Alpha 4: T Disch, E Pangborn, and T Carr

In Omaha in 2015 I purchased, along with a stack of other paperbacks, Alpha 4, a 1973 anthology of "superb" stories that are "important to the genre."  The potential problem with reprinting old stories widely considered "excellent" and "important" is that serious SF fans will have already read them in other venues, so the back cover of Alpha 4 tries to appeal to new fans of SF, people who may be familiar with the Big Three of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and with mainstream breakout success Ray Bradbury, but not yet with people like Thomas M. Disch, Damon Knight, Philip Jose Farmer and Brian W. Aldiss.  There were nine Alpha volumes in total, so maybe the pitch worked.

At this here blog we have already addressed a few of the stories that make an appearance in Alpha 4: "Dio," AKA "The Dying Man," by Damon Knight, "Judas Danced" by Brian Aldiss, and "All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty.  Today we'll assail three more of these allegedly excellent and important works, one each by Thomas Disch, Edgar Pangborn, and Terry Carr.

"Casablanca" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

This is one of those stories I own in multiple books, it appearing in the 1971 hardcover Disch collection Fun with Your New Head--I own a 1972 paperback printing of that-- and the 1980 paperback Disch collection Fundamental Disch, a copy of which sits right there on the shelves of the MPorcius Library.  It kind of looks like "Casablanca" first saw print in the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories that Scared Even Me, which seems a little odd, all the other stories in that book being reprints.  In 1968 "Casablanca" would appear in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, the famously influential and famously unprofitable flagship of the New Wave--the magazine's survival was only possible through subsidies from the British taxpayer and Moorcock himself, who sank into it cash he raised through the rapid composition and sale of paperback fantasy novels.

Thomas Disch is a smart guy and a good writer but also a bitter and snobbish sort of character and "Casablanca" is a derisive and even vindicative attack on the American people, in particular the Midwesterners among whom Disch was born.  The title is presumably an ironic reference to the famous film, which, like The Godfather, is one of those cultural icons I have never actually watched but which I feel like I know because people never stop talking about it.  Anyway, in the Bogart-Bergman movie, Americans in North Africa during a world war act admirably and achieve some kind of nobility, while in Disch's story Americans in North Africa during a world war act crassly and get totally humiliated.

An older married couple are on vacation in Morocco and Disch pokes fun at them for being unable to speak French, for trying to save money, for enjoying sugary treats, for being patriotic about the US of A and for being hostile to communism, exactly the kind of criticisms of provincial Yanks we'd expect from a New Yorker who spent a lot of time in England hobnobbing with other sophisticated smarty smarts.  While they are there in North Africa, the United States is destroyed by a nuclear attack and the couple is repeatedly humiliated by the locals because their travelers' checks and American money are no longer worth much of anything.  Eventually the wife disappears and the husband is robbed of his only means of getting out of Morocco; his incompetent efforts to find his wife prove fruitless and he is beaten up by a mob and robbed again following a tussle with a young thief.

(I don't know if people are still talking about "punching down," but "Casablanca" could be the subject of an entire discourse on the concept.  Is smart and educated Disch punching down at the ignorant tourists, or is he a homosexual punching up at breeders?  Are the Arab mobs punching down at a lone woman and a lone old man, or punching up at the white imperialist bourgeoisie?) 

Obviously you are going to enjoy this story if you hate America and relish the spectacle of seeing Americans humiliated by third worlders.  Silverberg in his little intro to "Casablanca" here in Alpha 4 bills the story as "comic and terrifying both at once, like most true nightmares," I guess trying to sell it not as a leftist wish fulfillment fantasy but as a horror story.  In some horror stories, horrible things happen to sympathetic people and you feel bad for them; in others, horrible things happen to people who have misbehaved and you feel justice has been served.  Disch in his story here seems to be conducting a sort of literary exercise in which directs the reader to feel the United States deserves to be annihilated and its expatriates laid low for their sins but leaves enough room for readers who don't share his snobbish anti-American opinions to be tricked into sympathizing with the tourists.  I can't say I am on the same page as Disch is here, but the story is thought-provoking and cleverly put together so I guess I have to admit it is good.

(A double-plus-super-anti-subversive subversive hot take on "Casablanca" might be that Disch is laying a trap for his fellow alienated sophisticates, seeing if he can get them to side with mass-murdering communists and Arab thieves against innocuous and ineffectual ordinary Americans.)

"Angel's Egg" by Edgar Pangborn (1951)

Here we have an at times tedious story that feels long and reminds me of the work of Theodore Sturgeon: the themes of love and of collective consciousness; the alien utopia that serves as a foil for our crummy human society; the argument that the cognitive elite should mold society for its own good regardless of the will of the plebians.    

"Angel's Egg" is almost 40 pages long here in Alpha 4 and comes to us as a series of documents in a file in the near future of a one-world government.  The wife of Cleveland McCarran, the "martyred first president" of that world government, donated these documents to some institution in 1994, and one component of the file is a letter sent to McCarran in 1951 when he was working at the FBI by a state police captain regarding an investigation of a Dr. David Bannerman, a biologist and school teacher.  ("Angel's Egg" is one of those stories that romanticizes teachers.)  The lion's share of the file consists of annotated excerpts from Bannerman's journal; these were attached to the 1951 letter and describe in sleep-inducing detail Bannerman's relationship with an alien who looks like a six-inch-tall woman covered in down and is equipped with dragonfly wings; Bannerman calls this doll-sized creature an "angel."

The angels hail from a planet ten light years away and their society is wise because it is 70 million years old.  In this oh-so-wise civilization the most honored of all professions is teacher (of course!) and these long-lived aliens spend many years being educated.  When the aliens sent an expedition to Earth it was only natural that one of their number hook up with a kindly Terran schoolteacher--Bannerman--whose goodness was confirmed by reading his brain--like so many aliens in SF stories of all types, from space opera to this kind of sappy utopianism, the angels are telepathic.  

Besides descriptions of how the little angel makes a little bed in a shoe box and having her around makes him the happiest man in the world, Bannerman fills his journal with summaries of his telepathic conversations with the alien, much of them about how her people's utopian society operates.  They no longer experience fear.  They no longer experience hate.  They have beautiful and intelligent cats who have outgrown the desire to torture their prey.  They have the capability to travel to every planet in the galaxy but are humble and have thus far kept themselves aloof and a secret from other life forms.  

The angel aliens have finally decided to help other intelligent species, and we humans are to be the beneficiaries of their wisdom--it is implied they will secretly program the minds of influential people so they will behave along the lines the angels think best.  (There is a scene in which Bannerman plays chess and the angel programs his mind to play a better game and Bannerman thinks he is coming up with these genius moves himself.)  But to provide us Earthers this help they must know as much about us as possible.  They can erase your brain and absorb the info themselves, but this process, which takes some considerable time, ends in death of the mind donor.  Bannerman, reflecting that the human race of 1951 appears to be on the brink of destroying the world, agrees to donate his mind to the angels for the good of his people.  Bannerman starts reliving his life, remembering every moment in detail, and then forgetting it; the process takes like a month, and then he dies.  

The file contains, and our story concludes with, a brief statement from the self-sacrificing Bannerman's  chess partner, a doctor, that provides clues that make it clear that Bannerman's journal tells the absolute truth, and that Bannerman's dead body shows no signs of distress, only contentment--it is the most well-ordered dead body the doc has ever seen.  ("Angel's Egg" is a story bubbling over with superlatives--doc also says Bannerman was the most stable human being he ever met.)  It is not quite as clear, but I guess we are supposed to think that McCarann's presidency and the world government are signs the angels are manipulating us to have a better society.  "Angel's Egg" is one of those SF stories like Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing and the overrated film The Day the Earth Stood Still that expects us to welcome alien imperialism.  

