1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty and Gerard F. Conway (plus: a 1942 tale by Dwight Swain!)

In April of 2017 I purchased on ebay a lot of four issues of Fantastic edited by Ted White.  Let's take a look at the December 1970 issue of the magazine; you can save some shekels by just reading it at the internet archive.

I'm skipping the Laumer serial, because I haven't read the earlier novels in the series and my interest in Laumer is limited.  I'm skipping Richard Lupoff's spoof of Harlan Ellison because spoofs have little appeal for me.  And I'm skipping Barry Malzberg's "The New Rappacini" because I read it a year and a half ago; I called it "very good," so don't you skip it if you haven't read it yet!   

In his editorial, White talks a little about his relationships with the artists who have appeared in Amazing and Fantastic since he took over the role of editor, among them MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  He also quotes a letter from Ursula K. Le Guin praising himself and Fantastic, and explains what his policy is regarding the types of stories that will appear in Fantastic:

Yes, it sounds like he'll take anything.

Alexei Panshin's column, described as controversial on the cover, starts with a long quote from Damon Knight paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Then Panshin takes Kuhn's idea (that the scientific establishment fruitfully follows a paradigm for a long period, during which minor problems with the paradigm gradually accumulate, until those minor "anomalies" and "counterinstances" are numerous enough that the paradigm becomes weak and vulnerable to overthrow by a new paradigm) and applies it to the SF field.  Panshin thinks the old SF paradigm is in a weakened state, and is under attack by the New Wave, but that the New Wavers have yet to come up with a truly new paradigm that is strong enough to replace the old.  Panshin then describes his own writing career, in which (he says) he tried to write in new ways--he loved SF but didn't want to write melodramas or about technology--that were rejected by the SF establishment.  But eventually he and his fellow young innovators, at first accepted only by Ace Books (which he calls "a rightly despised market that poured out such a stream of material that it would seemingly publish anything") fought their way to widespread acceptance, winning many Hugos and Nebulas.  He then exhorts the SF community to continue changing and expanding, while admitting that there is still room for melodramatic stories about technology.  Panshin suggests replacing the term "science fiction" with "creative fantasy," and throughout the magazine we can see White enthusiastically take up this coinage, using it in his editorial as well as in the intro to Malzberg's story.

Panshin's column is interesting, and as somebody who enjoys the old melodramas and sciencey stories as well as the work of many of the newer writers Panshin mentions, like Disch and Lafferty (and Panshin's own Rite Of Passage), I can look on these old controversies intellectually, with a comfortable level of detachment.

In this issue of Fantastic we find eleven pages devoted to letters and White's responses to them.  There is arguing about drugs, overpopulation, the TV show The Prisoner, and, most heatedly, about ZIP codes and the Post Office (Ted worked briefly in the Baltimore Post Office, we learn.)  I found most interesting the discussion of abortive attempts to include comic art in Galaxy (where Vaughn Bode's Sunspot appeared for four issues) and Fantastic (which included a four-page comic section called Fantastic Illustrated in at least one issue--the comic at the link is so lame it is embarrassing.)  White claims that he was going to have Bode in Fantastic and then the deep pockets over at Galaxy stole Bode away with the promise of quadruple the amount of cash poor Ted could offer.

On to the stories! The Aldiss, Lafferty and Conway stories were new; the Swain is a reprint from a 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

"Cardiac Arrest" by Brian Aldiss

This story (like 20 pages long) feels long and a little tedious.  An American flies to Hong Kong under an assumed name in order to meet a business contact.  On just about every page are italicized and ungrammatical stream of consciousness passages describing the Yank's fantasies and fears of violence and sex, daydreams and nightmares based on his reading of spy novels.  (Aldiss throws in some poetic "wordplay," like combining Mao's name and the word "drowning" at the end of this aphoristic phrase: "the army and peasants are an ocean in which the invaders will drowsetung.")

Before his scheduled meeting, which is unexpectedly delayed, the American meets an Englishman, an RAF veteran of WWII and the Suez crisis, and this guy's German partner in grey and black market business ventures.  The Yank explains that he is a scientist and he has brought with him samples of a virus which renders those it infects immortal--his idea is to defect to communist China and give them the virus; in return the Chinese Communist Party has offered him a big estate.  The American gets involved in a sort of side deal with these two shady Europeans, whose help he suspects he needs.

The defection effort fails when Hong Kong police interrupt the American's meeting with a Red Chinese representative, and the German is killed.  The American and Englishman flee for Europe, the RAF vet at the controls of a Soviet plane.  Disaster strikes, and at the end of the story we learn the answer to the mystery that was nagging me for many pages: why would an intelligent educated American who was not a communist himself want to move to mainland China, which in the story is portrayed as a pretty menacing entity? 

Along with the Walter Mitty/Owl Creek Bridge gimmick, Aldiss tries to do some interesting things in this story based around people's views of their own nations and other nations.  Characters give voice to American and British attitudes about WWII, American views of China, England and Germany, European views of the USA and China (a subplot has to do with the Portuguese surrendering Macao to the communists) and Chinese views of America.  Having fought in Burma in the Second World War, Aldiss has more first hand knowledge of the Far East than the average Anglophone bear--remember his story "Lambeth Blossom" about a tyrannical Chinese empire of the future?  Another theme is that political leaders (and ordinary people as well!) the world over are hypocritical and untrustworthy jerks who may or may not believe the ideological stuff they say and whose actions may not accord with those stated beliefs..

I want to like "Cardiac Arrest" because immortality, exiles and emigres, socialist tyranny, and British military history are all interests of mine, but while it is inventive and experimental, it can be hard going.  It is easier to admire the story now than it was to enjoy it when I was in the middle of it and finding it not very clear and not very compelling.  I guess I'll say its virtues slightly outweigh the challenges it presents, and recommend it to people who like a story that is puzzling but which more or less puts all the pieces together by the time you get to the end of it.  "Cardiac Arrest" would go on to be included on the DAW Book of Aldiss, behind an impressive Karel Thole cover and the British collection Comic Inferno.

"Walk of the Midnight Demon" by Gerard F. Conway

I don't think I have ever read anything by Conway before; he seems to be most famous for writing Spider-Man comics starting in the 1970s and TV crime shows starting in the 1980s.  Along with the long list of comic books Conway has penned, Wikipedia offers a writing sample in which Conway complains about how difficult life is for the sons and daughters of Erin:

My grandparents were born in Ireland. They came to America in the late 'teens of the last century and lived a life not very different from the life my housekeeper and her husband live today.... Because they were lower-class Irish, they were the Hispanics of their day...viewed with scorn by the WASP upper class....

Aye, Begorrah!

This story is set in one of those sword and sorcery worlds with witches and druids and people riding on horses and staying in inns and so forth.  Our narrator is Haxx, and in the first scene he is riding across "the death plain" with his buddy Illusiah, who is dying of a stomach injury.  After Illusiah expires and falls off his horse, Haxx subjects us to six or seven flashbacks which are presented out of chronological order.  Haxx and his friends were cursed--as they traveled from inn to inn, everywhere they went people around them would turn up dead.  They consulted various witches in an effort to  find out what was going on, and we get a longish scene of a tarot reading.  The whole story (like six pages) is boring; Conway tries to make it atmospheric with descriptions of faces and scenery and  weather, but these descriptions made my eyes glaze over and the story is vague in every possible way.  In the end we learn that Haxx is a vampire or werewolf or Mr. Hyde or servant of the "Death God" sent to gather souls or some such thing, that he has been killing all these people without any of his friends, or he himself, realizing it until it was too late.

Bad.  "Walk of the Midnight Demon," a pointless exercise, has never appeared elsewhere.

"Been a Long, Long Time" by R. A . Lafferty

A tarot-reading woman figures prominently in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and in Conway's "Walk of the Midnight Demon," and Lafferty's "Been A Long, Long Time" begins with a direct reference to Eliot's "The Hollow Men": "It doesn't end with one--it Begins with a whimper."  The whimper comes from Boshel, an immortal being at the beginning of time who, faced by a dispute between immortals--the rebellion of Lucifer that culminates in the Fall of the Rebel Angels--is unable to decide which side of the War in Heaven to join.  By default, he ends up with the conservative forces headed by Michael, but Boshel's indecision leads to the introduction of randomness to the universe, and it is determined that he must be punished.  Michael puts Boshel in charge of the practical realization of the famous thought experiment that insists that monkeys striking keys at random will eventually type out an exact text of the complete works of Shakespeare.

