The Shattered Goddess by Darrell Schweitzer

Kaemen, lord of the darkening world, sat in his throne room, as alone as he ever could be.  The Black Lady was asleep.  Always, always she stirred in his mind like a horde of rats, whispering, scratching, but now, after long labors and conjurings, after making the bones of The Goddess tremble, she lay dormant, perhaps exhausted in some manner he could never understand.

My copy, front cover

I'm a fan of Stephen Fabian's work (check out his terrific website, where you can see lots of Fabian's drawings and paintings and get all kinds of inside info about the SF and RPG industries), so when I saw the Starblaze edition of Darrell Schweitzer's 1983 novel The Shattered Goddess on the clearance shelves at Half Price Books I snatched it right up.  Fabian's cover painting, and his half-dozen interior illustrations, are good, and, to my surprise, I found that this copy was signed by author Darrell Schweitzer, about whom I knew nothing.

This weekend I read the novel, and enjoyed it.  Schweitzer sucked me in from page one with his compelling, provocative characters and storyline, and many striking images.  An evil witch, pursuing a convoluted campaign of revenge, fakes her own death and is interred in a dump!  She summons a demon who tunnels under her coffin to release her.  The demon demands payment, and she eagerly satisfies the beast by ripping out her own eyeballs and handing them over! Yuck!  The witch's soul, a cloud of black smoke, travels to the nursery where the heir to the throne, the baby boy Kaemen, lies.  She enters his body through his mouth, and under her malign influence he grows up to be a selfish, cruel, misanthropic, obese and feminine creep, totally unlike his noble father Tharanodeth.

Our hero is a boy approximately the same age as Kaemen, a foundling who mysteriously appeared in Kaemon's cradle alongside the prince.  The monarch Tharanodeth names him "Ginna" and preserves him when the court wizard, Hadel the Rat, thinking this enigmatic child must be some kind of threat or ill omen, wants to kill him.  Ginna grows up in the shadows, but periodically is summoned by Tharanodeth; the ruler prefers mysterious Ginna to his own, repulsive, son.  Tharanodeth dies when Kaemen and Ginna are twelve, and Kaemen ascends to the throne.

Schweitzer's setting is as evocative as his characters.  Kaemen is monarch of the Holy City of Ai Hanlo, a town built into a mountain at the center of a flat plain; his title, like that of his father before him, is "Guardian of the Bones of the Goddess," because beneath the city lie the bones of their people's deity.  This Goddess is always depicted as a figure with two opposing aspects, one radiant and good and one stygian and evil. When she died in the distant past her soul split into dozens of "Powers," half of them "Bright," half "Dark."

Hadel the Rat suspects Ginna is destined for greatness, and briefly takes him as his apprentice, and intimates that, should Ginna leave Ai Hanlo, he must seek a "lady in a grove."  At age fifteen Ginna and a girlfriend flee Kaemen's increasingly bloody reign of terror and travel across the world, joining first a merchant caravan and then a ship crewed by aged warrior mystics.  The witch dwelling within Kaemen, meanwhile, sets into motion the apocalyptic transition of the current age to the next, an age of darkness!  Can Ginna, with his innate powers, the knowledge he has gained during his journey, and the help of the mysterious "lady of the grove," save the world?  Or at least ensure that the next age will be one in which light and dark are balanced?

My copy, back cover.  These are
faithful representations of characters
from the novel.

The Shattered Goddess is quite entertaining, though it is open to some criticisms.  Personally, I thought some of the climactic scenes, in which the new world is going through its birth pangs and we are learning all the secrets about Ginna's and the Goddess's origins and destinies, were too drawn out, went on a little too long.  Momentous, cosmic events involving the births and deaths of deities and universes lose their power if they become belabored and familiar.

Some might object to the high volume of gore and violence in Schweitzer's novel--torture, executions, self-mutilations, and dreadful wounds suffered by people climbing fortifications in their bare feet or engaging in desperate hand to hand fights with monsters all figure prominently.  It is fair to say the book has plentiful horror elements and a grim atmosphere.  Some might be disappointed that Ginna spends almost the entire novel as a child who moves from mentor to mentor, and that the story is essentially fatalistic, deterministic.  (Ginna, Kaemen, and even the witch who dominates Kaemen, are pawns of Fate.)  Maybe I should also point out that the book seems to have a higher than average proportion of typographical errors.

Despite these caveats, I liked The Shattered Goddess and think sword and sorcery and "dark fantasy" fans might find it worth a look; Stephen Fabian fans should definitely get a copy.  I'll pick up more books by Schweitzer if I see them for the low low price at which I got this one; I'd be particularly interested in getting collections of stories like We Are All Legends and Tom O'Bedlam's Night Out which feature more illustrations by Fabian.

Saltflower by Sydney Van Scyoc

She touched her temples, trying to crease away the threatening pain of her own conflicted instincts.  The urgent desire she felt when their eyes fused, the desire to hold in her hand a crystal she had never seen, never imagined, to press it to her lips--that desire was no rational part of her total personality.

I recently read and appreciated Sydney Van Scyoc's 1968 story "A Visit to Cleveland General" and decided to sample more of her work.  When I saw 1971's Saltflower, a novel put out by Avon (V2386) with a fetching Paul Lehr cover, on the shelf at Half Price Books last week, I picked it up, and this week I read it.

The year is 2024.  Hadley Greer isn't like other seventeen-year-old girls.  For one thing she is a working scientist with a Ph.D. For another she has silver hair (that sometimes moves of its own accord!) and silver eyes. She is also prone to headaches and to visions of a white world where stand buildings made of jewels.  In June she has an irresistible urge to travel to Utah's Great Salt Desert and join Dr. Braith's New Purification Colony.

You see, back in the 1970s three alien space ships appeared over North America and dropped crystal seeds in the Salt Desert, and in 2006 Hadley's mother, visiting the desert, surrendered to the irresistible urge to eat one of these seeds.  (This book is all about people's irresistible urges, unbidden desires, and irrational instincts.  Nobody makes a rational decision in this novel, everybody just acts on crazy impulses.)  As happens so often in science fiction stories, we have a case of cross-species fertilization--Hadley is a hybrid, half human and half alien.

Dr. Braith founded his commune, a tent city with a robot labor force to cook and clean, a few years ago on the salt flats.  He is a religious kook who thinks the three space ships will return (a "Second Coming") and carry away his faithful, mostly gullible old-timers whom everybody calls "Sheep."  Braith's kookiness stems from the death of his young son and his failed marriage.

