J Merril 1959 recs: P J Farmer, C G Finney & C L Fontenay

We here at MPorcius Fiction Log are exploring 1959 speculative fiction, and we've got a map to guide us, a map drawn by that Trotskyist cheerleader of the New Wave, Judith Merril.  The map comes from the back of Merril's fifth Year's Best anthology, where lies a long list, alphabetically organized, of Honorable Mentions.  Of course, I am not making every stop on the map; today, as we travel through the "F" district, I'm skipping the story by Howard Fast, "Cold, Cold Box," because I read it ten years ago (and pronounced it "lame.")  But we'll check out Philip Jose Farmer's "Alley Man," Charles G. Finney's "The Gilashrikes," and Charles L. Fontenay's "Wind."  To read along, click the links in the previous sentence to be whisked away to scans of the famous science fiction magazines in which these stories first came under the gaze of SF fans back in the twilight of the 1950s.

"The Alley Man" by Philip Jose Farmer

I recently purchased a copy of the 1962 Farmer collection The Alley God because I liked the Richard Powers cover.  I could read this story from there, I suppose, but I'll stick with the F&SF version, as that is what our guide, Ms. Merril, is recommending.

Farmer begins his story by introducing us to two impoverished white women who live near the garbage dump, and unleashes a load of metaphors on us bringing to stark life how ugly they are.  It isn't nice, but it is strong evocative writing, and you can't help but admire it.  The man they live with arrives with a pretty young middle-class woman.  Old Man Paley, a ragpicker who makes his living collecting and selling discarded wood, metal, cardboard and paper, looks like a cave man and has a powerful smell, but he has the gift of gab and, it turns out, women of all classes find his smell irresistible.  "The Alley Man" is a story--in part--about how women are naturally attracted to big strong violent men who dominate them!  Zowie!  We actually see a physical altercation between Paley and one of his women, right there while the new girl lies nearby, sleeping off a drunk.  

The middle-class woman is Dorothy Singer, a grad student in sociology.  She is going to pay Paley fifty bucks she got from a foundation to follow him around as he works and to live in his home--a shanty with no running water--for a few days.  She has essentially fallen for him already, on the first day, and has been out drinking with him.

Singer and Paley travel into town the next day to scavenge in alleys.  Paley believes he is a Neanderthal, and has stories about life in the old world, before the arrival of homo sapiens and of the wars between his people and the physically weaker but more technologically and culturally advanced (they had archery and a relationship with dogs, which hate Neanderthals) homo saps.  Paley believes in, or affects a belief in, magic, and says the homo saps defeated the Neanderthals because they stole a magic item of great power, a hat, from his people and that the tiny number of survivors of his race, of which he may be the last, have been searching for it for millennia, and he has not given up the search.

Farmer succeeds in making being a ragpicker sound like a pretty cool job, and in making Paley a very fun guy, but also a sad figure--does this incredibly strong but ugly brute believe all the guff he says, or did he just get it from old comic books and issues of Weird Tales he found in the trash, use his self-image of the last of a lost race of heroes as a shield from social opprobrium, as a distraction from the marginalization he suffers?  Farmer doesn't beat you over the head with the marginalization stuff, he shows it rather than tells you about it, and the story is entertaining whether you notice it or not.

In the interests of science, Singer has a fake magic hat made and contrives a way for Paley to discover it.  And because she can't resist Paley's clever wooing and the smell of his monstrous body, she has sex with him.  This sets into motion a series of events which climax in a dramatic and tragic catastrophe.

"The Alley Man" is an edgy story, what with what it says about women and the fact that it depicts sympathetically a man who abuses women psychologically, physically and sexually, but it is also well-written, with believable and compelling characters with complex but very comprehensible relationships, and it is quite fun--Paley's monologues and manipulations are clever and amusing, and Farmer's description of a ragpicker's life makes it sound like its a blast.  Thumbs up for "The Alley Man."

Besides in The Alley God, "The Alley Man" has been reprinted in many anthologies and Farmer collections; people are crazy about this story, and I don't blame them.

"The Gilashrikes" by Charles G. Finney

Two years ago we read Finney's "The Iowan's Curse" and I said it was acceptable.  That story was a part of the "Manacle, Arizona" series, and so is today's story, "The Gilashrikes," which debuted in F&SF and reappeared in the Finney collection The Ghosts of Manacle, as well as foreign editions of F&SF.  