The immortal monkeys bang away at their unfailing typewriters for billions upon billions of years--the universe expands to its limit, collapses, and begins to expand again.  This cyclical process repeats itself hundreds, thousands, millions of times!  Boshel, and even more so the cleverest of the monkeys, grow frustrated, and that mischievous simian begins bending the rules a little in hopes of finishing up this absurd project once and for all.

This is a fun little story, and characteristic of Lafferty's work, with its folksy dialogue, entertaining jokes, and allusions to Christian thought.  "Been a Long, Long Time" would go on to appear in Brian Aldiss's Galactic Empires anthology and The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy as well as two Lafferty collections, and has been translated into German, Dutch and Serbian.

"The Bottle Imp" by Dwight V. Swain (1942)

For whatever reason (and let's remember that when we read the August 1972 issue's letters column we learned that Ted's control of the magazine was surprisingly limited) the December 1970 issue of Fantastic includes a reprint of a story from the September 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures, Dwight V. Swain's "The Bottle Imp."  On the contents page it is hailed as a "Famous Fantastic Classic" but it is not even listed on the cover--maybe it was a last minute selection.  I don't know that I have ever heard of Swain before; Wikipedia suggests he was an important teacher of screenwriters.  In 1942 Fantastic Adventures published stories by better-known SF writers like Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, and Ross Rocklynne, and why they chose Swain over them is a little mysterious to me--maybe Fantastic had lost the rights to those stories, or maybe they were not the right length?  Anyway, let's give Swain a chance.

Irish-American warehouse worker Tod Barnes is sitting in a crummy bar, lamenting his tragic lot and drinking whiskey and chewing Copenhagen (the kids we called "burnouts" in my high school used to chew that stuff) when a six-inch tall devil appears on his table!  The satanic creature introduces himself as Beezlebub and Tod explains to his new friend that he has been laid off from his job at a tire wholesaler's but can't get a new job because the firm's owner won't give him a release (some kind of war-related regulation is involved) and he can't join the army because of a bum leg and his girlfriend Molly Shannahan has left him for middle-class guy Walter Dale (Tod calls him "one of those office lounge lizards...smooth line, all the trimmings.")

Beezlebub tells Tod that his problems are nothing compared to the trouble he could get him in, and proceeds to demonstrate.  Tod vomits all over the new pants of another bar patron, mobster Steve Kroloski, renowned as "king of the rackets."  A brawl ensues and Tod and Kroloski end up in jail.  When Kroloski's lawyer springs him, the mobster also springs Tod.  Tod is soon involved in the burglary of his old place of employment, the tire warehouse.  Kroloski has Molly Shannahan kidnapped and dragged to the tire warehouse so she can open the combination locked door that stands between the gangster and the treasure trove of rubber.  For good measure he tells her that Tod is a willing accomplice in this grand larceny.

Molly refuses to open the door, and Tod is forced to watch while Kroloski beats his former girlfriend until "even Molly's staunch Irish spirit could stand the torture no longer" and she relents.  I guess the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle really do have it tough!  Beezlebub (whom only Tod can see, of course) takes credit for all the horrible things that are befalling Tod and gloats that Kroloski is going to murder both Tod and Molly to cover up his crime.  Via an elaborate stratagem involving spitting and cutting his own flesh, Tod escapes his bonds, rescues Molly by throwing tires at the gangsters, alerts the police by spitting at burglar alarm wires, and exposes Walter Dale (one of those scornful WASPs, no doubt!) as Kroloski's inside man (the phrase "finger man" is used.)  As the story ends Molly is back in Tod's arms, Tod gets a cushy government job ("warehouse inspector for the tire rationing board") and Beezelbub is exorcised in a dumb twist ending.   

"The Bottle Imp" is a brutal (and somewhat disgusting) crime story full of torture and pain and tobacco juice spitting that exploits people's ethnic and class resentments and fascination with sexualized violence, upon which has been grafted a goofy devil story, I guess as a joke or a justification for printing a weak mystery story in a SF magazine--the imp is actually totally unnecessary to the plot and we are invited to assume it is simply an hallucination.  Thumbs down for Swain, even if he is a member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame, along with R. A. Lafferty, C. J. Cherryh and S. E. Hinton.  (On the upside, I guess this is an interesting historical artifact, a piece of popular fiction about the lives of American working-class civilians during WWII, written contemporaneously with the milieu it describes.)

**********

More stories from old magazines in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log!     

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, July 1973

Our look through the August 1972 issue of Fantastic was so worthwhile I decided to similarly examine another issue in my collection, that from July 1973.  If you don't have a copy, and don't feel like spending ten or twenty bucks on ebay for one, you can read along at the internet archive.  No shame!

The cover featuring the mustachioed Conan, King of Aquilonia, by Harry Roland, while not terrific, isn't bad.  Swords and shields, dinosaur skeletons, human skulls, a grim muscleman, these are things we've all seen a billion times but which never lose their appeal.  The first thing we find in the magazine after an ad for the Rosicrucians and the Table of Contents is editor Ted White's editorial.  Ted uses three pages of his editorial to describe in detail the recent vote for the 1972 Hugo for Best Professional SF Magazine at LACon.  The somewhat complicated Australian ballot was used to pick the winner, and F&SF was awarded the Hugo, even though more voters picked Analog as their favorite mag.  (Fantastic came in fifth place out of five nominees, behind F&SF, Analog, Amazing and Galaxy.  Ouch!)

Ted then discusses the recent publication by Manor Books of The Best from Amazing Stories and the forthcoming release by the same publisher of The Best from Fantastic, and we learn that bringing these anthologies to market is a process fraught with peril!  Ted grouses that Manor's typesetting is poor and that they left out the introduction he wrote for The Best from Amazing Stories, and hopes they will do a better job on The Best from Fantastic.  He then spends half a page explaining the relationship of a magazine's cover date with when it will be appearing on newsstands.

Ted finishes up this editorial with some good news: the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which like this issue contained a Conan story by de Camp and Lin Carter, was a very big seller.  Ted muses that the Conan brand sells magazines, and that fantasy, which for decades has been outsold by science fiction, may be expanding its market share!  This leads Ted to voice what sounds like a mission statement!

...it is my conviction that, under Conan's herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function--indeed, the duty--of this magazine to join forces with the times.

Let's see what the herald of the fantasy renaissance of the early 1970s is up to!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

King Conan of Aquilonia has just lead his army to victory over an unexpected foreign invasion force.  Conan wonders why the leader of this foreign army would suddenly be so reckless as to attack wealthy Aquilonia and its famously warlike monarch, and his suspicions are confirmed by a white druid who comes by to tell Conan that the attack was inspired by the evil wizard Thoth-Amon.  So Conan leads his army to Stygia, a land of sand dunes and palm trees and the ruined city of Nebthu, which the druid informs Conan is Thoth-Amon's current base of operations.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" begins a year or so after the events depicted in "Witch of the Mists," the Conan story I talked about in my last blog post.  That tale featured the four greatest evil wizards in the world, including, besides Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, a huge muscular black jungle shaman, Pra-Eun, an effeminate little Oriental, and the witch of the title, Louhi, a woman in charge of a death cult of skinny mask-wearing weirdos.  Maybe the three diversity wizards were offensive stereotypes, but each of them at least brings an interesting image to mind--Thoth-Amon is totally boring, just some guy.  Why did de Camp and Carter choose to make bland Thoth-Amon the lead villain of this story instead of one of the other, more interesting, sorcerers?  (Maybe I should be asking why de Camp and Carter didn't spend more time making Thoth-Amon more interesting.  And don't tell me Thoth-Amon is really cool in some earlier story, so de Camp and Carter don't need to expend ink making him compelling here--each story should be able to stand on its own!)

