Quark/4: Davidson, Moorcock, Persky, Farmer and Platt

Way back in 2014, we read Quark/3, the third number of Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker's quarterly paperback presentation of SF that was somewhat outside the mainstream.  I also own a copy of the fourth and final issue of Quark, 1971's Quark/4.  My copy of Quark/4, previously owned by a personage named "Shan," is in quite good condition; maybe Shan never read it.  (I have several of Shan's books, which I purchased in April 2016 at a Half Price Books in Ohio--remember Harlan Ellison's Doomsman?  I think Harlan may have wanted you to forget!)

 I should have taken this picture before I'd bent the spine to scan the pages you'll see below--
you'll have to take my word for it that Shan left it in near mint condition 

I covered Quark/3 over three blog posts, and I guess we'll devote three to Quark/4 as well.  Today let's read the contributions by Avram Davidson, Michael Moorcock, Stan Persky, Philip José Farmer and Charles Platt.

"Basileikon: Summer" by Avram Davidson

This story by the critically acclaimed writer and editor of SF and detective stories, has, as far as I can tell, only ever appeared here in Quark/4.

"Basileikon: Summer" is a sort of collection of vignettes of New York life, portraits of New York characters, and is full of sex jokes and ethnic jokes.  Puerto Rican women throw garbage out of their apartment windows into the backyard, so that it is now a foot deep in garbage.  Black nationalist and would-be dictator of New York Hulber Rudolph abandons his slave name and takes up the name Zimbabwe Kunalinga, and swears vengeance on the black women who laugh at his new dashiki.  An unsuccessful painter, an old man who has has lived in the same apartment for decades, owning ten cats in succession and watching all the Irish people who resided there when he moved in be replaced by Hispanic immigrants, spends money on paint he should spend on food.  An unsuccessful writer waits in his agent's office, frustrated when his agent ignores him in favor of a successful African-American writer.  And so on.

I'm a sucker for New York stories, and "Basileikon: Summer" is clever and amusing, and also quite sad.  I like it, but be forewarned--it ain't woke.

"Voortrekker" by Michael Moorcock

This is a Jerry Cornelius story; according to isfdb, the twelfth.  I read some Jerry Cornelius things in my late teens or early twenties, so over two decades ago--I think The Final Programme and A Cure for Cancer in the 1977 Avon omnibus The Cornelius Chronicles with the Stanislaw Fernandes cover.  During my high school and Rutgers years I read tons of Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, but the Jerry Cornelius things I read interested me relatively little; I liked Elric the best, of course, but also liked Corum and John Daker and Von Bek and the first two Dancers at the End of Time books and found the Hawkmoon and Bastable books tolerable, though I thought the Mars books written under the Edward P. Bradbury pseudonym to be lame.  My memories of The Final Programme are that I found it underwhelming and annoying--it felt sarcastic instead of sincere, part of it was a joke retelling of one of the most famous Elric plots, and part of it was a lot of gush about the Beatles.  I had enjoyed the sincere melodrama of Elric and Corum, I didn't like the way the Cornelius story undermined my beloved Elric, and maybe writing about how great the Beatles were was edgy when The Final Programme first appeared in 1968, but by the 1980s lionizing the Beatles was the opposite of edgy, it was banal and boring--my mother liked the Beatles, for Christ's sake!  I also felt The Final Programme was an attack on the United States and a smug dismissal of anti-communism, which was the last thing I wanted to read in high school and college, when I was being fed a steady diet of anti-Americanism and socialism by my teachers and professors.

Anyway, for a few years I have been thinking I should take another crack at Jerry Cornelius--maybe over 25 years my tastes have changed, and maybe my memory has exaggerated the negative aspects of the Cornelius stories.  I suppose "Voortrekker," which would be reprinted in the many editions of The Lives and Times of Jerry Cornelius, is as good a place to start as any.  (Wikipedia claims that "Voortrekker" first appeared in the British underground paper Frendz, a piece of information not found at isfdb or anywhere in Quark/4.)

"Voortrekker" turns out to be a very New Wavey story, twenty pages divided into twenty six chapters with titles from Buddy Holly and Elvis Presley songs, chapters that consist largely of long quotes from books by Frantz Fanon and Charles Harness and newspapers touching on Cold War and post-imperial topics, like Soviet intentions in Eastern Europe, non-white immigration into England, fighting in Cambodia and Vietnam, North Korean complaints about Japanese trade policy, etc.  The plot of the story, such as it is, is related in fragmentary vignettes of Jerry Cornelius travelling through time and between alternate versions of the world (at least I think that is what is happening) making contacts, collecting cryptic messages, and assassinating people.  The word "entropy" comes up several times, and basic themes are imperialism, racism, and women and children getting killed.  (All these plot elements and themes of a dangerous journey, racism, violence and collapsing empires are summed up in the story's title; the choice of title is probably the most effective thing about this story.)  The whole thing is vague and inconclusive--Cornelius doesn't know what is going on, why he is doing what he is doing, and what is going to happen, and neither do we readers--which I guess is in keeping with the entropy theme.  Cornelius's contacts seem to be participating in wars and revolutions not out of ideological conviction but because they think it is fun to do so.  At the start and end of the story Cornelius plays in a rock band, and maybe we readers are supposed to think that politics--or at least violent and deceptive politics--is a pointless, counterproductive waste of time, that it is art that is worthwhile.

This story is not very fun or interesting, there is really no plot or character development, and the many images of people smoking and flourishing weapons and driving in various vehicles are just brief flickers rather than anything sharp or rich.  "Voortrekker" is a mood piece that overstays its welcome and belabors its point, portraying life as incomprehensible and frustrating, and itself feeling like a waste of time bereft of anything tangible for the reader to hold on to.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

from The Day by Stan Persky

Click to enlarge

Lying between the Moorcock and the Farmer, though not listed in the table of contents or on isfdb, is an eight-page excerpt from the book The Day by Canadian writer Stan Persky.  Wikipedia indicates that Persky has written many books on gay issues, late Cold War topics like the foreign policy of the Reagan administration and the rise of the Solidarity movement in Poland, and life in post-communist Europe, as well as books about Canadian politics.  These eight pages are a stream of consciousness wall of text that I found rather difficult to read.  In case you are interested in seeing what sort of prose strains my 48-year-old noggin, I reproduce here a page on which, I think, a guy is having breakfast (cream of wheat and/or badly made pancakes) with a friend, a cat comes in the room, and the guy daydreams that the house he is in and house next door are warships from the Age of Sail exchanging broadsides.

There are many works of great literature that make demands on their readers, things like Moby Dick, In Search of Last Time, and The Waste Land.  I personally have found investing effort into reading Melville, Proust, and Eliot to be very rewarding.  Maybe Stan Persky's The Day would be very rewarding to the reader willing to make a commitment to reading it with attention, but I don't feel that I have the time and energy to make that commitment myself.

"Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" by Philip José Farmer 

I actually own this story in another book, the Farmer collection Riverworld and Other Stories; I read three stories from it full of disturbing sex meant to shock your bourgeois sensibilities back at the very end of 2015.  Farmer provides a foreword to "Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" in that 1979 collection, in which he tells the sad story of how, when he lived in Los Angeles and was working for the aerospace industry (I guess as a technical writer), a flash flood destroyed his decades-old collection of pulp magazines and old Edgar Rice Burroughs and L. Frank Baum books.  Damn!  "Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" also appears in DAW's The Book of Philip José Farmer.