This is a merely acceptable trifle.  An herbalist in Arizona has a pet gila monster, female, and a pet shrike, male.  He puts an aphrodisiac in their food and they mate and produce three intelligent winged lizards.  The three hybrids, in order to redeem their kind from the bad reps suffered by the venomous gila monster and the notorious butcher bird, take on the task of maintaining law and order in the community.  They drive off cats who terrorize little birds and big dogs who bully little dogs.  They punish peeping toms and necking teens and even encourage layabouts who would sleep in to get out of bed and attend church Sunday mornings.  But when they try to get the herbalist to become a teetotaler, the herbalist kills them.

Competent filler.  Maybe edgy because of all the sex; a gripe of the New Wavers was that there was not enough sex in Golden Age and early Cold War SF, so maybe that is what attracted Merril to this tale.

"Wind" by Charles L. Fontenay 

There are a lot of racial and ethnic stereotypes out there.  I'm not going to list them, tell you who runs Hollywood and who steals your bike, who drinks tea all day and who drinks booze all day, who covers women head to toe and then rapes little boys, or who buys used panties from a vending machine, because I'm a uniter, not a divider.  But you can probably think of a few of them.  One that maybe isn't coming to mind, one I don't know I ever heard of before, is that Dutchmen are stubborn.  This stereotype is one of the motifs of Fontenay's story "Wind," which all you 12-year-olds out there will be disappointed to learn is not about farting.  

There is a Dutch colony on Venus, and a Dutchman is enlisted to make an emergency drive from the Dutch colony to the remnants of a failed colony to pick up an individual who has a terrible disease and requires return to Earth.  The space boat to the orbiting Earth-bound spaceship is leaving the Dutch colony soon, and this patient has to be on that boat or he will die here on the second planet, but getting him to the boat is going to be a hassle because there is a terrific wind storm brewing.  The wind is so strong it can overturn a ground car if not driven just right--our hero is the best driver in the colony.

His pipe clenched between his teeth (Fontenay includes references to everything you know about Dutch people, like wooden shoes and tulips, with windmills particularly prominent), our guy makes the dangerous drive to the wretched little settlement where the patient awaits.  Reminding us of Hal Clement's 1999 "Exchange Rate," which we just read, Venus is constantly being shaken by earthquakes, and new fissures are always opening and new cliffs rising up to make the drive hazardous.  

Our guy is disappointed to find that the people in the pathetic settlement the Dutch call "Rathole"--it doesn't even have a nuclear reactor, but powers its air conditioning with wind mills!--are Spaniards or Mexicans (they are all the same to him) because he still nurses a grudge from when the Spanish oppressed the Netherlands like 500 years ago!  He gets over his prejudice pretty quick when he meets the patient, a bright eight-year-old boy, and his mother, a gorgeous blonde widow.  The Dutchman immediately starts plotting future visits to this sad little settlement to date up this delectable senora.  

A new fissure blocks the way back to the Dutch colony and the space port.  Is the boy doomed?  Well, Rathole used to be the site of a U. S. military base, and there is an old hover craft hanging around.  But it has gasoline engines and there is no gas here in Rathole (the Dutch ground car runs on diesel.)  The Dutch guy has a brainwave--he attaches a windmill to the hover craft and uses it to turn the fans that provide the vehicle's lift and thrust.  He and the sick boy take off and get to the Dutch colony and the space boat just in time!

This is an OK classic-style SF story in which the author comes up with meteorological and geological reasons for plot obstacles and then has the protagonist use his ingenuity and science knowledge to jury rig a technological means of overcoming the obstacles.  We also have an antiracist theme and a little "we are all human--even the Russians!" lecture.  I'm torn between judging "Wind" to be on the high end of acceptable or the low end of good.

"Wind" debuted in Amazing, in an issue that includes an installment of the serialized version of E. E. Smith's The Galaxy Primes; Smith's novel is illustrated by the great Virgil Finlay, who takes the opportunity to celebrate the female form and explore human anguish.  A 1969 reprint magazine included "Wind" among its offerings, and you can also find Fontenay's tale of a flying Dutchman in some 21st-century collections.

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Merril didn't steer us wrong today.  Farmer's "The Alley Man" is a sophisticated and fun story that talks about racial and class prejudice without being preachy and annoying and without romanticizing minorities and the lower classes.  Finney's "The Gilashrikes" is a silly joke story, but not bad, and maybe it says something about the costs and benefits of living in an orderly society--the same forces that protect you from bullies might be deployed to keep you from feeling up your girlfriend and taking the edge off with a little of the old firewater!  Fontenay's story is a traditional science fiction piece competently performed that reminds us not to judge people by what their co-ethnics did centuries ago, but judge them as individuals, based on their own particular attributes, like whether they are good-looking or not.

