Whispers II: Lafferty, Davidson, R. C. Matheson, Chalker, and Sallis & Lunde

They don't have to be in mint condition
for me to buy them

Followers of my twitter feed know the wife and I like to go to antique stores.  In some of those antique malls that host booths from a large selection of sellers you can find a booth which is practically a mini-used bookstore, and at one such booth in the Westminster Antique Mall in Westminster, Maryland this last weekend I purchased a hardcover copy of Whispers II, the 1979 anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  Let's check it out!

In his Introduction, Schiff, who I guess was a trained dentist living in the greatest state in the union, says that fantasy and horror are now big business, what with Sissy Spacek as Carrie, Max von Sydow as The Exorcist and Michael J. London as The Snowbeast burning up our screens, but these popular commercial versions of horror and the weird designed to please the masses are diluted, adulterated.  In his work as an editor of Whispers, a semi-pro zine, Schiff (his friends like David Drake call him "Stu") has tried to encourage the creation of and to disseminate more pure, less commercial, horror/fantasy fiction.  He goes on to praise the role of little magazines like Whispers throughout the modern history of horror, citing the early careers of Lovecraft, Bradbury and Stephen King.

Whispers II includes 21 stories and I think I am going to read and opine on 19 of them.  I am skipping Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow," a Kane story.  I read all the Kane stories in the late New York and early Iowa periods of my life and didn't really find them to my taste, though some were better than others.  My vague memories suggest that "Undertow" was better than the average Kane story.  I have already blogged about Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep" and Russell Kirk's "Lex Talionis," having read them back in 2015 in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, which was edited by Wagner.

Tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog has already trod this ground--feel free to read his brisk and informative blogpost from 2010 about Whispers II and skip my long-winded babbling about it and get back to your real life; I'm sure you'd be better off doing something productive like chasing girls or making money or something like that.

"Berryhill" by R. A. Lafferty (1976)

"Berryhill" has a straightforward plot.  On the edge of town is a decrepit house where live some really old people who are rarely seen and are kind of weird.  All kinds of rumors about their alleged crimes have sprung up over the decades.  One day a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent who likes to torture animals and vandalize local farms ventures into the old weirdos' house.  What will happen to all these creepy characters?

Lafferty, with understated brilliance, takes this plot and makes it both hilarious and horrifying.  Everything from people's names to the little turns of phrase he uses to the details about small town life and casual descriptions of human evil work to make the reader smile and laugh or wince and shiver.  Engrossing and surprising, and easier to understand than some of Lafferty's work, which can often be difficult, this story alone is worth what I paid for this book.

Very good, highly recommended.  "Berryhill" first appeared in Whispers #9, and would later appear in the collection Iron Tears, which has a good cover by the Dillons.

"The King's Shadow Has No Limits" by Avram Davidson (1975)

I often find Davidson's stories to be erudite but gimmicky and silly, though I gave his novel Enemy of My Enemy a moderately positive review earlier this year.  "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" seems to have appeared approximately simultaneously in Whispers #8 and the book The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy.  I think this will be the first Dr. Eszterhazy story I have ever read.

I guess this story is a mood piece about historical change with a focus on social class and what today we would call income equality.  Dr. Eszterhazy lives in a bustling metropolis in an alternate history 19th century, the capital of a multi-ethnic empire in the Balkans that I guess was inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  This empire has a triple monarchy (one better than the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and is known as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.  The city is home to both both modern buildings and ancient ruins, to modern devices, like steam shovels, electric lights and telephones, and centuries-old rituals and superstitions, like poor people clamoring for the dust scarped yearly from a long dead saint's grave.  Esterhazy wanders around the town, seeing the poor working on a construction site, accepting alms, waiting in line for the aforementioned dust, etc.  Some impoverished old men remind him of the aged Emperor, and Eszterhazy addresses one and finds that it is the Emperor!  The Emperor tells him that some wise Jews inspired him to spend time among the poor; he also compares himself to Louis XV, quoting "after me, the deluge," suggesting that after he dies the empire will fall apart.

Later we are provided evidence that the Emperor had been in a coma all day, and his soul left his body to travel around the city and experience life from a different perspective.

Most stories which deal with historical change have the protagonist acting as a change agent, a rebel or reformer or innovator, but Esterhazy seems to be a sincere supporter of the Emperor and I think we are supposed to get a sense of foreboding from this story, to suspect that the death of the elderly Emperor is going to usher in a cataclysm like the French Revolution or World War I that will kill untold numbers of people and sweep away cultures which, while they have faults, perhaps have admirable elements whose destruction is to be lamented.  I detected similar ideas and themes in Enemy of My Enemy; I'm getting the feeling that Davidson is a sort of sad, romantic conservative, or maybe I am just projecting my own tragic view of life onto his work.

(Being the last story in the collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, it is perhaps appropriate that "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" foreshadow and expound upon the passing of the book's setting.)

This is a well-wrought literary story, dense with description and allusion.  It is a success, but it is not exactly fun or thrilling--it is sad, but not cathartic the way a more extravagant tragedy might be; "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" is haunting rather than melodramatic.  I have to admit it is leaving me feeling kind of depressed; maybe I should have eaten more chocolate today.