"Brass and Gold (or Horse and Zeppelin in Beverly Hills)" is a farcical story about a drunken and impecunious Gentile poet, Brass, who lives in a Jewish neighborhood in Beverly Hills.  Brass and a Jewish woman, Samantha Gold, who loves the taste of pork but has almost no opportunity to eat pork sandwiches because her husband keeps her a virtual ;prisoner in their home, meet and fall in love.  Mrs. Gold starts to regularly sneak away to Brass's place to eat pork and have sex.  She introduces Brass to her father, a veteran of World War One who was an officer on a Zeppelin that bombed London.  This old Jew hates the governor, whom he calls Abdul von Schicklgruber (in 1971 in real life the governor of California was Ronald Reagan, though I'm not sure if this story is supposed to take place in real life or what year it is supposed to take place in), and on the same day Brass decides to leave town and Mrs. Gold declines to run away with him, electing instead to stay with her husband, her father takes off in a small Zeppelin he has built himself to bomb Sacramento.

This joke story, which is like 13 pages long, might be considered by some to be anti-Semitic or anti-feminist, but that is not why I am giving it a thumbs down.  My complaint is that it is not funny, and it is too silly to arouse any emotional attachment to its characters.  There is a lot of dramatic potential in a sexual relationship which crosses boundaries of class and faith, and in an old man who is obsessed with his youthful war experiences, but Farmer doesn't develop any real drama, instead focusing on lame jokes about how Mrs. Gold's expanding waistline makes it harder for her to sneak out and about how expensive things are in Beverly Hills.

"The Song of Passing" by Marco Cacchioni

Also missing from the table of contents page is a poem by Marco Cacchioni.  It is not very good.  A quick google search suggests this is Cacchioni's only published poem.  Hopefully Cacchioni, described as a young student in the "Contributors' Notes" at the back of Quark/4, went on to a successful life as a hedge fund manager or brain surgeon or something with a loving wife and a bunch of happy kids.

"Norman vs. America" by Charles Platt

Platt, a British immigrant to America himself, contributes to Quark/4 a choose-your-own-adventure comic book of 21 pages about a young Englishman who comes to the USA to make his fortune.  Platt even drew the panels himself!  The choices readers are to make are all goofy reflections of late-'60s/early-'70s cultural preoccupations--should Norman become a member of the Silent Majority or a student revolutionary?  Should Norman take to the streets of New York to work as a cab driver or a mugger, or instead start a dildo factory?  Some of the jokes are pretty "out there" by today's standards, like when Norman, after being castrated, becomes a child molester.

Click to enlarge

Platt is no Harvey Pekar or R. Crumb, but this comic is sort of amusing.  Perhaps the most interesting thing about "Norman vs. America" is the gamebook format--the first Choose Your Own Adventure did not appear until 1979, so I guess Platt is sort of an unacknowledged pioneer of the format, one which I, and millions of others, have cherished since our youths, which were full of CYOA, Fighting Fantasy and Steve Jackson's Sorcery! books.  Platt, on the first page of the comic, acknowledges that "Norman vs. America" "is from an original idea by John T. Sladek", so maybe it was Sladek who came up with the gamebook idea.

[UPDATE NOVEMBER 18, 2019: In the comments below Matthew Davis describes the pioneering role of John Sladek in the development of the beloved gamebook format.  Check it out!]

Like "Basileikon : Summer," I think "Norman vs. America" only ever appeared here in Quark/4, so all you Platt and Davidson enthusiasts need to get a hold of a copy.  As I write this draft of this blog post on November 10, there is a copy of Quark/4 signed by Larry Niven available on ebay for fifteen bucks.

**********

Five experimental stories; the only one I can really recommend as a fun read is the Davidson, though all the others (though the Farmer the least) have interesting aspects and are worth a look.

More Quark/4 in our next episode!

Garbage World by Charles Platt

"You know how we feel about off-worlders.  Nothing personal, mind, but we can't take their lily-white, pansy-faced pious attitudes.  Don't like 'em dropping their garbage on us, then complaining because we're not clean like they are." 

The water- and sticker-damaged copy
of Garbage World from the MPorcius
Library's Joachim Boaz wing

Seeing as in my last blog post I gushed about the Keith Roberts cover of the issue of New Worlds in which Charles Platt's Garbage World debuted, I figured it was about time I actually read Platt's novel.  Garbage World was serialized in New Worlds in 1966, and appeared in book form in 1967--I own a copy of that 1967 printing which was donated to the MPorcius Library by Joachim Boaz last year; I believe it must be the copy he read when he reviewed the novel back in 2015.  Our man tarbandu reviewed it way way back in 2010, when we were young!  Both tarbandu and Joachim gave Garbage World a mere two stars out of five--will we at the quixotic endeavor we call MPorcius Fiction Log concur with the assessments of our benefactors and give this work a negative vote, or strike a discordant tone and champion it as an unfairly maligned masterpiece?  Let's see!

Oliver Roach lives in a part of the galaxy full of asteroids.  Via the use of gravity generators, these asteroids have Earth-like gravity and atmosphere, and all but one are peaceful and orderly "pleasure worlds."  Roach is an information expert who manages and analyzes vast amounts of data about the asteroids; he has traveled to hundreds of them over his career, collecting data to catalog and synthesize.  As Garbage World begins, Roach is acting as assistant to an anthropologist and government minister, Larkin, as Larkin travels to the unique asteroid Kopra.  As you no doubt already know, "kopros" is the Greek word for dung, and Kopra is the asteroid where all the hundreds of pleasure asteroids shoot their garbage, and the place is now miles deep in refuse!  Two or three generations ago a spaceship got stuck on Kopra, and the descendants of that ship's crew have lived on Kopra ever since, surviving by eating not-quite spoiled food scavenged from the crash sites of the garbage containers that land on the asteroid daily; they build their homes from scrap metal and plastic similarly collected.  The Koprans have developed a whole distinct and resonant culture and social hierarchy of their own on the garbage world, one based on scavenging--he who has the best hoard of scavenged items is the leader, and gets first dibs on every new heap of trash that falls out of the sky.  The Koprans are a happy people whose social life revolves around drunken parties (just about the only thing they can produce locally is a crude and powerful alcohol they call "homebrew.").

I really like these Keith Roberts covers.

Larkin and Roach meet the ruler of Kopra, Isaac Gaylord (grandson of the captain that crashed his ship on Kopra), to tell him that Kopra's gravity generator is about to dangerously malfunction because the asteroid's balance has shifted due to all the garbage being added to it unevenly over the decades.  The asteroid must be evacuated for ten days so a new gravity generator can be installed.  Gaylord's daughter, Juliette, immediately becomes powerfully attracted to Roach, and essentially throws herself at him.  She is pretty, but she smells, and, as Roach learns when she impulsively kisses him, even tastes, like garbage, which sickens Roach.  Gaylord's son Norman is also interested in Roach and Larkin, but his passion is not amorous--he hopes his fortuitous meeting with Larkin and Roach can somehow get him off this asteroid and to a cleaner and more advanced one--the people of Kopra have scavenged TVs and can watch transmissions from the pleasure asteroids and know all about how the inhabitants of the other asteroids live.  Most Koprans have contempt for the people of the clean asteroids, but Norman is a dissenter who rejects his native culture.

Juliette's aggressive pursuit of Roach is only one of several complications the data expert has to face on Kopra.  He eavesdrops on a conversation between Larkin and Captain Sterril (groan) of the engineering team that arrived shortly after Larkin and Roach himself did, ostensibly to install the new gravity generator deep in a hole in the asteroid, and gets the idea that there is more to this mission than meets the eye, that Larkin is keeping something from him and from the Koprans.  Gaylord's hoard is stolen, so that his son Norman becomes head of the village.  And Roach learns that there are Koprans who live outside of Gaylord's village, nomads and tramps who travel the wastes, and Larkin gives Roach the job of driving out into the mutant jungles and garbage dunes of Kopra in the expedition's "desert tractor" to try to collect these hardy individualists so they too can be evacuated.  Roach will need a guide out in the wastes, and Gaylord volunteers himself and Juliette--Gaylord wants to talk to the nomads because he figures it was a nomad who stole his hoard, and his daughter is a necessary adjunct as she is experienced at traversing the wilderness, where she regularly scavenges while dad stays in the village managing the affairs of its hundred or so citizens.