(I often talk about how genre fiction is wish fulfillment fantasy, and maybe we should also consider this story as the wish fulfillment fantasy of a childless man who likes the idea of having a smart beautiful daughter.  Did Pangborn have children?  A skim of Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction hasn't yielded any info on his family life.)

I found the first half or two-thirds of "Angel's Egg" pretty boring and annoying but by the final third or so, after the sappy preliminaries are done with and the chess partner is introduced into the story, I guess I fell into its groove and it got a little more interesting.  I guess we'll call it acceptable.

"Angel's Egg" debuted in Galaxy and appears to be Pangborn's first published SF tale.  Many of the prominent SF editors--Damon Knight, Groff Conklin, Martin H. Greenberg, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, and Edmund Crispin--have seen fit to serve up this slab of sentimentality to their readers.

"In His Image" by Terry Carr (1971)

Here is another of those stories in which robots who admire humans inherit the Earth and we readers are offered reason to believe humans are not in fact admirable.  There are a lot of these stories out there; I associate this theme with Clifford Simak, but we recently read just such a story by beloved bad boy Harlan Ellison.  Fortunately, Terry Carr here in "In His Image" takes a nuanced view on the matter of whether human beings are worthy of admiration.

It is like three centuries in the future.  In the period between the Nixon Administration and the time in which this story is set the human race developed human-like robots, built abstract sculptures the size of mountains, polluted the air severely, and then retreated into domed cities to escape the pollution that corroded the mountain sculptures and made the air almost unbreathable.  This story relates the search conducted by our narrator, a human-like robot, of the tallest building in a domed city for the last surviving human being!  Our narrator makes clear he admires humans because they are always striving to climb higher, both literally and metaphorically.  When he finds the last human being the man turns out to be a drunk who hates robots--when he isn't vomiting he is calling the robots mere machines no better than staplers or typewriters.  The faith of our narrator is not shaken--in fact, after the medical robots take off the last living human our narrator decides to emulate the human race, to embody our ambition, by figuring out how to climb one of the mountain sculptures.  His computer brain doesn't have enough data to mathematically calculate the probability of success in scaling the sculpture without falling, and this is one way in which he is able to emulate his creators, going on a dangerous adventure without any certainty of how it will turn out!

Of today's three stories this is the most conventional and comfortable, the easiest to read and the one with the least irritating (to me) message or theme.  I like it.

"In His Image" was the cover story of an issue of Amazing published in the year of my birth; the story is titled "In Man's Image" on the magazine's interior pages.  "In His Image" hasn't been reprinted nearly as often as "Casablanca" and "Angel's Egg," but, speak of the devil, it did appear in the third volume in the Harlan Ellison Discovery Series, the Carr collection The Light at the End of the Universe.  As I was copyediting this blog post I learned that the internet archive, world's greatest website, was back in action, and I was able to read Carr's intro to "In His Image" in The Light at the End of the Universe; Carr relates how Amazing editor Ted White acquired the Mike Hinge painting and asked Carr to write a story based around it and the result is this story

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If you were inclined to think SF fans were misanthropic and pessimistic self-important snobs who hold normies in contempt and expect them to destroy themselves and maybe the world unless some elite group were to seize the reins from them, these stories would not disabuse you of this notion.  I'm not on board with a lot of what these stories have to say, but none of them are actually bad, though at times Pangborn's "Angel's Egg" comes close.  I am, however, skeptical that "In His Image," while a good story worthy of inclusion in an anthology, is "important."

Stay tuned for more short stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

1967 stories by C Kapp, R Zelazny, A Offutt and B Aldiss

Over the last five blog posts we've been reading from paperback anthologies I own.  Well, now we are six.  On the anthologies shelf of the MPorcius Library we find a copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series, a 1970 reprint of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  Back in 2020 I read four stories from the book, Samuel R. Delany's "Driftglass," Thomas Disch's "The Number You Have Reached," and R. A. Lafferty's "The Man Who Never Was" and "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," and earlier this year we read the included story by Larry Niven, "Handicap."  Let's read four more of the book's 16 stories today, those by Colin Kapp, Roger Zelazny, Andrew Offutt and Brian Aldiss.  

"Ambassador to Verdammt" by Colin Kapp   

In 2016 we blogged about Kapp's "The Cloudbuilders" and his novel Patterns of Chaos, and just last year we read his story "Enigma."  I don't actually remember anything about those three works, but I didn't condemn them in my blog posts about them so Kapp is still in my good books and hopefully today's engagement with a Kapp story won't do anything to change that.

In "Ambassador to Verdammt" we have a traditional SF story that I can mildly recommend, a tale that tries to give you that ol' sense of wonder, details super futuristic technology, valorizes the engineer and the scientist (including the psychologist!), describes crazy aliens and offers a sense of hope--conquering the stars will be tough and entail serious risks, and people don't always get along, but mankind us equal to the task and it is a task well worth accomplishing.  (If you read my last blog post you know this is the sort of thing I have kind of been looking for, and I guess it is no surprise I found it in Analog before I found it in Galaxy.)

A space naval officer, an engineer, is dispatched with a bunch of subordinates and many tons of equipment to a planet he thought had no native intelligent life with the job of setting up all the extensive and expensive apparatus to allow a hyperspace ship to land on the planet.  He is skeptical of the diplomats and scientists on the planet, thinking these civilians may have distracted the space navy from its real work in corrupt pursuit of their own personal benefit.  The "landing grid" he is in charge of erecting is to catch the ship carrying the new formal Ambassador, who is the son of the current head of administration of the tiny research station on the planet--if there are no intelligent aliens on the planet, why do they need an Ambassador?  Is the staff here just securing a plum no-show government job for the administrator's flesh and blood?

The administrator and the station's top head shrinker try to explain to the engineer that among the local life are intelligent beings whose physical make up and way of thinking are so alien that their existence at first went unrecognized.  Even now humans are totally incapable of comprehending these natives, and just trying to communicate with them runs the risk of driving you insane.  The shrink suspects the natives are having the same experience as the human visitors, trying and failing to understand the humans.  

The engineer hears the strange noises made by the aliens, sees the evidence that they are able to perform apparently impossible physical feats, and when he tries to look at them he can't even get a handle on what he is seeing.  A brave and determined guy, he plunges into the jungle in an effort to figure the natives out himself and almost goes insane.  Luckily the shrink brings him back from the brink of madness so he is able to finish the landing grid.  When the Ambassador arrives the engineer learns this is no Hunter Biden situation--the administrator's son is a mere infant, and is being brought to the planet on the theory that a baby who grows up in proximity to the natives will be able to fathom their ways, its brain not set in its ways like that of an adult human who was raised among only humans.  The natives have similarly left at the research station what looks like a crystal that seems to shift as you watch it and grows at  measurable rate--presumably this is a baby native who, like the administrator's son, will serve as a liaison between human and native, having come to maturity with a foot in both cultures.

After its debut in Analog its appearance in the many editions of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, "Ambassador to Verdammt" had to wait until 2013 to appear again in print in the Kapp collection The Cloudbuilders and Other Marvels.   

(NB: I read "Ambassador to Verdammt" in a scan of the applicable issue of Analog because I don't want to wreck my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series, which is in quite good condition.)

In Germany, Wollheim and Carr's 1968 anthology was split into multiple volumes;
"Ambassador to Verdammt" was included in Science Fiction Stories 33.

