1970 stories by Clifford Simak, Ed Bryant, and George Zebrowski & Jack Dann

While working on my blog posts about Bob Shaw's 1973 collection of short stories Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, I flipped through the March 1970 issue of If and became intrigued by a story by Clifford Simak, "The Thing in the Stone," because it was accompanied by a moody illustration of a bipedal dinosaur.  Like everybody, I love dinosaurs.  So today we are looking at this story and two others in that issue of If, which also features debate about race and IQ in the letters column and an ad in which Tony Curtis offers you a button reading "IQ" (which stands for "I Quit") if you quit smoking cigarettes.

"The Thing in the Stone" by Clifford Simak

"The Thing in the Stone" was apparently a hit with readers, coming in second to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story "Ill Met in Lankhmar" in the voting for the 1971 Hugo for Best Novella.  It was included in Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1971 and has appeared in many anthologies and collections and been translated into six foreign languages.

This is one of those pastoral stories about country folk in the Wisconsin hulls who sit on porches and look at the hills and gossip about foxes and chickens and moonshining.  Wallace Daniels has lived in the area only three years as the story begins.  We learn that he likes climbing the hills and looking for fossils, but he sees more than fossils on these daily outings--he sees prehistoric plants and animals in the flesh!  In a flashback we learn that he developed the ability to see the past after a car accident (which wiped out his family) injured his head and "rearranged" something in his brain.  As he hikes, this ability will kick in and shut down at random intervals, enabling him to walk the countryside some apparently randomly determined time in the distant past, but not really interact with it; photographs taken in the past do not develop, he can't bring samples back to the 20th-century, and the dinosaurs and other prehistoric fauna can't see or smell him.

That car accident gave Daniels still more powers--he can listen in on the telepathic communications of aliens!  In a cave in a cliff face, accessible by climbing a tree, Daniels senses an alien intelligence embedded deep inside the rock which he suspects to be the crew of a space ship which crashed tens or hundreds of millions of years ago and was buried in the mud that this stone then was.  When an envious neighbor traps Daniels in the cave our hero tries to communicate with the alien and succeeds in holding a conversation with making a friend of not the actual space traveller trapped in the stone but a lesser creature loyal to it, a creature of pure energy that plays a role in alien society similar to that of a dog in human society.  This space hound has an intelligence similar to that of a human, but is a "lowly" creature in the  hierarchy of super smart alien society--it has been waiting here for the alien to somehow achieve freedom for millions of years.

Daniels escapes the cave when his power kicks in and he finds himself at a time before the cliff and cave had formed (luckily, his power always materializes him at ground level, not up in the air even if the ancient landscape was at a lower elevation than it will be in the 1900s.)  He is on the shore of an ancient ocean, at the time of the dawn of land-based life, there are no trees or grass, just slime and little amphibious creatures Simak doesn't describe.  An alien space ship appears, and drops a sphere into the shallows of the prehistoric sea; Daniels can "hear" the alien authorities bidding a farewell to an alien criminal who is being left imprisoned on the primitive Earth ("beyond the farthest track of galactic intercourse") for unspeakably horrible crimes--this is the alien entombed alive in the Wisconsin stone, beloved of the space hound despite its evil.

I guess the fact that the trapped alien is some kind of interstellar Mengele is our twist ending.  Our happy ending is provided by the fact that the space hound is going to be Daniels's bosom buddy--both lost their loved ones to some kind of tragedy but neither need ever be lonely again.

The big theme of this story seems to be the unity of all life, and the responsibility of living things for each other, even across borders of species and regardless of considerations of justice and worthiness.  Daniels feels a sense of duty regarding his cows and hogs, who rely on him for food and shelter, and when he is in the cave, in danger of dying of cold or thirst, he is thinking about the poor trapped alien and his own poor unfed livestock as much as he is about his own skin.  (The space hound notes the similarity of this devotion to his own devotion to the trapped alien.)  Daniels, who has no interest in hunting and doesn't own a gun, refuses to try to kill the fox who steals his chickens, and doesn't report to the cops the life-threatening trick his jerk of a neighbor played on him.  Like the aliens who don't execute a perpetrator of unfathomable atrocities and the space dog who loves his master despite his crimes, Daniels forgives those who trespass against him.