There is plenty of fiction in which a guy from a more advanced or somehow superior society visits a less sophisticated or otherwise inferior society and switches sides or goes native, like those movies Dances With Wolves, Last Samurai and Avatar (full disclosure: I've never actually watched any of those movies from beginning to end) and Garbage World is another one.  Interestingly, Platt dedicates Garbage World to Michael Moorcock, with whom he worked at New Worlds (Platt did a lot of the art direction for the magazine), and again and again in Moorcock's fiction we see characters who go native or switch sides and end up fighting against their homelands or original allies (I'm thinking of the Elric and Bastable stories here, as well as the Erekose novel The Eternal Champion, and I have vague memories of other examples.)  You might even say that Moorcock and Platt have lived out (less violent and melodramatic versions of) such narratives, both of them having left their native England to live in the United States.

The drive in the desert tractor is a disaster: the vehicle breaks down due to sabotage, and Roach, Gaylord and Juliette are almost killed by a monster and then in a rare storm.  They are rescued from these life-threatening events by the nomads Roach left the village to rescue--after saving them the nomads reject Roach's help, refusing to be evacuated.  Roach stumbles upon further evidence that Larkin and Sterril are up to no good, and, more importantly, he comes to feel at home on smelly, filthy Kopra.

Oliver no longer noticed the dirt around him.  He had become a part of the planet, on equal terms with the Koprans.  The smell of the place could never be called pleasant, and his throat was still a trifle raw--but he'd got to the stage where he didn't notice any of it.  Gaylord had been right; in a way, dirt suited him.  He was happier and more relaxed than ever before.

Roach and Juliette surrender to their desire for each other--like John Carter, Oliver Roach has arrived on a barbaric world and quickly come to prefer it to his own and become the lover of a native princess.  (As you probably know, Edgar Rice Burroughs was a big influence on Moorcock.)

Our three dirty heroes return to the village on foot.  They find that new headman Norman, his father and sister presumed dead, has tried to clean up the town; they also learn that it is Norman who stole his father's hoard and sabotaged the desert tractor (Juliette explains to Roach that Norman was adopted and never felt a part of the family and would spend all his time trying to clean himself and watching TV shows depicting clean life on other asteroids.)  Roach goes to confront Larkin and learns that Sterill's team, which just left the asteroid, did not install a new gravity generator in that deep hole of theirs but rather a powerful shaped charge that will neatly break Kopra into four smaller garbage asteroids where nobody will be allowed to reside.  The population of Gaylord's village will be carried off to have their brains altered, their dirt-loving personalities replaced with squeaky clean personalities so they can be settled on other asteroids.  (Larkin is willing to callously leave the nomads to die during the explosion.)  Norman has complicated this drama by sabotaging the high tech bomb, putting down into the hole a less advanced remote-controlled explosive of his own that has the potential to spoil the carefully calibrated explosion planned by Larkin--if Larkin refuses to help Norman achieve his goals he can blow up the asteroid in such a way that it spreads filth all over the pleasure asteroids.  (If Larkin's and Norman's activities don't necessarily make sense to the reader, Platt makes sure to indicate they are both insane as a way to paper over any gaps in his plot.)

The redoubtable and resourceful Gaylord seizes control of events, and in the last thirty or so pages of the novel (which is less than 140 pages total) leads Roach, Juliette, and the villagers to victory over Larkin and Norman.  The villagers (including a cowed Norman) crowd into the ship and escape, while Kopra explodes behind them, Larkin and all those nomads being killed.  The villagers celebrate aboard the ship as garbage spreads throughout the asteroid field--soon every asteroid will be as foul as Kopra was.

Garbage World has the form and content of a traditional SF short novel--a guy arrives on another planet, goes native, learns a truth about his own society, and participates in a revolution/paradigm shift that remakes society.  It is also largely a goof and a satire--observe the Dickensian names of the characters--the leader of the party-hearty villagers is named Gaylord, his daughter who falls in love with a man from the society her father despises is called Juliette, his son who wants to live a normal clean life is Norman, etc.  There are lots of slapsticky jokes revolving around people's love or hate of dirt, and the most blatantly silly element of all is Platt's chapter titles (e. g.; "The Great Purgative Plan," and "The Defecated Village"--even the mundane chapter titles, like "The Hole" and "The Deserted Excavation," in context, bring to mind bowel movements.)

I've suggested that Platt's story could be a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs stories--one element of this is how it is not Roach who does most of the hero stuff, but Gaylord.  The effort of Norman to turn his filthy village into a nice clean and orderly hamlet felt a little like a spoof of the Scouring of the Shire part of Lord of the Rings.  (Another possible Moorcock influence?--Moorcock famously hates J. R. R. Tolkien's work.)

On a somewhat more serious note, Larkin's talk of cleanliness reminded me of Victorian and Edwardian sanitation and eugenics campaigns--Larkin, apparently a cleanliness fanatic, links physical cleanliness to moral cleanliness--maybe Larkin is a sort of spoof of a bourgeois reformer or imperialist who considers the lower classes or other races to be sub- or inhuman, people who need to be controlled, either radically reformed or simply eliminated.  One of the odd things about Garbage World is its blithe dismissal of the value of sanitation and sobriety--Platt unabashedly celebrates acceptance of filth and participation in drunken orgies, as if a bias towards sanitation and sobriety is just a matter of taste or even a form of close-minded bigotry.  Maybe we should see Garbage World as a reflection of 1960s counterculture values, a somewhat irrational or tongue-in-cheek rejection of the bourgeois values of "squares" in the form of a wacky light-hearted novel.  We might also compare Garbage World's off-the-wall attitude about dirt to Theodore Sturgeon's 1967 "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?," in which a space traveler learns that the key to building a utopia is for a society to reject the incest taboo.

Garbage World is sort of pedestrian, but I found it mildly entertaining; the odd society Platt devised for the book is fun and the jokes (e.g., Gaylord stamping on his son's brand new flower garden and throwing his new curtains out the window) are obvious but sort of funny.  I kind of like it--Garbage World isn't brilliant or groundbreaking or beautiful, but it was certainly not boring or irritating.  I guess I'm disagreeing with tarbandu and Joachim Boaz on this one; if I used numbered ratings I would give Garbage World a three or 3.5, a mild recommendation.

"The Long Remembered Thunder," "Cocoon" and "A Trip to the City" by Keith Laumer

Behold!  Before you lies the third and final installment of MPorcius Fiction Log's look at the 1967 collection of Keith Laumer stories titled Nine by Laumer.  I've felt that the first six stories were pretty good, though preferring the straight serious stories with cool war machines ("Dinochrome" AKA "Combat Unit" or weird aliens ("Hybrid" and "End as a Hero") over the satirical ("Walls") or joke ("Doorstep") stories.  Let's hope we have three super cereal tales today.

Before we begin, allow me to recommend Charles Platt's Dream Makers: Volume II, which includes a profile of Laumer which I reread before reading the stories I will be talking about today.  Platt, who famously pissed off Harlan Ellison and David Drake to the point that they sought revenge (the former in physical violence, the latter by naming unlikable characters in his fiction after Platt) describes how he pissed off Laumer--by forgetting the name of Retief's sidekick, who apparently appears in every Retief story.  The profile is interesting and sad, describing as it does the diminished state of the formerly healthy and industrious Laumer after a stroke in 1971.  As Platt tells it, Laumer in the early 1980s was prone to fits of rage during which he would scream at the top of his lungs and strike furniture with his cane and even a saber.

(If you don't have a copy of Dream Makers: Volume II handy you can check out a version of the Laumer profile that appeared in the Winter 1982 issue of Science Fiction Review along with a striking illustration by Allen Koszowski, an article about pulp by Algis Budrys, and multiple reviews of Robert Heinlein's Friday.)

