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

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

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

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

"Basileikon: Summer" by Avram Davidson

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

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

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

"Voortrekker" by Michael Moorcock

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

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

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

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

from The Day by Stan Persky

Click to enlarge

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Song of Passing" by Marco Cacchioni

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

"Norman vs. America" by Charles Platt

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

Click to enlarge

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

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

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

**********

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

More Quark/4 in our next episode!

Garbage World by Charles Platt

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

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

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

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

I really like these Keith Roberts covers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"A Museum Piece," "Divine Madness," and "Corrida" by Roger Zelazny

Cover illo by Lebbeus Woods

It has been five years, but Roger Zelazny is back, here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

I own a copy of the 2001 ibooks edition of Zelazny's collection, The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, which I purchased at a Des Moines Public Library sale for ten cents.  This edition presents seventeen stories, and over three blog posts in 2014, I read nine of them:

"The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth," "The Keys to December," and "Devil Car"

"A Rose for Ecclesiastes," "The Monster and the Maiden," and "Collector's Fever" 

"This Mortal Mountain," "This Moment of the Storm," and "The Great Slow Kings"

By the time I read "The Great Slow Kings" I was getting a little tired of Zelazny, and decided to take a break from this collection.  I thought that break was going to be a few weeks, but that turned into a few years.  Best laid plans, I guess.  Today let's crack open this 500-page volume and continue our examination of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth by reading Zelazny's "A Museum Piece," "Divine Madness," and "Corrida," all of which first appeared in 1960s magazines...and not necessarily the most prestigious ones, like Galaxy and F&SF, where many of Zelazny's famous short stories debuted.

"A Museum Piece" by Roger Zelazny (1963)

"A Museum Piece" was first printed in Fantastic, and maybe this one counts as prestigious, because it was one of the issues edited by Cele Goldsmith, who is beloved by the critics.

This is a joke story about an artist, Jay Smith, who pioneered "two-dimensional painted sculpture" and, ignored by the public and panned by the critics, abandons art to immerse himself in yoga.  This was not remunerative, so he decides to live by residing, clandestinely, in the art museum, standing naked and still in the classical section of the museum, mistaken by all for a Greek sculpture from two thousand or so years ago.  (In part the story is a satire of the limited interest people have in art--Smith is able to fool everybody because almost nobody even looks at old sculptures, and the only people eccentric enough to care about art are nerds with bad eyesight and mental cases subject to hallucinations, people who would not believe their own eyes if they suspected that a sculpture a real living and breathing person.)  Smith memorizes the movements of the night watchman and after closing time he steals food from the cafeteria.

The story (like 14 pages in this 2001 book, with its large type and wide margins, and 8 pages in the 1963 magazine) gets more absurd as it proceeds.  It turns out most of the statues in the Greek and Roman sections of the museum are actually failed artists and disgruntled art critics, and even the statue of a lion is a (albino) man-eating beast.  The mobile hanging in the modern art section is in fact a space alien marooned on Earth.

Zelazny is the kind of writer who likes to show off his erudition and "A Museum Piece" is full of allusions and mentions of Samuel Johnson, Dylan Thomas, Thomas Wolfe, and many artists and art movements.

I'll call this one an acceptable trifle, a piece of filler gussied up with learned references.  "A Museum Piece" was reprinted in Fantastic in 1979, where it had appended to it an analysis by a college professor, Robert H. Wilcox.  It also was included in Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles Waugh's 1982 anthology Science Fiction A to Z: A Dictionary of the Great S.F. Themes; I can't find online any indication of what theme "A Museum Piece" is supposed to illustrate--"A Museum Piece" is the second story in the anthology, so maybe it is under the "Alien" category?  I'll be grateful to anybody who can offer a solution to this mystery in the comments.

"Divine Madness" (1966)

"Divine Madness" first appeared in Robert Lowndes's The Magazine of Horror ("Bizarre - Frightening - Gruesome.")  We have already looked at a story in this issue, Robert E. Howard's "Valley of the Lost" AKA "King of the Forgotten People," a fun story about weird science, giant spiders and scary Orientals.  That very same year Michael Moorcock included "Divine Madness" in the same issue of New Worlds as Charles Platt's Garbage World, which both tarbandu and Joachim Boaz have read--I haven't read it myself, but Joachim donated his copy to the MPorcius Library and someday I expect to experience Garbage World (which both tarbandu and Joachim awarded two out of five stars) myself.

(The sextastic cover of the October 1966 issue of New Worlds is apparently the work of Keith Roberts, author of Pavane and Molly Zero.  I have not been able to get this picture out of my mind since I first saw it over four years ago--this magazine cover should be available as a poster at all fine retailers, it should be as iconic as Raquel Welch's One Million Years B.C. poster.  That long neck, that perfect hair cut, the mysterious face mask, the extreme contrappasto pose--there's even the dirty toes for all you foot fetishists out there!) 

Alright, back to "Divine Madness."  The nameless protagonist of the story suffers seizures that have him experiencing periods of time, twenty or thirty minutes, backwards, a passenger in his own body who watches himself undoing all the stuff he just did, walking backwards as ashes leap up to make his cigarette longer, for example, as around him the sun sets in the east and cars drive in reverse, etc.  Zelazny fills the story with what you might call snatches of imagist poetry, not just the backwards-in-time stuff, but visions of urban life:

Clustered on the concrete, birds pecked at part of a candy bar stuck to a red wrapper.

****

Telephone lines were tangled with wooden frames and torn paper, like broken G clefs and smeared glissandos.