"Conversation Piece" by Richard Christian Matheson (1979)

Here's a story from the son of the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best film and Vincent Price's best film.  "Conversation Piece" appeared first here in Whispers II, and Schiff liked it so much he also included it in his anthology Mad Scientists.  "Conversation Piece" also shows up in the Richard Christian Matheson collection Scars.

This is a gimmicky silly story; maybe it is supposed to be funny.  Most of it is taken up with the transcript of an interview, "A"s following "Q"s, bookended by the brief recollections and reflections of the journalist who posed the "Q"s.  Basically, the journalo interviews a guy who is just a head, a guy who was born in a normal healthy body and made money by selling body fluids and then body parts to medical scientists until he had sold almost everything.  We don't realize he is just a head until late in the story.  The interviewee's attitude is not that of a victim; he acts like his chosen career of selling off his body piece by piece is just a normal profession, saying it suits him and talking about how he sold this part to pay for his wedding and that part to pay for his daughter's school clothes, etc.  The journalist, at the end of the story, lays on the heavy symbolism, suggesting that we all surrender or sacrifice parts of ourselves, our honesty or convictions, for example, in our pursuit of a career and a satisfying sex and family life.

Acceptable.

"The Stormsong Runner" by Jack L. Chalker (1979)

I think I read a few Jack L. Chalker SF novels in my high school days in the 1980s, but all I can remember is that a party of people was on a space ship, searching for something and being chased by enemy space ships and all that usual stuff, and at one point they had to design a new life form, and they divvied up the design duty, with one person designing the head and another designing the body and whatever.  One guy got the job of designing the life form's penis, and there was a whole paragraph in which the guy described the penis's fascinating attributes (the word "telescoping" was used.)  Did I really read this or is this just a crazy dream I had that I have unfairly associated with Chalker?

Anyway, here we have a short story which first appeared here in Whispers II but would later be included in a Chalker collection and some anthologies of American ghost stories.  Boo!

Our narrator is a guy who got a degree in "elementary education" but had a hard time finding a position and devoted much of his time to booze, drugs, and women with the same dubious hobbies.  Some money falls into his lap after a car accident caused by the other driver, so he leaves the city and moves to the hillbilly country of West Virginia.  Chalker gives us some descriptions of how poor and illiterate and ignorant the people in the hills are, and also how proud they are, how close they are to nature and how they value people and their word more than materialistic and overly sophisticated city folk.

The narrator convinces the state to pay him to be a sort of peripatetic teacher of these country folk who refuse to have anything to do with conventional schooling.  Our ghost story involves a little girl (approximately 12) whom others consider a witch.  Little Cindy Lou Whittler (I suspect this name is a joke because Chalker also directly refers to Dr. Seuss in this story) believes she can control the weather and that her dead father speaks to her, telling her when to make it rain.  And sure enough, one day our narrator hears two voices from the Whittler shack, arguing--a man wants Cindy Lou to trigger a powerful storm, but the little girl says it will cause the dam to burst and kill the local people!

The ending of this story is anti-climactic.  The dam bursts, but nobody gets killed.  Cindy Lou doesn't have to suffer the guilt of wrecking the dam, because (she tells the narrator) her father the ghost, who has responsibility for the weather of the region, enlisted some other witch to make fall the rain, which was mandated by a still higher authority.  The narrator reflects that maybe everybody in this world has a purpose, even drug addicted losers like him (his purpose is to educate these illiterate poor people) and the impoverished people of Appalachia (who control the weather at the behest of Mother Nature or God?)

Lame.

"They Will Not Hush" by James Sallis and David Lunde (1974)

Lunde is new to me, but we've encountered James Sallis before.  I didn't like his experimental story from Quark 3, thought his experimental stories in Again, Dangerous Visions were alright, but could not recommend his experimental stories in Alternities.  The story here has an epigraph from Yeats, four lines from "The Madness of King Goll" about woodland creatures, cluing us in to the source of the story's title.

This is a sleep-inducing prose poem full of sentences like, "A doe, invisible in a dapple of sun and shadow, suddenly bounds down the slope before him," and "A door slapping shit, firmly, like the closing of a fist; a car gearing up, then fading quickly away."  I think it is about a guy who just graduated from college with a physics degree coming home to the forest to his family of witches; the witches are about to face some war or other trial, and the college kid burns his college books and prepares for "the Strengthening" of "the Agreed," who must face "Them"--the college kid is now the leader of the witches and their animal friends.

A total waste of your time.

"They Will Not Hush" first appeared in Whispers #4 and has not been reprinted since Whispers II came out.   

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The Lafferty is very good, but it has been downhill from there, from the successful Davidson to the OK R. C. Matheson to the weak Chalker and finally the pointless Sallis and Lunde production.  Hopefully this trend will be reversed when we read five more stories from Whispers II in our next episode.