This story is not bad, though the conversations and descriptions feel a little long-winded at times and of course the powers Daniels has are pretty nonsensical.  "The Thing in the Stone" is a good example of the "pastoralism" for which Simak is famous, and it lacks the sort of bitter complaints we sometimes get from Simak about city life and human shortcomings that can get on my nerves.

"In the Silent World" by Ed Bryant

"In the Silent World" doesn't appear to have been a hit; besides If, it has only ever appeared as a bonus story in an Italian collection of Sterling Lanier stories.

Julie is a nineteen-year old college girl from a small town in Georgia and a telepath who can read minds.  She is lonely because she has never met another telepath.  One day during a lecture on Baudelaire she receives a mental message--another telepath, a young man named Ted, has found her!  After class she walks across campus to meet him, already thinking of what their married life will be like--who else could she fall in love with and marry besides the only other telepath in the world?  Especially since with her mind reading power she knows how selfish and horny all other men are!  But when she meets Ted she sees an obstacle to her new found happiness--Ted is black!

This is more of an idea than a story--it doesn't have anything to say about racism or interracial relationships or the black experience in America or anything like that, it just points out that people are racist as a twist ending--but it is acceptable filler, I guess.

"Traps" by George Zebrowski and Jack Dann

The galactic government is almost ready to OK colonization of an as yet unnamed planet, but they need a specimen of all the planet's land animals first, and one beast has so far eluded captured--the greycat!  Rysling is hired to capture one of these elusive beasts, and after landing on the planet sends out his remote controlled robot cage to snag the feline.  (Remember when J. Jonah Jameson remotly guided a robot designed to catch Spider-Man?  That was really something, wasn't it?)

The cat, it turns out, has psychic powers and somehow part of its soul enters Rysling's body and part of Rysling's soul enters the cat's body.  Not realizing the limitations of a human body, the cat psyche in Rysling's body tries to jump off a cliff, breaking the human's neck.  Meanwhile, the surviving portion of Rysling's psyche enjoys being in a cat body and quickly forgets its former human life altogether.

(Science fiction people love cats!)

OK, I guess.

"Traps" would later be translated into Italian and French (it appeared in the French edition of Galaxy) and was included in a 21st-century collection of Zebrowski and Dann collaborations titled Decimated. 

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These stories are a little underwhelming, but not actually bad.  (I'd have read the Poul Anderson story in this issue of If but the Poul Anderson estate requested that it be excluded from the file at the internet archive.) 

In our next episode, stories from SF magazines published in 1971.

Three mid-70s stories by Barry N. Malzberg

Via Ebay, I recently acquired the Lake Blackshear Regional Library of Americus, Georgia's withdrawn copy of Barry N. Malzberg's 1976 hardcover collection Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  On the jacket are quotes from Harlan Ellison ("Barry Malzberg is...a better writer than I am") and Brian Aldiss (who sees Malzberg as "a master of sex and depression") which would be reason enough to crack yet again the severely cracked spine of this harried and tattered volume, even if I hadn't, somehow or other, slowly been evolving into some kind of Malzberg obsessive. Today, four pieces from this collection!

"Introduction: A Short One for the Boys in the Back Room" (1976)

Malzberg starts the six-and-a-half page intro, dated "New Jersey: January 1976," to Down Here in the Dream Quarter by describing how he temporarily left off using 1950s issues of Astounding as bedtime reading and absorbed nine ("or perhaps ten") biographies of literary icons ("Ross and Tom and John and Ernest and James and John again and Sinclair"--he just gives the first names, mystifying you or flattering your erudition, though in the next paragraph there are more clues--for example, the James is apparently not Joyce or Boswell but Thurber,) only to find them depressingly similar tales of unhappiness--lives of rejection, failed marriages, and alcohol abuse.