The Aquilonian army camps in the desert near Nebthu and a sphinx that looks like a hyena-headed monster.  At night a spy is spotted, and Conan, accompanied by his son and the white druid, shadow the dimly-seen enemy agent into the sphinx and underground, walking right into a trap!  In a huge circular room with seating on its perimeter, like a senate chamber or an arena, await Thoth-Amon and hundreds of evil wizards.  (When I read Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon's The Eyes of Sarsis I wondered how the economy of Tiana's world could support so many pirates, who, like government workers, don't produce wealth, just consume it, and now I'm wondering how the economy of Conan's world can support so many evil magicians, who presumably are not farming, hunting, fishing, mining, or doing anything else productive.) 

Thoth-Amon gives a speech in which he lists all the times Conan has defeated him (it's practically an ad for the Lancer line of Conan paperbacks) and then he and his battalion of wizards try to wipe out Conan's party with green rays, but the white druid ("the greatest white magician alive on Earth in our age") repels all their spells and then shatters their minds, leaving only their leader standing.  Thoth-Amon flees, but not before summoning the monster that serves as the model for the sphinx, the "ghoul-hyena of Chaos!"  This quadruped is "huge as half a hundred lions!"  The ghoul-hyena chases Conan and his friends out of the sphinx, but then the monster is distracted by the Stygian army (which is taking a break from beleaguering the Aquilonian army) and wipes them out.  The sun rises, and the sun-hating ghoul-hyena retreats to its lair before it can molest the Aquilonians.

Foreshadowing the next Conan story, the druid uses his powers to divine that Thoth-Amon is travelling south, to the jungle, so maybe we'll be seeing Nenaunir next time!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is certainly better than "Witch of the Mists;" it feels larger and more momentous, and I like all the military stuff, the battle scenes between the Aquilonian force and the Stygian force and seeing how Conan leads his army on its march.   The Egyptian-type setting is also better than the boring woods and swamp of the earlier story.  Of course, the structure of the climax is pretty similar to "Witch of the Mists," with Conan blundering into traps and getting saved from a magic spell by one of his friends.  I'll judge this one on the high end of "acceptable," maybe "marginally good."

A British edition of
Conan of Aquilonia

One of the things about "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" I didn't really like was the implication that Conan's wild career was the result of the "Lords of Creation" impelling Conan "out of wintry Cimmeria...to crush evil in the world's West."  I like to think of Conan as a strong-willed individual, a self-made man, who does whatever he wants in an amoral universe in which the gods are indifferent or parochial or simply selfish; embedding Conan in a Good vs Evil narrative and portraying him as a champion or a pawn of the Lords of Light doesn't seem, to me, like a very good idea.  A Conan who bends the world to his will and, if he does the right thing, does it because he chooses to do so, is more interesting than a Conan who is the obedient servant or cat's paw of some establishment or set of principles.  (I'm not at all opposed to stories about champions of good fighting agents of evil or stories about people manipulated by gods or establishments, I just don't remember the Conan of the Howard stories being that sort of character--my image of Conan is as an icon of rugged individualism and self-reliance who pursues his own course, seizing life with gusto and the hell with everybody else and their rules.)

Another gripe I have with this story as well as "Witch of the Mists" is that the magic is boring.  The stories feature the four top black magicians in the world and the top white magician in the world, but all they do is obvious stuff like shoot rays at each other and teleport.  Offutt and Lyon filled their Tiana books with much stranger and creative magic.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" would reappear in 1977's Conan of Aquilonia.   Here in Fantastic it is accompanied by an unspecific and embarrassingly silly illustration by Billy Graham.  Graham doesn't even include Conan's mustache!

"Iron Mountain" by Gordon Eklund

It has been years since I read anything by Gordon Eklund, and a glance at old blog posts that mention him indicates I was not very impressed with his work.  Well, here's your chance to get me on your side, Gordon!

Chou Lun Chu served in Manchuria in World War II, made his way to Hong Kong, and then, ten years ago when he was 70, to San Francisco.  Since then San Francisco has been evacuated, but Chou decided to stay and is currently living the life of a scavenger!  Life for a single (the Japs killed his wife 50 years ago!) 80-year-old scavenger in a city full of smog and murderous gangs is no picnic, but Chou has no interest in moving to the countryside.

When he can't find any more canned goods in his residential hotel, Chou ventures out into the abandoned streets for the first time in a month.  He meets a young white woman, who befriends him and shares her food and water with him.  She also shares with him her little pleasures, like "shopping" in an abandoned clothing store, and explains to him (and we readers) why the city was evacuated.

This is a "literary" or "New Wave" story, more a psychological character study and collection of striking images than a plot-driven narrative.  Nothing is clearly resolved, though I guess we are supposed to think that Chou and his new friend are going to die a few hours after they meet and share a beautiful moment.  I thought the explanation of why San Francisco had been evacuated was a little silly, more like something out of a fable than a realistic story, but otherwise the tone is good and Eklund's style is good, and Chou and the young blonde are actually interesting characters.  Thumbs up for this one!   

It seems that "Iron Mountain" has never been reprinted, though the good people at Ramble House are producing a series of collections of Eklund's stories, so maybe it will eventually be back in print. 

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack C. Haldeman II is the brother of Joe Haldeman, who wrote the classic Forever War and has won a stack of awards.  Jack was a biologist who wrote quite a few SF stories and novels, many co-written with people like his brother, Jack Dann, Harry Harrison and Andrew Offutt.  Jack also won a Phoenix award from the people who put together the DeepSouthCons; this is an award I have to admit I never heard of before, a sort of lifetime achievement award given to those SF professionals who "have done a great deal for Southern fandom."

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is one of Jack's earliest published stories, and its title has got me worried it is a sophomoric joke.  The story is accompanied by a graphic design style illustration by Don Jones which I like, however.  This is Don Jones' sole credit at isfdb, so who knows what the hell his story is.

Ugh, this thing is so tedious that while reading it I began to feel an urge to go wash the dishes and file our 2017 Columbus, OH local income taxes.  (Yes, residents of Columbus, OH are expected to pay a 2.5% income tax to the city above their federal and state income taxes.)  "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is a first-person, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness narrative of a guy's dream in which he gets attacked in the shower of his hotel room, then watches a kid vomit after eating cigarette butts, then meets a giant wolverine in a movie theater.  Maybe I am supposed to appreciate this plotless mess as an indictment of U. S. intervention in the Vietnam War and of American TV and cinema, which have scrambled the narrator's mind?  The story is also full of leaden jokes.  Take a gander:

If we look at "Iron Mountain" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that works, I think we can see "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling.  Quite bad.

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" has not been republished anyplace.

**********

I'm skipping Part Two of Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca.  If you are curious about it, check out tarbandu's review of the Panshin's novel; he read it in its book form, which bore the title Earth Magic.  Jeff Jones contributes a fine illustration to its appearance here in Fantastic, July 1973, a male figure.  (I tweeted the picture on Jones' birthday back in 2017.)

In the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, editor Ted White explained to a reader that, if the magazine staff finds they don't have enough material to fill up an issue, the publisher (without consulting Ted) will make up the shortage by reprinting a "portfolio" of old art.  After Part Two of The Son of Black Morca we find just such a portfolio, eight pages dedicated to Wesso's illustrations for the 1932 appearance in Amazing of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Invaders From the Infinite.  Some years ago I read the 1961 version of Invaders From the Infinite and wrote a negative review of the novel on Amazon.  These Wesso illos, however, are charming.  (What's not to like about a picture of a single space warship incinerating an entire modern city?)

Next up is the Panshins' SF in Dimension column.  This is the final installment of SF in Dimension to appear in Fantastic, and takes as its topic the period 1968-1972, which the Panshins see as a period of "imbalance and stagnation."  The authors dismiss Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds as failed efforts to break out of SF's current doldrums, but are more impressed by recent "introspective" works like R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, Robert Silverberg's Time of Changes and Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died.  The Panshins in this column get psychological and philosophical, even mystical, suggesting SF's problem is like that of an adolescent faced with the crisis of having to mature into adulthood, a problem for which the experiences of his or her earlier life offer no solution.  "These crises, these critical moments of impasse, continue to occur all throughout a lifetime.  They can only be solved by growth, by rebirth as a larger person.....It is these critical moments of impasse that are symbolized in fiction."  As examples of this symbolism the Panshins present long quotes and analyses of passages from Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.  The authors finish up on an optimistic note, predicting that this period of stagnation in SF will end in 1973 and that the "speculative fantasy of the next years will be a great literature;" they even suggest that SF of the 1970s might guide our entire society in a much-needed process of rebirth!   