"The Man Who Loved the Faioli" by Roger Zelazny

Back in 2014 I acquired a withdrawn library copy of a 2001 edition of the Zelazny collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth with a cool Lebbeus Woods cover and I actually started reading it and put up three blog posts about it, uno, dos, tres, but I didn't get to "The Man Who Loved the Faioli," which is in the second half of the book.  So I own this oft-reprinted story in multiple books, and will read it in that 2001 volume, which is already in questionable condition.  "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a fun Gray Morrow cover that is quite similar in spirit to, and shares some individual components with, Morrow's cover for Neil R. Jones' The Sunless World, another 1967 production.

"The Man Who Loved the Faioli" (pronounced like "ravioli"?...I love ravioli...) is written in a semi-poetical fairy-tale or fable-with-a-moral style and is set in a future of technology so advanced it is almost indistinguishable from magic to us poor 20th-century goofenheimers.  Here's a sample of the text that puts on full display the repetition, nature similes, and obvious romantic naming conventions that are giving me that fairyland vibe:

"I said 'hello, and don't cry,'" he said, and her voice was like the breezes he had forgotten through all the trees he had forgotten, with their moisture and their odors and their colors all brought back to him thus, "From where do you come, man?  You were not here a moment ago."

"From the Canyon of the Dead," he said.

"Let me touch your face," and he did, and she did.

"It is strange that I did not feel you approach."

"This is a strange world," he replied.

Anyway, the plot consists of John Auden (a reference to W. H. Auden?) encountering the most beautiful woman he has ever met and having sex with her.  Over the course of the brief story we learn the nature of both John Auden and the beautiful woman.  The Faioli are alien creatures I guess a little like vampires, though Zelazny doesn't use that word.  They can fly through space on their wings of light, and they come to men in the form of impossibly beautiful women.  They cannot see dead bodies, only living people.  A Faioli will spend a month with a man, giving him the best possible sexual experiences, and also serving as a dutiful spouse, cooking and massaging and so forth, then on the 31st day of the affair will suck his life out, killing him.  John Auden is the first ever man to have the upper hand over a Faioli, as he is, more or less, already dead.  You see, in this high tech future, almost nobody suffers diseases, but John Auden unluckily caught some malady nobody knew how to cure.  He didn't want to be put into suspended animation to wait for a cure, so instead died but technology allowed him to maintain consciousness and mobility, I guess as a sort of cyborg.  He took the job of caretaker of the planet to which are brought all the bodies of people, human and alien, who die throughout the galaxy by robots who dump them in the "Valley of Bones."

When the Faioli arrives she can't see John Auden and starts crying because she came to this planet for nothing.  John Auden, who has heard about the Faioli, sees how hot she is and decides he wants to have sex with her, so he pushes a button under his armpit that brings him back to life.  (This story doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense; it's just one arbitrary romantic thing after another.)  So they have sex and play house for 31 days, and when the time comes for the Faioli to suck his life out he explains to her his odd condition.  John Auden is willing to die, now that he has spent a month enjoying the best possible sexual relationship, but the Faioli has the curiosity this story attributes to women and she pushes his armpit button and he dies again, becoming invisible to her.  Once dead, John Auden has lost his interest in dying, and so doesn't bring himself back to life.  The Faioli cries, then flies off.  Zelazny ends the story with a cryptic moral: "life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it."

Gender studies people may find a lot in "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" for them to put their hammers and tongs to work on; seeing as it is a story about women who suck your life out in exchange for sexual favors, a story that employs phrases like "...having taken the form of woman, or perhaps being woman all along, the Faioli who was called Sythia was curious..." and a story which offers a portrayal of the platonic ideal of a perfect marriage.  As for me, maybe I am in a cynical mood today, but the numerous nonsensical elements of the story and its fairy-tale or folk-tale style put me off, had me rolling my eyes.  I'll call this one barely acceptable instead of bad because its lack of appeal to me is more a matter of it not being my kind of thing than of Zelazny failing to achieve his goals--maybe "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" is a stellar example of what it Zelazny intended it to be?

"Population Implosion" by Andrew Offutt 

This is an idea story, with little by way of plot or character, written in a smart-alecky jocular style.  Our narrator is a doctor and one of the first people to figure out the alarming development facing the human race in the second half of the 20th century.  This is also one of the many SF stories that addresses the issue of overpopulation.

Old people start dying mysteriously, just all of a sudden keeling over without evidence of injury or illness.  Our narrator and an actuary realize the scope and evolving nature of the problem and our narrator is put on the team trying to figure out why these geezers are dying.  It seems that people that reach a certain advanced age all die spontaneously, and that age is getting lower all the time, so that there are no more 75-year-olds in the world, then no more 74-year-olds, etc.  Eventually it is realized that the human race is limited to approximately 5 billion people at a time, and, when a baby is born who tips the world pop over the edge, the oldest person in the world dies instantly.  There are worldwide efforts to limit birth, but the duplicitous Chinese Communist Party secretly initiates a crash breeding program, forcing people to have sex like crazy with the idea that they can thus increase China's already high percentage of world population and dominate the Earth, but the Westerners catch on and the West and USSR ally and then nuke China into oblivion.  

This mass death event only delays the problem briefly, and soon the maximum age is creeping down again.  As the story ends there is no hope in sight and the narrator proposes the theory that the being who created the universe made five billion souls at its start and that is why there can never be more than five billion people alive at any one time.

We'll call "Population Implosion" acceptable.  The satirical elements, largely aimed at politicians and government and other bureaucratic institutions, aren't actually funny but also are not offensively lame.  The story is a smooth read, thanks to the style and to the mystery--the reader is kept curious about what will happen next, what the explanation and solution will be--but those questions are not really resolved so "Population Implosion" isn't what I would call a particularly satisfying read.  We might think of the story as a wish-fulfilment fantasy that absolves readers from the need to worry about overpopulation and eases fear of death by telling you your soul is immortal.

"Population Implosion" debuted in an issue of If featuring an editorial by Frederik Pohl about the New Wave (he diplomatically praises people on either side of the supposed divide between Old and New Wavers) and illustrations by Vaughn Bode--comics fans may also be interested to see an ad for Wallace Wood's Witzend featuring a kid in a space suit.  (I read Offutt's story in a scan of the magazine.)  "Population Implosion" would go on to be included in a 1974 textbook meant to be inflicted on high school kids, As Tomorrow Becomes Today.  

As noted above, German readers were exposed to World's Best Science Fiction: 1968
in dribs and drabs, sections of the book appearing in translation across
multiple entries of the series  Science Fiction Stories; "The Man Who Loved the
Fialoni" and "Population Implosion" appeared in number 35

"Full Sun" by Brian Aldiss 

This story debuted in Damon Knight's Orbit  2 and would be reprinted in various books including Terry Carr's Creatures from Beyond and Bill Pronzini's Werewolf!  At time of writing I can't access any of these books at the internet archive so I am putting at risk the spine of my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series by reading "Full Sun" in there.  Please pray for that beautiful green wraparound Jack Gaughan cover, readers of faith!

Luckily, the risk incurred by reading this story in a physical book I bought with real money is commensurate to how good the story is--thumbs up for "Full Sun," a well-written story full of wild SF ideas and a plot that is one surprise after another.