Barry then moves on to describing the start of his own career as a writer and how he got into science fiction (at the same time telling us that his SF career is over--don't believe him!)  This account is both entertaining and interesting and contains numerous memorable tidbits, e.g., "the single happiest moment" of his life was when he learned he had made his first real SF sale, "We're Coming Through the Window" to Frederick Pohl at Galaxy, and that when he wrote his breakthrough story "Final War" (original title, when he was shopping it to literary magazines and slicks like The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, Playboy and Esquire, "Shoe a Troop of Horse") he "did not have Vietnam at all in mind."  In our last episode of this here blog we saw that Malzberg identified with A. E. van Vogt as a fellow sui generis writer--in this book Malzberg identifies with J. G. Ballard because both are (he says) symbols of a certain type of writing:

I never expected to be a major science fiction writer let alone the figure I have become.  (Which if not "major" is certainly that in terms of visibility as best symbol of a certain kind of writing in my field in my country just as J. G. Ballard occupies the same role in England.)      

We'll let you decide if both these self-identifications, written within six months of each other, can be reconciled.

A valuable document for all of you (us?) students of the sage of Teaneck!

"A Galaxy Called Rome" (1975)

This famous story, the foundation of Malzberg's novel Galaxies, which I read back in 2011 in a 1998 anthology of classic novels of space travel and was my first exposure to Malzberg's work, begins by invoking seminal SF editor John W. Campbell, Jr, dead four years when "A Galaxy Called Rome" was published.  (Campbell died on July 11, 1971, within a week of your humble blogger's birth.)

The first line of "A Galaxy Called Rome" is "This is not a novelette but a series of notes," and Malzberg explains that the novelette will "lean heavily upon" two posthumously published editorials by Campbell, in which Campbell posits the existence of a "black galaxy," the product of a neutron star's collapse, a thing with such gravitational power that it is invisible and can constrain not only "light itself but space and time." The novelette Malzberg proposes writing would be about a space ship trapped in this black galaxy, named after Rome by Campbell because all roads lead to it (though none lead away.)

In note form, interspersed with draft fragments of important scenes, we get the outline of the story of ship captain and pilot Lena Thomas, who is the sole waking person on a ship that ends up in the black galaxy, and who thus lives for thousands of years, going insane.  Malzberg's "notes" are full of specific criticism of hard SF ("At this point in the story great gobs of physics, astronomical and mathematical data would have to be incorporated") as well as criticism of fiction in general ("It is to be noted that putting this conventional viewpoint in the character of a woman will give another of those necessary levels of irony with which the story must abound if it is to be anything other than a freak show...irony will give it legitimacy.")

"A Galaxy Called Rome" seems, to me, to be about the impossibility of real knowledge, as well as a reflection on the uselessness of science fiction and perhaps literature in general.  No information can leave the black galaxy, a reminder of the inability of one human being to know another, to transmit information, or to truly know anything with confidence.  Lena Thomas talks to the rest of the crew and passengers, all of whom are in suspended animation and cannot hear her--she is talking for herself, for own psychological benefit, and isn't this like the writer, who writes not knowing if his work will even be published, much less if others will read and understand it? Malzberg muses that SF's pretensions makes little sense--what is the point of speculating about what happens on other planets or in different times when what goes on in one's own town, much less the town one over, is just as unknowable?  ("...it occurred to me that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious as the stars...." Why consider the "sound of pulsars" when "the music of the paddock area at Aqueduct racetrack" is just as, or even more, strange and exciting?  Isn't writing or reading about riding in a star ship just as interesting as writing or reading about riding in a New York City subway car?

Image from Amazon.co.uk--Malzberg's career is plagued with typos!

"A Galaxy Called Rome" is characteristic of Malzberg--it's about being a writer, it shows respect for SF at the same time it calls SF's traditional attitudes into question, it suggests that man's problems will go with him to the stars because those problems are spiritual and psychological, it mentions Freud and the Aqueduct and frustrating sex--but it is better than average for Malzberg because it has more clever turns of phrase and more interesting images per page than most of Malzberg's work, and at about 20 pages it is a good length, neither overstaying its welcome and feeling like it is bloated with filler nor coming off like a half-baked trifle dashed off for a check.  I really recommend this one, not just to Malzberg fans (who of course need to read it) but to people curious about Malzberg who haven't tried him yet, or those who have read one or a few other Malzberg stories and been irritated or unimpressed; this is top shelf Malzberg.