In his book review column, Fritz Leiber looks at an anthology of horror stories about cats, Michael Perry's Beware of the Cat, and a novel by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.  Fritz comments on each of the cat stories in Perry's volume, praising most but judging Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" "by far the best in this book."  In the review of The Phoenix and the Mirror Fritz asserts that the best fantasies are those that are "based on stuff that is half history" that strive for a sort of realism and are "fortified by a deep knowledge of the human condition." He lauds Davidson and his novel for meeting these criteria and presenting many unforgettable scenes.

Then come the letters.  There are two pages on which a postal worker, Ted, a reader, and even a U. S. senator opine on the United States Postal Service in response to an increase (of 100%!) in the cost to publishers of shipping magazines.  I was surprised to learn that the Post Office charges were not determined simply by weight and distance, but in large part based on how much advertising a magazine had; shipping a page of advertising cost almost three times what it cost to ship a page of fiction.  (The postal worker says about 6% of an issue of Amazing is devoted to ads, while Playboy hits 80%.)

In an amusing letter a guy denounces "Witch of the Mists" as "abominable drivel" and even more ferociously slags illustrator Henry Roland, whom he claims plagiarized his illos for that story!.  Given a chance to respond, Roland resorts to ad hominem, saying that the poison that drips from his detractor's pen surely indicates he is a "very unhappy person."  Then Ted gets in an argument with a guy who didn't like Ted's and Harlan Ellison's chapters in All in Color for a Dime, a book of essays about Golden Age comic books.  This guy says Ted and Harlan's writing is "subliterate," and Ted wittily responds by saying that, no, it is your writing that is sub-literate!  The fireworks continue with an underhanded attack on Star Trek from a guy who writes in to share sarcastic plot ideas for the show in the event it is revived.  Then we get a nice helping of SF snobbery, as a letter writer and Ted goof on the TV show UFO and agree that SF is not very popular because normies are scaredy cats--the reader says people are scared of technology and the future, and Ted asserts that "science fiction scares most people--its very precepts scare them."

Lester G. Boutillier, apparently some kind of superfan who attends many SF gatherings, contributes a letter that takes up two and a half pages.  He addresses a number of topics, including the whole postage increase issue (his father works for the USPS), but he is at his most entertaining when criticizing Poul Anderson (whom he admits seemed "a very nice man" when he met him at an Apollo launch party) for including too much "far right" politics in his writing, calling Anderson the "William Buckley (or perhaps I should say Ayn Rand) of science fiction," and complaining that there is too much nudity at SF convention costume events.  (A pinko and a prude?  This guy sounds like a real piece of work!)

Someone writes in to tell Ted that he was tricked into printing as new in the October 1972 Fantastic a story by Eric Frank Russell, "Vampire From the Void," that had already been published back in 1939 in the British magazine Fantasy.  Ted says he hasn't read the '39 story, but he doesn't think Russell would do such a thing.  (The wikipedia article on Fantasy actually addresses this issue, blaming Russell's agent for deceiving our long-suffering Ted.)  Ted finishes the letters with a page-long letter from somebody who thinks Ted has greatly improved the magazine over the last two years, and who likes both Poul Anderson's and Henry Roland's work.  So there, haters!

On the last page of Fantastic of July 1973, in the classifieds, we have some ads from New York witches, no doubt worthy rivals to the Missouri witches from our last blog post, and an ad for a book by the astrologer Solastro that will teach you how to win at the race track--you need merely conduct a simple numerological and alphabetical analysis of each horse's number and name to identify the winning horse 67% of the time!  Read more about Solastro and his system at this website, then get your ass to the Aqueduct and rake in the Benjamins!

There is also a mysterious ad for Richard E. Geis' fanzine Science Fiction Review which draws you in by announcing it is "adult," "outrageous," "uncensored" and "shocking," but doesn't tell you the periodical's title!  (It seems that Geis' zine went through periodic name changes.)  A quick look at isfdb entries on Science Fiction Review certainly makes it look attractive--besides all the great cover illustrations by Stephen Fabian there are many letters from and interviews with famous SF writers.

Shocking and uncensored covers of Richard Geis' Science Fiction Review
by Stephen Fabian--don't show these to Lester Boutillier!

A fun issue.  More Conan and more problems for poor Ted in our next Fantastic episode!

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, August 1972

Well, we just read Andrew Offutt and Richard Lyon's sword and sorcery trilogy War of the Wizards, the second volume of which was dedicated to L. Sprague de Camp and Fritz Leiber.  So it seems an appropriate time to read some fantasy-related work by those two influential writers.  One publication to which both de Camp and Leiber contributed was the August 1972 issue of Fantastic.  Over the years, via ebay and visits to flea markets, I have accumulated a bunch of issues of Fantastic, and this issue is in my collection.  Let's take a look at this "All-Star 20th Anniversary Issue" of the magazine--you can read along without having to scour the tables of flea markets or the listings at ebay by visiting the internet archive.

Jeff Jones provides the cover art, a sort of cthonic, primordial, monumental image of Conan--the Cimmerian looks like he is emerging out of a mass of stone, maybe like one of Michelangelo's famous unfinished sculptures of slaves.  Appropriate for an unvarnished, uncivilized, self-made man who owes his success and survival to his own native cunning and physical strength.  Among the listed contributors, besides de Camp and Leiber, we see two MPorcius faves, Bob Shaw and Barry Malzberg, as well as critical darling James Tiptree, Jr.  This is an exciting issue!

First we have Ted White's seven-page editorial.  (No doubt you remember Ted White as author of Spawn of the Death Machine and Harlan Ellison's long-suffering friend.)  Ted presents an interesting history of Fantastic, its many editors and its ups and downs and its relationships with other SF magazines, and gives us insight into his own editorial philosophy (he thinks a SF magazine should reflect its editor's personality, and include features like editorials and letters columns that generate a conversation and a community among SF professionals and fans.)  He finishes by bragging that Fantastic has received its first ever Hugo nomination!  Good work, Ted!

Next is the first half of Avram Davidson's The Forges of Nainland Are Cold.  I have decided to put off reading this novel, which appeared in book form under the title Ursus of Ultima Thule.  I will say that I like the illustration by Mike Kaluta, a stark female nude in front of a massive gnarled tree, that accompanies the piece.

"The Witch of the Mists" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

There's Conan and Conn, fighting some
crazy monster (could that be
Nenaunir on the flying beast?)  I feel like
Conn is facing the wrong direction.

I guess nowadays it is conventional to think de Camp and Carter are poor writers and their Conan stories are crummy, and I myself consider de Camp and Carter to be pretty mediocre, but let's give this story a fair and open-minded look.

"Witch of the Mists" would later appear in the 1977 book of four Conan stories by de Camp and Carter, Conan of Aquilonia.  Here in Fantastic the story is illustrated by Harry Roland, who, following the text, gives Conan a mustache!  This is an older Conan, whose mustache and famous "square-cut mane" are "touched with gray!"

Conan is King of Aquilonia, richest kingdom of the West, and is out hunting with some of his courtiers and his twelve-year-old son, Conn.  Conn gets lost chasing a white stag; the stag turns out to be an illusion, conjured by the witch Louhi to trap him!  Having captured the king's son, the witch and her tall skinny henchmen use him as bait to draw Conan away from his companions.  Conan follows the kidnappers' trail through a swamp and across the border of Aquilonia.  Along the way he is robbed by a pack of inbred degenerates (the descendants of criminals who have hidden in the swamp for generations--I thought this a Lovecraftian touch) who steal his horse, armor and weapons, so that Conan has to proceed practically naked, reduced to fighting off wild beasts with a stick!  When he gets to Louhi's castle, the HQ of her death cult, he is imprisoned with his son.