"The Long Remembered Thunder" (1963)

"The Long Remembered Thunder" was first printed in the inaugural issue of Worlds of Tommorow, edited by Frederick Pohl.  The story is illustrated by Virgil Finlay, and one of Finlay's two full-page illos is printed in two colors; I guess World of Tomorrow was experimenting with color as a way of gaining attention.  Apparently Laumer was considered a powerful draw--an ad on the inside cover meant to entice subscribers boasts about six authors ("All Your Favorites!") whose work will soon appear in Worlds of Tomorrow, and Laumer's name is at the top of the list, above Judith Merrill, Jack Williamson, Damon Knight, Brian Aldiss, and Daniel Keyes.

Some old dude, apparently some kind of foreigner, named Bram has lived in an old house outside of the little rural town of Elsby for as long as anybody can remember.  Reclusive, this guy has never been seen out of doors at night, and only comes in to town once a week for supplies.

Jimmy Tremaine grew up in Elsby, and was one of the few to have any sort of intercourse with Bram, who took a particular interest in Tremaine.  Tremaine is now an engineer or scientist or something, working for the federal government.  A strange transmission has been detected coming from the Elsby area, a transmission that interferes with the top secret hyperwave project Tremaine has been heading.  So Tremaine comes back home to Elsby to investigate, and Bram is on top of his list of suspects!

Tremaine does the stuff we see in detective stories and weird stories all the time, like going to the municipal hall to look at old real estate records and to the local library to look at old newspapers, and interviewing people who might know something about Bram, like a woman who had a crush on him back in 1901, one Linda Carroll.  There's also that thing you see on cop shows, the state police resenting how the feds, in the form of Tremaine, are muscling in on their turf, trying to hog all the glory of solving the case.  The staties even try to sabotage Tremaine's operation, enlisting Tremaine's childhood rival to pick a fight with him.  Luckily, Tremaine isn't just a genius at electronics, but at boxing, too.

It turns out that Bram is a space cop from "the Great World,"another planet in another dimension.  At the turn of the century, the peeps of the Great World detected that the evil reptilian Niss were trying to build a space-time portal (or whatever--it's complicated, with harmonics and matrices and all that stuff) from their worn out husk of a world to our beautiful young Earth!  If the lizard men finish the portal they will suck all the oxygen off of Earth to their own planet, killing us all!

So Bram came to Earth to try to stop them.  Every night, for sixty years, he has gone down from his kitchen via a secret passage to the cave where sits the Terra end of the half-built Niss portal, and uses his brainwaves, amplified by a device on a tripod, to push back against the Niss, who are pushing from their side, trying to get in.  It is this battle that has been sending out the radiation that Tremaine's new hyperwave project has detected.

(Luckily the portal can't be opened when the sun is up, so Bram can rest during the day.  And if it seems goofy that the Niss have been trying to break through for sixty years without trying a different tack, remember that time here runs differently than time on the Niss planet, so for the Niss this battle has only been going on a few days.)

Tremaine, an electronics whiz, improves the device on the tripod and massacres the Niss with his mind.  The amplifier gives him god-like power, so Tremaine reaches back in time, changing history so that the Niss were defeated back in 1901 so Bram need not stay here on Earth sixty years but instead can take a 20-something Linda Carroll away with him to the Great World.  Then Tremaine decides to stay in 1901 America himself--after all, back in the 1960s the cops are after him, and in 1901 there will be no annoying TV.

This story is kind of lame.  The plot of Bram opposing the Niss by going down to a cave every night for 60 years is sort of thin, and Laumer fails to sell it.  Instead of imbuing this idea with Lovecraftian cosmic horror or Lucasfilm gee whiz swashbuckling or anything that might generate some kind of feeling in the reader, Laumer just piles on a lot of boring gumshoe goop about looking for clues, a lot of boring hicksville merds about how the rural police are corrupt jerks and the rural lower-class goobers are violent jerks, and Bram's boring saccharine romance--Linda Carroll, now in her eighties, actually accompanies Tremaine down into the cave where Bram is waging his nightly psychic battle with the alligator men.  All this slosh that just makes the story more contrived, busy, slow and long--it is 39 pages in this edition of Nine By Laumer, and few of those pages are interesting.

Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  As on so many topics, I disagree with Fred Pohl on the subject of "The Long Remembered Thunder"--he selected the story for inclusion in the reprint magazine The Best Science Fiction from Worlds of Tomorrow.  (Maybe Fred just wanted to include those Finlay illos in the reprint mag?)

"Cocoon" (1962)

"Cocoon," which was first printed in Fantastic, was also included in a reprint magazine, 1970's SF Greats.  Let's hope it is an improvement over "The Long Remembered Thunder."

Remember when we read William Spencer's "Horizontal Man?"  Joachim Boaz read it, too.  In that 1965 story a guy in the future sat in the same room for thousands of years being fed through a tube and experiencing virtual reality sex and adventure programs.  Well, here in "Cocoon" a guy in the future, Sid, has been in a cocoon with screens connected to his eyes for two hundred years, watching sitcoms and doing clerical work.  (His work is indexing all the TV shows, I think.)  His wife is in the cocoon next to him; she watches shows that induce orgasms.  The couple haven't touched each other or looked upon each other for two centuries; they communicate via the electronic network, and are represented on each others' screens by stylized symbols.  People in this future are so alienated from their own bodies that they consider the human face to be ugly and don't even like to use the word "face."

The plot of the story consists of Sid gradually learning, via malfunctions of the cocoon and network as well as unauthorized transmissions made by rebellious types, that the city is being engulfed by a glacier.  He leaves the cocoon, drags his atrophied body to the elevator, rides up to the roof to look upon the real world one last time before he dies.

This story feels long, as Sid calls his wife, calls his friends, calls the police, calls the government, etc., trying to figure out what is going on.  Besides being too long, it covers much of the same territory covered by "Walls," which also appears here in Nine by Laumer.  Why include two stories in the same book in which people watch too much TV and get disconnected from the natural world?  Oh, well.

Barely acceptable.

"Cerebrum" is a story by Albert
Teichner; God knows why Teichner's
name isn't on the cover--I thought Laumer's
story was going to be about a city ruled
by a giant evil brain!

"A Trip to the City" (1963)

Like "Cocoon," "A Trip to the City" was proudly announced on the cover of a magazine edited by Cele Goldsmith, this time Amazing.  I guess Laumer was considered a powerful selling point not just by Fred Pohl, but other editors as well.  "A Trip to the City"'s original title was "It Could Be Anything," and, like "The Long Remembered Thunder," is illustrated by Virgil Finlay; "It Could Be Anything" was even reprinted in a 1974 issue of Thrilling Science Fiction touted as an "All Virgil Finlay Issue."  Ted White also included the story in the Best of Fantastic volume under the "A Trip to the City" title. 

Brett Hale grew up in a small farm town.  His relatives and friends think their little community has all any of them will ever need, but Brett has read a lot of books and wants to see some of the world he has read about; he's also not crazy about working all his life on a farm or in the local factory.  So he gets on a train, heads off to see cities, mountains, the ocean.

The train stops while he is in the bathroom, and when Brett emerges from the lavatory he finds the train's engine, and all the crew and passengers, have vanished.  The passenger cars sit in the middle of a field.  Brett sees something in the distance, and marches towards it; it turns out to be a walled city.

Brett explores the city, and he (and we readers) gradually learn what is going on in this nameless burg.  The city is like a Hollywood set, the walls of most buildings being thin facades with little behind them.  Most areas of the city are abandoned, with no people or cars, unless a "scene" is taking place, and then robot extras (the word "golem" is used) play the parts of police and cheerleaders and spectators at a parade, or of a married couple crossing the threshold of a hotel room to start their honeymoon, or whatever.  Within the fake city there is a small handful of real people, apparently people from other dimensions who got cast away here as Brett did.  If these real people interfere with a scene, amoeba people called Gels arrive to take them away and throw them into a pit filled with the bones of earlier victims.  The real man who explains the golems and Gels to Brett, Awalawon Duvah, is captured by a Gel, and Brett sets out to rescue him from the bone pit.  Reunited, the two men sabotage the city, blowing it to bits and killing all the Gels and rendering inoperative all the golems.