Next up in our tour of 1959 will be the "G"s--let's hope they treat us as well as the "F"s have.  But first, a novel of terror!  Have your vocal cords ready for some screaming next time we meet!

Harlan Ellison: "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes," "A Lot of Saucers," and "Incognita, Inc."

As chronicled in my most recent overly long blogpost, I downloaded a scan of the 600th issue of Amazing Stories, published in the year 2000.  Today let's read the Harlan Ellison story included in the issue, and two other stories from the Y2K period by SF's bad boy.  As I write this, the below links will get you to scans of publications including today's stories, but no guarantees--the high seas of internet piracy are treacherous.

"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes"  
"A Lot of Saucers"
"Incognita, Inc."

"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" (2000)

I'm reading this in a scan of the magazine in which it debuted, the cover of which has a good illustration by Christopher Moeller.  The painting feels like a sincere invocation of the idea that the future is going to be a beautiful adventure, not like a goof or a parody of classic adventure SF.  I can't say the same for Don Ivan Punchatz's interior illustration for "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes," which looks cartoony, like a lampoon of something.  But we can't really blame Punchatz, as, reflecting our decadent times in which everything is derivative and usually an effort to denigrate or "update" the past rather than an homage, Ellison's story is a self-conscious spoof not to be taken seriously and certainly not meant to express hopes for the future.

"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" begins with an italicized intro in which a princess in some medieval milieu kisses a toad, Ellison using flowery sentences and archaic words I guess in an effort to be funny or emulate our stereotypical image of a fairy tale.  As it turns out, this intro is not a frame or anything, in fact it has absolutely no connection whatsoever to the main story and is absolutely superfluous.  The five chapters of the legit story forgo the baroque romantic stylings of the fairy-tale intro and most of the text is reminiscent of a hard-boiled detective story, though Ellison includes more graphic violence, over the top gore, really.

Mars has been conquered by the human race, the natives, whom Terrans call "gooks" or "marties," raped en masse, the land strip mined and then covered with businesses and industry.  Among the businesses-- brothels.  Our main character is Sarna, a human whore at one of the brothels where the rest of the whores are mixed race people with yellowish skin.  These hybrids look down on full-blooded natives, but Sarna is liberal and sympathizes with the natives.  When a full-blooded native comes to the brothel it is Sarna who takes him to her room, but the Martian doesn't want to have sex--he is trying to hide from criminals out to murder him.  He has something they want, and when he shows it to Sarna she screams--her screams get the attention of the native's human pursuers and they climb in the window, cut the native to pieces and leave, having not seen the treasure.

In Chapter Two the half breeds overthrow the Terrans, exterminating the people who forced their native ancestors and themselves into factories and mines.  In describing the murder of the native in Chapter One, Ellison included a lot of very detailed, cartoonishly detailed, gore, and he does the same here in Chapter Two as Sarna, the only human left alive on Mars, fights off many half-breeds, shooting off their heads and limbs with a "burp gun," a kind of energy rifle.  She even uses the burper to clear away some corpses that are blocking the door of an elevator she wants to use.

Sarna escapes to the top of a skyscraper, where she plays possum among some middle-class Terrans who have been murdered at their desks.  She is an expert at playing dead because she has had so many clients at the whorehouse who savored the idea of raping a sleeping woman.    

We sometimes hear that Ellison just bangs some draft out and doesn't revise it before sending it off to the publisher, and "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" certainly shows signs of this practice.  Here are three passages that give you an idea.  

She ran through the whorehouse, the burp rifle before her like some deadly appendage, and once, when a door swung toward her, blown by the wind, she blasted it from its frame.

As a last resort she blasted at the bodies with the burper, and the arms that blocked the elevator separated. She kicked the stumps away, thrust home the door, and shot the elevator up, to the very top of the twenty-story building.

She ran to one of the desks, painfully and with strain lifted the white-collar corpse from the chair, and dumped it through the broken window beside the desk. 

Personally, I object to "like some deadly appendage," to "separated" and to "thrust home" as applied to an elevator door, as well as to "painfully and with strain" and "white-collar corpse."  These clunky phrases are fine for a draft when you are trying to get ideas down in a hurry, but why didn't Ellison or Amazing editor Kim Mohan take a few seconds to smooth these sentences out?  As they are, these sentences take me out of the story because they sound so silly.  (Please spare me the lazy explanation that Ellison and Mohan are intentionally including bad sentences as part of the spoof of the science fiction of the thirties or forties.)