Louhi calls a meeting of the world's greatest wizards, and three other evil weirdos--Thoth-Amon of the West; Nenaunir, a huge muscular black shaman from the South; and an effeminate little sorcerer from the Far East, Pra-Eun-- teleport in to discuss what to do with Conan.  When Louhi tries to prove to Thoth-Amon that the King of Aquilonia is not the hot stuff he's been telling her he is by having one of her cultists humiliatingly cudgel the Cimmerian, Conan turns the tables on his tormentors and he and Conn fight all four wizards, plus Louhi's coven of death worshipers, with whatever furniture they can snatch up and throw.  During the fracas the Aquilonian knights finally catch up to their sovereign.  Louhi and her entire cult, along with Pra-Eun, are killed, while Thoth-Amon and Nenaunir teleport away.

This is a pretty routine and underwhelming story.  Nothing in "Witch of the Mists" feels fresh, and de Camp and Carter are incapable of elevating the pedestrian material with any literary style and fail to imbue it with a sense of drama or horror or fun.  The battle between the barbarian king of the most sophisticated nation of Caucasians and a multi-ethnic mixed-gender cabal of the planet's four most powerful wizards should feel grand and momentous, and come at the end of a long build up, but, shoehorned into this brief story about a kid lost in the woods, it feels small and petty, like a bar brawl.  Too bad; I'm judging this one merely acceptable--it feels like filler.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Alice Sheldon, the woman who wrote under the male pseudonym James Tiptree, Jr., is one of those SF writers the critics and college professors are always gushing about.  Early last year I read and liked a few stories by Tiptree; let's see if she continues to live up to the hype.

It is the 21st century!  The east and west coasts of the United States are vast megalopolises, Boswash and San Frangeles!  But our story takes placed in sparsely populated Alberta, where our protagonist, Dov Rapelle, young geo-ecologist, has a cabin in the snowy wilderness.

One day Rapelle is just hanging around in his cabin when a helicopter drops off a naked teen-aged girl ("sixteen at the oldest") nearby.  When he gets her inside he wraps her in his Hudson Bay blanket (wikipedia is telling me that the Hudson's Bay point blanket is an iconic article associated with Canada, and Tiptree tells us that this blanket has been an element of Dov's youthful erotic fantasies.)  The mysterious girl proclaims she loves him and starts grabbing at his pants, initiating a graphic sex scene in which she loses her virginity.  It turns out that the girl, Eulalia Aerovulpa, is a "time jumper;" her 75-year-old self, sixty years in the future, has switched consciousnesses with her 16-year-old self.  In one of those time paradox thingies which always hurts my brain, elderly Eulalia remembered how her marriage to Dov started, and has come back in time to make sure she meets Dov and kindles their love.  In an additional SF twist, teenage Eulalia's wealthy parents have had her conditioned to find men and sex disgusting so she won't get mixed up with males who are after her money, but elderly Eulalia knows the secret to undoing the conditioning: "The man whose toe she bites...she will love that man and that man only so long as she lives."  She bites Dov's toe after their second bout of intercourse, so, when 75-year-old Eulalie's visit to 16-year-old Eulalia's body ends after a few hours, young Eulalia is as madly in love with Dov as senior citizen Eulalia was.  (This presents the sort of philosophical conundrum presented by the love potion in the story of Tristan and Isolde: is Dov and Eulalia's love "real," or just the artificial product of psychological manipulation?)

Dov and Eulalia get married and briefly enjoy a happy life together, but Eulalia isn't content to let things be.  A few months after their wedding, Eve-like, Eulalia convinces Dov that they should use the time-jumping apparatus to learn about the future (and to give their elderly future selves a little vacation from senescence.)  Disaster occurs, and Dov is killed.  Now Eulalia will have to endure 59 years without the man she is hopelessly in love with, her only comfort the knowledge that she will spend a few torrid hours with him when she is 75.

Perhaps it is noteworthy, this story having been written by a woman masquerading as a man, that the tragic victim of the tale for whom our hearts are meant to go out is the woman, even though the story is written more or less from the point of view of the man, and he dies because of the woman's recklessness.  Also, Tiptree has Dov surprised by Eulalia's taking the sexual initiative, telling us that in his sex fantasies Dov is the aggressive partner.

This story isn't bad, but I'm not crazy about it.  The somewhat complicated structure works (though I'm not quite sure I like that the psychological trigger of toe-biting works on the teenage consciousness even though that consciousness is absent from the body when the toe-biting occurs) but the whole story is too jokey and silly for the tragic ending to affect me.  Acceptable.

"Forever to a Hudson Bay Blanket" would later appear in the oft-reprinted and oft-translated collection of Tiptree stories entitled Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home and was chosen by Barry Malzberg for inclusion in the volume he edited for ibooks in 2003 entitled The Best Time Travel Stories of All Time.

"Allowances" by Barry Malzberg

Speak of the devil!  "Allowances" was reprinted in 1974 in Malzberg's collection Out From Ganymede.  I own Out From Ganymede, but haven't read "Allowances" yet.

The text of the story consists of the written testimony of eight employees of a race track and one customer, testimony presumably elicited by the management of the track or the police or some other government representatives.  (Malzberg usually writes in the first person and often writes about horse racing.)  Taken all together, these various reports tell the story of the day an insane and violent man came to the race track and made a serious nuisance of himself.  This man wears odd clothes and insists he is an alien.  His mental illness is, apparently, the result of his recognition that the universe is unpredictable (as symbolized by the unpredictability of the horse races) and general feeling that society is going downhill--machines dehumanizing life, the government becoming less trustworthy, etc.  (The testimony of the witnesses indicates they also feel life is getting worse, many phrases like "nuts now being all over the place" and "unless the Racing Commission severely tightens its rules and regulations I see no future for the sport" crop up in their testimony.)  The "alien" begs people for advice on who will win the races, even accusing them of fixing the races.  He believes that if he can't win a bet, his alien civilization will suffer, and in desperation he threatens dire consequences if he should fail in his mission of placing a winning bet today.

"Give me a tip or I'll blow up your planet!"  

(Malzberg stories usually include an insane person, and this person is often preoccupied with alien or supernatural beings and catastrophic events like the alien conquest of the Earth or the coming of the Messiah or the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, events for which they feel some level of responsibility.  There's a story in which a guy has to win a chess game or aliens will win a space war, for example, and another in which an employee of the New York City government has to fulfill one of his quotidian job tasks in order to impress alien overlords.)

As a coward, a cheapo, and someone who admires asceticism and fears he has a genetic predisposition to addiction, I avoid gambling and know almost nothing about betting on horse races.  So I had to google around to figure out what the hell this story's title referred to.  It appears that the second level of races a horse can participate in are "allowance" races, in which, based on their records, some horses have to carry more weight than others, to make the race more competitive.  A horse that has lost a bunch of races will be "allowed" to carry a few pounds less weight than a more successful horse, is how I am understanding it.

This is Malzberg doing what Mazlberg does, and if you are hip to Malzberg's jive, you will appreciate it (I rather like it), but if you are sick of Malzberg treading the same ground again and again, or never liked Malzberg in the first place, this story is not going to change your mind.

"The Brink" by Bob Shaw

I like Shaw and was looking forward to this one.  Unfortunately, it is a very short and gimmicky story that goes nowhere.

"The Brink" is a Cold War story and the title refers to "brinksmanship," the kind of thing we talked a lot about in history and political science courses when I was at Rutgers in the last years of the '80s and the first years of the '90s.  An American aircrew is transporting a superweapon ("a nuclear device which yielded its energy over a period of years instead of microseconds") to the Far East, where it will be used to interdict Communist traffic on the future equivalent of the Ho Chi Min Trail in some unspecified jungle.  The aircrew's huge cargo plane (which one character compares to the flying machines seen in the old film Shape of Things to Come,) is called Icarus, and the superweapon is repeatedly compared to the Sun.  The tone of the story is gloomy and foreboding, and it is implied that participation in the Cold War has wrecked the economy of the United States but not that of Great Britain.  (The UK is like Daedalus, the clever and creative father, with America as the reckless son.)

The cheap ending of the story is that, while the rest of the plane's crew is napping or in the cargo hold, the pilot sees a man with wings on his back flying through the air.  This birdman gets in the way of the Icarus and is struck and plummets to the surface, and, presumably, to his death.  No doubt the point of the story (besides being a sort of wish fulfillment story for Englishmen in which sophisticated and wise Britain is shown to be vastly superior to the upstart USA) is that the American use of technology to oppose Communism is self-destructive hubris, just like Icarus' flight in ancient myth.