The inside jacket flap text of my hardcover copy of Whispers II

1974 stories by Barry Malzberg, David Bunch, Ed Bryant and James Sallis

The back cover text of Alternities ("DAZZLING VISIONS...unfettered by strictures and taboos..probe the forbidden...."), and the titles of the included stories (e. g., "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb with a View") made me think the anthology, published in 1974 and edited by David Gerrold (associate editor, Stephen Goldin), was part and parcel of the New Wave.  But Gerrold's intro makes me wonder if it is a blow struck against the New Wave:

Science fiction has been standing neck-deep in bullshit for so long....Science fiction used to be fun.  Now it's become "important," with all the resultant literary in-breeding and incestuos navel-studying that implies.  Too many writers have forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money....I want science fiction to be fun again....The goal of this editor is to provide a place for stories that I believe are worth reading because they're "fun" in one way or another.

In this intro Gerrold seems to be calling out (though not by name) Golden Age writers L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein for acting and/or being treated like gurus:

Being able to tell a story--no matter how well--doesn't automatically qualify a man as a magician.  (Oh hell, we really are the special dreamers, but "special dreamers" shouldn't be capitalized and turned into a religion.  That way leads only to Scientology and Terminal Grokking.)

More subtly, I think Gerrold criticizes Harlan Ellison, who likes to write long intros to stories in anthologies he edits:

The stories [in this book] speak for themselves, which is why I have specifically avoided introductions at the beginning of each one.  That's one of the places where the bullshit quotient is highest.

Zing!

It makes sense for Gerrold and Goldin to be the editors of such a volume, as, while they both have agendas that are evident in their fiction (advocacy for social acceptance of homosexuality in Gerrold's fiction and hostility to religion in Goldin's), both are strongly influenced by Golden Age SF (Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr books reminded me alot of Heinlein's juveniles and Starship Troopers, and his Yesterday's Children was reminiscent of van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle; Goldin has worked with and in the style of E. E. "Doc" Smith) and their novels (that I have read, at least) are primarily entertaining adventure stories.

(I wrote about Gerrold's celebration of dinosaurs, laser guns and gore, Deathbeast, in 2013.  This year I wrote about Goldin's Assault on the Gods.  Joachim Boaz reviewed Yesterday's Children in 2014; in the comments to his review we discuss the radical differences between the original edition of the novel and the revised one.)

Gerrold's intriguing introduction to the volume has me wondering what Alternities has in store for us.  Let's check out some of the stories; in this post we'll look at contributions by people we've read before: Barry Malzberg, David R. Bunch, Edward Bryant and James Sallis.

"Before the Great Space-War" by Barry N. Malzberg

ATTENTION!  Calling all Barry Malzberg completists!  If isfdb is to be believed, "Before the Great Space-War" has appeared in one and only one publication, right here in Alternities.  Order your copy today!

"Before the Great Space-War"'s six-pages consist of messages sent back and forth between an invasion force and HQ.  First we have messages from Interstellar Scout Wilson, who is making friends with primitive natives on some planet, learning about them in preparation for the invasion.  The natives have invited Wilson to a mysterious ceremony, and HQ insists that he accept the invitation, but Wilson is reluctant.  Perhaps fearing that he will be relegated to the "basket of deplorables," Wilson assures HQ that "it is not, not xenophobia which makes me reluctant to participate in the Ceremony of Hinges but merely a certain shy reluctance...."  Later messages indicate Wilson has gone native--he vows to join the locals in resisting the invasion force.  The final communications, to and from the commander of the invasion force, suggest that the entire fleet has been suborned and seduced by the natives, who are cannibals and hope to entice down colonists to serve as the meal at the next ceremony.  Presumably the space war of the title is between the now-cannibalistic spacemen and a fleet sent to rescue or destroy them.

Trifling perhaps, but the style is the classic Malzberg we fans are used to and so "Before the Great Space-War" is an acceptable entertainment.

"How Xmas Ghosts are Made" by David R. Bunch

This story is four pages long and is perhaps the kind of thing that "breaks taboos" in its irreverent attack on America's bourgeois society and its rituals and mores.

A married couple with two young children (three and four) is out Christmas shopping.  Bunch stresses that the mother wears expensive clothes, perhaps trying to excite the reader's supposed envy of the rich, or just lampoon the pretensions of American consumers.  In an ironic deadpan Bunch describes how Mom slips in the snow and is run over by public busses trying desperately to keep to their schedules.  Mama is torn in half by the machines as husband and children watch; the pieces are then carried away by the wheels of the vehicles so that the woman has simply vanished without trace.  Right before she is killed Mom is thinking of suing somebody for causing her fall, a means of defraying the cost of all those Christmas presents.  (Bunch never spells out "Christmas," it is always "Xmas," like ten times.)  A drunken Irish cop is no help and Papa can find no witnesses; in the coming years Papa and kids embrace the fiction that Mom abandoned them.

If you haven't heard enough that Christmas is too commercialized and people these days are in too much of a hurry and Americans are too selfish and materialistic and litigious and religion has become a pro forma scam and the government is a callous and incompetent racket, well, here is your chance to hear it again. The style is alright and at only four pages this thing doesn't overstay its welcome, so I guess I can award "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" the coveted grade of "acceptable."

Like Malzberg's "Before the Great Space-War," Bunch's "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" seems to have appeared only in this volume; Alternities is shaping up to be a must-buy for all you fans of short wacky misanthropic trifles.

(Back in 2014 I read other Bunch stories about how crummy American society is and about people getting run over.  Apparently in 1974 Bunch really had hit and run accidents on his mind.)