It is millions of years in the future!  Mankind's relationship to machines and city life is such that almost no human ever leaves the cities, and so the space between the cities--each a paradise of pleasure for men and women--is uninhabited wilderness.  A tiny number of men do leave the cities, and our story concerns three such men.  We've got our main character, a man who, accompanied by a robot, is hunting a werewolf!  Werewolves are, the machines say, mankind's terrible enemies.  On the trail of one such monster, our hero meets another man, a sort of park ranger or forest conservator guy.  This guy lives outside the cities all the time, and has some harsh things ("social criticism") to say about the machines who have been running human life for millennia.  Our protagonist, who still admires the machines, isn't pleased to hear such politically incorrect talk.

Our hero finds reason to change his attitude, however.  He watches the TV news on his wrist phone; there's a new story about the machines' efforts to communicate with the machines who will rule the world of the far future, when the sun is a weak dwarf star.  Our hero realizes that no human beings seem to be alive in this dimly lit future.  Then he finds the timber officer has been killed, and a clue suggests he was killed by the robot and the robot tried to make it look like the werewolf slew him!  Are the werewolves the menace the machines have been claiming, or just rebels against the machine tyranny?  Our hero ends up in a desperate chase, the robot hunting him.  (One of the interesting changes in the story is how when it starts we are led to believe that the robot is a mere tool of the hunter, but later realize that the robot is the master capable of initiative and deception.)  As the story ends, the werewolf watches the cat and mouse game of robot and ordinary man--the werewolf is confident that his kind, the superhumans, will defeat the machines and inherit the Earth long after the machines have eliminated mundane humanity.

I like it.  

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A decent batch of stories, can't really complain.  Maybe we'll read more from World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series as we continue reading anthologies here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Third Galaxy Reader: T R Cogswell, F L Wallace, A Davidson, and L del Rey

There are people who will tell you that conquering outer space is a waste of time.  We at MPorcius Fiction Log beg to differ!  And today we are gambling that 1950s stories from H. L. Gold's Galaxy will agree with us and not the naysayers who want to tie us all down permanently to this big ol' rock that--admit it!--you are kind of getting sick of.

Years ago I purchased a bedraggled copy of Permabook M-4172, The Third Galaxy Reader, for 50 cents at the Second Story Books location in Washington D.C., the belly of the beast.  This book has crossed this great country of ours at least once, as a stamp indicating it was at one time on the shelves of Rodden's Bookshop in Long Beach, CA, indicates.  First printed in 1960, this paperback edition of the 1958 hardcover promises, right there in all-caps on its cover, stories about "the world of outer space" that are "soaring" and "exciting," not depressing or discouraging.  Let's investigate the contents of this book which is falling apart in my hands as I speak.

But first, I'll point out that I have already read many of the tales here in Third Galaxy Reader.  Who could forget Cordwainer Smith's "The Game of Rat and Dragon," which I read ten years ago?  Less memorable was "Volpla" by Wyman Guin which I also read in 2014.  Oh yeah, and then there's Evelyn E. Smith's "The Vilbar Party," "Time in the Round" by Fritz Leiber, "The Haunted Corpse" by Frederik Pohl, "Man in the Jar" by Damon Knight and "Honorable Opponent" by Clifford D. Simak, all of which I read in one fell swoop in 2019.  That's a lot of stories, but there are still some left for us to try on for size today: Theodore R. Cogswell's "Limiting Factor," F. L. Wallace's "End as a World," Avram Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper" and Lester del Rey's "Dead Ringer."  These titles don't exactly sound optimistic, but let's not give up before we've even started.  

"Limiting Factor" by Theodore R. Cogswell (1954) 

Here we have a story lacking in plot and character that relies for what little energy it has on weak jokes and a counterintuitive idea about a SF commonplace, homo superior.  Barely acceptable filler.

Jan and Ferdie (these feel like very Fifties names to me, but I guess that is because I think of Jan and Dean as a 1950s act, even though wikipedia is telling me their big hits were in the '60s) live in the near future.  They are among the secret minority that has psychic powers--they can communicate telepathically, fly, etc.  We see the theme of the story immediately when they talk about how taking an elevator or an air taxi is faster than using their mental powers to fly and using telepathy causes a head ache so calling somebody up on the phone is preferable.  The secret supermen and superwomen decide to leave the Earth to avoid the inevitable conflict between them and the mundanes, so Ferdie and Jan abandon their jobs and friends and families and are aboard the psychic-powered hyperspace ship when it takes off from its secret location on a mission to find a world for the super people to settle.  They discover a world inhabited by human beings who developed independently of Earth; these people are decadent and bored, their civilization is going nowhere.  At first the Terran superpeople think that these losers are mundanes abandoned by their own homo superior minority, and figure that homo superior members buoy and protect society; the belief that progress and prosperity on Earth is dependent on them, they decide to return home out of a feeling of responsibility to their fellow (if inferior) Earthers.  But then it comes to their attention that these do-nothing bores are the local homo superior, people who left their home world just like they just did!  There is a limit to human psychic powers, just like there is a limit to human muscle power--even the strongest man can't lift as much as a steam shovel, and similarly machines will soon be developed on Earth that can perform any feat a psychic superman can but far better.  The psykers of this dead-end civilization the Earthers have discovered thought, wrongly, their psychic powers would expand without limit, and brought with them no people able to build machines, and so they have stagnated.  The homo superiors of Earth return home and take their old jobs and reunite with family and friends, confident that their powers don't make them all that special and so there will be no race war.

Cogswell's basic idea is not bad, but the actual story lacks entertainment value--the story is mostly light-hearted dialogue and the characters are not there to inspire feeling in the audience, but just to air the idea.  "Limiting Factor" has resurfaced in mutant-oriented anthologies and Cogswell collections.

"End as a World" by F. L. Wallace (1955)

Here we have a gimmicky story the twist ending of which is based on what amounts to a pun.  "End as a World" has an optimistic hopeful message, which in theory might be uplifting or give you the warm fuzzies, but the lion's share of the story deceitfully tries to inspire in the reader the opposite emotions.  Thumbs down! 

Our narrator is a teenaged boy.  We see him interact with his mother and with various friends, including a black kid (a "Negro") whom we are told is better at sports than all the white kids.  Everybody in town is sort of anxious--everybody in the world is sort of anxious!  In front of the churches are signs saying "THIS IS THE DAY THE WORLD ENDS!"  At the predicted hour the townspeople gather to watch the sky--people all over the world are watching the sky!  The twist ending is that the human race is not going extinct, as the text has sort of duplicitously implied--the first ship that went to Mars is returning today and before landing the vessel will circumnavigate the globe and leave a condensation trail that everybody in the world can see.  If people are worried it is because something might go wrong with the ship.  The phrase "This is the day the world ends" is an oblique poetic way of saying "this is the day the human race takes its first steps out into the universe" or something.  The ship arrives safely on time and everybody rejoices and strangers kiss each other and so forth.

I hate this kind of trickery.

Martin H. Greenberg seems to have liked "End as a World"--he put it in at least two anthologies.

"Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" by Avram Davidson (1957)

Here we find a joke story about illegal immigration and welfare fraud.  Is Galaxy a humor magazine?

The setting of the story is a secret meeting of the leadership of the American Dental Association.  The assembled dentists have received a message from the most innovative dentist in the United States, inventor of superior dental prosthetics, Morris Goldpepper, who has been missing for some weeks.  Goldpepper, we learn, was a SF fan who made no secret of his ambition to be the dentist on the first space ship.  The message was found in a faulty dental plate by a dentist who worked on the mouth of an old--and odd--man, and is read to the assembled ADA big wigs and reproduced in the text of the story.