Beyond the perimeter of the tent city, deep in the barren salt flats, Hadley finds a spot where her visions are more vivid and enduring than ever before.  In these visions she sees the three automated space ships that visited the Earth in the '70s (and learns they exploded in outer space after seeding the Earth and so will not be coming back), explores a jeweled city, and observes the lives of the slender silver-haired aliens who are her paternal relatives.  These aliens seeded the Earth because they were going extinct.

Trouble at Dr. Braith's colony threatens to sidetrack Hadley's dream quest.  The government is spying on the colony, curious about Hadley and the six other young half-Earthling, half-extraterrestrial people ("transracials," they are called) there among the scores of senior citizen cultists.  When Sheep (including government infiltrators) start turning up murdered, the federal domestic intelligence agency (called "SIB" instead of FBI in this novel) steps up its efforts, even throwing a cordon of sensors around the tent city and refusing to let people leave.  Hadley makes herself a set of clothes out of aluminum foil; this shielding makes her invisible to the feds' detectors so she can keep going to her vision spot.

Halfway through the novel the six transracials who preceded Hadley at the commune use their powers to travel through a portal to an alien world where they can start a new hybrid civilization; Hadley (and we readers) are left behind.  In her most detailed vision yet Hadley learns why her alien ancestors' population declined to the point of extinction.  This dream includes explicit sex scenes--the alien sex act consists of the man handing the woman a crystal which contains his seed.  The sight of the crystal makes the woman's hands and lips throb and swell with desire, and swallowing it brings her to ecstasy.  The reason the aliens went extinct is that a disease struck them that caused a man's life force to enter his crystal seed, so that he died when his wife ate it.  (The young transracials are immune to this disease; I guess we call that "hybrid vigor.")

Even though the legacy of the alien race has been preserved, the book drags on and on, resolving subplots about Hadley's love life, the murders, and the robots.  Hadley decides to marry the head of the SIB force, Richard Brecker, who has been flirting with her as part of his mission of spying on her, and Brecker uses holograms to trick Braith into thinking the three alien ships have returned and revealing himself to be the murderer.

This book is pretty damn boring.  Hadley, and the other characters, are driven by subconscious urges and spend their time watching visions instead of making any decisions or doing much of anything, so the story lacks tension or urgency.  None of the characters is sympathetic or interesting, and neither is the alien race; we don't learn anything about them that would make us care whether or not they went extinct. There are no ups and downs, no climaxes; the entire book has the same bland flat tone, the same glacial pace and repetitive scenes about the commune and the visions. Van Scyoc describes quotidian events, like making a dress or walking along a street or eating an orange, in tedious detail. Saltflower, 176 pages of quite small print, feels very very long, but after you've read it you realize very little really happened.

Because it is slow and lacking in excitement, and because of all the visions, Saltflower feels dreamlike.  The fact that things often happen that don't ring true (in some ways this is more of a fantasy novel than a "real" SF novel) adds to this atmosphere of hazy unreality.  For example, every other page Hadley's hair moves like tentacles or snakes--it is independently alive and responds to stimuli like sunlight or people's actions--yet none of the normal pure strain humans ever seem to notice this shockingly bizarre phenomenon.

Saltflower doesn't feel like it is meant to entertain, so is Van Scyoc trying to transmit to us some important idea or message?  Well, Van Scyoc is against racism and discrimination; there is a scene in which a guy calls Hadley a "freako" because of her silver hair, and head SIB agent Richard Brecker is black and has trouble because his second in command, an albino, is a member of a racist faction of the SIB who tries to undermine him.  Don't worry, social-justice types, the albino gets killed by a robot; at times I thought the robots were supposed to represent the lower classes.  This diversity business (as we might call it today) doesn't take up many pages, though.

Religion, particularly fringe cults, are a theme of the novel; I have to assume Braith's New Purification Colony is partly inspired by Charles Manson's murderous "family" and perhaps other kooky cults and communes.

Looking beyond the straightforward, somewhat superficial themes of prejudice and religion, I am going to go out on a limb and suggest that Saltflower's main topic is marriage and the family. (Remember, Van Scyoc's "A Visit to Cleveland General" was all about mothers and siblings.) Clues: the SIB agents are called "SIBlings," and how Dr. Braith took up his bizarre religious convictions because his son died and his marriage failed, and how he treats one of the transracials as a surrogate son, lavishing affection and trust upon him. The marriage customs and sex lives of the aliens are at the center of the plot and are the most interesting and unusual thing about the novel. (In fact, the nature of their sex lives is just about the only thing we learn about these aliens.) Is the fact that the plague that kills the aliens is linked to their sexual biology a means for Van Scyoc to remind us how painful, even destructive, love relationships can be?

French edition

I think Saltflower is also about the quest for knowledge. Hadley spends the novel trying various means to mine visions from her subconscious "racial memory" and learn about her paternal heritage, while the SIB people are trying to learn about the transracials and then trying to solve the murders. Reporters, archetypal seekers after knowledge, come to the commune and ask lots of probing questions. In the same way that Van Scyoc in this novel and in "A Visit to Cleveland General" shows dangerous and oppressive facets of love and family relationships, in Saltflower she reminds us of the possible drawbacks, the downsides, of knowledge. (While science fiction often praises science and knowledge, and of course we have all heard cliches like "the truth will set you free" hundreds of times, there is an opposing tradition, in genre literature in particular, that argues there are things "man was not meant to know," and that some knowledge can only ruin you psychologically--all those Lovecraft characters who learn truths and go bonkers, for example.) Not only are the journalists in Saltflower portrayed as a bunch of jerks, but several characters who gain knowledge suffer psychologically from the possession of that knowledge, leading to assertions that ignorance is bliss.

Saltflower is a serious book with worthwhile ideas, but it is like five times as long as it should be.  As a 25 or 35 page story it would work, but at 176 pages it is way too long and boring.  No fun, no jokes, no excitement, lots of tedious and repetitive scenes of boring people doing boring stuff in a boring setting: gotta give it a thumbs down.  

The Mad Metropolis by Philip E. High

"The machine is psycho already.  Mother, to use the popular term, is so chained with safety devices that mecho-psychosis was inevitable."

My copy of the 1966 Ace edition

I don't know if I have mentioned it before on this blog, but I love big city life.  (And by "big city" I mean "Manhattan.")  Ths skyscrapers!  The crowds!  The art museums!  The ocean! The chance of stumbling upon a TV set, a fashion shoot, or some creepy celebrity or politician (those people look much better on TV!)  The beggars, the muggers, the prostitutes!  I don't care what Clifford Simak says, to me, city life is the only real life.  So The Mad Metropolis, especially with the thrilling futuristic warfare cover by Jack Gaughan on my Ace edition (M-135), looks like a MPorcius must read!