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

This is the third story from Alternities that has never appeared anywhere else, but the first which I can't dismiss as a trifle; Bryant really tries to construct a provocative and believable alternate reality here.  "Cowboys, Indians" depicts a United States onto which a sort of Vietnam War template has been placed--the country bubbles with revolutionary fervor, while Canada (!) and Communist Vietnam send agents and commandos to infiltrate the USA as part of their covert war on America.

Our narrator is a young rancher from Wyoming.  At college he got radicalized by smoking weed and reading Marxist texts; this story includes flashbacks to his youth (episodes illustrating how violent and racist people in general or maybe just Americans in particular are) but primarily describes a raid on a government facility in which he participated.  The raid team includes a Vietnamese agent (his eyes altered so he can pass for a Mexican laborer), a female Canadian "exfiltration expert" equipped with electronic jamming devices, and another American radical.  Their mission is to sneak into a fortified lab in the countryside (where an addictive birth-control drug is being developed for use in the effort to limit the fecundity of urban blacks) and rescue a scientist (an expert on steroids) being held there against her will.  The scientist will be extracted via a Harrier jet that revolutionaries have stolen from the USMC!

The raid is a disaster; not only do some of the team members get killed, but the steroid scientist has been used as a guinea pig by the government researchers: "She was no longer a woman, and I didn't know what she was."  The narrator escapes with his life and abandons the cause of revolution.

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

I've read two stories by James Sallis before, "The Field" from Quark/3, which I gave a thumbs down to, and "Tissue" from Dangerous Visions, which I thought was more worthwhile.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" is a sort of four-page literary experiment in which the narrator describes his wife walking down a street barefoot, watched by five men, as she collects mail and steps on an earthworm which has died on the pavement.  We hear about the wife's thoughts (she is an artist) and get to read a piece of her mail and hear a pitch for her husband's idea for a stage play based on this walk.

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

Sallis's second story in the anthology is just two pages.  It describes a dream or maybe just a load of nonsense in the first-person.  The narrator takes a flight to the city where a friend lives, and along the way there are visions of warfare, cannibalism, and crime.  The narrator gets on the plane never having considered writing a novel before, but during the flight he becomes a best-selling novelist.

I can't recommend this, either.

Both "The First Few Kinds of Truth" and "Delta Flight 281" would show up in the 1995 collection of Sallis's work entitled Limits of the Sensible World.

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Despite Gerrold's complaint that SF writers have "forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money," this anthology appears to be full of stories with thin or nonexistent plots and little or no characterization, stories which would only appeal to a very small market.  The Malzberg, Bunch and Sallis stories are what I would expect from them, but they seem to go against the sensibilities Gerrold propounds in his intro.  Very strange.

(Bryant's work seems to actually try to fulfill Gerrold's mission, and it is the most successful of the stories we read today.)

There are 16 stories in Alternities, which leaves 11 to go.  We'll look at about half of those in our next episode.

Vengeance of Quark/3: Dangerous Visions from Sallis, Saxton, and Hill

Back in June I read Quark/3, a 1971 anthology full of challenging speculative fiction by writers I had limited familiarity with.  This week I opened up my 1972 hardcover of Again, Dangerous Visions, to sample a second time the work of three Quark/3 contributors: poet and crime writer James Sallis, feminist and committed gardener Josephine Saxton, and journalist and novelist Richard Hill.

"Tissue" by James Sallis

On this here blog I called Sallis's story in Quark/3, "Field," a "prose poem" that was "not good."  Of the 13 pieces of fiction in Quark/3 I ranked it 11th, and declared it a "certifiable disaster."  Ouch.

Harlan Ellison, editor of Again, Dangerous Visions, includes a five page introduction to "Tissue" in the anthology.  Sallis, we learn, "is clearly one of the most important writers produced by our genre in some time," and Ellison compares him to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, suggesting Sallis is a genius with an unstable, even self-destructive, mentality.  Fun fact: like my wife and I, and Thomas Disch, Sallis has lived in both Iowa and in New York.

"Tissue" is in fact two stories, whose titles are not capitalized.  These tales have been reprinted separately in Sallis collections in 1995 and 2000.  The first is "at the fitting shop."  This story, four pages, consists entirely of dialogue and includes no quotation marks.  It is an extended joke about how easy it is to get lost in a large department store.  (In my head the characters had the voices of Jack Benny and Frank Nelson.)  The punchline of the joke is that this is an alternate universe in which at puberty young men go to a store's plumbing department to buy a penis.  There are various models to choose from, each with evocative names, like "Polish Sausage" or "Mandrake Special."  I guess this is a satire of American consumerism and morality (to purchase a penis you are legally required to produce a note from your minister, priest or rabbi.)

"at the fitting shop" is alright; it gets my coveted "acceptable" rating.

The second story is the four page "53rd american dream."  This is a surreal story about a monstrous family; the children (Tom, Tim and Jim) regularly murder and devour the maid, the father (Bruce) has sharp teeth and detachable facial features, the mother (who I guess is some kind of huge arachnid or insect) can be disassembled alive--her cast off limbs are capable of independent movement.  The joke is that the mother and father try to be good parents, following advice from a book on parenting; part of this advice is to not make a mystery of their sex life, and so the kids get to watch and cheer on dad as he flagellates their mother until she achieves orgasm.  The story is full of brand names like Brillo, Beautyrest, and Neiman Marcus, I suppose some kind of reference to American consumerism.  Maybe we are supposed to see the family as representative of rich WASPs (Neiman Marcus is upscale, isn't it?) who exploit poor ethnics (the murdered maids have names like Olga and Griselda.)