The message describes how Goldpepper was approached by an old man whose mouth and inner eyelids were blue.  This guy turned out to be an alien and invited Goldpepper to accompany him back to his homeworld via teleporter to help the aliens improve the state of their dental science, apparently lacking.  But it was all a trick!  These aliens naturally shed all their teeth as they reach adulthood and eat goops and slimes, and always look old to human eyes, even when in the prime of life.  They can more or less pass as (aged) Earthers if they put cosmetics on their blue skin and if they are provided false teeth.  Their scheme is to move to Earth, to California, the state which has the most generous welfare provisions, and live on the dole.  Goldpepper is enslaved, forced to make false teeth for these interstellar parasites!

As the story ends, the assembled ADA leadership discusses steps to deal with the aliens and rescue Goldpepper.

This story is competently executed, with Davidson giving Goldpepper a personality and writing style, and it is interesting to see a satire about illegal immigration and abuse of the welfare system, though I don't know enough about Davidson to know if he thinks generous social spending and unregulated immigration are a real problem or if he is just poking fun at people who consider them a problem.  Part of the satire of course is of SF itself, this story serving as a comic contrast to the huge number of SF stories in which aliens want to conquer the Earth; these aliens are merely small scale deadbeats.

We'll call it acceptable.  "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" would be reprinted in Davidson collections and by Robert Silverberg in his anthology Infinite Jests: The Lighter Side of Science Fiction.

"Dead Ringer" by Lester del Rey (1956)

Here we have a decent horror story with a twist ending you can kind of see coming. 

Dane Phillips is a reporter and a veteran of the Pacific War who moves from newspaper to newspaper, repeatedly getting sacked.  During the war he saw a comrade get killed, only to meet him later and find him hale and hearty!  Since then, Dane has done some investigating and come to believe there live among us humans, undetected, space aliens who look human but are almost unkillable, capable of healing up after almost any injury.  When mangled in an explosion or a car wreck or something, some of these E.T.s have had to fake their own funerals--others have even had to escape from their coffins after being buried by ignorant native Terrans.  Dane keeps getting fired from newspapers because he keeps trying to get them to print the stories he writes with the aim of blowing the lid off this alien conspiracy and editors won't have it.  Dane has even been committed to a mental institution and escaped.

We observe some of Dane's sleuthing--digging up a grave!--during which he is captured by the men from the funny farm; he is dragged back to the loony bin where he overhears the shrinks' plans for him--since he has refused to abandon his beliefs in alien infiltration they are going to give him shock treatment in an effort to erase these obsessive thoughts!  This sounds like a fate worse than death, so Dane tries to commit suicide!  But when he slashes his throat the wound heals up lickety-split!  Dane himself is one of the aliens!

A fun little story.  Besides del Rey collections, "Dead Ringer" has been reprinted in some anthologies, including a 1966 German "Best of" Galaxy volume. 

**********    

Obviously, these were not the "soaring" stories about "the world of outer space" we were promised.  We'll put aside whether they are set in space or actually about life outside the Earth's atmosphere and consider if they are "soaring," which I am taking to mean uplifting, optimistic, hopeful, a vindication of life and humanity, etc.; I'm not going to allow any lawyerly bunkum about how these stories "soar the heights of terror and anxiety."

Wallace's "End as a World" comes the closest to soaring because at its climax we realize the people of Earth are united across national and ethnic boundaries in their hopes of conquering space and their joy at the first step of that heroic destiny being concluded successfully, but the story consists of a cheap trick and through most of it Wallace tries to make you sad.  Cogswell's "Limiting Factor" is optimistic about the future of the human race, suggesting high technology will open up wide vistas of freedom and damp down class and racial conflict, but it is too silly and jokey to be soaring.  Davidson's "Help! I Am Dr. Morris Goldpepper!" is not soaring but base and belittling, being full of jokes and having as its characters self-important goofballs who resent the relatively low esteem in which their profession is held and parasitic deadbeats who take advantage of others' credulity and generosity.  Del Rey's "Dead Ringer," while probably the most entertaining story, is not soaring but sordid--it is a blood-soaked horror story about infiltration, suicide, and a horrible revelation about one's own identity.

It seems Galaxy is not the place to look for validation of our belief that the human race should bend the universe to its will and colonize the galaxy.  Again we learn not to trust the text on the covers or jackets of SF books.

Look out for more stories from anthologies in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

Beachheads in Space: L del Rey, A E van Vogt, J Wyndham and N Bond

We're going back Jack, and doing it again--reading from a paperback edition of an anthology edited by August Derleth and with a cover illustration by Richard Powers, that is.  I bought Beachheads in Space, Berkley G-77, years ago, I think at one of the Second Story Books locations, maybe Rockville, MD, fabled in story and song, maybe Washington DC, the belly of the beast.  This 1957 edition contains half the stories of the 1952 hardcover edition--who decided what stories would make the cut and based on what criteria?  The SF game is full of heartbreak, I guess.

We've already read two stories that appear in G-77, Donald Wandrei's "The Blinding Shadow," which we liked, and Eric Frank Russell's "Metamorphosite," which I thought merited a "mild to moderate recommendation."  The previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space graded the stories in the volume, and he seems to have thought the Russell was excellent and the Wandrei poor.  (Unless "E" is for "evil" and "P" is for "perfect," which I suppose is possible in this crazy world of ours.)  We're going to read four more selections from Beachheads in Space today and see what we think of them and whether our opinions jive with the assessments of my predecessor.

Grades issued by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space; 
looks like Eric Frank Russell was his fave with A. E. van Vogt coming in second;
we see Donald Wandrei and Nelson S. Bond in the garbage

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" by Lester del Rey (1951)

Here we have a downbeat story that suggests there is nothing in outer space worth finding and mankind is going to go extinct when it no longer has any frontiers to conquer.  Say it ain't so, Lester!

It is the future!  Human life has been extended many centuries, thanks to rejuvenation treatments.  On Mars was discovered the ruins of a high tech civilization that must have expired ten million years ago.  The human race used Mars as a star port from which to launch forty starships carrying forty hardy and optimistic bands of explorers hoping to find new worlds to colonize, hoping to meet other intelligent races.  That was centuries ago.  By fifty years ago, 39 of the star ships had returned--not a single one had found an inhabitable planet or evidence of alien life, after exploring thousands of systems!  Earth's culture went into decline and the Mars star port was closed. 

The plot of our story here is set in motion when the sensors detect the approach of the fortieth star ship.  The Mars star port is reopened and operated by only one man.  When the ship touches down only four men, a fraction of the vessel's original complement, emerge.  The explorers found alien ruins on a distant world, and to everyone's dismay they proved to be ruins easily identified as those of the long dead Martian civilization.  Just like us Terrans, the Martians explored the galaxy, found nothing worth conquering, and then lost all ambition and faded away!  The men of the final ship and the guy managing the Mars port, seeing life is hopeless and civilization has nothing left to achieve, decide to forgo their next rejuvenation treatment!

 

A downer!  We'll call this one acceptable; del Rey does a good job of setting the mood of fatigue, decay and hopelessness, but the characters don't do much and there isn't much plot progression or climax; you might call it a mood piece, the bleak tone of which is maintained from start to finish.  Previous owner calls it fair and I am right there with him.

"'The Years Draw Nigh'" made its debut in Astounding, in the same issue as Eric Frank Russell's "Ultima Thule," which we read two years ago and which I can recommend.  "'The Years Draw Nigh'" has been reprinted in del Rey collections.