In his Afterword Malzberg tells us he wrote the story for an anthology called Faster Than Light and that it was rejected by the editors, whom he does not name (they are George Zebrowski and Jack Dann.)  Malzberg, who usually says sympathetic things about editors and often expresses his gratitude to them (in fact, Down Here in the Dream Quarter is dedicated to a list of eleven editors) tells us that he is still angry about this rejection; I think Malzberg realizes this is some of his best work.  "A Galaxy Called Rome" first appeared, then, in F&SF, and it has been reprinted many many times, often in books with titles that include the word "Best" or "Top" or "Favorite" or "Great."  (Zebrowski and Dann blew it on this one, but I suppose they made amends in 1998--they were editors, along with Pamela Sargent, of that three book anthology that contains Galaxies!)

"Thirty-Seven Northwest" (1976)

This story, if isfdb is to be believed, has only ever appeared in this book, so you are just going to have to go buy a copy, aren't you?

Our narrator, who is also named Thomas, is an explorer walking around on the surface of Jupiter, in a massively heavy suit which allows him to survive and move in the tremendous gravity of that planet.  He does whatever the people back at base tell him to do, setting up cameras, looking this way and that, etc.  This is all pretty well written in hard SF style, interspersed with Malzbergian descriptions of the narrator's fears about the deadly planet and his worries that stem from the fact that he was supposed to be merely one component of a three-member team, and his comrades, for some reason, have not accompanied him.

At the end of the seven-page story the people at base order him to remove his helmet; when he protests that he will die they threaten to leave him on Jupiter forever.  Then we learn the shocking truth: everybody on this mission is a child!  Why or how this happened is not explored.

A decent piece of work.

In his Afterword to this tale Malzberg compares it to Golding's Lord of the Flies.  He also says that "What all post-technological cultures share is the absolute brutality with which they treat their children, all their children.  (I don't think most other cultures were or are any better but it is this one I know well enough to generalize.)"  This is puzzling. First of all, do people normally think of 1976 USA as "post-technological?"  Does Malzberg mean "post-industrial?"  Secondly, it seems obvious that, compared to most other places and times, that post-World War II America, and the West broadly, coddles and pampers kids.  What "absolute brutality" is he talking about?

Malzberg also uses the afterword to promote Kris Neville, whom he considers "underrated," and to list stories of Neville's which he believes "articulate" the alleged brutality of which Malzberg speaks "with visionary skill."  The Neville stories he lists are "Betty-ann," "From the Government Printing Office," and "Overture;" I have read some Neville but none of these.  Joachim Boaz read the fix-up novel of which "Betty-ann" and "Overture" are a part, and wrote about it in 2015--check his thoughts out at the link.

"Sedan Deville" (1974)

Here's something you maybe didn't know about our pal Barry--he loves cars!  Cadillacs, in fact!  I'm always a little surprised to learn that a smart and/or educated person loves cars or sports, but I hear it all the time, so maybe I should stop being surprised by it.

"Sedan Deville," which first saw light of day in F&SF, consists of letters written to a literary agent by Karl Delvecchio, New Jersey auto mechanic!  Delvecchio writes ungrammatically and refers to himself in the third person with regularity, but he is a published writer, having sold stories to a failing SF magazine, Terrific Science Fiction.  I know you are disappointed about this grease monkey's name, but dry your eyes--the editor of Terrific Science Fiction is named Mr. Walter Thomas!

Anyway, the letters reveal that Delvecchio's stories are all about Cadillacs; in fact, he claims that he is simply the messenger of the Cadillacs, who tell him their stories as he works on them.  He is contacting the agent because Terrific has folded and he desires help finding new markets, but the agent's demands for reading fees and criticism of his stories (the agent suggests he show range by writing about some other make of car) anger him.  The letters conclude with Delvecchio's assertion that the energy crisis is a plot to murder the Cadillacs!