"53rd american dream" is OK; the more surreal passages are a little hard to visualize, which makes the story seem long.  I think I prefer the snappier "at the fitting shop."

Both tales are much better than "Field," a pleasant surprise.

Emshwiller's illustration for "at the fitting shop"

"Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon" by Josephine Saxton

I liked "Nature Boy," Saxton's story in Quark/3, and rated it the #4 story in that anthology.

After a page and a half of Ellison's jokes we get Saxton's page and a half autobiography.  She never watches TV, she loves to cook, swim, read, write, garden and paint and she is fascinated by religion, psychology and the occult.

The story itself is 13 pages.  Elouise is a healthy young woman on a planet where everybody, by law, is required to have some kind of disease or birth defect.  Elouise is dragged onto a stage to be examined by a legion of doctors--Saxton presents us with a scene which all you gynecology students out there may enjoy.  Then a mob of people even less healthy than the average citizen of Pergamon storm into the theater and demand Eloise; do they want to worship her, or sacrifice her?  Elouise manages to escape, in the process killing almost everybody in the building (over a hundred people) with poison.

The writing is fine, but the story feels long.  We learn on the second page that on Pergamon people are required to be ill and Elouise is healthy; there isn't any subtle buildup to this bizarre fact, and it isn't sprung on us as a surprise.  The illnesses of the many incidental characters are described in lengthy detail; I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be funny or disgusting or both.  (The whole story has a jocular tone, with jokes about how the doctors love to play golf, for example.)  I'm afraid I was neither disgusted nor amused.  Saxton's focus is, perhaps, Elouise's own psychology; she wants to be among people like herself, and alternately wishes she was on a planet of healthy people, or was ill like her fellow Pergamonians.  Unfortunately I didn't find Elouise's psychology very compelling. 

In the Afterword to the story Saxton tells us that "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon" is about the struggle for freedom and how politics is not a means to achieve freedom, the dangers of identifying with people in the mass, the importance of accepting yourself, and the fact that nothing gained at the expense of others is legitimate.  All that sounds more interesting than the actual story, which didn't do anything for me; it wasn't bad, but didn't excite any pleasure or admiration either.

A little disappointing; inferior to "Nature Boy."  

Emshwiller's illustration for "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon"

"Moth Race" by Richard Hill 

When I read Quark/3 I thought Hill's "Brave Salt," a bizarre farce, was even worse than Sallis's "Field."  So I didn't start this story with much enthusiasm.  I was relieved to find "Moth Race" was a traditional story with a plot, images, and emotion.

In the future the world is run by a mysterious totalitarian government that enforces order and material equality.  Everybody has to take pills that dampen aggression (as well as racial prejudice.)  Intelligence test results guide the government in assigning people jobs; a small number of people who do well on the tests are permitted to travel and/or have children.  Everyone is provided (bland) food and health care, and government-provided TV transmits not only sound and images, but taste and physical sensations, such as having sex with a famous actress or eating lobster, to liven up everybody's drab constricted life.

Once a year comes The Race, a day on which people do not need to take the "easypills."  Brave people volunteer to ride in a car on a track; if someone can survive two laps around the track, he or she becomes the Champion, and will be permitted to eat luxury food and travel the world.  (It is the Champion's erotic and culinary experiences that are transmitted to the populace via TV.)  The Race, however, is no test of skill: the car goes at a set speed, and traps appear so unpredictably and so quickly that it is impossible to dodge them.  The Race is either totally random, or rigged, and only one person of the multitude of volunteers has ever survived The Race to become Champion.

In the story the Champion, perhaps bored with life or fed up with societal corruption, volunteers to ride The Race again, and is killed.  We are invited to speculate as to the long term effects of this action; will it destabilize the static dictatorial society?

There have been lots of science fiction stories with this kind of setting and plot, but "Moth Race" is well-written and has a slightly different point of view: the main character is a spectator at The Race, (not the Champion, whose motives remain a mystery), and The Race is a refutation of ideas of free will and merit, not a vehicle for an adventure story.  So I enjoyed "Moth Race," and think it a worthwhile read.  Like Sallis's contribution to Again, Dangerous Visions, Hill's story is a pleasant surprise.

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I was a little disappointed with the Saxton, but revisiting these three writers has been a good experience.  I'd be willing to read shorts by all of them again.

I should also note that one of the nice things about Again, Dangerous Visions is Ed Emshwiller's illustrations for each story; many of them are quite good. 

Quark/3 (Part3): Harrison, Stanley, Veitch, Bailey, & Vickers

Here we have the concluding episode of my epic reading of Quark/3, a 1971 anthology of experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Delany and Hacker endeavored to present in Quark/3 stories that were not mere "popular entertainment" or "adventure stories" by "commercial science fiction writers," but rather risk-taking work of speculative fiction that was "politically dangerous" and meaningfully addressed "social, psychological and technological crises" evident in the early 1970s.