"Repetition" by A. E. van Vogt (1940)

It has been a while since we grappled with the bewildering oeuvre of the Canadian madman who is so close to our hearts, A. E. van Vogt.  "Repetition" debuted in Astounding, in the same issue as the first installment of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, which we read way back in 2014, and Lester del Rey's "Reincarnate," which we just read in July, and Leigh Brackett's "The Treasure of Ptakuth," which we haven't read yet.  (Maybe soon!)  "Repetition" would become a component of the 1959 fix-up novel The War Against the Rull and would be reprinted in anthologies starting in the 1970s under the title "The Gryb."  

"Repetition" is a traditional science fiction story with space suits, alien monsters, and a hero who saves the day with quick outside-the-box thinking that leverages his knowledge--the title refers to the fact that this guy has had adventures on many planets and learned how to deal with many situations, and so has solutions to the problems he encounters during the course of the story because he has already dealt with similar problems.  At the end of the story he gives a little speech about how if mankind is to unite in peace to conquer the galaxy, people will have to learn techniques to prevent war and use them again and again throughout history the same way he has used tried and true techniques to overcome monsters.

The solar system is on the brink of war!  The Earth-Venus union is at odds with the Mars empire, and one of the points of contention is Europa--the Martians want control of Europa, and the Europans, who have built five cities in the fifty years since the colony on Europa was founded, want to maintain their independence.  As the story begins, our hero Thomas, an important politician from the Earth-Venus union, is flying over the surface of Europa with his guide, the Europan Bartlett.  Bartlett is leading Thomas into a death trap--the Europans are aware that the Earth-Venus union wants to allow Mars control of Europa in order to avoid war, and so these hardy colonists have hatched a wild scheme to murder Thomas and short circuit his appeasement policy.  But Thomas is an expert judge of character and psychology and a seasoned adventurer and survives the murder attempt, and Bartlett is too much of a gentleman to just kill Thomas himself in cold blood.  So, Bartlett sets the controls of their jetpack space suits, energy weapons attached, so they fly off into space, leaving them to die in the barren and monster-haunted Europan wilderness.  But Thomas insists he isn't licked yet, that they can survive the long march to one of the Five Cities.  To the amazement of Bartlett, Thomas figures out how to defeat the native monsters without any high tech weapons, ensuring their survival.  During the march the men argue over interplanetary policy, Thomas eventually convincing Bartlett the appeasement policy is a good one--it is essential to avoid war because all of the solar system's resources must be dedicated to developing star ships, and giving a diplomatic "win" to the current Martian government will enable them to prevail in the coming election against the war party, and then join the Earth-Venus union.  It seems that Thomas' skill in fighting the monsters and his ability to read Bartlett's psychology are as important in convincing Bartlett as are facts and logic.

The adventure portions of the story are pretty good--the equipment, the monsters, the descriptions of perils and landscape and so on.  The means Thomas employs to kill the most dangerous monster, the thirty-foot-long armored gryb, and the political discussions around the fate of Europa and the relationship among Earth, Venus and Mars, are pretty complicated, contrived, and unconvincing, but somewhat entertaining.  "Repetition" is certainly a good example of van Vogt's totally out-of-left field thinking, and perhaps Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s dedication to shaking readers up and presenting counterintuitive thinking that bucks conventional wisdom, that our man Van offers a scenario strikingly similar to the crises around Czechoslovakia and then Poland in 1938 and 1939 and makes a go at convincing the reader to side with the appeaser instead of the patriot eager to fight for his country.

I like this sort of thing, and agree with previous owner that "Repetition" is moderately good.

As I read the version of the story in this rapidly decaying copy of Beachheads in Space I consulted a scan of the appropriate issue of Astounding and the only differences I found were in punctuation and in the relationships between paragraphs--the magazine version has section breaks between scenes that are eliminated in the Beachheads version, and at least once two magazine paragraphs were combined into a single paragraph for publication in Beachheads.  Then I took a glance at the version, titled "The Gryb," in my copy of The Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders and it seemed this version restored the magazine punctuation and section breaks.  I wanted to see what changes to the story van Vogt wrought to make it fit into the novel The War Against the Rull, but internet archive was down, so while in Frederick, MD I stopped at the WonderBook there and bought a paperback copy of the novel put out by Ace with a John Schoenherr cover.

Chapters VI, VII and VIII of War Against the Rull consist primarily of the revised material from "Repetition" and much of the original story has been excised or altered.  The murderous guide is now a woman, and much of the psychology stuff has been removed or changed to instead reflect female psychology.  The location has been moved to an extrasolar system and all the business about appeasing Mars to influence the Mars election is gone; instead we have political jazz related to the Terran relationship with alien races, the ezwal and the Rull.  The only things that remains unchanged are the barren landscape and the monster fighting elements.  These changes are all for the worse--most of the intellectually challenging stuff is gone--but the scenes are still entertaining in a surface action-adventure way. 

German and Dutch translations of
Proxy Intelligence and Other Mind Benders

"And the Walls Came Tumbling Down..." by John Wyndham (1951)

John Wyndham has a high reputation but, as I never tire of telling people, I wasn't crazy about The Chrysalids AKA Re-Birth.  Maybe I'll like this story, which debuted in an issue of Startling containing a story by Edmond Hamilton I haven't read yet and much discussion in the letters column related to whether or not the magazine should have monsters and sexy girls on its covers--many correspondents seem to think that the magazine will sell better if it switches to astronomical paintings and abandons the traditional "garish" and "lurid" and "oversexed" covers that readers are ashamed to let their relatives at home and strangers on the street see them carrying.  Just tell those judgmental normies "I was born this way" and "I'm just being me," people--let your freak frag fry!

The gag of "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down...," the title of which appears with more or fewer ellipses depending on where it is printed, is that silicone-based aliens arrive on Earth and are amazed and disgusted to find carbon-based life.  You'll be proud to hear that the carbon-based life shoots half the arrogant interlopers' ships right out of the sky and then when the aliens land in the wilderness it is only a days before humans have discovered them and wiped them out.  CBL!  CBL!

The text of the story, which I guess is supposed to be funny, bug has some gruesome horror elements, is a series of reports from an expedition to Earth by the telepathic silicon creatures, crystal people, who approach Earth and are fired upon repeatedly; many of the crystal people are killed before they land.  Later events in the story suggest that the silicon ships were destroyed not intentionally by anti-aircraft weapons but accidentally by radar or radio waves.  

The surviving aliens then land in a desert, which they consider a paradise because of all the silicates just laying around.  Some gorge themselves on all the available silicates and grow to huge size.  Others study the trees and animals and people inhabiting the area, finding it hard to believe that an automobile, which exhibits the hardness and straight lines they associate with intelligent life, is not alive and certainly not intelligent but that soft sacks of tubes are in fact alive and may be intelligent.  One reason for confusion in the interactions between human and alien is that the crystal people and their equipment are totally transparent to visible light, essentially invisible to the human eye.  A pair of people crash their car right into the fortification thrown up by the aliens around their ship.  The aliens can read human minds but humans cannot pick up alien thought transmissions.

The aliens dissect a person and thusly inspire a woman to scream and the frequency of her scream causes one of the aliens to shatter.  The story proceeds from there, with more and more people, including the authorities, arriving to investigate and try to rescue those people captured by the aliens, who are fully in sight behind the invisible but bullet-proof walls of the alien redoubt.  When women see the dissected person they scream, causing more of the aliens to shatter.  Eventually the aliens try to shoot down the humans with their weapons--sonic artillery that can shatter crystal people and equipment, but whose waves merely sound like queer music to humans.  When sound of the aliens' weapons is played back by the humans through a police radio, likely simply accidentally, the alien ship, fortifications and personnel are destroyed.