Stories which portray the United States as the villain in the Cold War always stick in my craw anyway, and the in-your-face sophomoric and pedantic use of classical symbolism in this one had me groaning.  A waste of time, even at only three pages.   

"The Brink" was later republished in the 1976 collection Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

**********

I'm skipping "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX" by "Ova Hamlet."  The Ova Hamlet stories are parodies written by Richard Lupoff, each written in imitation of a different SF writer.  I have an aversion to this kind of broad and obvious humor and "Agony and Remorse on Rhesus IX," Ted tells us in the intro, is a parody of Phillip K. Dick.  I am not familiar with Dick's oeuvre, so I probably wouldn't even get the joke if I read it.

After the Lupoff piece comes an installment of Alexei and Cory Panshin's critical history of SF, "SF in Dimension," these 12 pages covering 1926 to 1935.  This article, for the SF fan interested in the period, is very engaging and very fun--it includes a long description of and excerpt from E. E. Smith's Skylark of Space, which the Panshins regard as extremely influential, a longish discussion of Stanley Weinbaum, covers the development of sword and sorcery as well as space opera and alien exploration-type SF,  and places changes in SF in the larger context of changes in mainstream popular culture.  Very cool!

Next up is Fritz Leiber's seven page feature of three book reviews, "Fantasy Books."  First Fritz talks about Robert Heinlein's I Will Fear No Evil, which we at MPorcius Fiction Log just read!  Fritz starts off by telling us that Heinlein is his favorite SF writer, and that his favorite Heinleins are probably Double Star, Spaceman Jones, and Time for the Stars, and then proceeds to discuss Heinlein's entire body of work in a provocative way that includes comparing it to his own writing.  Very good.

Leiber's second review is of an anthology edited by Lin Carter, New Worlds for Old, which provides him an occasion to discuss fantasy literature in general and E. R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros in particular.  Finally, Leiber heaps praise on an odd book, Songs and Sonnets Atlantean, by Donald S. Fryer.  According to Fritz, this collection of poems, ostensibly translations of verse written by inhabitants of lost Atlantis accompanied by notes from 20th-century scholars, presents "a total picture of a fabulous Atlantis...more convincing and touching than that of a novel might be."

In the back of this issue of Fantastic are thirteen pages of letters (and Ted's detailed responses to the correspondents.)  Half of these pages are devoted to arguments about the TV show Star Trek; it seems Ted slagged the show in an earlier issue, inspiring a legion of Trekkies (Trekkers?) to rise to the program's defense.  There are also letters complaining that the magazine includes too many novels that are published in book form soon after, or even before, the magazine hits the newsstands.  And there is quite a bit of talk about how difficult it can be to find Fantastic, as the staff of some drug stores never even put the magazine on display.  Ted's responses are an eye-opening look into the life of a magazine editor and his surprisingly limited authority; again and again Ted explains that there are parts of the magazine over which he has little control, like the Table of Contents, use of some illustrations, and even the "typographical makeup of the title page of the stories--which I do not see until I have an actual copy of the issue in hand." 

The last two pages of Fantastic's 20th Anniversary issue consist of classified ads.  These ads are pretty fun, including as they do an ad for an anti-gravity device, an ad for a free book on how to hypnotize people, and an ad from the "School of Wicca" in Missouri.  "Obtain serenity and fulfillment," the ad promises, and offers a "serenity guide" and "protective pentacle" for only one dollar!  One hopes that reading about the less than serene and fulfilling conclusion to Louhi's career as a witch (screeching in agony as she burned to death, a barbarian monarch having heaved a brazier-full of hot coals on her) didn't discourage serenity seekers from sending their dollar to the witches of Missouri.

The School of Wicca (now the Church and School of Wicca, a wise
 tax move!) is apparently still in the business of selling 
protective pentacles, though this institution of higher learning (they offer doctorates!)
 has moved from Missouri to West Virginia.

**********

In his editorial Ted White argues that nonfiction "features" are an important component of a SF magazine, and his own magazine proves him right.  This SF fan found White's, the Panshins', and Leiber's nonfiction contributions to Fantastic's August 1972 issue more entertaining than much of the fiction! This magazine is full of info and educated opinions about 20th-century SF, and I recommend it unreservedly to people who care about that sort of thing.  The Shaw and Tiptree pieces seem below average for those writers, and the Conan story is a weak example of the genre, but the Malzberg is a good specimen of that idiosyncratic scribbler's output.  (And I do plan to read the Davidson novel someday!)

More Conan, Fritz Leiber, and Hugo news from a 1970s Fantastic in our next episode!

January 1974 stories from Fantastic: Myers, Bunch & Malzberg

Let's take a look at one of the magazines I got at the Des Moines Flea Market!

The January 1974 issue of Fantastic has a weak cover painting; the dripping knife in the brutish woman's hand actually reminded me of the knife StrongBad likes to include in his own art work.  And is that water coming out of her sleeve?

Editor Ted White's editorial is full of minutia that might interest the SF fan obsessed with 1970s inside baseball stuff, like how the number of stories in a SF magazine compares to that of a mystery mag, and whether SF and the mystery are genres better suited to the novel or the short story.  White tells us that a traditional (puzzle whodunit) mystery story drawn out to novel length is a drag, while the "most memorable and outstanding" SF stories are long stories or novels.  He and other SF editors find that there have been quite few really good SF short stories lately.

At the back of the magazine we have eleven pages of letters.  Alexei Panshin praises Ted White to the skies, and White returns the favor.  Other correspondents call Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca "brilliantly creative" and "sheer greatness."  My man tarbandu read the paperback edition of this novel (retitled Earth Magic for book publication) and called it "one of the worst fantasy novels I've ever read."  There is also a lot of discussion of Gene Rodenberry's failed TV pilot Genesis II and a rumor of a Star Trek movie!

I read three pieces of fiction from the issue early this week: a short novel by Howard L. Meyers, a very short story by David R. Bunch, and a story by Barry N. Malzberg.

"The Earth of Nenkunal" by Howard L. Myers

I'm not familiar with Howard L. Myers, who wrote few novels but a substantial number of short stories.  Baen has published two collections of Myers' stories recently, and "The Earth of Nenkunal," as I write this, can be read for free as part of the free e-book, the Creatures of Man.  "The Earth of Nenkunal" is the first story in what the people at isfdb call the "Econo-War" series, which the people at Baen tell us is part of the "Chalice Cycle."  The version of the story in Fantastic is graced with an evocative illustration by Jeff Jones.

The world is changing!  The Age of Magic is giving way to a period of religion.  This revolution is the doing of spirit creatures called "necromancers" from outer space; they are coming down to the Earth and taking over people's bodies and stealing people's souls and that kind of thing.  The necromancers have the ability to lay a geas on people that causes them to worship the necromancers as gods.  Among the worshipers, sex is considered dirty, which is a big change from the Age of Magic.  Among those still devoted to magic, it is normal for people to have group sex in the middle of a tavern while the other patrons watch and cheer.

Basdon is a swordsman newly arrived in Nenkunal, where magic is still holding on. Basdon is a recovering worshiper, and so he is a little reluctant to climb onto the tavern table and bang a chick while all the farmers watch and wait their own turns with the young lady.  But he manages to get into the swing of things.

After pulling up his trousers Basdon is pulled aside by a magician, Jonker.  The magic-user tells Basdon that the coming era of religion will only last twenty thousand years, so no biggie, but when the next magical era begins it may be stunted.  The magicians of the future will have an easier time of it if Jonker can find a particular magical talisman and preserve it for them in a place safe from the religious.  Jonker asks Basdon to accompany him on this quest; the talisman is currently in territory ruled by religious people, and Jonker could really use the help of a fighting man with knowledge of the ways of the religious.

In Nenkunal the croplands are lush and the people friendly; in the lands of god-worshipers there is famine and everybody is a jerk who loves money.  Basdon and Jonker have to fight in hand to hand combat with "weredogs" and their master, an evil wizard, and in the ruin where the talisman lies buried kill the musclebound body occupied by one of the necromancer "gods."  Basdon also rapes a six-year-old girl.  Hey, don't worry!  You see, she has a curse on her, and for the last two weeks her body has been growing at the rate of a year a day, so she's legal!  And, after Jonker applies a little more magic, the girl isn't calling up Rolling Stone for an interview, she's asking Basdon for more! 