The first third of the book contained two good stories, those by R. A. Lafferty and Delany himself, while the second third limped along on the strength of an OK story by Kate Wilhelm and a slightly better tale by Josephine Saxton.  What awaits us in this final third? 

"Ring of Pain" by M. John Harrison

I recently read Harrison's first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, and thought it alright, nothing special.

In "Ring of Pain" a man wanders through a Central England devastated by war, scavenging food from the ruins.  Not a single building is intact, and not a single live person is to be seen.  Is he the last member of the human race? 

No!  He meets a woman, who is overjoyed to no longer be alone.  She talks of having children with the main character, and our protagonist responds by vomiting and fleeing!  He wants no part of continuing the human race, finds abhorrent the idea of being the Adam of a new civilization which will, no doubt, repeat the grim and catastrophic rise to industrialism and then industrialized, world-shattering war.  The woman eventually catches up with him, and he tries to win her over to his view that they must not procreate.  He fails to convince her, and finds himself unable to resist having sex with her.

The brief final scene I didn't quite understand.  I think a military unit, riding tanks and armed with rifles and bayonets, appears, and somehow this leads to the woman cutting off her breasts.  Or perhaps the main character is reflecting that even the sight of an armored squadron would not discourage the woman from wanting to have children, though if she had her breasts cut off then he would no longer desire her.

This is an acceptable story, even though it is written to be intentionally difficult to follow; there are lots of sentence fragments, I guess to convey the feeling of a world that has been smashed to bits, and get you into the mindset of people who have lived through such a catastrophe.  

"To the Child Whose Birth Will Change the Way the Universe Works" by George Stanley

American-born Canadian poet Stanley won the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award in 2006.  "To the Child..." is a two page poem, an adaptation of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. All you classical scholars out there already know that Eclogue IV was widely interpreted in the Middle Ages as a sort of prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Having been indifferently educated myself, I can't read Latin, but, in preparation for reading Stanley's piece in Quark/3, I took my copy of the Penguin Classics 1980 edition of the Eclogues off the shelf and read Guy Lee's translation of Eclogue IV.

Virgil's poem was written around 40 B. C. (or B. C. E., as we are saying nowadays) to express hope that a marriage alliance between the two successors of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), would end the long period of instability and civil wars that had been wracking the Roman world.  Virgil is praising the prospective child of the union between Mark Antony and Octavian's sister: with his birth will come a new beginning which will see the end of fear and the "iron race" replaced by a "golden" one.  

Stanley updates and Americanizes the poem.  The birth of the child will end the "machine age," and where Virgil mentions Achilles, Stanley mentions George Washington.  Virgil suggests that, with the child as his subject, his poetry will surpass that of Linus, Orpheus and Pan; Stanley says his verse will be the superior of Hart Crane's and Lorca's.

Maybe Stanley sees the assassination of JFK as analogous to the assassination of Caesar, and the 1960s, with such contentious events as the Civil Rights movement and race riots, Vietnam War protests and all the trouble around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as analogous to the civil wars and other crises suffered by Romans during the Late Republic.  I can't tell if Stanley is referring to any specific person or event as ending the crisis period, the way Virgil does; a clue that isn't getting me very far on google is that this poem is dedicated to a Brian DeBeck.

"A Sexual Song" by Tom Veitch

Veitch has only three credits at isfdb, one of them a story he co-wrote about Greedo of Mos Eisley Cantina fame.  Veitch has written numerous comic books, including Star Wars comics. 

This story is even more surreal and less coherent than Hill's "Brave Salt."  "A Sexual Song" begins "He dressed in moth skins torn from a beaver's diary..." and in the second paragraph we get, "Print culture seems to be dying this morning because the dead men who occupy those zones cannot provide nourishment to tribal electricians...."  The entire story is like this, incomprehensible nonsense, like the product of playing Mad Libs.  I guess the plot is about a sexual encounter in a post-nuclear war world in which everything is mutated and crazy.

Painful.

"Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" by Hilary Bailey

Bailey, when Quark/3 was published, was married to Michael Moorcock.  This is the first thing I've read by her; she seems to have been quite productive, though much of her work falls outside the SF genre.

After some kind of catastrophe the British populace resorts to living in government-built underground complexes.  Each complex is isolated from the others.  A female technician in one complex discovers a secret means of communicating with other complexes, and starts a surreptitious correspondence with an old acquaintance living in another complex.  The entire text consists of their letters, and through them we learn how human beings are reacting to being confined in the sterile and depressing complexes.  There are many women who insist on having children despite the discouragement of the authorities and a lack of resources.  Children and adolescents get into all kinds of mischief, creating extra work for the technicians and mechanics.  Family relationships collapse and there are pathetic attempts by lonely people to secure some kind of human comfort; the long distance love affair of our two main characters is one example.

A convincing and interesting milieu, actual characters and emotion, and a smooth writing style; Bailey brings to Quark/3 some things which have been in short supply.  After some of the pieces I've endured in Quark/3 it is certainly a relief to encounter a well-written story with some genuine human emotion and a clever SF premise that hearkens back to the tradition of the epistolary novel.  I am proclaiming the oasis that is "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" the best story in the anthology!