An acceptable sort of minor thing.  "And the Walls Came Tumbling Down" has reappeared in Wyndham collections, including "Best of" books.  If this is among Wyndham's best work, maybe I'm fated to forever be a Wyndham skeptic.  Previous owner considered it fair.

         

"To People a New World" by Nelson S. Bond (1950)

                 

This one debuted in Blue Book, a magazine that only rarely comes up in my SF explorations.  This story was considered poor by the previous owner of my copy of Beachheads in Space, and has not been reprinted very much; besides Beachheads you can find it in the Bond collection Nightmares and Daydreams.

This is a pretty lame story, obvious and boring; a SF magazine probably would have rejected it for being elementary and banal, and I don't know why Derleth selected it for republication. 

A family--Dad, Mom, two boys--live in a post-nuclear-war world, having set up a productive farm and being able to hunt and fish with bow, sling and spear.  Every year Dad goes away for a month to scavenge in a nuked city.  He avoids touching metal and there is no metal on the farm--metal retains radiation and would make them ill, or so Dad thinks.  They have never met any other people since the cataclysm.

When he is sixteen the narrator, one of the two boys, accompanies Dad to the city.  He finds a book which talks about machines and buildings and so forth, and the narrator likes it and secretly brings it home.  When Dad finds out about it he orders the narrator to destroy it, as books and technological knowledge were what brought on the nuclear war, but the narrator loves the book and loves the idea of rebuilding a technological society and hides the book and studies it closely in secret.  When his brother catches him reading he threatens to tell Dad and the narrator kills him.  The narrator is forced to leave his family and the last word of the story is his name: "Cain."  I guess we are supposed to think that our civilization is built above the ruins of a previous civilization obliterated in a nuclear war and the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel is based on these survivors of that disaster.

Lame twist ending, very little plot, we're giving this one the old thumbs down.  When I read Bond's "Prescience" back in January I liked it enough to say the kind of thing I say all the time, that I should read more by this author, but today's Bond experience is dampening my ardor a little.

**********

I like the van Vogt, but the other three stories we've looked at today are leaving me feeling like this paperback edition of Beachheads in Space is an underwhelming anthology.  The Bond is lame and feels like it is not aimed at a SF audience but a mainstream audience unfamiliar with SF themes and tropes.  The del Rey and Wyndham are competent, but are not thrilling or heroic or inspiring--you might call them tragic but they lack tragic grandeur, depicting mere blunders and people at the mercy of their environments, and seem to belittle the human race and suggest exploring space is a waste of time.  Do we crave these sorts of flat mopey stories in which people's fates do not reflect their aspirations and abilities?  Not really.

  

1974 stories by W Macfarlane, D Picard, M D Toman and M Bishop

Let's read the second half of David Gerrold's 1974 anthology of all new stories, Science Fiction Emphasis 1.  The first half was interesting and entertaining, with three sex stories and a good story about the life of the artist; hopefully this second half will be at least as rewarding.

"The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Bagley" by W. Macfarlane

I haven't actually read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam so maybe this is going to go right over my head.  We'll soldier on regardless.

This is a shaggy dog story written in a silly jokey style; it is perhaps somewhat like an R. A, Lafferty story.  A Midwestern salesman, the Bagley of the title, is an expert at sales, can sell anything to anybody, but he is unfulfilled.  He has heard stories of luxurious cruises out of Hong Kong, and so goes to Hong Kong and boards a cruise liner.  The cruise is everything he might have hoped, the food and the accommodations impossibly delicious and comfortable, and he has an affair with a British aristocrat who has amazing erotic abilities.  Then he gets back to America, refreshed.  I guess the point is that as a salesman he sells things to people and they actually believe his sales pitch and so enjoy the products he offers as if his pitch was true, and now he has had the same experience, enjoying the cruise as much as he has been told he would, and this has made him feel better about his own work.

This one feels like a waste of time.  It doesn't seem like "The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Bagley" has been reprinted. 

"Gate-O" by Don Picard   

Here we have a well-written adventure/horror story that addresses issues of class conflict, racism and the role of the United States in the world.  It is pretty good, but does not seem to have been reprinted anywhere.  Don Picard only has this one citation at isfdb; is it possible he had a career in mainstream or detective fiction?  Or that this is a pen name?  The story is totally professional, entertaining as well as serious and ambitious, as if this guy has a lot of writing under his belt and in his future.  

It is the near future--the 1990s!  In the 1980s there was a nuclear war and the USA, the Soviet Union, and China were all wiped out, and most of Europe as well.  The Third World blames the US for the cataclysm, and the Americans who were living in Africa and Latin America at the time of the war today feel the full force of Hispanic resentment of the gringo and black resentment of the white man!

Our narrator's father was an American working in finance in Mexico City when the First and Second Worlds blew each other up and the narrator grew up in the walled ghetto to which Americans are confined; when they venture out of the ghetto they have to go through security, wear a "G" on their clothes and sit in the back of the bus.  Picard, in the voice of the narrator's father, directly and explicitly likens the living conditions of Americans in post-cataclysm Mexico to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, while with the back of the bus business indirectly comparing the fate of the last Americans to that of blacks in the Jim Crow South.  Picard doesn't seem to be picking out Americans or Mexicans for particular criticism in this story, as there are sympathetic and honorable gringos and Mexicans as well as racist gringos and murderous Mexicans; I guess he is just commenting on racism and destructive class envy in general and trying to get his white American readers to look at the universe through the eyes of marginalized and oppressed people.

As I suggested above, most of the story's text consists of adventure and horror stuff.  The narrator is 14 years old when the assassination of a hardline anti-American Mexican politician triggers a pogrom against Americans, and he is the only survivor among his family, his life preserved by an obese Mexican maid and a beautiful Mexican prostitute.  Our narrator runs here and there on the torchlit streets, climbs walls, hides inches from discovery, sees the mutilated corpses of his mother and sister, and that of the maid, who sacrificed herself for her white employers.  As the adult author of this memoir, he works on a ship crewed by Americans and Australians, and likens the ship to a ghetto; in the final passages of the story he describes his gratitude to the maid who lost her life at the hands of her countrymen while standing up for him and other Americans.

A good choice by Gerrold.  At isfdb and on the contents page of Science Fiction Emphasis 1 this story is listed as "Gato-O" but the title page of the story has "Gate-O" and the text of the story makes clear that it should be "Gate-O," as this is a phonetic spelling of how a Mexican character pronounces "ghetto."  Gerrold or somebody at Ballantine should have caught this typo on the contents page during copyediting or proofreading.

"Shards of Divinity" by Michael D. Toman

Here's our third story of the day that has never been reprinted.  We are really venturing into rarely trod regions today, comrades.  We love to don the pith helmet and swing the machete here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

This is an experimental thing--I guess you'd call it very "New Wave"--that mocks Christianity and American pop culture and illustrates the way different cultural products influence each other over time (the word "syncretism," which I've heard people smarter than me use, is coming to mind) and the limited ability of the academics of an advanced society to figure out the culture of a less advanced and/or extinct one.  "Shards of Divinity"'s text of 13 pages consists of academic writing and reproductions of primary sources, apparently put together by space aliens who have visited Earth in the future, after a nuclear war or some such catastrophe.  The work of these extraterrestrial college professors is focused on unravelling the apparent links between action and adventure films and the Gospels.  John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are mentioned in passing, H. P. Lovecraft is quoted, and even Doc Savage is thrown in there, I think (one fragment seems to be an advertisement for a film retelling of the story of the temptation of Jesus by Satan, Damnation Desert, in which Jesus is recast as "Doc Messiah.")  Much of the story's page count is taken up by what come across as fragments of screenplays, full of italicized stage directions.  In one, Jesus is the "Sarge" in a war movie; in another, the crucifixion is reimagined as an episode of Mission: Impossible in which Jesus has to free Barabbas from Pontius Pilate's maximum security prison.  We also get Jesus as a zombie or vampire rising from the grave and Jesus as King Kong breaking out of bondage on stage.