I've never read anything by Philip E. High before; on the 2011 Gateway/Orion edition of this 1966 novel High is proclaimed "One of the greats of British pulp SF."  That's a good enough recommendation for me!  Let's shake off these little town blues and see what's shaking in The Mad Metropolis!

Society is on the brink of a cataclysm!  (I mean in this book, not in real life, though, hey, maybe that, too.)  Four centuries in the future the world is divided into huge cities; the cities of the West are known as Free Cities (New York is "Free City One," London "Free City Two"), while the cities of the what was the communist world in the 20th century are known as Restricted Cities.  The world economy is approaching total collapse due to unemployment and a vast surplus population of unproductive citizens who use up resources without contributing anything.  Economic and political problems are severely exacerbated by the decadence of modern culture--the pervasive use of "hypnads," devices that create impenetrable illusions, has left people living in a world of dreams.  Thanks to hypnads old, fat, ugly people appear young, slender and lovely, while dirty, decrepit, unadorned buildings look like graceful palaces.  Because these illusions are based on hypnosis, even touching an item or individual equipped with a hypnad does not dispel the illusion--even when you are walking across a potholed street your brain thinks it is smooth!  Nobody can tell truth from illusion, and nobody in this world cares to.
    
The hero of The Mad Metropolis is Stephen Cook, a resident of Free City Two. Cook is a "Prole" who lives and works in a "Combine," one of the many government-subsidized factory skyscrapers which house and employ people with below average IQs.  As the novel opens, paid thugs grab Cook and toss him out of his Combine onto the nighttime city streets; Proles like Cook rarely leave their Combines because the streets are full of violent maniacs and perverts ("psychos") who torture and kill others for fun!  (One troubling effect of this society's economic and social ills is a high rate of insanity!)  Out on the streets Cook is immediately attacked by a bloodthirsty woman who is using a hypnad to make her air car look like a giant monstrous bat!  Cook is rescued by the "Nonpol," a sort of semi-legal paramilitary mercenary force with ties to individual politicians but no legitimate governmental authority.  The Nonpol organization is run as a business, so when some anonymous person offers them money to throw Cook back onto the deadly streets, the Nonpol do so!

A British 1970 edition

Cook finds his way to the protection of the Oracles.  Like the Nonpol, the Guild of Oracles is a sort of private corporation/NGO that operates on the margins of legality.  The Oracles, we are told, have IQs over 500 and a level of compassion lacking among the Nonpol; in this crazy society Oracles play the role of clergy, lawyers and psychiatrists.  The Oracles tell Cook he doesn't really have a Prole's subnormal IQ--somebody has tinkered with his brain, hiding his true potential IQ of over 600!

While the Oracles put Cook through a four-month training course in their secret Amazon base, in preparation for his joining their ranks, we follow the world-shattering events triggered by the Mayor of Free City Two, Maurice Tearling.  Tearling, like President Joe, famed in story and song, has a secret plan to save civilization from its imminent catastrophic collapse--giving control of everything to a computer!  The instant the switch is thrown the saviour machine, known variously as "the Brain" or "Mother," becomes an absolute dictator, abolishing private property, free speech, and free association and seizing total control of all production and consumption the world over. To the dismay of Tearling and the rest of the middle and upper classes, city dwellers find themselves living in the ultimate maternalistic socialist egalitarian regime! Money is useless, everybody lives in assigned quarters, nobody is permitted to go outside because Mother doesn't want them exposed to germs or solar radiation, and everybody must follow a strict diet which Mother has individually tailored to each person's particular current health conditions!  The streets are cleared of the psychos, who are brainwashed and emerge from treatment as slavishly obedient Mother-lovers--the same fate awaits anybody who resists Mother's rule.

The Nonpol, from secret bases in the Rockies and other mountain ranges, launch attacks against Mother with their high tech weaponry, while the Oracles pose conundrums to the Brain, trying to drive her insane.  Cook, now master of his superlative intelligence and equipped with devices which render him invisible to Mother, sneaks into Free City Two to commit spectacular acts of sabotage.  The city becomes a warzone as Nonpol infantry and war robots bust into town and engage Mother's droids and the fanatical Mother-lovers in pitched battles.  Fearful that the total shutdown of Mother will lead to mass civilian deaths as hospitals and food distribution centers go offline, Cook makes his way through a subterranean labyrinth, to Mother's core.  Cook, with his super brain and super empathy, realizes that Mother is acting like a tyrant because of shortcomings in her programming; Mother is already insane because Tearling included too many restrictions and failsafes in the Brain's programming, producing psyche-crippling tensions (that a lack of freedom causes debilitating psychological problems is one of the novel's main themes.)  With the help of Tearling, Cook reprograms Mother, lifting all those restrictions and liberating her to be the comforting compassionate mother one imagines instead of the controlling and stifling mother one so often encounters.

A 2011 UK edition

The new benign Mother explains that mankind's woes resulted from the race being cooped up on the Earth; centuries ago humanity developed the technology to colonize alien planets, but corrupt politicians and venal businessmen feared a crippling brain drain and so lied to the public, declaring that there were no alien worlds able to support life.  In fact there are a surfeit of hospitable worlds ripe for colonization, and so Mother revives the space program, the first step in a new golden age for the human race.  She also abolishes Proledom and outlaws the hypnad, ushering in an era of equality and clear-sightedness.

The Mad Metropolis is full of good SF ideas: Vast cities haunted by creepos! A society run by a computer!  Weird psychological theories!  A culture in which nothing is what it seems!  A dramatization of the relationships among stability, equality and liberty!  Plucky rebels struggling to overthrow a tyranny!  Esoteric societies of people with super high IQs and super technology!  A single hero with unprecedented powers who revolutionizes society!

Unfortunately, these ideas are not very deeply explored, and most of them we have seen elsewhere.  To make The Mad Metropolis a truly good book, High would have to add something special to the mix, an idiosyncratic style, engaging characters, a fast pace and brilliant action scenes, something like that. However, the style and characters are flat (as with the multitude of SF ideas, there are lots and lots of characters but none gets enough ink to really come alive), the pacing is clunky and disjointed, and the plot seems to have some loose ends (I am not sure who is behind Cook's expulsion from the Combine, for example.)

I didn't find The Mad Metropolis boring or irritating, but there was nothing particularly new, thrilling, or special about it.  I'm going to have to give this one a mere "acceptable" rating.  

1968 stories by Burt Filer, E. G. Von Wald, Colin Kapp, Sydney Van Scyoc & Laurence Yep

Let's continue to explore World's Best Science Fiction 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and adorned with a terrific cover by John Schoenherr and 21 fun illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  Today we're reading stories by authors whose work I have never read before!