This guy is broken-hearted, constantly drinking, and near the end of the story, which is just ten pages in this edition of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, we learn why.  The protagonist has his longest seizure ever, time flowing backwards for days, and we learn that after a loud bitter argument his wife drove away, upset, and her reckless driving lead to her death.  The main character relives, in reverse, the funeral, the purchase of the casket, learning of his wife's accident, all the way back to the argument.  Because of all the talk of death and the gross images of booze flowing backwards out of a guy's mouth and birds eating trash and so forth, "Divine Madness" feels like a horror story, and I expected a downer ending, but at the very end (spoiler alert, kids) we get a happy ending--"Divine Madness" is a wish fulfillment fantasy that brings to life all our dreams of going back and undoing a mistake.  When time starts running forward again, right before his wife gets into the car, the protagonist apologizes and she decides to stay with him. 

At times I was getting close to dismissing "Divine Madness" as a gimmicky thing, but maybe because it came as such a surprise, despite myself I found the ending powerful, even moving.  I have to give this one a thumbs up!

"Divine Madness" has appeared in many anthologies, and I can concur with the judgments of such editors as Terry Carr, Martin H. Greenberg, and Robert Silverberg (and of course Lowndes and Moorcock) that it is a good, memorable, read.

Is it a coincidence that New Worlds and New Worlds of Fantasy
use the same font on their covers?

"Corrida" (1968)

"Corrida" debuted in the third issue of the fanzine Anubis, of which four issues were printed form 1966 to 1968.  With the possible exception of Vaughan Bode's "Dead Bone," I think "Corrida" is probably the most famous/successful thing to ever appear in Anubis.  (Check out Jeff Jones's fine portrait of Bode.)  "Corrida" would reappear in an odd anthology by Fred Corbett, Gerry Goldberg and Stephen Storoschuk called Nighttouch: Journeying into the Realms of Nightmare that includes work by SF stalwarts like H. P. Lovecraft, Theodore Sturgeon, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch alongside that of major poets like Allen Tate, Conrad Aiken, James Dickey and Ted Hughes, and in an Asimov/Greenberg/Joseph D. Olander anthology of short shorts I sampled back in 2014.

"Corrida" is a brief (like three and a half pages here) piece in which a man wakes up naked in a dim room and sees a dark figure with four arms and a naked woman and pursues them, eventually grappling in gory combat with the tall four-armed creature.  There is something symbolic going on--the man is a New York lawyer, he remembers being accosted by a man on the street late at night, he thinks he is being treated like a bull at a bull fight, when he strikes the dark figure he himself feels the pain--but it feels like a waste of time to really figure all this out.  He feels guilty for putting people through legal trials and so hates himself?  Trials are as cruel as bullfights?  He was mugged and is having dreams as he lies unconscious on the streets of the Big Apple, bleeding to death?  Who cares?

Gotta give this pointless exercise a thumbs down.   

**********

"Divine Madness" is good, and so my belated resumption of my reading of The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, has been worthwhile, even if "A Museum Piece" and "Corrida" aren't exactly winners.  Maybe we'll get back to this collection soon.

A Heritage of Stars by Clifford D. Simak

Our field of study is the technological civilizations, none of which seem to be viable for any length of time.  They carry within themselves the seeds of their destruction.

A year ago I mentioned my fond memories of Clifford D. Simak's A Heritage of Stars, and since then I have been hoping to find it in a used bookstore.  These hopes have not been realized, but, when a Jeremy M. Beaver pointed out on twitter recently that he was reading the 1977 novel, I was spurred to look for it at the internet archive.  And, sure enough, a scan of a Book Club Edition owned by a library in Colorado was soon available, and so today we reread this book from my youth!

In the 25th century the populace rose up a against the high tech world man had created for himself, destroying the millions of robots and all the machines, burning all the technical books and even tearing out from books that were not primarily about technology those pages bearing technical knowledge.  Human society collapsed into primitivism, people living as small subsistence farmers or in nomadic tribes, leaving the cities to fall into ruins.  Simak gets us readers up to speed on his setting by including long excerpts from a book written, by hand, in 2952 by one Hiram Wilson, who reconstructed a picture of the fall of civilization as best he could from folklore, rumor and the meager surviving records.  Wilson was a resident of the University of Minnesota, a fortified community on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River and one of the few places where people know how to read, and his handwritten book sits in the university library for centuries.

The protagonist of A Heritage of Stars is one Thomas Cushing, a guy who reads Wilson's hand scrawled history like a thousand years later, in the 40th century.  As a child, Cushing lived with his family on a small independent farm safely hidden away from bandits in the woods, but by the time he was sixteen he was alone, his family having been wiped out by disease, old age, or unexplained mishaps (his father went hunting one day and didn't come back.)  So, after finding some people to take on responsibility for his farm animals, he struck out on his own.  After a few years wandering alone and as part of a band consisting of only a handful of men, he decided to join the University of Minnesota community, where he grew potatoes and learned to read.  He read Wilson's book, and, by chance, even found some old hand written notes Wilson had left behind but never incorporated into his history.  These notes are about rumors to the effect that, before the destruction of technology, man had built star ships and launched them from a facility port somewhere out west.  Cushing, after five years at the University, decides to go investigate these rumors.  His experience as a farmer and a nomad, and his book learning, make him the perfect guy to go on such an expedition!