I think of this sort of thing as sterile, as an example of cultural decadence, the mere rehashing of stuff that has already been done, but "Shards of Divinity" isn't very long (there is a lot of extra space between lines of dialogue in the screenplays) and some of the jokes and references are faintly amusing, so we'll say it is acceptable.

"On the Street of the Serpents" by Michael Bishop

Science Fiction Emphasis 1 is billed as a book of stories by unknown writers, but the story the back cover text pushes most fervently is this one, by Michael Bishop, who had already published over half a dozen stories when this anthology appeared.  This thing is like 70 pages long, and has a long subtitle, "or, The Assassination of Chairman Mao as Effected by the Author in Seville, Spain, in the Spring of 1992, a Year of No Certain Historicity," so I'm afraid it is going to be a chore to read, but Bishop is a decent stylist so maybe it won't be so bad.

The first part of the story, a sort of nostalgic look at the youth in Spain of the narrator, an American who has the same name as the author of the story, and his relationship with a little girl whose father is a Japanese-American and whose mother is a German, reminds us of Proust in its tone and with its theme of jealousy and its literary descriptions of locales.  The second part describes Bishop's young adulthood, his fathering of a son and his work as a teacher; there are passages about classical music and snow.  A theme of both of these sections is East Asia and its relationship with America; besides the little girl in Part I being the son of an ethnic Japanese who grew up in the US and doesn't speak Japanese, in Part II Bishop repeatedly describes his infant son as looking Asian ("like a small clown from Cathy" and "a pale-blue Buddha, swaddled in terrycloth") and talks about Richard Nixon's famous trip to China.

Part III takes up fifty pages of "On the Street of Serpents," and begins with Bishop, a man in his forties, returning to Seville, Spain, where he grew up as the son of an enlisted man in the United States Air Force.  There's an italicized page of somewhat confusing business about how Bishop is writing Part III from the vantage point of 2000, from prison, but it really isn't 2000 or 1992 yet, suggesting Part III is a fantasy or a delusion or something.  Anyway, he is in prison in 2000 typing away because in 1992 he went back to Spain to murder Mao Zedong, who had come to Spain to celebrate an alliance between Communist China and Franco's Spain.  In 1992 in this universe Mao and Franco are both alive and kicking; in fact, Mao has led the development of a union between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union!  Yikes!  In this bizarro world, socialism is thriving, and all the nations of the world are uniting to form a world government, except for the increasingly isolated United States, which is in decline, suffering increasing divorce rates and racial strife--Bishop's is among the families that have collapsed.  

With its focus on assassination of politicians, alternate history plot, unreliable narrator, and undercurrent of grim humor, Part III of "On the Street of Serpents" reminded me of Barry Malzberg's work.  The narrator's scheme to murder Chairman Mao involves him impersonating a blind man; before he kills him, Bishop has long conversations with the blind man and learns that the Chinese Communist Party, as part of its diplomatic overtures to Europe, hired an American doctor to put the brain of the aged Pablo Picasso into a robot body so Picasso might live on and continue creating art.  The robot Picasso cannot speak, which I guess symbolizes something, maybe the censorship regimes of Red China and Fascist Spain?  (There is a lot of censorship in the United States of this alternate future as well--Americans have no idea what is going on around the world.)  With no money for a room, the narrator spends the night in the abandoned ruin of the apartment building in which he lived in his teens--the body of the blind man he has murdered reposes a few floors above.  The next day he encounters the Japanese-American girl, now a grown married woman, who lived on the floor above him in this very building in his youth.

The woman describes how her family fell apart and then was reformed, her parents remarrying in Germany.  And how she married a blue-eyed blonde German, an expert on Asian languages.  Her husband was committed to the Chinese-led project of unifying the world and became a diplomat, representing Germany at the court of Chairman Mao.  So charming was this guy, that he became friends with Mao.  When her husband got inoperable brain cancer, he agreed to have Chairman Mao's brain installed in his still-healthy young body!  Mao Zedong, a Chinese brain in a European body, has come to physically embody his political objective of a world united under Chinese leadership!

Our narrator, Bishop, goes through with his plan to kill Mao during an event in which Franco and Mao walk down a Saville street, greeting the various local merchants--the blind guy was one of these small business people, a seller of lottery tickets.  When the now blue-eyed and blonde-haired Chinese tyrant sees Bishop he talks about how nowadays there need be no blind people, but our narrator kills him anyway.  Bishop is imprisoned, and while he is allowed to write, all news of the outside world is kept from him.

"On the Street of Serpents" is a big success, justifying the claim the story is "brilliant" on the back of the book.  Bishop handles the human characters and their relationships very well, and the literary touches--the descriptions of light and shadow and all that--are good.  The science fiction elements--the alternate history jazz and the brain transplants--are also intriguing and entertaining.  So, thumbs up.

What are we to take from the story besides admiration for Bishop's literary skill?  Obviously the theme of China reaching out to the rest of the world and uniting the world under its influence is inspired by the Nixon trip to China, though Bishop sort of reverses the polarity of this event--in real life the United States became closely enmeshed with Communist China, while in this story the US becomes very isolated and China builds close alliances with the USSR and Europe.  Is Bishop in this story trashing the United States, blaming America for international conflict?--after all, Mao is proposing to cure Bishop's supposed blindness a second before Bishop kills him.  The Japanese-American woman and her family, in their sexual relationships and in their relationship with Mao, represent intimate interactions among different cultures and ethnicities, but are these rocky relationships in the end healthy and beneficial, or do they lead to unhappiness and deracination?--the woman and her father are depicted as being cut off from their Asian roots, and other Asians deplore this abnegation of their cultural identity. Francisco Franco and Mao Zedong are essential figures in the story, but it is not clear how Bishop wants us to see them--while the narrator calls Mao a monster and kills him, the narrator isn't exactly sane or admirable, and Bishop doesn't spend any time describing the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party or of Franco, does little to change the opinion of these dictators that the reader held before he started reading the story.  Is the alliance between the anti-communist Franco and the icon of socialism Mao supposed to demonstrate that one authoritarian or totalitarian ideology is much like another, or that tyrants are essentially non-ideological and pragmatically and selfishly pursue their own power?  What do we make of the fact that the medical technology Chairman Mao deploys in his efforts to court Westerners seems to all come from the United States?--I'm not even sure if we are supposed to marvel at the transplants as medical miracles or recoil from them as Dr. Frankenstein atrocities.  The ambiguity with which Bishop treats all these themes is one of the strengths of the story, making it more engaging and thought provoking.

In response to the great merit of this story I am thinking I should read more Bishop.

"On the Street of the Serpents" would go on to be included in the Bishop collection Blooded on Arachne and at least two European anthologies.

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These stories seem to share themes, to present visions of America and Americans that reflect 1970s pessimism; three of them are about Americans abroad and the two serious stories are about relationships between Americans and foreigners that might be considered disastrous.  Did 1970s readers consider these horror stories, or savor seeing the white bourgeoisie getting it in the neck?  Either way, Picard's "Gate-O" and Bishop's "On the Street of the Serpents" are well-written and entertaining and I recommend them and recommend Science Fiction Emphasis 1 as a whole as an engaging and fun anthology; bravo to Gerrold and associate editor Stephen Goldin.