In Chapter Three, after the rebels fail to see through Sarna's dead act and leave the office, we learn what the treasure from Chapter One is--a being the size of your fist that looks half-toad, half-human and has seven eyes.  The creature has been dormant, and Sarna has kept in a little box in a pocket or purse since acquiring it, but now it is awake.  Via telepathy it explains that it is one of six such creatures, which, when united into a single entity, wield great power.  It seduces Sarna with the promise of helping Terra take over Mars again, and with the promise of curing a wound she has.  Previously when we heard about this wound Ellison told us that "She saw one of the martie burp blasts had ricocheted a bit of masonry off her arm, and it was bleeding" and "Her head ached, and her arm was a sliver of red-hot pain where the masonry had grazed her."  Well, now we learn that the wound is radioactive and the radiation will spread through Sarna's body and kill her soon.  "Sama bit her lip and watched the raw wound ooze blood down her arm. It was quite painful, throbbing and glowing as only a burper wound could."  This feels a little sloppy, to me; Ellison only mentioned the bloody wound when Sarna needed it to lend verisimilitude to her playing dead act, not when it happened, and now that Ellison needs a way to get Sarna, of whom we have been told "she had never been loyal to Earth, or patriotic," to cooperate with the monster, Ellison decides the wound is radioactive to the point of glowing visibly in daylight, even though he has never before suggested the burp weapons' discharges cause radiation poisoning or make things like masonry radioactive.  Ellison is totally making this stuff up as he goes along and not bothering to revise his first draft so such improvisations are properly integrated into the narrative and foreshadowed.

Anyway, the toad monster enters Sarna's mind and operates her like a puppet, directing her through the abandoned dome city to the space port/air port.  Even though a revolution that killed all full-blood humans took place earlier in the day, it is business as usual at the space port.  Didn't the halfbreeds kill all the humans so they wouldn't have to do these jobs anymore?  Sarna knocks out a guard with the butt of her energy rifle and hides among cargo, and when the cargo is loaded she is able to get aboard a flight across Mars to where one of the monster's five brothers has been buried.  Some half-breed comes to inspect the cargo and she guns him down.  Won't that fill the ship with radiation?  Well, I guess the burp gun radiation only has effect when it furthers the plot.

In Chapter Four the monster continues to puppeteer Sarna in the task of finding its brothers.  The first is a glowing entity, again fist-sized, that allows Sarna and the first monster to teleport across the galaxy to the environs of a white dwarf star where they find another brother, a globule of water floating in space.  In Chapter Five they retrieve two other brothers from a jungle planet's swamp, one that looks like a human man and one that looks like a cloud of goop.  The five join to become a sort of hovering grey ball that now can travel through time.

Then comes the big twist ending, one that which I think marks this story as an homage to A. E. van Vogt.  (I'll note here that Ellison championed van Vogt when other SF big wigs, led by Damon Knight, were always trying to diminish our favorite Canadian.)  Sarna the prostitute is the sixth of the six entities that make up the god-like monster and her integration into it will make it invincible.  For a million years she has inhabited thousands of mundane bodies, forgetting her divine nature, trapped thuswise by powers who fear the uniting of the six, for together the six could rule the universe, and would rule it cruelly.  Sarna joins the ball.  But her mundane lives have taught her to be against racism and imperialism, so she guides the grey ball to commit suicide in the heart of the sun so Terra will not regain power over Mars and the super-entity will not gain power over the universe.  Ellison ends the story with a line in italics: "And they died happily ever after."

Then comes Ellison's afterword, which is mostly lame jokes but suggests he had the idea of this story in the 1980s and wrote it in the early 1990s but for like 15 or 20 years had trouble convincing editors to publish it.  He points out that Allen Steele got a story with a similar gag published a few years ago and hints he is worried people will think he is copying Steele.

"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" is at best a mediocrity.  The basic plot is fine, but it is self-consciously unoriginal and the writing is shoddy and sloppy.  The justification for doing a pastiche of a type of story that has been done before with sincerity is that you are making it funny or undermining its supposed outdated values.  But Ellison includes relatively few jokes, and none is funny.  And he doesn't undermine old SF with his boilerplate anti-racism and anti-imperialism and by having as a protagonist a woman because such politics have always been represented in the science fiction magazines--my go-to examples are Edmond Hamilton's 1932 "A Conquest of Two Worlds" which appeared in Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories and Nelson S. Bond's 1941 "Magic City" which appeared in John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Astounding, but there are others.  