"The Coded Sun Game" by Brian Vickers 

The isfdb indicates that "The Coded Sun Game," which is the longest story in Quark/3 (over 60 pages!), constitutes 50% of Brian Vickers's SF output.  Under ordinary circumstances I wouldn't devote the necessary time and energy to reading a 60 page story by a guy I never heard of, especially in an anthology which is full of weak stories, but I am on a mission, and I'm certainly not going to give up with the finish line in sight!


"The Coded Sun Game" is convoluted and difficult, and at times I found it hard to attend.  The narrative is a sort of stream of consciousness of a being who is delusional, suffering from "psychotic hallucinations" that are "compounded of past perceptual experiences."  The narrative is full of pop music references (the names of bands and singers, like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and lines from songs like the Doors' "Light My Fire" and The Who's "See Me, Feel Me," pop up at random) and lists (of oil companies, of modern artists, of cities) and is periodically interrupted by science lectures (psychology, biology, solar astronomy) and medical reports.

Paul is a young man (perhaps an alien, perhaps a fallen deity) suffering from the aforementioned "psychotic withdrawal visions."  He is living with an English family near the ocean: Clive Noland, a doctor, his wife Barbra, an artist, and their sexy daughter Michelle.  Paul watches TV, walks on the beach, swims in the pool, has sex with Michelle.  His mental problems seem to be linked to solar radiation; a medical report says his symptoms reach their peak at midday, and the text is full of references to color, sunspots, and solar flares.

The story gets more confusing as it goes on.  In the second half more characters are introduced, and, like in a time travel story, Paul seems to be reliving scenes but as different characters, talking to and fighting with younger versions of himself from the first half of the story. 

I've spent some time flipping through this story, rereading passages and trying to figure it out, but I don't really get it.  Still, I didn't find it offensively bad.

Fun fact: Until I read this story I wasn't familiar with the British slang term for transistor radio, "tranny" or "trannie."  You can imagine my initial puzzlement at the phrase, "Beatles strangled by a trannie."

**********

So there we have it, Quark/3.  It wasn't an easy ride, but let's look at the bright side.  I read a pile of stories by writers totally new to me, and among them are Hilary Bailey and Josephine Saxton, whom I will definitely read again (also, it is notable that the Bailey and Saxton stories have never appeared in any other book, so I'd never have encountered them otherwise.)  Richard Hill's and James Sallis's stories are so crazy I am spurred to read their contributions to Again, Dangerous Visions.

Taken as a whole, the stories were less propagandistic and more experimental in style and form than I had expected.  Gordon Eklund's anti-war story and Kate Wilhelm's overpopulation story felt tired, but most of the writers really did try to do something strange and/or new.   

Finally, let's rank the fiction to be found in Quark/3.  Hilary Bailey comes in first, with Lafferty and Delany close behind, and Saxton a distant fourth.  Then we have a pack of OK tales, followed by a mass of weak stories, and then three certifiable disasters.

QUARK/3 FINAL STANDINGS
Hilary Bailey                            "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth"
R. A. Lafferty                          "Encased in Ancient Rind"
Samuel R. Delany                    "Dog in a Fisherman's Net"
Josephine Saxton                     "Nature Boy"

M. John Harrison                     "Ring of Pain"
Kate Wilhelm                           "Where Have You Been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?"
Brian Vickers                           "The Coded Sun Game"

Gordon Eklund                        "Home Again, Home Again"
Virginia Kidd                           "Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside"
Joanna Russ                             "The Zanzibar Cat"

James Sallis                             "Field"
Richard Hill                             "Brave Salt"
Tom Veitch                              "A Sexual Song"

Quark/3 (Part 2): Sallis, Dorman, Wilhelm, Hill, Saxton and Kidd

For some reason (dementia?) I decided to forgo my usual practice of reading one or two stories from an anthology and then consigning the book to the inaccessible recesses of my overstuffed bookcase; instead I am reading every page of Quark Slash Three, the early 1971 issue of a quarterly devoted to experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Unsurprisingly, R. A. Lafferty was the star of the first leg of my journey into Quark/3, though editor Samuel Delany put in a creditable performance as well. I thought Gordon Eklund's contribution was conventionally bad, while college professor Joanna Russ managed to find a special way to inflict a bad story on me.  Who will be today's standouts as I read the second third of Quark/3?

"Field" by James Sallis

James Sallis mostly seems to write crime stories, as well as books about American music (his bio at the end of Quark Stroke Three indicates he was working on a book on country and western music.) I've never read anything by Sallis before.

"Field" is, I guess, a series of prose poems.  First off we get a bunch of bizarre images and sentence fragments in both first and second person.  On the first page we get "Where this morning the charred bodies of all the women I've loved come floating down the stream outside our window," a line I heard in my mind in the voice of poet Jason Irwin.  This flight of fancy made me laugh, but most of the sections aren't that funny, alas.

One paragraph is a "to do" list with most of the items crossed out, another is the instructions of how to convert your snowmobile into a lawnmower ("Tighten bolts 1-8. (See Diagram 3.)")  There are vignettes about sophisticated writers who live in cramped apartments and can't pay their bills and can't stay true to their lovers.

Not good.