As the story ends the two men wonder if their home worlds were a scam like the now destroyed city behind them, if all the people they knew before getting transported to the mysterious city were golems, if all the buildings they never went into were just empty facades.

"A Trip to the City" is long and tedious, full of detailed descriptions but no excitement or emotion.  Why did Harlan Ellison and Ted White love it so?  (Ellison claims he reread the story seven times to prep for writing his introduction to Nine by Laumer!)  I guess because it is trying to make some philosophical point; I expect this point is that we can never confidently know anything and that people with power are always trying to deceive us.  Brett never finds out who the Gels were, where they came from, why they maintain a fake city full of fake people, or how he himself got to the city.  We might also say the story is a celebration of those people who refuse to accept the facts given to them and instead have to see things for themselves, first hand.  (No doubt Harlan Ellison thought of himself as just such a man.)  One of the real people in the city is satisfied with the fake environment the Gels have set up, and he opposes Brett's efforts to rescue Duvah and to blow up the city.  Laumer makes sure we know we are not supposed to sympathize with this collaborator--not only is he a big fatso, but as the city begins to crumble this fat guy refuses to accept that his life is based on a lie and runs to the epicenter of the explosion to be killed.  Laumer may want us to admire those who seek the truth, but he doesn't shy away from letting us know that the pursuit of truth may not lead to happiness: early in the story, on Earth, there is a long scene in which Brett explains to a young woman he is attracted to that the ads in her movie magazine are just a sanitized, gussied-up version of real life, a total scam.  This mansplaining ruins his relationship with the woman, who would rather enjoy her illusions.

Long-winded, cold, tedious, and with an unsatisfying plot, I have to give "A Trip to the City" a thumbs down.  I'm all for making philosophical points in a science fiction story, but the story still has to be fun or interesting.  Spoonful of sugar and all that, old man!

**********

Whoa, what happened?  I was on my way to becoming a Keith Laumer fan, having really enjoyed three of the stories in the first half of the book ("Hybrid," "Dinochrome," and "End as a Hero") but this last third has been pretty dire and has cooled my ardor, as we say.  Well, we'll give Laumer another shot in the future, but first we'll work on a different project.

Three stories by E. C. Tubb: "The Ming Vase," "J is for Jeanne," & "Blood in the Mist"

It's been a while since we read anything by E. C. Tubb, the scribe who recorded the many adventures of space gladiator of the far future Earl Dumarest.  Instead of cracking open one of my many unread Dumarest volumes, let's check out three short stories by Tubb which I found in magazines and anthologies from the MPorcius library.

"The Ming Vase" (1963)

"The Ming Vase" appears in numerous collections of Tubb stories, including two in which it is the title story, as well as the ninth of Judith Merril's famous Year's Best anthologies.  I guess this is one of Tubb's more critically acclaimed productions.  I read it where it first appeared, in my copy of the May 1963 issue of Analog.  (I recently read the Norman Spinrad story from that issue.)

It is the Cold War!  One of America's advantages over the Goddamned commies is our superior psychic program!  Unfortunately, one of our best psykers, Klieger, has gone AWOL from the psychic project's HQ at Cartwright House.  CIA operative Don Gregson (wait, is he supposed to be operating domestically?) is on the case, following Klieger's trail across the USA as he does things like steal valuable Chinese vases from tony antique stores.  But how can Don catch a man who can predict the future?  And why did Klieger, after obediently residing in the fortress of Cartwright House for a decade, suddenly make a break for it?  

This is a solid story with themes we've seen a bunch of times before (in our struggle with the Reds are we coming to resemble them?  Is the future determined or can it be altered by our actions?) and a decent "think-outside-the-box" ending.  In his interview with Charles Platt in 1980's Dream Makers Tubb tells the world he is a fan of Robert Heinlein's pre-Stranger in a Strange Land work (he hated Stranger, saying RAH had "done himself a tremendous disservice" in producing that and later books), so I was sort of primed to see similarities in "The Ming Vase" to Henlein's Cold War psyker story "Project Nightmare" (1953) and to "--We Also Walk Dogs" (1941), which also has a beautiful Ming ceramic as a major plot element--maybe those earlier stories were an influence on Tubb.

"J is for Jeanne" (1965)

In the interview in Dream Makers Platt portrays Tubb, and Tubb presents himself, as a "hack" who resides in the "skid row of the science-fiction ghetto," the "action and adventure" sub genre, and who is at a distance from, and perhaps even has some contempt for, "serious" or "ambitious" "literature."  So I think it is fun to see Tubb in such venues as Judith Merril's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F along with such mainstream literary figures as John Ciardi (the translator of the version of Dante's Comedy which I read in high school and in college) and Jorge Luis Borges, as well as those critically acclaimed New Age pioneers J. G. Ballard, R. A. Lafferty and Thomas Disch.  It is in my copy of 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F that I read "J is for Jeanne;" the story first appeared in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds.

"J is for Jeanne" is not the kind of action and adventure story that we associate with Tubb and his fellows in their particular part of the SF ghetto.  Instead it is a lame gimmick story.  We are presented with an odd narrative in which, it appears, a woman is relating her recurring nightmare to a series of analysts.  As revealed at the end, and as the reader perhaps has predicted from various clues, Jeanne is not a woman at all but a computer, and the interactions between Jeanne and the engineers we have witnessed are just allegories or fantasies or indications tghat the computer has developed a (insane) personality.

In the interview with Platt, Tubb talks about throwing together brief stories to fill space when he, as editor of a short-lived magazine, needed material and the only stuff getting submitted was "rubbish."  This feels like a story that was thrown together in such a fashion.  Not good.

"Blood in the Mist" (1979)

I purchased my heavily foxed and water damaged copy of Heroic Fantasy, edited by Gerald W. Page and Hank Reinhardt and published in 1979, at a flea market in South Carolina last year.  I kind of bought it just so I would have something to show for having dragged my wife and in laws to a hideous parking lot where people who smelled like cigarettes were selling rusty old tools, prehistoric videotapes, and boxes of expired pasta and breakfast cereal.  But now, months later, I am warming up to this volume which I originally thought of as a mere consolation prize.

In the intro to "Blood in the Mist" the editors compare Tubb's ability and volume of output to that of Henry Kuttner, Robert Silverberg and Edmond Hamilton, but, annoyingly, spell Hamilton's name incorrectly.  They also tell us it is the third story by Tubb about the hero Malkar; Page and Reinhardt don't give us the titles of the first two Malakar capers, but I'm guessing they are "Death God's Doom" and "Sword in the Snow," both from 1973.  It seems that in 1999 the Malkar stories were expanded into two novels (Death God's Doom and The Sleeping City), or maybe these novels are additions to the Malkar saga.

"Blood in the Mist" is one of those stories in which a grizzled mercenary (that's Malakar) meets an ancient merchant who seeks immortality and a gorgeous veiled lady in a smoky inn and accompanies them on their perilous journey through a snowy waste where they face treachery and monster attacks and the merchant resorts to calling upon the aid of eldritch demons.  I like these sorts of stories, and Tubb does a good job with the pacing, plotting, tone and the descriptions of the settings, creatures and fights.  Worth the attention of sword and sorcery fans; I'd be happy to read more Malakar stories.

**********

"J is for Jeanne" is just bad, but "The Ming Vase" and "Blood in the Mist" are entertaining stories and good examples of their respective categories.  I also recommend that SF fans read the Tubb profile in Dream Makers; it has some laugh out loud moments and provides a memorably cynical and iconoclastic perspective from within (maybe just barely within) the world of SF publishing.

