commonly used in the written communication of the 23rd century:

The punchline of the story is the letter writer's complaint about obscurantism.

Only four pages, but still a waste of time.

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Well, we've got two duds so far, but also two decent traditional SF adventures full of sinister creatures, high technology and bloodshed.  We'll continue our look at The Future is Now in our next episode!