A Heritage of Stars is sort of a traditional quest narrative.  Cushing travels along, making friends and overcoming challenges (in Cushing's case there are lots of friends and very few challenges.)  Early in his journey he meets an old woman with psychic powers, Meg, and one of the last "living" robots, Rollo.  Rollo is one of those robots we encounter sometimes in SF, a robot who has developed a personality and can overcome its programming.  (We just met such a robot in Damon Knight's 1956 story "Stranger Station.")  Robots were programmed to be nonviolent, but when Rollo needed grease to protect himself from rust he was able to reprogram himself to kill animals to get the needed fats.  Rollo feels loneliness, and tells how, though he doesn't like humans, because we are violent and so on, he would feel a need to hear conversation, and so would sneak up on nomad tribes to listen, unnoticed, to their talk around campfires.  Thanks to all this eavesdropping and a single human friend over the course of 15 centuries, Rollo has a lot of information; for example, he knows the name of the site of "The Place of Going to the Stars": Thunder Butte.  As luck would have it, shortly after learning this from Rollo, Cushing by chance stumbles upon a topographical map with "THUNDER BUTTE" labelled on it.

(In a lot of novels, to find plot coupons like this map the protagonist would have to kill a monster or crack a code or seduce a girl or climb a mountain or something, but Cushing just finds the people and items he needs to complete his quest laying around.)

The mood of A Heritage of Stars is mostly sad.  Every individual's happy days are behind him, every species's happy days are behind it.  Most of the minor characters are old and pathetic.  Rollo the lonely last of the robots is obviously a sad character, as are all robots in the story.  The robots of the 25th century were almost entirely destroyed, their metal bodies wrecked by anti-technology zealots or worn away over the centuries by rust.  But the robots' "brain cases" were made of a metal almost indestructible, and these brain cases have survived, and many tribes pile them up ritualistically.  Meg, with her psychic powers, detects that the robot "souls" inside the brain cases are still "alive," and there is some speculation that the robot personalities are suffering the torment of sensory deprivation.  To spare Rollo's feelings, Meg keeps the reality about all those millions of robot brains a secret from him.  Luckily, another theme of the novel is human inferiority to every other life form, so there is hope that the robot souls are made of sturdier stuff than yours and mine and have found peace in sensory deprivation.

On their way to Thunder Butte, Cushing, Meg, Rollo, and Meg's horse Andy are joined by an old man and his granddaughter.  This old dude, Ezra, can talk to plants--plants, he claims, have a consciousness, an intelligence in some ways superior to human intelligence!  The flowers have told him of some plants to the west that are even smarter than the flowers and trees he commonly converses with.  We readers already know what these super plants are all about, because Simak has already spent a short chapter on the intelligent, semi-mobile Trees (with a capital T) that protect Thunder Butte.

Ezra's granddaughter, Elayne, has a permanent blank look on her face, and Ezra claims that she "lives in another place."  Cushing is warned not to pity her even if she has a look on her face like that of a mental case or what I would have called in my youth "a retard"--Elayne is happier than all of us and by rights she should pity us who are stuck in this crummy world, living as she does in a better world.  Cushing and Rollo have already told us that they prefer to keep away from people because the human race stinks, and Elayne is another example, an extreme one, of the misanthropic hermits we are expected to admire in this book.  (Meg comes right out and says Elayne, who almost never talks and does nothing productive but instead stares into space constantly, is better than most people.)

As well as these various psykers (and the robot), Cushing also meets a bunch of mysterious alien creatures who are wandering the Earth, some of them shadows and some of them flickers of light.  These creatures do not talk, but they develop relationships with some of Cushing's companions; they don't really contribute much to the plot; but they do add to the mood.

In the second half of the book the party reaches Thunder Butte, which has various guardians, including the capital-T Trees.  These guardians are easily persuaded to allow the party onto the Butte, though Simak keeps it ambiguous whether they are responding to Elayne's innocence, Ezra's ability to talk to plants, Meg's psychic powers, or the results of a scan of Cushing's brain.  On the way up the butte our heroes meet a bunch of flying robots, Earth space probes, who babble semi-coherently about the surreal scenes they witnessed on alien planets.  And then they meet some alien scientists, people who look like big bubbles.  The bubbles say they have been to many planets and have observed that all technological societies collapse onto barbarism, as Earth's has.

Atop the butte is a spare unadorned walled city, like one colossal building.  Meg's psychic powers eventually afford them entry.  Inside they meet an old robot, a more sophisticated model than Rollo, who manages the city and is apparently the city's sole Earthborn inhabitant.  Simak calls the facility "the City" with a capital C, I guess to make it evocative (City is the title of an important series of stories by Simak, and Simak's dislike of cities is an important theme in his body of work--he has a nonfiction essay in the 1973 anthology Future City)  , but it doesn't really behave as a city--there are no crowds or businesses or factories or whatever, it is just a big building with one robot guy and a bunch of uncommunicative little flying aliens and babbling little flying robots in it.)

This super robot, who goes by the name "The Ancient and Revered," explains that human exploration beyond the solar system was cost-prohibitive, so a multitude of robot probes were sent instead.  The City has a huge data bank, full of the info those robot probes collected from many alien planets--this data was wiped from the probes after it was uploaded to the City, so any data the probes themselves currently retain is fragmentary and useless--that is why they babble unproductively.  Many of the planets explored by the probes were home to nontechnological societies, and, maybe if all that data could be accessed, human civilization could be rebuilt on nontechnological lines.  Unfortunately, the computers that could access the data bank are busted.