Three stories by James Tiptree, Jr. published in 1972

As anybody reading this probably knows already, James Tiptree, Jr. is a pseudonym used by Alice Sheldon.  For ten years (1967-77) Sheldon published critically acclaimed science fiction stories under the Tiptree pen name, successfully hiding her true identity.  Tiptree is one of the famous SF authors I have never read, but that gap in my experience is closed today!

Charles Platt's profile of Sheldon in his 1983 book Dream Makers II makes her seem like a fascinating character who lead a privileged and heroic life: participation in safaris and scientific expeditions in Africa and India as a child, a successful career as a painter, work in the Pentagon analyzing aerial photographs in support of the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific War, work for the CIA during the early Cold War, then a stint as a behavioral psychologist.  In the profile she expresses the conventional lefty elite contempt for Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, but, being born long before our current identity politics era, she isn't afraid to paint a picture of Africa as a place full of cannibals and witch doctors who saw her, a little blonde girl, as some kind of goddess, or to say stuff like "much as I loathe Roman Catholicism as an authoritarian religion, Islam is worse."

Let's hope Sheldon's stories are as interesting and exciting as her own character and life were.  As part of my project of reading every story in David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1972 anthology Generation, I am reading the Tiptree stories included therein, "Through a Lass Darkly" and "Amberjack."  Also published in '72, the year of your humble blogger's first birthday, was Harlan Ellison's famous Again, Dangerous Visions, and I will be reading the Tiptree story included in that volume, "The Milk of Paradise," as well.  (Note that the Generation stories were purchased by Gerrold and Goldin in 1969, even though Generation wasn't published until 3 years later.)

"Through a Lass Darkly" 

In his intro in Generation to this story Gerrold praises Tiptree to the skies: "...if I had to pick one writer today as being the most all-around skilled architect of the short story as well as one of the freshest and most original craftsmen, I'd pick Tiptree.  No shit."

Amusingly enough, one of the two characters in "Through a Lass Darkly" is a man who writes an advice column under a female byline.  (In real life, libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie did this at Teen Machine magazine, ghostwriting an advice column for Alyssa Milano.)

The advice columnist is sitting in his office, banging away at the ol' typewriter, when a pretty girl teleports in.  She is from the year 2269, and speaks in a futuristic version of English which the columnist and we readers have to interperet as best we can. Deciphering her argot we learn that, in the 23rd century, sexual and social relations will be very different than they are today, with group marriages, and, apparently, government control over how many children a woman can give birth to.  When the girl learns that the columnist is a bachelor she is disgusted at his "perversion." (Interestingly, in the future there will still be a strong distinction between small town and big city values.)

In the same way that people in 1969 knew little about what went on in 1669, the girl from the future knows nothing of the typical concerns of a 1960s person, and when the columnist asks if there is nuclear war or race hatred in the 23rd century, she doesn't know what he is talking about.  Of course, her ignorance doesn't keep her from having an arrogant confidence that her society is far better and far more free than those of the past!

An entertaining and engaging story.

All three of the stories discussed in this blog post would later be included in Warm Worlds and Otherwise

"Amberjack"

This one is just three pages.  As with "Through a Lass Darkly" there is a level of intentional obscurity here, with long convoluted sentences and challenging metaphors and the use of onomatopoeia.  I think I have an idea of what is going on, though. While "Through a Lass Darkly" was light-hearted and a little jokey, "Amberjack" is heavy.

A young couple is reluctant to really commit to each other, to admit that they love each other, because of bad relationships with their parents and siblings, who were nagging, neglectful, etc; neither of them has ever had a good role model of a healthy love relationship.  One hot night they are sleeping on the fire escape of their apartment, and the woman admits she is pregnant; neither of them expects to find marriage or parenthood a happy situation.  Somehow a fight breaks out, and the woman falls from the fire escape to her death.  Then the woman's sister appears, telling the man she has been looking for them and suggesting she will help the man escape prosecution for the death of his girlfriend, her own sister--it seems like she wants the man for herself.

The three characters' names may be significant.  The man is called "Amberjack" throughout the story, but we are told that he was called "Daniel" when he first met his girlfriend, "'Rue."  Daniel brings to mind the lion's den, while an amberjack is a type of fish (which I did not know until today); the use of two names suggests some kind of uneasiness about identity, or a desire to be a different person than he was when he was with 'Rue.  'Rue's name always has that apostrophe, perhaps hinting that her bad upbringing has left her a truncated or incomplete human being?  "'Rue" makes one think of the phrase "you will rue the day," and also kangaroos, I guess.  The sister (who looks almost identical to 'Rue) is named Pompey, like the general who, during the crises during the last years of the Roman Republic, was allied with Julius Caesar but then sided with Cato and the Republicans against Caesar.  (Of course, the ancient Pompey suffered defeat and a depressing death, while this Pompey seems to have succeeded in her aims.)

This is one of those stories which forces you to decide how much time and energy you want to spend trying to figure it out.  Every line seems to contain a clue or a red herring.  I'm leaving this story with the feeling I often get after reading a Gene Wolfe story, that I enjoyed it, but that I probably missed something.

"The Milk of Paradise" 

In his intro to "The Milk of Paradise," the last story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison brags/complains that he is exhausted from writing 60,000 words of introductions for the 800+ page book.  Then he tells us that "The Milk of Paradise" is the best story in the volume, and Tiptree is a "Giant" with a capital "G."

Like "Amberjack" this is an economical story in which every word counts and which has me straining my poor brain in an effort to puzzle out what is really happening.

The universe is inhabited by two races, the Humans and the moronic, inferior Crots.  But our protagonist Timor claims to have been raised by a third race, a race so beautiful and sophisticated that they make Humans look like Crots!  Timor was "rescued" from the planet of this super race when he was ten; he believes that a disease unwittingly brought by his Human rescuers wiped out the super race.

Timor has just finished training as a space scout and is the "newboy" at the space station.  Human society in the setting Tiptree presents us is very sexually permissive, and very casual about sex, and both women and men make advances on Timor. Timor is receptive to these advances, but his memories of the super race leave him unaroused by his fellow Humans--to him, Humans, even his own body, are disgusting! Timor even wears a grey outfit to cover his hideous "pink" skin--the beings of the super race have grey skin.

Timor's first assignment is to accompany an experienced scout, a black man, on a space mission.  Foreshadowing what is to come, the black scout, Santiago, jestingly calls Timor a Crot, and, because his skin is dark, Timor is able to experience some kind of sexual feeling for Santiago.  Santiago wants to explore the planet of the super race, and uses drugs and other invasive techniques to get the data out of Timor's brain. When the two scouts get to the planet, which Timor recalls as a sort of paradise of shimmering towers, Santiago laughs to find the natives to be grotesque little monsters ("grey rotten lumps") with colossal genitals who live in wretched mud huts.  "SUBCROTS!" he guffaws.  But Timor jumps into the mud with them, starts having sex with them.

It seems like Timor had living within him one of these aliens, or its consciousness, or something like that.  Anyway, he is happy to return to his true people, who, it is suggested, are going to "totally recondition" him so he can live as an equal among them.  (As with "Amberjack," I feel like I "got" almost the whole story but was confused by the last few paras; Pompey's arrival is confusing in that earlier story and in "The Milk of Paradise" I am puzzled over Timor's precise relationship with the grey lumps.)

I guess you can say this story is about how beauty is in the eye of the beholder and different cultures have different customs and so forth (a theme also evident in "Through a Lass Darkly.")  Someone like Sheldon, a wealthy Westerner who lived among Africans and Indians as a child, would no doubt be very aware of the vast diversity in values and mores across communities.  The story is also about race, and about identity, and about how such things are potentially fluid and open to interpretation; we learn immediately in this story that the protagonist has two names (just as we did with the protagonists of "Through A Lass Darkly" and "Amberjack") and as the story progresses people call Timor a Human, a Crot, and then (indirectly perhaps) a Subcrot.  