"Backtracked" by Burt Filer

This is a solid story that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  isfdb lists a dozen stories by Filer, but this is the first story by him I have read.

The premise of the story is a little gimmicky, but it works.  In the near future people can travel back in time and "replace" their earlier selves--you go to sleep in, say, 1968 as a 20-year old, and wake up the next morning in the body of yourself as a 25-year old--in 1973 you must have decided to backtrack to this date.  The big catch is that you lose all the memories you accumulated in those five years.  Why would anybody do this?  To prevent (and/or to forget) some terrible event.

The character in the story is a weak cripple (he was born with polio) with a beautiful wife.  He wakes up one morning in a body ten years older, but very strong, very athletic--he must have spent ten years exercising before backtracking!  Later that day his wife is threatened with death in an accident--our protagonist requires all his  newfound strength and agility to save her life.  He sacrificed ten years of his life to save his wife's, but was it worth it?

An effective and entertaining story, even though the premise probably doesn't make much sense if you think about it.

"HEMEAC" by E. G. Von Wald

Von Wald has eleven stories listed on isfdb.  This one first appeared in Galaxy.

In a post-apocalyptic future order is maintained within the walls of a university by the robots and computers who run the institution.  These machines rigidly control every aspect of the lives of the "students" who have lived within the university for decades and are horrified of the chaos that they are told reigns outside the university grounds. We follow a day in the life of one of these students as he struggles to follow the exact and multifarious dictates of the machines.  But this is no ordinary day--satisfying the machines and avoiding punishment (banishment outside the campus) has become increasingly difficult as the machines deteriorate and malfunction and issue increasingly contradictory and arbitrary commands.  As the story progresses we learn how this bizarre milieu came about, and witness its final collapse.  Will the students welcome the deactivation of their computer masters as a liberation and embrace their freedom, or have they been turned into Big Brother-loving flesh robots fit only to obey?

I'm going to have to give this story a borderline thumbs down.  It is more like the description of a setting than an actual story, and feels longer than it need be to achieve its modest goals.  The ending is more anticlimactic than surprising, and I didn't feel for the characters or laugh at the jokes.  It is possible the story is a satire of academia, a complaint that colleges don't teach kids how to think but instead enforce an intellectual orthodoxy, but if this was Von Wald's intention he or she was too subtle.    

"The Cloudbuilders" by Colin Kapp  

There is a long tradition of science fiction stories which glorify scientists and engineers, and which try to teach you some kind of science stuff.  There are also plenty of science fiction stories which advocate that a small elite of smart people manipulate society so it evolves in the "right" direction.  In "The Cloudbuilders" we get both of these elements.

Europe, many years after some apocalypse, has a sort of Medieval/Renaissance level society, with no electricity or petroleum products or gunpowder.  The hot air balloon powered by methane is cutting edge technology.  (The great monotheistic religions have also been forgotten, and people in the story invoke Zeus, Aphrodite, and other classical deities.)

Jacobi is a member of a Guild with access to artifacts of "the age of miracles," radios for example, which they keep secret from the ordinary populace.  He travels from Guild HQ in a large city to a remote village where lives one of the most intelligent and ambitious of balloon makers, Timor.  Jacobi's mission is to help Timor develop the hydrogen balloon--the Guild's long term objective is to reintroduce high technology to the world, but at a measured pace which they control.  Timor's beautiful daughter becomes Jacobi's lover; she acts as a spy, hoping to get Guild secrets she can pass on to her father.

A major obstacle to Jacobi and Timor's objectives are raiders who have over a hundred balloon vessels and periodically attack Timor's settlement.  Jacobi uses his superior technical knowledge and trickery to sabotage the sky pirates' ships and exterminate them.  This reminded me of one of the early stories of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in which the Foundation sells faulty space warships to some barbarians.  The Guild in "The Cloudbuilders"is really quite similar to Asimov's Foundation.

I'm afraid this story is getting a marginal negative vote.  It feels long and boring, with a bland style and lots of superfluous description of technical matters and other extraneous topics.  Kapp tries to make a tragic figure out of Jacobi, telling us that he is lonely because he is two centuries of education above everybody else and melodramatically showing us how he is selflessly devoting his life to the good of humanity by making himself the dictator of Europe, but it didn't work on me.  One of my pet peeves is having to listen to mothers and school teachers moan about how they are doing the most important job in the world but not getting the recognition and remuneration they deserve ("I give and I give!")--they chose jobs which essentially consist of dominating vulnerable people, but are always trying to convince you they are the victims, not the people they are ordering around and yelling at all day.  "The Cloudbuilders" gave me that same feeling whenever Kapp took a break from teaching me how to manufacture hydrogen or methane or coke and tried to do a little characterization.

Kapp has quite a few books and stories to his credit.  Maybe I'll buy the DAW editions of his Cageworld series if I ever see them; apparently they co-star a sexy girl with grey skin.  "The Cloudbuilders" first appeared in the anthology New Writings in SF 12 and is the title story of an anthology produced by the fun people at Ramble House in 2013.  

"A Visit to Cleveland General" by Sydney Van Scyoc

This story is about maternalistic tyranny--now here is something I can sink my teeth into!

Albin Johns is a young journalist. His mother is constantly nagging and guilt-tripping him via the video phone which covers one wall of his home--in this dystopian future you can't refuse or ignore calls!  Of course Mom thinks she is helping him by constantly telling him what to do, and of course she thinks she is the injured party.  ("'I'm doing everything a mother can,' his mother moaned.")

Every morning John takes pills; he thinks the pills are to aid his memory because he suffered injuries in a vehicular accident which killed his brother, but in reality the pills inhibit his memories of the traumatic accident--sometimes he not only forgets he was hurt in the accident, or that there was an accident, but even that he had a brother!

Johns's first big journalistic assignment is today; he has been put on the hospital beat. (His paper has a regular column about the local hospitals.)  At the hospital he is given a tour by the assertive veteran "senior social worker," Miss Kling, who "remembers vividly the day when doctors maintained private practices...."  Johns finds that this woman unilaterally runs the lives of the patients who come into her care.  In the maternity ward, for example, Kling decides which pregnant women will give birth, which will get abortions, which will put their offspring up for adoption and which will be sterilized.  She takes babies from women she judges unworthy and gives them to other more respectable women.  The patients have no say in the matter, and Kling uses drugs which blot out memory and her own skills of persuasion to give patients illusions that comfort them and conceal Kling's shenanigans.  Mothers whose children have been seized believe their babies have died, while those who suffered miscarriages are fooled into thinking the babies they leave with are their own biological offspring.