When Cushing's party reveals to The Ancient and Revered that the robot souls in the brain cases that litter the landscape and are collected by the tribes are still alive, that there are lots of psychics all over the world, and that there is a university in Minnesota where live many people who can read, the robot theorizes that maybe the data can be accessed, either directly by the robot brains working with the psykers, or by training the literate university people at The City's library (where technical and scientific books have been preserved) to repair the computers.  Cushing goes out to talk to a tribe, to ask that they donate their brain cases and volunteer their psychics for this endeavor.  The tribesmen suspect Cushing is insane and fear he is going to end their happy lives of hunting and gathering and bring back the high tech civilization where everybody works from 9 to 5, and so they tie him to a stake.  Before they can decide how to dispose of Cushing, an army of aliens from the city scares the tribesmen away and rescues Cushing; I guess we can call this A Heritage of Stars' action climax.

In the final chapter we are assured that Cushing and his friends, protected from superstitious tribesmen by the many shadowy or sparkly aliens, will make it to the university of Minnesota where people will be eager to join the campaign of accessing the data from other worlds and setting the human race on a path that will lift mankind out of barbarism without resorting to technology.  Also, each of the robot brain cases will eventually be teamed up with a psychic who can be its friend and ease the torture of living without any sensory input.

I'm not hip to Simak's attitude, what his supporters call "pastoralism" and I am inclined to think of as "Luddite misanthropy."  The history written by Hiram Wilson talks about the "arrogance" of the physical sciences and technological thinking and how that arrogance must have stifled the development of psychic abilities.  Simak romanticizes animals and plants and even robots, even though he denounces technology.  Similarly, Simak is sympathetic to mysticism and talks about souls, but dismisses religious people as fanatics who have devoted their lives to a dumb mistake.

Maybe we should see A Heritage of Stars as a pioneering text of wokeness.  Second class citizens (robots) are better than their creators and masters (humans.)  Women are better than men.  Animals (and even plants!!) are better than humans.  And aliens whose civilizations are not based on technology are better than Earthlings.  Simak attacks people who are afraid of new ideas, while he himself is obviously afraid of new ideas if they involve technology.  Simak's thinking is not logical but emotional; there is no suggestion of what a non-technological civilization might look like, or even what exactly is wrong with technology, why people rebelled against it--that crack from the tribesmen about preferring a life of hunting and gathering to one of regular work is the closest we get to an explanation of why people rebelled against technological life.

A Heritage of Stars moves slowly, and there is very little tension or excitement.  There is almost no danger or violence, and absolutely no sex--surprisingly little happens besides a bunch of conversations.  Cushing is the kind of protagonist to whom things happen--most of the challenges he faces are resolved by dumb luck or by his companions.

If I find Simak's ideology silly and A Heritage of Stars is lacking in thrills, what did I like about it as a kid, and why am I giving it a moderate recommendation now?  I like Rollo, the robot who hunts grizzly bears for their fat; it is obvious that Rollo could use fat from some lesser creature to make the grease that has kept him rust-free for fifteen centuries, but his sense of dignity permits him to only use the fat of huge dangerous grizzlies--Rollo is what I have remembered of the novel over three decades.  The idea and the image of piled up robot brain cases, feared or revered by the primitive descendants of those who built the robots in the first place, each one inhabited by a living consciousness, is a powerful one.  And I like that Simak doesn't give us aliens who are lizardmen and catgirls--so many SF writers just use aliens to represent human societies, or base their aliens on Earth animals to facilitate working on our emotions, that it is nice to see Simak make the effort to depict aliens that are actually alien.

Simak's writing style is also smooth and comfortable, so even when little is happening, reading A Heritage of Stars isn't boring or irritating. 

I can't recommend A Heritage of Stars with great enthusiasm, but I liked it and I certainly enjoyed revisiting a book from my past, and people on Simak's wavelength may get more satisfaction out of it than I did.   

Tales of provocative horror by Matheson, Sturgeon, Ellison, Etchison and Bloch

1989 and 2004 editions

Regular readers of this blog know I love the internet archive, a convenient source of multitudes of things worth reading.  I spend a considerable amount of time there just typing in names and topics and seeing what comes up; last week, for example, I read a scan of The Stick and the Stars, William King's memoir of commanding Royal Navy submarines during the Second World War.  Another recent find was the 1989 anthology Hot Blood, which has a cover that I find pretty hilarious. On its inside title page Hot Blood bears the subtitle "Tales of Provocative Horror," but I guess the boys down in marketing got their way and on the cover the subtitle is "Tales of Erotic Horror." Anyway, seeing as this is the month in which we all pretend we think that mutilation, murder and evil are a big joke, and one of the twelve months in which we are all fascinated by sex, it seems appropriate to check out what Hot Blood has to offer.

Hot Blood is full of stories by people of whom I have never heard, but there are also some familiar names, so let's read stories by those worthies Richard Matheson, Theodore Sturgeon, Harlan Ellison, Dennis Etchison, and Robert Bloch, men about whose work I have already written here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Likeness of Julie" by Richard Matheson (1962)

"The Likeness of Julie" was first published in the Ballantine anthology Alone By Night under the pen name Logan Swanson.  Its subtitle is "Tales of Unlimited Horror," but Alone By Night also includes Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore's "A Gnome There Was," which, when I read it in 2014, I interpreted as a satire of left-wing activists that was full of goofy jokes.