**********

These stories are all good--they are certainly better than most of the stories in Generation--and they have many of the attributes I admire in stories, like economy and a focus on human feeling and human relationships.  Significantly, they are all about people who have two names, two identities, like Sheldon, who, masquerading as Tiptree, did herself.  Perhaps we should consider to what extent each of the three characters chooses to take on a second name and identity, and to what extent a second identity is thrust upon them by others, and compare this to what extent Sheldon herself voluntarily chose to write under an obscuring pseudonym and to what extent she felt societal pressure to do so.

It is good to have gained a little familiarity with an important SF author, and it is nice to find that there is something to all that hype.  I will certainly read more of Tiptree's work in the future.

Eight stories by Barry Malzberg from the period 1974-6

The time has finally come!  Today we conclude our epic journey through Barry N. Malzberg's 1976 collection, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  It has been an exciting trip, and we still have eight stories to tackle before we can return this baby, with its terrific Robert Schulz cover and surrealistic Harlan Ellison back cover blurb, to my dusty shelves.  Let's get to it!

"Twenty Sixty-One" (1974)

In the intro to this one Malzberg tells us he has "long been a fan of schizophrenia" (remember, his uncle Benjamin was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and author of publications with titles like Migration and Mental Disease: A study of first admission to hospitals for mental disease, New York, 1939-1941.)  He jocularly suggests that schizophrenia, "the only disease that was genuinely artful...might save all of us yet."

"Twenty Sixty-One" was first printed in F&SF and was later translated into Portuguese

"Twenty Sixty-One" is set in a single room, where we find two men.  Their dialogue, and insight into their thoughts provided by the third-person narrator, makes evident that these men live in a future in which so many people are unhappy with their lives that they pay technicians to administer drugs to them that give them mental disorders like paranoia and catatonia.  The twist ending makes us wonder if this scenario is in part, or entirely, a delusion.

As we have seen as we have read The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, our buddy Barry often writes about futuristic institutions which provide strange forms of therapy, forms of therapy which often seem more like self-indulgent recreation than any kind of serious medical regimen.  One of Barry's recurring motifs in these stories is that the therapists are called "technicians," not "doctors," suggesting the mental health professionals portrayed have little compassion for their patients, and that a human being is just a machine, like an automobile perhaps, not something magical with a unique personality or soul.

Pretty good.

"Closing the Deal" (1974)

"Closing the Deal" appeared in Analog (when it was edited by Ben Bova), which gives Malzberg occasion to use his intro here to talk about John W. Campbell, the legendary SF editor.  Malzberg credits Campbell with creating the modern SF field in the 1940s, and argues that, without Campbell's guidance, SF would be a tiny moribund niche market, like westerns, and not the prominent (perhaps dominant?) cultural phenomenon it in fact had become by the 1970s.  (Malzberg here calls SF "the American literature of the last third of the century.")

"Closing the Deal" is actually a good fit for Analog; it not only deals with one of Campbell's hobby horses-- psionic powers--but, compared to much of Malzberg's body of work, it is clear and direct, and has believable characters who are not insane. At the same time it is pure Malzberg: it is cynical and depressing, it portrays an unhappy marriage and an unhappy parent-child relationship, and it deromanticizes one of the most romanticized (and most ridiculous) of SF tropes.

A man whose wife abandoned him and their little girl is in discussion with another man.  The little girl, eight years of age, is a voluble genius who has the ability to levitate; she also accuses her father of stifling her. The conversation between the father and the visitor at first sounds somewhat like those between a social worker and a single parent facing difficulties, but we soon learn that psychic powers are relatively common in this world, and the visitor is a talent scout from one of several private firms who train and manage young psychics; he and the father are negotiating a price for the father to surrender custody and "total control" of the girl to the firm.  The father gets a much lower offer than he expects, not realizing how common psychic powers really are and how limited are his daughter's (the talent scout uses the phrase "third string.")  The scout reveals that he himself has psionic abilities, powers much like the little girl's, and these have not enabled him to have any glittering career or win any fame.

In a van Vogt story or a Sturgeon story people with mental powers radically change the world or the universe, leading man to his destiny of crossing the black void between the galaxies or the gulfs between individual consciousnesses, opening up an eternity of adventure or peace.  In this Malzberg story psykers are just people trying to sell their skills on the market like the rest of us, people just as likely to be frustrated with their careers and lives as anybody else.  ("How many violinists are there for every concert master?" asks the scout.  I wonder if Malzberg, who has admitted to dreams of being a professional violinist, had his own career as a writer in mind with this stuff; he was able to make a decent living for his family with his pen and win the accolades of his fellow SF writers, but is obviously disappointed he hasn't achieved the recognition of a Roth or Nabokov.)

It is great to see Malzberg put together a good mainstream story for the most popular of SF magazines without compromising his own artistic vision.  "Closing the Deal" is a better than average example of his work, and a story I can recommend without reservation to all SF fans, not just to those who are into experimental or literary SF.

Very good.  

"What the Board Said" (1976)

In his intro Malzberg warns us that this is another story about the JFK assassination.  I think it has only ever appeared here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg--completists take note!

It is the future!  The Earth is inhabited by thirty-five billion people, and they travel around the globe via a public transportation system of teleporter gates.  Our narrator works for the government, for the "board" which "runs the world;" his in-person report to the board makes up the first part of this story.  The board is an old man, whom it is hinted may be largely a machine and who apparently plays a sort of religious role in this future world; we are told the board is kept alive by a full-time staff and the prayers of half the world's population.  The board has sent the narrator to search the Earth for the answer to some unspecified question, and he has returned to say there is no answer that human beings can understand.  Presumably the question is about the meaning of life or possibility of free will or some other weighty philosophical issue.  The board, whom the narrator considers insane, weeps upon learning that this essential question is unanswerable.

The narrator leaves the broken-hearted board to join a line at one of the teleporters. There is a long queue because the teleporter system, like the board, is in severe decline, breaking down under the pressure of overpopulation and deficient maintenance.  A fat man in line behind the narrator begins complaining, and even proposes confronting the board.  The narrator considers this man insane (the narrator tells us that modern technology has driven many people insane) and tries to stop him; the fat man calls the narrator insane and leads an angry crowd back to the board's room, knocking over the narrator in the process.  The last line of the story reveals that all this has happened in Dallas and suggests that a violent revolution is about to take place.

I really don't see the connection between what happens in this story and the murder of JFK.  Was Kennedy assassinated in response to a severe deficiency of his government or general decline in American society due to overpopulation and technological change?  Did a popular revolution result from his murder? What happens in this story seems more akin to the French Revolution or the murder of Archduke Ferdinand or the Bolshevik Revolution or the fall of the Weimar Republic or something like that. Maybe the murder of Kennedy felt like such a cataclysm to his more ardent fans?  If it wasn't for that last line, and Malzberg telling us the story is about JFK in the intro, the reader would have little reason to link the story to JFK at all.

This story is alright; I think the last line is in fact distracting, and I would probably like it more if that last line was absent or modified; instead of feeling like a story inspired by the tragic death of JFK, it feels like the author wrote a story and then tried to cheaply take advantage of the reader's presumed deep feelings about the assassination to make his story seem more profound.

"Uncoupling" (1976)

In Charles Platt's very entertaining profile of Malzberg in Dream Makers, our pal Barry tells Platt that his favorite of his own stories is "Uncoupling."  In his intro to "Uncoupling" here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, the author tells us it is a tribute to and a "shameless pastiche" of Alfred Bester, whom Malzberg considers the "best stylist" in the "history of the field."  Malzberg's exact words are "The best stylist pound-for-pound (I'd make him a light heavyweight) in the history of this field is probably Alfred Bester..." but I don't really know what he means by that "pound-for-pound" business; maybe it's just a joke?  Does Malzberg have a list of SF writers in his head, each ranked according to sales or influence or critical acclaim, with (one guesses) Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke the top heavyweights?  What weight class does Malzberg reckon he himself belongs in?