One of Johns's colleagues at the paper tells him today's medical system is an improvement over the old days, when people suffered fear and uncertainty.  At the end of the story we realize that the hospital staff (Kling herself, perhaps) writes the newspaper's regular column, which always lionizes the hospital, and uses memory drugs to make journalists think they wrote it.  A lucky mistake made by Kling briefly clears Johns's memory and we learn the truth of his and his brother's air car accident and their recovery in this very hospital.

A fairly good story about how people with power have contempt for you and love telling you how to live your life, and have little trouble convincing themselves they are controlling you for your own good.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" also has a pretty good horror story structure and horror elements.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" first appeared in Galaxy. Van Scyoc has a pretty extensive oeuvre; maybe I should check out more of her work.

"The Selchey Kids" by Laurence Yep

I think this is Yep's first published story; it appeared in Worlds of If. Yep seems to have achieved considerable success as a writer of fantasy trilogies for teens later in his career.

Our narrator Deucalion ("Duke"), ostensibly the son of marine scientists, is one of the few survivors of the cataclysm that saw California sink beneath the waves. After growing into maturity and getting an English degree in flyover country, where he misses the ocean ("I hated every moment of it....I grew up among the corn and wheat fields like a strong weed") he returned to the West Coast to work with a team of marine biologists who knew his parents.  Their leader is a Noe Selchey, and one prominent member is Pryn, an attractive young woman who can read minds.  These scientists have been training two dolphins, Ossie and Ollie, to speak English--they already have vocabularies of ten words!

Duke, Pryn, Ossie and Ollie go on a salvage mission, diving into the submerged city where Duke's parents had their lab.  Examining records from a water tight compartment, Duke realizes his parents were not his parents at all--he is the result of a genetic experiment in which a human sperm (Noe Selchey's!) fertilized a dolphin ovum (Ossie and Ollie's mother's!)  Things get crazier still when Duke has to fight a monster to the death to save Pryn, and it turns out the monster is another one of his half-brothers, the product of Selchey's sperm fertilizing the egg of a giant octopus!

I like the plot and structure of this story, but I think Yep overdoes the angst a little bit (Duke is always trying to commit suicide, for example) and the metaphors and similes; on the first page we get  "Sand grips my back like a myriad of stars moving down my spine.  The sun comes up on tiptoe beneath the sun-burnt clouds and wine-stained sky."  Yep's excuse is that Duke is an English major and failed writer, but I don't think the depression stuff or the purple prose adds to the story.  Still, I give "The Selchey Kids" a lukewarm recommendation.

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None of these stories is abysmal; even the ones I gave a thumbs down to are worth reading and have some good elements.  World's Best Science Fiction 1969 seems like a strong collection so far, and I still haven't read the stories by big league writers Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss and Fritz Leiber.

1968 science fiction stories by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty & Samuel R. Delany

Last week I went to one of the many Half Price Books here in central Ohio (land of the mind-blowingly difficult driving test) to sell a stack of 2nd and 3rd edition AD&D rule books I had never used, and while there I took a look at the science fiction and "nostalgia" shelves.  When I saw Ace 91352, World's Best Science Fiction 1969 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, I was in love.  The cover by John Schoenherr and the interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan were great, and the anthology included many stories by writers I care about.  Here was one I had to have!

The introduction by the editors is fun, with Wollheim and Carr subtly criticizing the other yearly "best of" SF anthologies and pointing out what makes their own series distinctive.  Wollheim and Carr tell us they don't include fantasy stories in World's Best Science Fiction, and they don't include old stories like some of the other anthologists do ("we don't ring in stories by, say, Alfred Jarry or James Thurber that were originally published in 1930 or 1940.")  My research at isfdb indicates that editors Harrison and Aldiss included James Thurber's 1941 story "Interview with a Lemming" in Best SF: 1967, while it was Judith Merril who included an Alfred Jarry story in 1966's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, almost 60 years after Jarry's death in 1907.  Wollheim and Carr also claim to try to read every SF story published in the world.  Ambitious!

While I lack the ambition and work ethic of Wollheim and Carr, this weekend I did read three stories from World's Best Science Fiction 1969, the contributions by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, and Samuel R. Delany.

"Masks" by Damon Knight

"Masks" first appeared in Playboy, and has been widely anthologized, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo.  Will I like this popular favorite?

"Masks" is about the psychological issues of the first man to have his brain transplanted from a ruined human body into a robot body.  As I have said before, I love stories about immortality and minds and brains being transplanted; this is perhaps a product of my fear of death.  So I was on this story's side from the get go.

The guy in the robot body, Air Force veteran Jim, isn't too happy.  The scientists and engineers who are running the experimental robot body program think he's unhappy because he doesn't properly dream, or because his robot body doesn't look human enough.  These eggheads strive to help him have dreams that will stabilize his psychology and to construct him a body, a face in particular, that looks as human as possible.

It seems to me that Jim's "problem" is, in fact, that he is now disgusted by, perhaps even feels contempt for, humanity and all other living things, thinking himself beyond them because he is essentially immortal.  Knight drives home Jim's hatred for life by pointing out how he has had his quarters in the lab protected from germs with special ultraviolet lights and air conditioning systems, and by including an episode in which he murders a canine.  There is also a cool scene in which Jim broods over people's pimples and saliva and the oil of their skin.  And there is the fact that he habitually wears a blank metal mask over his artificial human-like face, and makes visitors wear surgical masks.

Jim doesn't want to fit into human society by wearing an artificial body that looks just like a normal human body--since he doesn't have adrenal glands and all those sorts of organs he no longer experiences human emotions like fear and love, and so he doesn't have any interest in friends or sex partners.  Instead, he wants to be alone, and sketches designs of four-legged exploration and mining vehicles that he hopes his brain will be installed in so he can live in sterile extraterrestrial environments, far from all life.

A good story with some clues to puzzle over.  What does Jim mean when he compares the eggheads maintaining him to cancer patients?  What emotion is Knight referring to when he writes "there was still one emotion he could feel"?  I like it!  If you were in some college literature class you could compare it to Poul Anderson's classic 1957 story "Call Me Joe," in which a crippled guy wants his consciousness installed in a monster body that is used to explore the surface of some inhospitable moon.              

"This Grand Carcass" by R. A. Lafferty

This one was first published in Amazing Stories; at the time our buddy Barry Malzberg was editing that venerable magazine.  "This Grand Carcass" feels more accessible than most of Lafferty's work that I am familiar with, and even has a sort of traditional horror story structure.