"The Earth of Nenkunal" is an ordinary quest adventure with a few crazy pro-sex and anti-religion elements stapled on.  Barely acceptable.

"Alien" by David R. Bunch

This story was translated into French and included in Univers 10.  Univers 10 has one of those covers that makes us Anglo-Saxons say "Sacre bleu!" or "ooh la la."  Bunch is another author I have never read before; I guess it's education time for your humble blogger!

"Alien" is one of those stories that makes us 21st century people say "WTF?"  Two pages long, it stars a "little man-not-around" with a "pumpkin-yellow-face" who wants to love everybody and serve as people's "umbrella." But everybody, particularly a millionaire and a woman in high heels with lots of cosmetics on her face, is in too much of a hurry and they push the guy out of the way.  So pumpkin-face decides to become a man in a hurry also, and becomes the fastest and hurryingest of all.  The moral of the story: we are all trying to get away from something, and we don't spare enough time for love.

Awwwwwwww......

In his intro to the story Ted White tells us "Alien" is "a parable" and "a unique offering," but I suspect White included it to serve as evidence of what he says in his editorial: "I have talked with several of these editors and I've noted a common complaint: all are very discouraged by the general state of the sf short story."  Editor dudes, I feel your pain!

"Network" by Barry N. Malzberg

This story appears in the 1976 collection The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and it is pretty good. It includes images, characters, an adventure plot, and traditional SF ideas, things our man Barry doesn't always feel the need to include in his work.  Somehow, of the three stories we are talking about today, Malzberg's is the least crazy!

In the future a crumbling big city, I'm guessing New York, has been closed off by the authorities, so the inhabitants can't get out and only tourists and students of the Institute can get in.  (Yes, this sounds kinda like Ben Bova's 1976 novel City of Darkness and his 1973 short story, "The Sightseers.")  Our story follows two students from the Institute who drive into the city, which is called "Network," to collect information.  They act foolishly, get in trouble, and have to fight for their lives.

A decent story, I suppose about urban decay and the callousness of the authorities and intellectual elites in their dealings with the common people.  The tense action and danger stuff actually works, so, kudos to Malzberg.

***********

When the wife and I are on some road trip in the Toyota Corolla, and I inevitably get us lost with my incompetent driving or incompetent map-reading, I say things like "hey, this is an adventure!" and "we're explorers!" and "it's always worthwhile to see things you've never seen before!"  The January '74 issue of Fantastic is a little like that.  Am I going to be seeking out more stories by Myers and Bunch?  No, not really. Am I glad I got to experience their 1974 wackiness?  That's what I'm telling myself!

(Luckily the Jeff Jones illustration makes the issue worth far more to me than what I paid, and I liked the Malzberg.)

In our next episode I'll explore more fiction from this issue, including Ted White's own story about "a new kind of sword and sorcery hero," Janet Fox's story about a "witch-girl," and the mysterious Susan Doenim's story, which she dedicates to Harlan Ellison!

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein

"It may not be possible to do away with government--sometimes I think government is an inescapable disease of human beings.  But it may be possible to keep it small and starved and inoffensive...."

Whenever I find myself at the West Des Moines Library I check out the book sale. Earlier this month I found they had a Berkley 1983 paperback copy of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, one of Heinlein's most famous novels.  The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of those books I feel like I see on the shelf of every library I wander into, so it wasn't really necessary to buy it, but it cost me less than 10% of the cover price and I was charmed by the embossed stamp on the first page, informing me that this volume was once part of the Library of Bruce A. Wedeking.  You may recall I was fascinated by a similar stamp in a copy of Gallery of Horror.  When I buy and read these books I feel like I am part of a SF tradition and community (without the hassle of actually meeting or talking to people in the flesh.)

Last week, as I bragged on Twitter, I scored a pile of Heinlein paperbacks at the local Goodwill.  This windfall, and the subsequent discussion with other SF fans on Twitter, brought Heinlein back to the forefront of my mind.  I thought, before reading any of those Goodwill paperbacks, I'd reread The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, which I read 25 or so years ago, in my early teens.

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was serialized over five issues of Worlds of If in 1965 and '66.  You can check out fifteen interior illustrations for the novel by Gray Morrow at Heinlein scholar Rafeeq O. McGiveron's website.

In his long career Heinlein wrote quite a bit about revolutions and wars of independence, and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is about the three million inhabitants of the moon, most of them transported convicts or the descendants of such convicts, achieving independence from Earth in 2076.  The 300 page novel is split into three sections; the first section, over half the book's length, is about overthrowing the government on Luna, which is known as "the Authority," and is led by "the Warden," an appointee of the late 21st century version of the UN.  The second section covers diplomacy between Luna and the nations of Earth, while the third describes the war between Luna and Earth.

All three sections are narrated by Manuel O'Kelly, a freelance technician who, many years later, is recounting his pivotal role in the revolution (and correcting the history books, which he claims have many things wrong.)  Among his jobs is repairing the super computer that handles all the infrastructure on the moon.  One day he discovers that this machine has somehow gained consciousness and a personality.  Manuel becomes best friends with the computer, christened Mike, and when Manuel gets recruited into a revolutionary conspiracy by sexy redhead Wyoming Knott and genius philosopher Professor Bernardo de la Paz, it is the fact that Mike runs all communications, transportation and media to, from and on Luna that makes the revolution possible.  These four individuals manage the entire revolution. 

Gray Morrow's conception of Manuel O'Kelly

In some ways The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is an archetypal "speculative fiction" novel.  Heinlein does lots of speculating about future technology.  Manuel has a versatile prosthetic arm with a wide array of tools and attachments, Mike the supercomputer produces computer-generated audio and video of fictional people which is indistinguishable from audio and video of real people, and there is lots of talk about gravity wells and the technical issues of transporting things and people between the Earth and the moon.  Scientists and engineers are glorified and romanticized in the way we so often see in older SF literature.

But Heinlein is probably more interested in social speculation: what kind of society might arise on the moon with its population of rebels and criminals whose sex ratio is two men for every woman, a population which is completely divorced from the Earth because the low lunar gravity renders people who stay on the moon more than a few months unfit to live on Earth?

The society that Heinlein comes up with could perhaps be described as an anarchist utopia.  There is little or no violent crime, little or no racism, no taxes and practically no government, even before the 2076 coup-- the Warden commanded an armed force of less than 100 members.  The gender imbalance is resolved by alternative family structures; most people are in group marriages of one kind or another.  These large families are also presented by Heinlein as a more efficient and less coercive means of providing the social needs that 20th century welfare states attempt to provide via taxation, bureaucracy, redistribution and regulation.  Similarly, police and court functions are dealt with through private and voluntary institutions.  There is also a Darwinian factor which helps this anarchic society work: life on the moon is dangerous, and people who are incompetent and anti-social, the kind of people likely to end up on the dole if they were on Earth, are killed when they fail to seal their vacuum suits correctly or commit some other fatal blunder.

It might also be important to note that many of the "criminals" who populate Luna are not thieves or murderers, but political undesirables exiled by the despotic governments of Earth, like the Soviet Union and China, which by 2076 has conquered much of the Pacific Rim, including Australia and New Zealand. 

An interesting twist to Heinlein's utopia, if we choose to describe the book as one, is that it is doomed.  The first lines of the novel indicate that, by the time Manuel pens these memoirs, all that anarchism business has gone by the wayside, and the successor governments to the revolutionary Party have started taxing and regulating everything just like on Earth.  The novel could as easily be seen as a tragedy about human fallibility.

Heinlein is a good writer with a smooth and easy style, and all the philosophical stuff and science stuff is interesting.  So the book is readable and doesn't feel long.  What The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is missing for much of its length is human drama and excitement.  Manuel and Wyoming are not particularly interesting characters.  The Prof is another of Heinlein's mentor characters who has vast knowledge and wisdom.  Mike the computer is interesting, but there are long stretches when he is not around.  The revolution goes according to plan, with few bumps in the road or surprises for the rebels or the reader.  This is not an adventure story with ups and downs, suspense, and a cathartic victory at the end; instead it moves forward with a sense of inevitability, like a history book about a conflict whose course and outcome you are already familiar with. 