"Uncoupling" first appeared in Dystopian Visions and later in The Road to Science Fiction #4

In the overpopulated future in which the government runs everything and enforces its rules with an army of tentacled robot cops, a self-described fascist goes to the government-run brothel to enjoy his government-authorized monthly act of sexual intercourse.  Bad news--his allotment has been reduced from ten minutes to five!

Being a good fascist the narrator accepts this diminution of his sex ration: "I will not dispute the Government in any area."  But before the story ends we will learn that there are people in this totalitarian world who rebel against the government's control of their intimate relationships, however futilely.

I was expecting more from Malzberg's own fave story (I thought Malzberg's favorite of his novels was really good, the most enjoyable Malzberg novel I've ever read), but I certainly liked "Uncoupling," and it is probably better than average for him, and probably more approachable than average.  It also has what may be considered shocking or salacious elements: the government brothel caters not only to those who favor traditional sexual practices, but every fetish imaginable, and as the narrator is escorted to the "HETEROSEX" wing he passes by the "SADO-MASOCHISM,"
"BESTIALITY" and "NECROPHILIA" sectors, hearing various shrieks, squeals and moos as he does so.

"Over the Line" (1974)

In his intro to this one Malzberg claims he wrote it in an hour, during a break in an argument with his wife!  He also claims that "the writer" is "essentially" a "blue-collar worker."  I find it irritating when college-educated people who sit at desks reading and typing for a living try to don the mantle of the working classes; being a professional creative writer is certainly work and certainly comes with its own psychological challenges, but it is not like toiling in a mine or a factory or driving deliveries or scrubbing floors or whatever.

"Over the Line" first alerted us to the
pointlessness of our lives in
Roger Elwood's Future Kin

Whether or not he really wrote it in 60 minutes, "Over the Line" is quite good.  A generation ship has been crossing the cosmos for generations, so long that the ship's computer is breaking down.  At sixteen years of age inhabitants of the ship go ask the computer a question; this is a rite of passage that marks the line between childhood and adulthood on the ship.  Most of this story consists of our narrator describing his meeting with the computer during his own rite of passage.  He asks when the ship will finally reach its destination, and the computer admits that the files with the ship's destination have been lost--the ship is just going to travel on forever until it crashes or suffers catastrophic technical failure; the ship's voyage and the lives of the space travellers are pointless.  

An allegory for our lives!  And an allegory for (a cynical/practical view of) religion: when the narrator returns to his father he lies, telling Dad that the computer assured him that Mom, who disappeared eight years ago, is "at peace."  Religion is the lies we tell each other to make life endurable.

This is a good one; I like that the computer was programmed to feel emotions, in order to better identify with and serve the passengers, but that this has resulted in a computer that is depressed and miserable, scared of its own death and liable to short-tempered outbursts and self-pity.      

"Try Again" (1974)

"Try Again" and "An Oversight" share an intro.  In the intro Malzberg tells us that, while he is Jewish  ("guilt-stricken and intermittently disbelieving Reform") himself, he has written little influenced by Judaism, but quite a bit of work referring to the New Testament, and these two stories are examples of such fiction.

Both "Try Again" and "An Oversight"
first appeared in Strange Gods.  One
wonders if any of the stories is a
sword and sorcery adventure, as the
color illustration suggests.

The world has ended and the text of "Try Again" is that of the journal of a survivor, Steve the mediocre small town sportswriter, who is in a bomb shelter with his wife Eva and his father-in-law Bill, a fundamentalist minister.  (That's our  Barry, putting a woman named Eva in a bunker and suggesting she may be the only woman in the world, getting two allusions for the price of one!)  Bill has been preparing for the end of the world all his life, studying and preaching about the Book of Daniel incessantly for years--Eva, who hates her father, thinks he is happy that the world has ended!  Steve, we readers are given reason to believe, may also welcome the end of the world as a release from a disappointing life in which he never strove to do his best, but instead coasted--if the world was going to end during his lifetime anyway, his taking the easy path and settling for less all these years was justified!

Malzberg's work is often so short and crazy and experimental that he doesn't devote much energy to delineating characters, but in "Try Again" he effectively presents us with people with interesting personalities and motivations, people (in particular, the narrator) who are quite believable.  Malzberg often talks about psychology in his stories, but in an abstract or clinical way, throwing around Freudian terms and portraying characters who are totally bonkers.  In "Try Again" I felt like he was doing the more traditional literary thing, showing us the psychology of a more or less normal person, and I liked it.

Of course, this is still a Malzberg story, so there are some bizarre off the wall twists: can it be that the world hasn't ended after all? And what is up with this friendly tentacled alien who says he is a researcher and has been living in the bomb shelter since long before Steve and Bill and Eva arrived?

Fun and engaging, with a protagonist with whom an ordinary person can easily identify!

"An Oversight" (1974)

This brief story is a wacky trifle.  Our narrator, the head of some tiny apocalyptic Muslim sect with a mosque in the US (I guess in New York), thinks that "the Saviour" is on the Earth, travelling in various disguises.  He chases the Saviour around the world, spotting Him disguised as a hotdog-gobbling sports fan at a football game in St. Louis, as an Armenian Jew on a bus in Israel, as an old woman in Moscow.  Our narrator thinks if he can seize the Saviour that the Apocalypse can begin, but He keeps getting away, so much so that his followers are grumbling and making fewer and fewer donations to the cause.  Finally, on a plane bound for Alaska, the narrator realizes that the sexy stewardess is the Saviour in disguise!  He grabs her, and the "thousand years of war and judgement" begin.

This story is sort of amusing; the apparent preoccupation of the Saviour with money (our narrator suspects He disguised Himself as a stewardess so He could fly for free!) made me laugh.  Malzberg also hints that the narrator's theory that he can start the Apocalypse by grappling with the Saviour, who disguises himself in many ways, may be an excuse to sexually molest strangers.

Not bad, but slight.

"And Still in the Darkness" (1976)

Here it is, the last story in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg!  In his intro Barry tells us that, at age 35, he has made the "irrevocable decision to write no more science fiction."  Say it ain't so!

Malzberg explains that he loves the science-fiction field, but is convinced that even the best SF writers run out of ideas and just repeat themselves after seven or ten years. This fate he does not want to suffer.  (Malzberg's theory, that science fiction "seems to impose a definite time limit upon the creative working life of its practitioners" challenges those of us who are SF fans to look over the oeuvre of our favorite writers and try to figure out if, after the ten year mark, any of them wrote something fresh and different from what came before.  I also think it is fair to consider how much this discovery about SF--if true--matters to readers.  I am willing to admit that The Master Mind of Mars (1927) and Synthetic Men of Mars (1940) are not radically different from A Princess of Mars (1917; magazine version 1912) and Gods of Mars (1918; magazine version 1913), but I remember enjoying all four immensely!)

"And Still in the Darkness," which apparently only ever appeared in this essential volume for all of us SF scholars, bears considerable similarities to "Over the Line."  As a rite of passage a teenage boy has to go talk to the old computer that runs his society: the point of the encounter is to have it explained to him that life is "pain and darkness," that human life, compared to the vast size and scope of the universe, is insignificant.

Inferior to "Over the Line" because it lacks the family dynamics of "Over the Line" and the interesting idea of an emotional computer, so just OK.

**********

The Best of Barry N. Malzberg has been a great ride.  Many of these stories are good, and I love Malzberg's intros about his life as a writer and about the SF field.  This is an absolute must have for fans of Malzberg, and I also reccomend it to anybody interested in "literary" SF, the New Wave, and 20th-century SF criticism.