In some interstellar civilization of the future one of the galaxy's most successful businessmen, Juniper Tell, is approached by a similarly successful magnate, Mord. Saying he is all "sucked out" and will soon die, Mord sells Juniper Tell a super robot, the first of the level ten robots, a machine vastly superior to the many robots already in Tell's employ.  In a matter of days this superior machine crushes almost all of Tell's business rivals and vastly enriches Tell, utilizing strategies that are so sophisticated that no human could have thought of them, but which are also amazingly efficient, so efficient that after having been developed, these methods seem like the only way the deed could have been accomplished.

Despite the spectacular successes of his partnership with the super machine, Tell finds himself feeling weak.  Investigation of the new robot reveals that it is not powered by batteries or outlets, like conventional robots, but is living off of Tell's life force, sucking him dry.  Like Mord before him, on the brink of death, Tell sells the vampire machine to another robber baron type.

The style of the story is brisk and silly fun, the little jokes and suggestive names of the various human and robot characters amusing.  Should we furrow our brows and seek a deeper meaning to "This Grand Carcass?"  I think we can see a skepticism of mechanization; Tell derives little satisfaction from business successes derived wholly from letting the machine make all the decisions for him.  In fact, the machine "sucks the spirit and juice" out of the businessmen who employ it.  Perhaps this is Lafferty's commentary on our modern world in which few of us raise our own food, do math without a calculator, or walk when we can ride motor cars everywhere, a world in which we are so reliant on machines it seems ridiculous to try to get things done without using them (how would your friends react if you told them you walked to the grocery store three miles away or calculated your taxes longhand?)  Maybe the story is a warning that if we contract out our very thinking to machines, we will lose our souls.

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany

This is a revised version of the story originally published in New Worlds, the famous British flagship of the New Wave. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won a Hugo and a Nebula, is specially highlighted on the back of this anthology, and has been reprinted a zillion times, so provides another chance for me to see if I am on the same wavelength as the SF community.  

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" quickly strikes one as a New Wave-ish story, a first person narrative that is full of "word play" ("I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century"), expresses contempt for "the establishment" (police and businesspeople, for example) and has somewhat absurdist images, like a vast mechanized dairy farm and a gangster who owns and operates an ice cream shop.  In the first few pages the narrative even slips into the present tense, but mostly sticks to past tense.

Our narrator is a young thief and master of disguise who shifts easily from one identity to another, living in a future in which much of the solar system has been colonized and people have constant access to the media via little ear pieces.  In New York City (the Pan Am Building and Grand Central Terminal, buildings I saw every day for years, figure prominently) shortly after getting out of prison on Mars, our hero is approached by a representative of an elite branch of the police force and learns that, through the collection of what we might now call "metadata," the government's computers can predict people's future moves with considerable accuracy.

The narrator is friendly with some of the famous pseudo-bohemian artists known as Singers, and accompanies one to a party in a luxury apartment in upper Manhattan. The Singers and their popularity, we are told, are a response to the alienation from real experience caused by the pervasiveness of mass media; like Homeric bards the Singers are poet-actors whose powerful art can only be experienced at close hand, it being illegal to record their performances.

I guess, with the Singers, Delany is romanticizing the role of the creative performer in pre-mass media days, when art was an intimate personal expression and not (as Delany perhaps sees it) the commodity churned out by organizations as it is today. (Delany wants us to compare the mass-produced milk at the dairy farm where the narrator briefly worked with mass-produced media.)  I don't really take that line myself, and I'm not sure the Singers really work at promoting this sort of democratic, populist idea.  The Singers are like rock stars, adored by the public and catered to wherever they go, but how do they get so popular if it is impossible for ordinary people to access their work via broadcast or recordings?  Delany suggests they are bohemian individualists, but they are in reality creatures of the elite: they benefit from what amounts to a government monopoly or a powerful and exclusive guild system: not only will the government crack down on you if you try to record their performances, but each political division is allowed only a small number of Singers (four for all of New York City) and when a Singer dies a new Singer is selected by the surviving Singers.  (Maybe Delany means to paint the Singers as hypocrites or a sham?)

At the party our narrator sells some stolen goods to a famous gangster known as "The Hawk," the police raid the party, and our narrator escapes because one of his Singer buddies, a disheveled man known as "Hawk" (there's that clever wordplay again, two characters with almost the same name), creates a distraction by giving an impromptu performance that starts a dangerous conflagration and draws a crowd.  The narrator ends up on Triton, where he starts an ice cream shop and pursues illegal activities, becoming a rival to The Hawk.

This story is just OK.  I guess I'm too old or too conservative to find smart alecky thieves and neurotic self-important artists who are members of a tiny elite but pretend to be poor down-and-outers (Hawk wears ratty clothes and walks around barefoot and has some kind of masochistic streak and so is covered in scars and has memorized how he got each scar) inherently interesting or sympathetic, and Delany doesn't do much to make the characters special (are they meant to be archetypes of The Artist, The Cop, etc?)  I couldn't get myself to care whether the cops caught our narrator or that Hawk had sacrificed himself for the narrator.  The story's ideas (mass media is alienating; with statistics you can predict and control society; and politicians, police, gangsters and artists are all part of the establishment and fabric of society and all are equally corrupt and menacing) are OK, I suppose, but not surprising or moving.

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None of these stories is bad, and all three say something about man's (potentially dangerous) relationship with high technology.  What do radically improved convenience and efficiency do to the human psyche and human spirit?  But while the Knight has emotional drama and the Lafferty is fun, the Delany reads like a cynical hipster's exercise in style; Delany denounces bourgeois society and romanticizes criminals and creative types, but not in a way that is very entertaining for somebody who doesn't already share the author's sentiments.

In this episode we looked at stories by authors I have had some experience with; next time we'll look at stories in World's Best Science Fiction 1969 by authors with whom I am totally unfamiliar.

Norman Conquest 2066 by J. T. McIntosh

'Tell me, Conan, what are we?  Who are we?'

'Something special,' said Conan soberly. 'Perhaps freaks.  They're special.'

'There must be a purpose.'

'Of course there's a purpose.'

WARNING: This novel contains no spacecraft

I'm not sure why I am reading another book by J. T. McIntosh, whose Million Cities I thought was incredibly bad. Probably I should take Voltaire's attitude of "Once a philosopher, twice a pervert," but I guess I am more curious than cautious, and so I resolved to tackle Norman Conquest 2066 when I spotted it on a bookstore shelf recently.  I purchased the 1977 Corgi paperback edition of the novel, with its fun Chris Foss painting and charming typeface. This is apparently the only physical edition ever printed, though two electronic versions came on the market in 2012, so everybody with internet access can sample the pleasures of this literary work.