I laughed at some of the jokes in this story, so it gets a thumbs up.  Maybe nowadays the story would be pilloried because it could be interpreted as making fun of a choleric working-class ethnic who may be an immigrant.  It would have been safer to name the mechanic "Thomas," Barry, and reserve "Delvecchio" for the kind but doomed editor of Terrific!

In the Afterword Malzberg talks about the Cadillacs he has owned and describes how each died on him in dramatic circumstances.  (Every day brings new reasons to be glad I drive a Toyota.)  He also points out that when some unnamed "commentator" learned he drove a Cadillac this "enraged" individual listed Malzberg "near the top of the Exploiting Class"--a foreshadowing of the feminist attack on Malzberg in 2013?  No matter how leftist you may be, there's always another leftist ready to slide the knife into you for the least infraction of their ever-shifting creed.

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Worthwhile stuff!

When Brian Doherty of Reason magazine reviewed the 2013 Malzberg collection The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg he noted that it had typos on every page.  Down Here in the Dream Quarter is not nearly as bad as that, but poor Barry was not well-served by the editors at Doubleday back in the '70s.  When he cites the Neville stories, "From the Government Printing Office" is listed as "In the Government Printing Office" and even though the book's title is printed correctly on the title page, the header on every page that has one reads, nonsensically, "DOWN HERE IN THE DREAM QUARTERS." Sad!

The Omega Point by George Zebrowski

"You were the strongest, the best, the most worthy to inherit the universe, at the cost of every other intelligent race in the galaxy.  By your own criterion you lost.  You were not the strongest."

George Zebrowski's was a name I was familiar with (maybe primarily from tarbandu's and Joachim Boaz's blogs), but I don't think I had ever read anything by him when I saw the Ace 1972 paperback of The Omega Point at a used book store recently, so I picked it up.

(I may have read "Assassins of Air" in Future City, but I don't remember it.)

I really like the cover by Bob Pepper: the colors, the repeated motif of circles and horizontal lines, the draperies (I love paintings and sculptures and drawings of draperies, from Ancient Greece to Albert Moore to Leonardo to Burne-Jones), the woman holding up a ring Mucha-style, the guy going into convulsions, the pile of skeletons.  Can I like the novel as much I like as the cover?  Gadzooks, I hope so!

The Omega Point (which turns out to be the second volume of a trilogy, though it was the volume first published) was at least partly inspired by the Punic Wars, seen from the point of view of the Carthaginians. On the very first page of the book, the page which in other books often has some blurbs or other ad copy, is a retelling of the story of the young Hannibal swearing eternal hatred of Rome, and our main character, Gorgias the Fourth, is a stand-in for Hannibal.  As I guess we should expect from a Vietnam War-era SF novel, the Earth is the Roman-like evil empire, and Gorgias (are we pronouncing this "gorgeous?") is one of the last survivors of an alien culture defeated and reduced to almost nothing by the vindictive Earth.

It is the brink of the Seventh Millennium!  Humans have been colonizing the galaxy for thousands of years.  Back in 5000 or so the Herculean Empire was built, its people the hybrid descendents of Earthmen who raped aliens--this is one of the those SF novels in which the aliens are similar enough to humans that interbreeding can take place.  This is also one of those SF novels in which the aliens are better than the humans--the Herculeans have psychic powers, superior technology, and great longevity.  Despite these advantages, when the Herculeans and the Earth Federation go to war in 5148, it is the Herculeans that are defeated (after a war that lasts over a thousand years.)  The Earthmen destroy entire Herculean planets, put Herculeans to death in the vaporizer chamber, hunt the survivors for sport, and so on.  (Zebrowski attributes to the Earth all the crummy things white people have done to non-whites throughout history.)