Eddy is a horny college student who never paid skinny plain Julie much attention, but one day he notices she has an angelic face and some nice curves under those loose clothes after all, and becomes obsessed with her.  Her innocent look doesn't just inspire a desire to have sex with her--he wants to defile her, to rape her and blackmail her into keeping her mouth shut!  Eddy resists his own dark urges as long as he can, knowing the risk he runs if caught, but he can't help himself--he asks Julie out, drugs her, photographs her naked and has sex with her in such a brutal fashion that the next day he finds traces of her skin and blood under his fingernails and can't stop seeing in his mind's eye the bruises and bite marks he left on Julie's beautiful body!

The twist ending is that Julie craves being taken roughly by men, and uses her psychic powers to hypnotize men into abusing her, striking her, and raping her.  All of Eddy's crimes were her ideas, implanted in his mind.  When Eddy commits suicide she begins her search for another man to hypnotize into dominating her the way she aches to be dominated.

This is an acceptable sex and horror story.  The twist ending in which a woman is not only shown to be an evil manipulator but revealed to have rape fantasies and enjoy being abused is perhaps the kind of thing that would get a lot of pushback today. 

"Vengeance Is." by Theodore Sturgeon (1980)

"Vengeance Is." was first printed in Dark Forces, an anthology of new tales of horror and suspense by many important SF and horror writers.

A guy from the city goes to a bar in the country to ask about two brothers with a reputation for taking advantage of women and bragging about it, Grimme and Dave.  Through dialogue we learn the crazy story of Grimme and Dave's demise.  G & D attacked two city folks passing through, a gorgeous babe and her husband, an academic type.  Bizarrely, the professor egged the brutes on to rape his wife; for her part, the wife ferociously resisted their sexual assault--at first.  Then, when G & D found some priceless paintings in the trunk of the city folks' car and deliberately ruined them, the woman submitted to their efforts to rape her.  G & D died from a mysterious disease not long after.

The twist ending: the woman had some extremely rare disease (Sturgeon goes into it--I won't here) that is certain death to those who have sex with her, except for her husband, who is an extremely rare case of somebody who is immune to the disease.  The true horror of the story is not that a woman was raped, or that some priceless paintings were destroyed, or that two rapists died in agony from a weird disease, but what the two city folks learned about themselves.  You see, these educated people thought they were above a desire for revenge, but, when put to the test, the man quickly succumbed to that very desire, urging G & D to rape his wife so they would get the killer disease.  Initially, the wife fought G & D so vigorously because she didn't want them to get the killer germs, but when she saw G & D destroy the priceless canvases she was enraged and sought vengeance herself, letting the malefactors rape her as a means of killing them.

The two urban liberals repented of their lust for revenge and sent the guy in the bar out to look for G & D in hopes of providing information to those medical professionals caring for them that might ease the pain of their final days, but the guy is too late, G & D perished in terrible agony.

Acceptable; less sexy than the Matheson story, and kind of contrived, but more philosophical and science fictiony--Ted is at least pretending to give us something to think about instead of just trying to titillate and/or disgust us.

"Footsteps" by Harlan Ellison (1980)

"Footsteps" first appeared in the men's magazine Gallery, where it was advertised as "Harlan Ellison's Strangest Story."

Claire is a werewolf!  She travels the world, visiting the world's finest cities, murdering people and eating them.  One of the story's recurring jokes is that Claire thinks of herself as sampling world cuisine, and she compares the taste of different people from different cities--people in London are stringy, for example, in Berlin, starchy.  The tastiest people are in Los Angeles and Paris.  In this story, set in Paris, we follow Claire as she seduces a well-fed middle-class Frenchman at a sidewalk cafe, guides him under a bridge, sexually arouses him, transforms into a hairy monster, rips off his clothes and slits his throat, and then rides his erection as he dies.  Then she eats him.

Claire spends some time in the City of Light, feeding on innocent people.  Then she meets a man she cannot kill, a sort of plant man--sap runs from his wounds, which heal in moments.  Luckily the plant man has normal male human genitals, and can have sex with Claire.  The plant man uses his telepathy to convey to Claire some melodramatic goop about both of them being the last of their kind, and they live happily ever after!  The footsteps of the title are a metaphorical reference to Claire's fear that mundane civilization is out to get her, that if she is discovered, she will be destroyed (because, you know, she is murdering people by the score, just the kind of behavior that raises the ire of us muggles.)  Now that she has found her true love, plant man, Claire no longer hears the footsteps--I guess we are supposed to think plant man is going to teach her how to be a vegetarian...maybe he is going to feed her from his own flesh?

I thought it a little incongruous that a story about a famous type of gothic horror monster we have all heard about hundreds of times, the werewolf, a story in which, reminding us of Dracula, Ellison uses the phrase "children of the night" like five times, would achieve its climax and resolution not through the intervention of a vampire or an occult researcher armed with silver bullets or some other stock horror figure, but with something you'd expect to find in a story with rocket ships, robots and radiation, a telepathic plant man.  Also a little jarring, after like ten pages of Ellison trying to write poetically, evocatively, like a "real" "literary" writer, he has a startled Claire yell at the plant man, "You're a carrot, a goddam carrot!" undermining the tone I thought Ellison was trying to achieve.

The narrative thrust of the story is how Claire changes, from a lonely person who feels hunted by society to somebody who finds true love and safety.  That is all well and good, but a theme less in tune with our current zeitgeist is how the lone werewolf Claire was in total control of her life, and then chooses to give up control of her life to a (plant) man.  "But now she was helpless, and she didn't mind giving over control to him."  So far we have two stories, this one and Matheson's "The Likeness of Julie," about women murderers whose deepest need is to be dominated by a man.  I don't think we'll be seeing a blurb from Gloria Steinem on the next edition of Hot Blood.