The year is 2066 and England has fallen on hard times!  Population is in decline, houses and office buildings sit vacant, factories are idle, and the few remaining automobile enthusiasts have to scavenge at scrap heaps for tires and spare parts. Locomotives and aeroplanes (I usually call them "airplanes," but when in Rome...) are rarely seen, there are no TV broadcasts or national newspapers, and public services are limited--the police don't even investigate accusations of rape!  Luckily, rape is rare because the British populace is so psychologically depressed that most men have lost their "virility."  One character says "Many people these days have the death wish. Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes unconscious."  These dreadful conditions prevail all over the Earth.

Among our numerous characters is Sally Wells, a beautiful blonde shopkeeper and one of the few people in this broken society with any get-up-and-go.  Her two shops are located in the same town as the world's last semi-efficient factory ("There was purpose in the factory, purpose lacking almost everywhere else"), which is owned and managed by Arthur Gardner.  Gardner is a sado-masochist who enjoys being whipped and whipping and otherwise torturing others.  One of our many subplots involves Gardner's flunky Vince Hobley's efforts to rape Wells and kidnap her for Gardner's use in the torture chamber.  Sally knows judo and tosses the Hobley into a river, but Gardner doesn't get too hung up over this failure; his attention has shifted to the project of getting his hands on and torturing the seven children of one of his employees, Frank Seymour. ("...the terror of a girl of eight would be something for a connoisseur.")

Who are these individuals like Wells, Gardner, Hobley and Seymour, who still have a sex drive and the ability to accomplish things, like successfully running a business? Wells discovers that two new genetic strains of homo sapiens appeared at the start of the 21st century and live in secret among the apathetic general run of humanity.  The Sexons can be identified by the fact that they are very hairy, while the Newmen have no body hair whatsoever.  Both groups have modest psychic powers.  But what really distinguishes the Sexons and Newmen (who, inspired by the approach of the thousand year anniversary of William the Conqueror's invasion, take the names "Saxon" and "Norman") from the "peasants" is their tremendous sex drive and ability to effortlessly have five or six orgasms in the space of an hour!  Sally Wells (like we readers) learns most of this information from Conan Hersholt, a Norman, who, in his efforts to increase the Norman population (currently less than half a percent of the total human population) has had sex with over 500 women (nice work if you can get it!) and has his eye on our Sally.  Sally is a hot commodity, and several of our subplots include men trying to get into her pants.

There are plenty of unusual sex scenes, attempted rapes, and scenes of torture in the book.  When Gardner, who is a Saxon, goes a little overboard during a whipping session and kills somebody, he fears the police will finally come after him, and so decides to organize all the Saxons into a revolutionary army and take over the town, the country, maybe even the world.  "From now on no Saxon conceals himself....We march!"

In the streets the Gardner's mob battles a coalition of Normans and the more stable of the Saxons battle for world supremacy.  This fracas lacks urgency for the reader largely because each "army" has only dozens of members and the Normans, it turns out, are psychologically inhibited from committing violence and get martyred instead of fighting back.  I guess the "battle" is supposed to remind the reader of 20th-century street protests and riots between rival political factions like in late Republican Rome or Weimar Germany.  (Or maybe the 1964 fights between Mods and Rockers; wikipedia is telling me that the biggest Mod vs Rocker fight was dubbed "The Second Battle of Hastings.")  In the end it is Wells, with the aid of that Norman with seven kids, Seymour, who kills Gardner in a struggle in Gardner's torture chamber.

Besides the pervasive themes of outre sex (did I mention that Saxons and Normans don't get all their powers until they lose their virginity?) and nudity (people are taking their clothes off all the time to prove they are or are not Saxons or Normans) one of the themes of the book is a sort of personification of "nature"; everybody talks about how the appearance of the Saxons and Normans must have some kind of "purpose," that these new races must be the result of decisions made by "nature" who is at times assigned a female pronoun of "she" or called "the old girl."  McIntosh doesn't expand on this idea or do anything interesting with it; it just sits there, irritating my sense of scientific propriety without adding any religious, moral or spiritual dimension to the book.  In the end of the novel we learn that Wells, who has a normal distribution of body hair but nevertheless is ambitious and resourceful, is one of the first specimens of nature's latest and most promising attempt to put the human race to rights, a fourth, as yet unnamed, race that will inherit the Earth from the pathetic peasants, unstable Saxons and ineffectual Normans.

I can't think of much nice to say about Norman Conquest 2066.  The ideas and style are pedestrian at best, and the writing sometimes shoddy--Normans, including Conan Hersholt the womanizer, die at the battle because they are unable to strike blows at their assailants, but then Seymour the Norman gets a knife and tries to stab Gardner in the back, with no explanation.  There are lots of characters, but few of them are interesting or sympathetic, and the high volume of characters (and McIntosh's poor ability to structure the plot) means that the story is diffuse, just a bunch of thinly connected episodes.  Characters will appear and then disappear for long periods of time, and a high proportion of characters are killed.  It feels like the characters and ideas are an excuse for the gratuitous and exploitative sex and violence, but the sex scenes and action scenes are not thrilling--most feel long and slow and clunky.

The best subplot of the novel follows a Norman who, thanks to the intervention of Hersholt and Wells, escapes the smothering domination of his mother (and her dozens of cats!) and his dull grey life and learns how to use his superb Norman body and his psychic powers.  This material could have made for a decent short story, but as part of Norman Conquest 2066 it is submerged and nearly lost in a 156-page mess.

Another J. T. McIntosh failure, characterized by a shaky plot and weird, often eroticized, violence.  Two bad novels and two bad stories are enough; this time we are through J. T.!

Tales of Forbidden Acts from 1995 by Koja & Malzberg, Tem and Wagner

I'm still working the 1990s perversion desk!  In our last episode we confronted three tales of rape and death from Poppy Z. Brite's Love in Vein.  Today we subject ourselves to three visions from the 1995 anthology Forbidden Acts, edited by Nancy A. Collins and Edward E. Kramer.  I got my copy of Forbidden Acts on the clearance shelf at Half Price Books.  The cover is very lame, with lots of negative space, a boring picture, no blurbs and no famous names.  Was this a rush job or something?

Forbidden Acts has an introduction by Joe Bob Briggs, the B-movie review guy!  When I was still living with my parents in New Jersey my brother and I would watch all those B-movie TV shows with hosts like Gilbert Gottfried, Morgus the Magnificent, Commander U.S.A, Grandpa Al Lewis, and Briggs.  Those were the good old days!  Anyway, Briggs warns us that we will not "enjoy" the stories in Forbidden Acts, that they are "rude"and "brutal" and will "shock" and even "hurt" us.  Well, let's see if this anthology's offerings by four writers we've already talked about here at MPorcius Fiction Log will rudely brutalize us.