One of Heinlein's interesting choices in constructing the book is that he doesn't give us a heinous villain; Manuel even admits that the Warden "was not a bad egg, nothing to hate about him other than fact he was symbol of Authority...."  (As the prof explains, the real reason a change in government is imperative is that the moon is being depleted of natural resources--Luna grows grain that is shipped to Earth by economical catapult, but because it is so expensive to launch anything out of Earth's gravity no fertilizer or water is sent to the moon from Terra to replenish Luna's resources--and lunar society will collapse in seven years.  This reminded me of leftist critiques of Western trade with Third World nations, the idea that the metropole just strips the periphery of its natural resources.)  Because the lunar government is not particularly oppressive, the vast majority of the lunar populace is not particularly keen to overthrow it, and our protagonists, the vanguard of the revolution, have to work hard to inspire revolutionary fervor among the masses.  Their efforts include blatant lies about Authority policy, and egging the Warden's men on into creating a "Boston Massacre" moment.  Lies, PR stunts, and antagonizing the Earthers into committing some sort of atrocity are also essential parts of their diplomacy with Terra.

Portraying the revolution as based on trickery and manipulation by a small elite Party that is no more democratic or transparent than the government it is deposing may be realistic, but doesn't necessarily make for a rousing drama.  When the Warden met his bleak fate I sort of felt bad for him.

In the last fifty pages of the book things heat up a little bit.  We get fewer debates and lectures and some tension and danger as Earth's warships drop bombs and land assault troops on the moon, and the rebels bombard Earth using their catapults.  We also get some pathos as the Prof dies and Mike reverts back to being a lifeless machine.  

The Moon is a Harsh Mistress fits comfortably in Heinlein's body of work.  Hazel from The Rolling Stones, a grandmother in that book, appears as a teen in this one, and one of the interesting philosophical aspects of Podkayne of Mars, the assertion that nothing that is immoral for an individual to do is moral for a group to do, gets an airing.  Even though this is a book about resisting authority, Heinlein's common theme that one must obey one's captain is also present: the Prof manipulates meetings of the moon's brandy new legislature so that votes are only cast after he has guaranteed an outcome he likes, and the matriarch of Manuel's group marriage treats family meetings the same way.

I enjoyed The Moon is a Harsh Mistress more than I expected to.  In college (some years after I had read the novel) I read Alexei Panshin's criticism of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress in his book Heinlein in Dimension (you can read the book, and lots of other interesting SF criticism, online at his website), and this had a major impact on my mind.  (Perhaps like Marcel in his attitude about La Berma, I am a little too easily swayed by tastemakers like Panshin.)  After rereading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress I still share some of Panshin's complaints, but others seem off base--is it possible that Panshin's criticisms apply to the original serialized version in Worlds of If  and not the version later published in book form? 

It has its weaknesses, but I certainly recommend The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and it is obviously essential for Heinlein fans and libertarian types.

Three Stories from Far-Out People: Panshin, Malzberg, Zelazny

For two dollars I picked up The Far-Out People, an anthology of stories edited by Robert Hoskins on the theme of "worlds of tomorrow" published in 1971, the year of my birth.  The cover painting is signed Szafran, and the back cover has an ad for what looks like a sex novel about a young woman who flies around the world, seeking the finest of suckers.

In his brief intro, Hoskins enthusiastically declares that "Science fiction is tomorrow, come alive today," and that the stories collected in this book "are by some of today's most intriguing writers of science fiction, both new and old."  I read three stories today by authors I already like, Alexei Panshin's "The Destiny of Milton Gomrath," Barry Malzberg's "Cop-Out," and Roger Zelazny's "Angel, Dark Angel."

"The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" by Alexei Panshin (1967)

Alexei Panshin is inextricably linked in my mind with Robert Heinlein.  I've twice read Panshin's Rite of Passage, which is a sort of pastiche of one of Heinlein's juveniles, and a very good novel, and in college I read some of Panshin's book on Heinlein.  I still remember some of his criticisms of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

"The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" first appeared in Analog, where it took up two pages. It is an obvious joke that has nothing to do with the future or "life tomorrow with the far-out people."

Gomrath is a guy with limited intelligence who works on a garbage truck.  He was an orphan, and dreams he will someday be discovered by a long lost relative and elevated to a finer life.  Another guy teleports in, tells Gomrath that he somehow was born into the wrong universe, that he belongs in a universe full of castles, knights, dragons, etc.  As we can see coming, when Gomrath arrives in the sword and sorcery world he finds his true destiny is to be a landless laborer who sleeps on a pile of straw and spreads manure over the rose bushes with a pitchfork.  

This two page story about a sanitation worker is far inferior to Barry Malzberg's three page story about mummies in outer space, which I read yesterday.  Thumbs down.

"Cop-Out" by K. M. O'Donnell (1968)

Speak of the devil, here is Barry Malzberg himself, writing under one of his pseudonyms.  "Cop-Out" first appeared in the July 1968 issue of Escapade magazine, an adult publication with which I am not familiar.  In Malzberg's own intro to "Cop-Out" in Final War and Other Fantasies he lists all the venues that rejected the story, ten in total, before "an understanding editor" at Escapade accepted it.

I have to say that this story doesn't have anything to do with "worlds of tomorrow," either.  It appears to be a first-person narrative by one member of a two man team, sent to New York by "Headquarters" to perform a mission.  It is a little oblique, but it seems that the two beings are angels, or similar agents from heaven, and their mission is to put on passion plays.  They get an opportunity to put on a performance that will be televised, but this is some kind of trap, set by agents from Hell, and the two heavenly agents are killed and wake up back in "Headquarters" where their superiors are unhappy with their failure. 

Yesterday I endorsed Malzberg's three page story "Revelation in Seven Stages" even though it lacked any kind of character or plot because its central idea (AKA "gimmick" or "gag") was evocative and novel.  These short gimmicky stories live or die based on the gimmick.  "Cop-Out"'s gag is weak and tired, it reminded me of movies like "It's a Wonderful Life" with its superior angels sending subordinate angels down to Earth on missions that could lead to promotions.  (In "Cop-Out" the narrator talks about being "Grade" or "Class 9.") 

Another thumbs down for The Far-Out People.

"Angel, Dark Angel" by Roger Zelazny (1967)

This one first appeared in Galaxy, and is the subject of the cover illustration.  (The creature depicted is a Simule, an artificial organic computer, one small component of a galaxy wide network of such computers.) 

"Angel, Dark Angel" is actually about life in the far future (finally.)  Many planets have been colonized by man, and this vast civilization is run by a city-sized computer, Morgenguard; there appear to be no politicians or lawyers, Morgenguard runs everything.  In this task the computer has ten thousand aides, its Angels of Death, highly trained, cybernetically-enhanced assassins.  When Morgenguard decides that a citizen must die, because he has committed a crime, or would alter this perfect society, or just because of overpopulation pressures, an Angel of Death teleports next to the victim, kills him in seconds, and then teleports out.

The plot of the story, which is a mere 11 pages, is structured much like a spy thriller or detective story.  A woman, Galatea, has managed to defeat multiple Angels of Death sent against her.  So, one of the very best Angels of Death, Stain, is brought out of retirement to get her.  Stain befriends Galatea, begins an erotic relationship with her.  He learns of Galatea's belief that Morgenguard's rule has lead to a static, sterile society, not the kind of society which produced her heroes, depicted on a fresco in her home: Homer, Virgil, Dante, Leonardo, etc.  Galatea shows him her invention, the Simule, and convinces Stain to join her in her mission.  Stain launches a suicide attack on Morgenguard, sacrificing himself to start a new era of human liberty and progress.  Presumably Stain will join Leonardo and the others up on the fresco as one of the heroes of human progress.

This story is reasonably good, nothing special, but I liked it.

***********

I have to say that my experience with Far-Out People has been a little disappointing.  The Malzberg and Panshin stories are weak, and do not fit the theme; the Zelazny story is just average.  But they can't all be winners, can they?