"Footsteps" is OK, no big deal.  My attitude about Ellison is like my attitude about the Beatles--I am constantly being told that they are the best, to the point that it is annoying, but while I think they are good, they just don't move me or interest me the way a dozen or more artists working in the same genre do. 

(After drafting the above assessment of "Footsteps," a little googling brought to my attention the story that "Footsteps" was the product of a stunt in which Ellison wrote the story in front of an audience who provided the raw material for the story, improv style--the story is about a lady werewolf rapist in Paris because people in the audience set those parameters.  I believe it is still fair to judge the story like I would any other story, because it is presented to us in Hot Blood just like any other story, and during the years between the initial event that birthed the story and its appearance in the collection Angry Candy in 1988 and Hot Blood in 1989, Ellison had ample opportunity to revise and polish it--Ellison must have felt the version I read was satisfactory.)   

"Daughter of the Golden West" by Dennis Etchison (1973)

"Daughter of the Golden West" was first printed in the men's magazine Cavalier under the title "A Feast for Cathy."  (Cavalier in the 1970s, I now know, was full of early Stephen King stories and cartoons of nude women by Vaughn Bode.  I learn a lot of exciting information working on this blog.)

"Daughter of the Golden West" is the best constructed and best written story I have yet read from Hot Blood.  Etchison moves things forward at a good pace, starting us off with a mystery and giving us little nuggets of information that finally add up to the ultimate horror on the last page in a way which is satisfyingly striking.  Along the way Etchison provides images that are sharper and human relationships that are more interesting than anything Matheson, Sturgeon or Ellison offered us.  The reader gets the feeling that Etchison actually thought about the story and worked hard crafting it--it operates like a complex but smooth-running machine with a unified tone that leads logically to its erotic and gory conclusion, unlike the simple plots punctuated by a crazy surprise twist ending presented to us by Matheson, Sturgeon and Ellison.  And while Ellison's writing is showy and flashy, an obtrusive and heavy-handed effort at appearing literary, Etchison's piece here actually feels literary, each of the sentences feels like it is pursuing some story goal, not a pointless piece of fancy embroidery that screams, "Hey, I'm a writer!"  Even when you discover words like "gestalt" and "virgule" embedded in Etchsion's prose you try to figure out what Etchison is trying to accomplish with them, you don't just roll your eyes the way you do the fourth and fifth time Ellison waves "children of the night" in your face like a cheerleader's pom poms.

The plot: Three California high school boys are best buddies, doing everything together.  Then one of them disappears, and is found dead, the lower part of his body mutilated.  Two other young men have suffered a similar fate in the last few months.  The two surviving friends grieve, but also begin doing a little detective work, eventually going to talk to the high school girl, Cathy, who is probably the last person their dead buddy ever spoke to.  At her house they face the same horrifying danger that destroyed their predecessors--Cathy and her sisters are descended from a member of the Donner party, and have taken up cannibalism!  Their modus operandi is to seduce men and then incapacitate them by biting off their you-know-whats during fellatio!

A very good horror story; not only are the final scenes at Cathy's house, where the seduction, sex and murder take place, powerful, but the earlier scenes, in which the two boys and other members of the community deal with the shock and grief of the loss of one of their number, are also effective.  I can recommend this one with some enthusiasm.  

"The Model" by Robert Bloch (1975)

Like Ellison's "Footsteps," Bloch's "The Model" first appeared in Gallery, the author's name being given a spot on the cover.  This cover, however, unabashedly features a woman's bare breasts, and, for fear of getting on the wrong side of the Google authorities, and making my protestations of being a libertarian and a free-speech absolutist look pretty hollow, I am censoring the image of the November 1975 issue of Gallery that is appearing here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  To see the original cover image in all its glory, try here.

Remember how in "The Closer of the Way" Bloch used himself as the narrator and set the tale in an asylum?  Well, he uses the same gag here.  Robert Bloch, author of Psycho, talks to a mental patient, who tells him the story of his relationship with tall, thin Vilma, a fashion model he met while working at an ad agency.  He was some kind of assistant who handled schedules, and with no creative work to do had time to hang out with Vilma when his agency was building a campaign around photos of her taken in the Caribbean.  Vilma, the photog, the clothing and make up guy, and the assistant guy, traveled from port to port on a cruise ship, and between islands the assistant guy and Vilma spent their days on the ship sitting in the shade and shooting the breeze.  He lusted after the beauty, even fell in love with her, but she was very cool, gently rebuffing all his advances.

After two weeks of getting nowhere with Vilma, as the ship was about to return to Miami, Vilma finally invited him to her room.  She told him she wanted his genetic material, and revealed herself to be some kind of monster whose beautiful head was just an artificial appliance--her real eyes were on her nipples!  Even more horrifying was her vagina, which had teeth which she used to take possession of the man's genitals after arousing him and binding him with her special powers.  Vilma has not been seen since, and the assistant guy, who survived the removal of his genitals, is considered to have been driven insane by the mutilation he suffered--obviously nobody believes his story of Vilma being an inhuman monster.

The sense-of-wonder ending of this feeble story is Bloch suggesting that all those tall thin fashion models we see in magazines and ad campaigns, with their cool emotionless expressions, are inhuman creatures in disguise, monsters bred by some mysterious entity for some mysterious purpose.