Our story takes place hundreds of years after the end of the war.  Three-hundred year old Gorgias the Fourth, Emperor of the extinct Herculean Empire, is on the run in his one-man super space ship.  Since the end of the war he has been committing acts of murder and sabotage here and there, and we follow him on a few such missions. Between missions he searches the ruined planets of the Herculean Empire for a super weapon that can perhaps turn the tide of this one man vs the galaxy war, and visits another of the handful of Herculean survivors, Myraa, a beautiful woman who has the ability to absorb the consciousnesses of other people; within her live the souls of several other Herculeans.

We also follow Rafael Kurbi, the human currently tasked with pursuing Gorgias. Kurbi admires Gorgias, and has contempt for his own people; he hopes to make peace with Gorgias.  Kurbi thinks that human culture has become decadent, and that an infusion of Herculean culture would energize the human race.

This anti-Western space opera reminded me of Michael Moorcock's fantasies of Elric, Dorian Hawkmoon, and Oswald Bastable, in which the West, or thinly veiled symbols of England, are the evil empires and the admirable characters from these evil empires "go native" and turn on their fellows.

Two thirds of the way through the book Kurbi catches up with Gorgias, who has found the super weapon he has been looking for.  Kurbi tries to negotiate with Gorgias, but Gorgias refuses, and there is a battle on Myraa's planet that sees the employment of ray guns, forcefields, and a planetary laser bombardment by the Earth space navy, among even more amazing technological military marvels.  In the end Gorgias is killed, but his soul is captured by Myrra.  In the last few pages of the book we get a sense-of-wonder collective unconsciousness climax--Gorgias and Myraa will live forever, at one with the universe, loving every living thing:

He knew she felt his strength inside her, a new addition to the power which would enable the entire community to burst the confines of entropy and space-time.

On the lookout for classical allusions, I was reminded by the death of Gorgias of the death of Pompey in Lucan's Pharsalia.  At the start of Book Nine of Pharsalia, Pompey's soul tours the universe and then settles in the hearts and minds of republican heroes Brutus and Cato.  (Repeated references to the fact that Gorgias has much human blood perhaps should also point us towards Pharsalia, an epic recounting the civil war that broke out when Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon and invaded Italy; in fact, the translation I own, that of Susan H. Braund, is titled Civil War.) 

Though full of interesting stuff, The Omega Point is not very good.  While not particularly long (169 pages, with blank pages between the 17 chapters) it feels long; individual scenes can be long and full of unnecessary detail, like a four-page description of an orchestral performance (Gorgias assassinates the composer, but don't feel bad for him, Kurbi says he was a second-rate artist) and the sleep-inducing set-in-italics six-page New Wave dream sequence:

Fear became a glow reknitting the strands of his consciousness, reinforcing the matrix of his individuality, the craggy-lightning pattern of his nervous system buried deeply in his flesh, spine and brain....

The book can be pretentious, with lots of epigraphs consisting of quotes from Freud, Shakespeare, Unamuno, Teilhard de Chardin, and others.  The style is not very good, and the characters are not very interesting.  The plot feels kind of thrown together, like Zebrowski made it up as he went along, or was trying to reach a certain page count; some scenes feel unnecessary, and the novel lacks a clear focus or theme.  What is the book trying to be?  An action adventure?  A denunciation of Western imperialism? The story of a lonely man who is full of hate, and grows to the point he knows and loves all of creation?  A meditation on how you should not be blinded by anger, but should learn to love all things because we are all components of the same universe, all sparks of the divine fire?  I think maybe it is trying to be all those things, but not doing any of them very well.  

In 1983 a revised version of The Omega Point was published as a component of a single-volume edition of The Omega Point Trilogy.  Maybe the revision is a big improvement; Poul Anderson and The New York Times were crazy about the trilogy! (Squint or right click the image below to read the glowing blurbs!)

I have to give The Omega Point (1972) a marginal thumbs down.  It is not terrible and I can envisage a revision that tightened up the plot and pacing and improved the style enough that I would have enjoyed it.  (As the hours go by the things I didn't like about the novel fade from memory, while its virtues grow in prominence.)  If I spot the 1983 trilogy on the shelves of a used bookstore I will have to strongly consider buying it and giving The Omega Point a second chance.