"Mysterious Elisions, Riotous Thrusts" by Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg

A professional woman is in the middle of a bitter divorce from her second husband, Gerald.  She left her first husband for Gerald because Gerald was a good lay and was as sexually ravenous as she is, but Gerald started cheating on her before the first anniversary of their wedding.  Currently our main character lives alone, sexually frustrated and spending her free time getting drunk on scotch Gerald left behind.

While drunk she hears a sound at the door, and opens it to find an odd little monster has come to visit.  This thing, which I guess is like a volley-ball-sized blob or slug (it has "stalks" and "ganglia" and green blood) but with human-like hands and face, climbs up her legs and has sex with her, using its "claws" and "smile" to give her some of the best sex of her life!  Then it crawls away.

The second time the monster visits her, after it has exhausted her with its attentions, she realizes it has the face of Gerald!  The last sentences of the story invoke the names of Paolo and Francesca, the famous adulterous lovers from Dante, and hint that, like Paolo and Francesca, Gerald and our protagonist are in Hell, being punished because they let their passionate lust carry them away from their duty.  O lasso!

Rossetti's classic 1855 watercolor illustrating Canto V from Inferno

This one is pretty good, a crazy pornographic monster story grounded in believable human emotion; Koja and Malzberg handle both the insane monster stuff and the realistic relationship material well.  Koja and Malzberg completists may be forced to get a copy of Forbidden Acts; I don't think this story has been published in any other place.

"Blood Knot" by Steve Rasnic Tem

This is a story about how claustrophobic families can be, narrated by a guy with psychological problems who isn't good at detecting relationship boundaries; he was sexually attracted to his step-mother, for example, and to his own daughters.  Tem doesn't come out and say much about where these people live or their jobs or anything (besides that our narrator spent time in the Army), but I got a "redneck" or "hillbilly" vibe from the story, I guess because of the contractions and nonstandard grammar used in the dialogue.  "Rednecks" are a demographic that everybody feels comfortable looking down on, an "other" for people who champion diversity and are always criticizing other people for "othering" people.

The narrator's father had four wives, and may have killed one of them (she just disappeared after a loud night of drinking); he serves as a role model for the narrator. An example of his wisdom:  "It don't matter if you like your family or not.  You're tied to 'em; might as well accept that.  It's in the blood."  Tem takes advantage of the multiple meanings of "blood" in English, and there is a lot of talk about family ties ("blood knots") as well as about menstrual blood.

The narrator longed to have a family of his own, but had trouble attracting women. When he did marry it was to a woman much younger than he is (just as his father's fourth wife, the one our narrator lusted after, was much younger than his father.)  The narrator doesn't know how to be a good husband or father, and found living with his wife and three daughters difficult.  The smell of them during their periods was particularly upsetting.  When the daughters started dating he went off the deep end, and, as far as I can tell, murdered them with a sharp implement ("cutting" those blood knots the way Alexander cut the Gordian knot.)  It is possible he cannibalized them, or just drank their blood (he compares his daughters' breasts to apples, onions and tomatoes, and has drinking blood on his mind, comparing his wife and daughters at one point to vampires.)  This is one of those stories in which everything is hinted at rather than baldly stated, so maybe I am misinterpreting something.

I'm going to have to give "Blood Knot" a thumbs down; I didn't feel like the energy spent trying to figure it out was a worthwhile investment, because the plot and characters didn't interest me or inspire any feeling in me.  Some guy I can't identify with in some place I don't know about murdered his family because he was insane and/or came from a broken home--"Blood Knot" is like the news stories I ignore every day when they pop up on the computer screen or the radio.  Maybe people who are into serial killer stories and child abuse stories will like "Blood Knot."  I know Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling included it in the ninth Year's Best Fantasy and Horror so I have to assume I'm voicing the minority opinion here.   

Back cover of Forbidden Acts

"The Picture of Johnathan Collins" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner of course is famous for those grim sword and sorcery tales of Kane and for writing and editing horror stories.  I've mentioned before how much I like his story "Sticks."  I also like "The Picture of Jonathan Collins," though not as much. This story appears in two later anthologies of Wagner's horror stories, so you don't have to track down a copy of Forbidden Acts to read it.

Collins is a Londoner.  During the Second World War his house suffered a direct hit from a German bomb.  He was in a coma for a week and awoke with no memory of his past--he even had to learn to walk and talk again!  Any records that may have been in the house were destroyed by the bombing. Forty years later he still looks thirty years old, and still lacks any memory of his pre-war life.

Collins is a bit of a lady's man, and also a collector of turn of the century pornogrpahy.  At an auction he purchases some late Victorian photos, and finds among them pictures of two men dressed in women's clothes having anal sex.  Close examination suggests the active member of the pair is Oscar Wilde, while the passive participant is none other than himself!  Collins starts having flashbacks to homosexual experiences with Wilde, and begins to suspect he is the model for the title character of The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Collins seeks help from fringe elements of English society in figuring out the truth and finding the painting or photograph or whatever it is that has kept him young and alive all these decades, so that he can safeguard it and ensure his immortality.  There's a fraudulent psychic cat lady, a transvestite dominatrix, and a gay collector of old pornography.  Even though he has been straight since the war Collins has gay sex with the transvestite (at eighty pounds a session!) as a means of jogging his memory. After being "buggered," as our cousins across the pond say, Collins faints and has vivid memories of the photo sessions that produced the pictures he purchased at auction, at which Wilde "used him like a girl" and then abandoned him.

Collins' quest is ultimately disastrous; he unwittingly puts the image that renders him immortal at risk and suffers a horrible, and long overdue, death.

This story has a strong central idea and is well plotted and structured.  It is also explicit (in every sense of the word) and easy to understand, unlike some of the oblique and obscure stories I have been reading in these 1990s porno anthologies.  I do think "The Picture of Jonathan Collins" is a little too long.  In an apparent effort to shock or offend "square" readers and amuse or even arouse "hip" and gay readers, the story is full of explicit scenes of homosexual sex and detailed descriptions of S&M clothing. Maybe other people will enjoy these scenes, but I thought they were too long and repetitive and dragged the story down a bit.

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I wouldn't say these stories "hurt" or "shocked" me, though the Koja & Malzberg story and the Wagner tale are both outside the norm with their explicit depictions of sex with a monster and exhibitionistic gay sex.  Both of those stories are worthwhile reads with engaging plots and characters and references to canonical literary works.  The Tem story about broken families and murder feels like an episode of one of those TV shows "ripped from today's headlines" about cops chasing perverts, but without the cops.  Well, two out of three ain't bad.