Lame, the worst story we have discussed today.  It is a good idea to explore men's fear of losing their maleness (independence and virility and so forth) to a woman who wants to make a child with them, but Bloch only does this in the most shallow way, and then he tacks on the gimmicky concept that fashion models aren't really human, a theory that he just throws out there and doesn't do anything with that might be interesting or emotionally engaging.  "The Model" has no character development, no foreshadowing, no images besides the monstrous woman with eyes on her boobs and a toothy maw between her thighs, it's just six pages of filler and then the shock ending.

Thumbs down.

**********

German edition of Hot Blood

Five stories that offer the perennially appropriate advice, "Guys, maybe you should just keep it in your pants."  Four of the stories feature manipulative and murderous women, a reflection of the fact that men are scared of women and the desires they inspire in us, and the vulnerability we find ourselves in when we try to satisfy those desires.   

Dennis Etchison's contribution is far and away the best, delivering successful sexual and horrific content in a story that works in every way.  Richard Matheson comes in second with another story with decent erotic and terror elements.  In third place we see Ted Sturgeon, who unloads some speculative medical science on us as well as raising issues about how we should treat with those who trespass against us.  Then we have Harlan Ellison's mediocre offering, apparently the product of a stunt, followed by Robert Bloch's lackluster, anemic production, which fails to cross the finish line and is mired in "bad" territory.

I think my last dozen posts have been about short stories, but our next post will be about a science fiction novel by one of the SFWA Grand Masters, a novel I have wanted to reread for a while.

From Great Science Fiction of the 20th Century: Davidson, Budrys & Knight

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are flipping through Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century, a glamorous 1987 reskin of 1980's The Arbor House Treasury of Modern Science Fiction.  In our last episode we looked at the stories penned by Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein, and Ray Bradbury that editors Robert Silverberg and Martin H. Greenberg selected for the volume; today let's read their picks from the bodies of work of Avram Davidson, Algis Budrys, and Damon Knight, three writers about whom I've scribbled a bit in the last few months.

"Or All the Seas With Oysters" by Avram Davidson (1958)

This story won a Hugo after first appearing in Galaxy and has been anthologized many times, including by Neil Gaiman.  (I hear Neil Gaiman is one of the favorites of the kids these days.)

I guess "Or All the Seas With Oysters" might qualify as a joke story, but it is more sophisticated, at least in style, than the broad and absurdist joke stories I am always complaining about here at the blog.  Two men run a bike shop.  One, Oscar, is a hearty chap who seduces a lot of women and whose attitude is to take life as it comes, to make the best of the situations you find.  His partner is Ferd, a shy nervous type who reads books and worries over the things he reads about in the newspaper.

To make a long story short, over the course of Davidson's tale, clever and sensitive Ferd realizes that some sort of weird creature, one that looks like a safety pin in its larval form, a clothes hanger in an intermediate form, and a bicycle in its mature form, has infiltrated human society--Davidson's gimmick here is based on commonplace observations that you can never find a safety pin when you need one and that one's closet is always filled with superfluous coat hangers.  The story's punchline is the contrast between how Ferd and Oscar respond to this astonishing discovery and what fates their reactions lead them to.

One of the sophisticated aspects of the story is how Davidson doesn't make it too obvious which of the two men we should identify with, and whether we should view the story as a terrible tragedy or something of a goof.  Similarly, there is a vague reference to Ferd suffering anxiety over reading about communists in the newspaper, and Davidson doesn't let on whether Ferd is worried about the threat posed by the communists who are murdering and enslaving millions of people in Eastern Europe and China, or sympathizing with leftist Hollywood screenwriters whose careers are suffering some obstacles due to their beliefs.  This sort of ambiguity allows the reader to comfortably assume Davidson sees the world as he sees it, or forces the more thoughtful reader to think twice, which adds value to the story. 

Despite my aversion to absurd joke stories, I enjoyed and am recommending this one.  Over time Davidson is growing on me.

"Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" by Algis Budrys (1961)

As has Davdison, Budrys, about whom I was skeptical when this blog first lurched on to the interwebs from the recesses of my fevered brain, has been growing on me.  Like "Or All the Seas With Oysters," "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night" first appeared in Galaxy.  It would go on to be included in a number of anthologies, including Isaac Asimov and Greenberg's The Great SF Stories #23, which also includes a story we at MPorcius Fiction Log liked, R. A. Lafferty's "Rainbird," and two stories we loved, Jack Vance's "Moon Moth" and Cordwainer Smith's "A Planet Named Shayol."

It is the future--the 21st century!  Rufus Sollenar is an optical engineer and a successful businessman, who surveys beautiful Manhattan from his office atop a skyscraper--he can even see spaceships taking off and landing out at the Long Island spaceport.  He is on top of the world, his firm having just started manufacturing a new kind of TV, EmpaVid, that interacts directly with the viewer's emotions via subliminal messages and a biofeedback mechanism.  But word comes of trouble--a rival firm, that of Cortwright Burr, has been working with Martian engineers--the native Martians are a dying race, but they have all kinds of mysterious technology.  Presumably Burr has returned to Earth with an entertainment system superior to EmpaVid, putting Sollenar's firm, and all those who have invested in it, in terrible financial risk.