"Vanishing Points" by Sonya Dorman

This is a two page poem about the world being destroyed in a nuclear war: "the world winds up into a cloud...into one massive atom / O man of fire."  At least that is what I think it is about.  There's also a lot about fish and animals, the stars, etc.
  
This poem is listed as "Vanishing Point" on the table of contents, but the title is plural in the actual text. 

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" by Kate Wilhelm 

Years ago I read Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, one of those books in which aliens who share the author's politics force evil humanity to behave, putting an end to our racism, imperialism and strip mining.  I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read more Wilhelm; this must be the first short story I have ever read by her.

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" is a series of brief scenes from a dystopic future, with Wilhelm covering all the typical boring complaints like overpopulation, pollution, TV, consumerism, urban terrorism, international war, etc.  The plot is presented to us out of chronological order, and is a little ambiguous, but I think I have pieced it together.

The world is in turmoil, and little Billy's father, a scientist, testifies to Congress that because of overpopulation, humanity will go extinct unless the government kills half the population ASAP.  His plan is rejected by an influential Southern senator, so Billy's dad conspires to poison the water supply (or something of that nature) to prune the population without the government's OK.  Dad gets caught and imprisoned and lobotomized (or something; Wilhelm keeps everything vague.)  Billy grows up and gets a job at a consumer products firm, while things gets worse around the world, with increasing violent crime, war, and overcrowding.  Billy's father is released from prison and moves in with his son, and, before long, hangs himself.  There is also a subplot I didn't quite get about how Bill is hallucinating that he can shift himself to a world without other people.  I'm also not sure if the sections about Billy as a kid caught up in a riot and the parts about Bill leading a pop band are depicting alternate realities or just different periods of Bill's life. 

Not very good, but better than the Eklund, the Sallis and the Russ.

"Brave Salt" by Richard Hill

I've never even heard of Richard Hill before.  A gander at Hill's file at isfdb suggests that he retired from writing SF after he had a story accepted by Harlan Ellison for Again, Dangerous Visions.

This story is a surrealistic farce in twelve chapters (that's right, 12 chapters in ten pages) about a low-IQ hotel pool lifeguard who participates in a sort of Bay of Pigs style attack on Haiti.  It almost reads like Hill made it up as he went along, or perhaps used the surrealist technique of "automatic writing."  "Brave Salt" is full of references to pop culture figures like Jim Backus, Charlton Heston, and Merv Griffin, and feeble jokes about sex and drugs.  The most memorable joke: members of a band are having anal sex on stage while singing "I've Got You Babe," and then somebody bumps into their amplification equipment and the band is electrocuted to death.

Craziest of all, in the intro to his story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Hill floats the idea of expanding "Brave Salt" into a full length novel!

Suddenly Joanna Russ's story isn't looking so bad.

"Nature Boy" by Josephine Saxton

I've read Saxton's odd contribution to The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but this is the first fiction I have read by her.

This is a story about a mentally ill 40-year-old man who lives with his wealthy mother on a country estate.  He suffers delusions and unbidden, obsessive "daydreams," and feels driven to make "sacrifices" to woodland deities. We learn that he murdered a little girl some years ago in the woods; the tension in the story comes when he takes a walk into these very woods and meets another little girl--will he murder her as well?  The theme of the story seems to be human callousness and cruelty; the little girl and the mental case both kill small animals.

This is a moderately good mainstream crime or realistic horror story; the fact that the murderer believes in spirits, including the spirit of the girl he murdered, perhaps counts as SF content.     



Advertisement for The Science Fiction Book Club

Bound in the center of the book is an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club, highlighting the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, but also offering a dozen other books at low low prices.  One wonders how many of these books would pass the Delany/Hacker test of "meaningfully addressing crises" and "being politically dangerous."  (I have a feeling my man ERB wouldn't be passing this test.)

"Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside" by Virginia Kidd

Kidd is a very important literary agent, but I never have read any of her fiction.   

"Balls" is the biography of a successful Hollywood screenwriter who is obsessed with Walt Disney and Disney productions.  I guess this is a satire of American culture and society, perhaps in particular of Hollywood; at one point the protagonist declares, "I'm a real American success."  It feels tired and tedious, long and boring.  As you expect in a story about a Hollywood habitue the screenwriter has numerous divorces and sees a shrink.  Maybe Kidd is trying to tell us that Americans live in a fantasy world and are disconnected from the real world, that they care more about TV and celebrities than flesh and blood people they know.  Also maybe Americans are obsessed with success and happiness, but work too hard to really enjoy success and achieve happiness.

The SF content consists of the writer having the delusion that the universe is sending him (essentially useless) messages or signals via everyday sounds or hallucinatory images.  For example, the writer tells himself he should be happy, as he has "got it made," and then he sees a vision of a topless girl; this is a "tit maid."  A phone rings unexpectedly in the therapist's office and the doctor answers it, "Hello." Our hero figures this is a message in reverse, that the universe is saying to him, "Oh, Hell."

Weak.

*************

Cripes, doesn't look so hot, does it?  The Saxton story is marginally good, the Wilhelm is OK, the rest are poor or bad.

Well, there are several more selections in Quark/3, maybe in the third and final leg of my journey the anthology will make a comeback.