Utilizing some of the many gadgets and devices featured in this story, Sollenar launches a one-man commando raid on Burr's office and tries to assassinate him and steal his Martian technology.  But it seems that Burr has been given Martian immortality treatments and is almost indestructible!  A shattered, scarred and half-disguised Burr begins to haunt Sollenar at his office, at a big party, on the commercial space ship Sollenar takes to Mars to meet the Martian engineers himself.  On Mars, Sollenar and we readers realize that there are no Martian immortality treatments, that Sollenar is not being pursued by an immortal Burr revenant, but is hallucinating such persecution because Burr, using the hypnotic entertainment device he acquired from the Martian engineers, laid a trap for Sollenar, whom he expected to kill him.

Sollenar is, however, in fact being pursued by somebody, an agent representing an association of all the companies of the broadcast industry--this association enforces agreements and looks out for the broadcast industry's collective interests, and has decided that Sollenar, who is acting like a nut and thus putting all their investments in EmpaVid at risk, should be killed.  As the story ends Sollenar lays a trap for his killer similar to that which Burr laid for him.     

This is a solid SF story full of futuristic devices and processes and mysterious aliens; there is also, implicitly, the criticism of TV and big business we see in so much SF.  Budrys is a good writer and the images in New York and on Mars and the pacing throughout are quite satisfactory.  I have to admit that I was a little disappointed when I realized that Burr was not really a living-dead avenger chasing his assassin all over Manhattan's towers and the red planet's wastes, that it was all an illusion--I guess I have a childish fascination with immortality, revenge narratives and chases, as well as limited patience with "it was all a dream" stories.  But Budrys makes it work, and I can recommend "Wall of Crystal, Eye of Night."

(I'm glad I can give the thumbs up to two stories from Galaxy in this blog post, because I don't want people to think my lukewarm reaction to a bunch of Galaxy stories a few blog posts ago means I am some kind of irrational Galaxy-hater.)

"Stranger Station" by Damon Knight (1956)

"Stranger Station" got top billing on the cover of the issue of F&SF with the third installment of the serialized version of Robert Heinlein's Door Into Summer and a striking cover by Kelly Freas.  Like the other stories we have been talking about, it has been widely anthologized, and was selected for republication by, among others, respected anthologist Judith Merril and British men of letters Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest.

This is a traditional sort of SF story about space stations, a talking computer that may very well have developed a personality, psychic interaction between human and alien, and trying to figure out alien motives.

A century ago Earth astronauts encountered on Titan extrasolar aliens, colossal arthropod-like creatures with many limbs whose proximity caused an intense psychological pressure to the humans.  The aliens apparently also suffer from psychic contact with humans, and their suffering causes them to exude a fluid; this fluid, when taken by humans, greatly extends the human lifespan.

By the time of our story the process of trading with these aliens has been regularized, and human civilization is reliant on the alien longevity goop.  A space station orbits the Earth, and every twenty years a human spends a few months in one living compartment of the station, while an alien does the same in a huge adjacent compartment.  The mental stress on the human of being so close to the alien for such a long time is tremendous and tends to drive the human volunteer insane, though the details of that insanity, and what the aliens actually look like, is kept a secret from the common people.  The plot of "Stranger Station" covers one such period of interment at the station with the alien, that of Paul Wesson--we follow Wesson's wavering mental health, his relationship with the computer that runs the station and is meant to keep him company, and his efforts to figure out the aliens' motives for giving us this invaluable secretion for free.

There are many SF stories that contrast belligerent humanity with pacific aliens, and "Stranger Station" is one of them.  Wesson comes to believe that the elephantine bug-like aliens are not violent, and would thus be at the mercy of the aggressive human race when, in one hundred years or whatever, we invent an interstellar drive.  Contact with an alien mind alters a human's mind, making it more like that of the alien--for example, Wesson loses the ability to read and speak English during his exposure to the alien brainwaves--and Wesson theorizes that he is being manipulated into becoming a member of "the vanguard--the conquered men, the ones who would get along with their strange brothers, out among the alien stars."  The E.T.s are preemptively colonizing our psyches before we can colonize their planets!

This alien plan of altering our brains so we will be like them is characterized (as you might guess from the use of the word "brother" in the quote above) as "conquering by love," but in this case love is no match for good old hate!  Wesson's will, his ability to hate the hideous alien whose body "reminded him of all the loathsome, crawling, creeping things the Earth was full of" overcomes the alien efforts to adapt his brain and make it accept brotherhood with those freaks.  The alien dies, and in its death throes wrecks the space station, which Wesson presumes will mean an end to the goop handout, triggering human resentment and, when the human race does achieve interstellar travel, a campaign of revenge on the peaceful aliens.

A concurrent and interconnected subplot is how the computer may have developed free will and if so may be falling in love with Wesson.  The computer seems to break the rules a bit at Wesson's request, letting Wesson see a forbidden video feed of the repulsive oozing space monster that wants to be his brother, and it seems possible that it is this rule breaking that gives Wesson the ability to resist alien influence and set off the chain of events that will end the goop giveaway and set us on the road to interstellar war with these peaceful aliens.  Has love of computer for human tragically ruined any hope of love between alien and human...or rescued us from unnatural bondage to disgusting alien weirdos, from a betrayal of our essential nature?

(While I am holding on to the possibility that Wesson and his computer girlfriend should be seen as heroes for preserving human independence and free will from the machinations of giant alien hypno-bugs, Silverberg and Greenberg here in their intro to "Stranger Station" suggest Wesson's resistance is irrational racism.)

A good story.  I have been down on many of Knight's stories over the years, but I enjoyed "Stranger Station" and definitely recommend it.

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Three good stories.  Maybe we'll read more from Great Science Fiction of the Twentieth Century in the future.