"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" is a barely acceptable filler story much like many that came before it that Ellison and Mohan hoped would be elevated in the public mind by having the Harlan Ellison® brand stamped on it, the brand of the emperor with no clothes.

Harlan Ellison scholars trying to wring some value out of this unremarkable production might consider the question of whether Ellison gave to Sarna characteristics he associates with himself, if she might represent him in the story.  I've already pointed out how Sarna sympathizes with minorities and has no loyalty to her own race or country, which of course sounds like our old pal Harlan.  Early in "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" we are told Sarna is characterized by self-respect, is more popular with the clients than the other girls, but earns the other prostitutes' respect despite their envy and jealousy because she respects herself.  At the end we are told "The life she had led had been a shadowy thing, at core unpleasant and degrading, yet she had respected herself, and that had kept her from regretting too much."  Is this Ellison's view of himself, a writer who writes for money and is a better writer than the other writers but has won their respect through the tremendous power of his self-regard, a self-regard that has made it possible to endure a humiliating life of catering to audiences and clients and employers to whom he feels he is superior?     

"The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" resurfaced in 2009 in the Lansdales' Son of Retro Pulp Tales and in 2015 in the Ellison collection Can and Can'takerous, two good examples of how sad cover illustration has been in this 21st century. 

"A Lot of Saucers" (2000)

Armed with my history degree from Rutgers University, both before and after I worked in a government office doing nothing (or at least nothing good), I worked actual jobs entailing real work in retail stores, warehouses, department stores, as a delivery driver, and in book stores, so I recognized the name of children's book author Bruce Coville when I saw that a story by Ellison debuted in the 2000 volume Bruce Coville's UFOs.  Let's see what your old pal Harlan and whoever ghost-edited this thing for Skylark Award winner (!) Bruce thought suitable for the kiddies of the year 2000.  I'm reading "A Lot of Saucers" in the collection Troublemakers, which prints a blurb from the Los Angeles Times dubbing Ellison "the 20th century Lewis Carroll" and which includes an intro by Ellison that suggests this story is going to be about how you shouldn't be prejudiced.  Harlan, always coming up with new ideas.

"A Lot of Saucers" is largely about the relationship between a General and the Captain, Alberts, who is his adjutant.  Ellison tells us that "adjutant" is the "politically correct word for assistant...the guy who actually got the job done" and that it "sounded better than slave."  When the two men first met, Alberts was a Lieutenant, and "solved ten thorny problems in two days."  Still Alberts considers his position on the General's staff "cushy," that there has never been any real work to do until today.

What is so different about today?  Well, a week ago five thousand alien space ships, each "almost four miles around," appeared in Earth's skies.  So far they have done little; periodically a saucer will teleport away and then a different one will teleport into the empty spot some time later.  Still, each day since the ships appeared people have gotten more scared of them.  The General, a wealthy man who rose to his current rank "almost faster than the eye could see....through his father’s connections" gives Captain Alberts the job of coming up with what to do about this mysterious interstellar armada.

Three weeks after the aliens' arrival, Alberts boards a helicopter and approaches the most peculiar of the alien saucers, one that seems old, covered in pock marks and dust, and which has never teleported away.  An alien appears out of a hatch, a thirty-foot tall hairy biped, and the adjutant and his pilot flee in fear.

Week ten arrives.  Earth society is collapsing due to fear, though the saucers have done nothing hostile as of yet.  The General himself decides to take a helicopter up to see the dirty saucer.  He sees the hairy alien and decides to launch a nuclear missile at the dirty ship.  The saucer teleports away after being hit, but then returns, bearing a makeshift patch, and the hairy giant appears, and shoots down at the military men, killing the General.  As he shoots, the alien shouts in English, and his speech indicates that the aliens are using Earth as a parking lot and consider the Earth people to be vermin; this alien in the dirty ship is the parking attendant, responsible for keeping the vermin under control.  The alien begins a campaign that will kill all life on Earth.

A silly joke story with a tired "message," that the trigger-happy US military is going to destroy the world, that is sloppily written (there is a sentence in which the pronoun "he" could apply to either the General or to Alberts; sometimes the people on the ground can see what is happening on top of the half-wide wide saucer that is a mile above them and it is not clear how; Ellison writes about the year 2000 military in a way that is bizarre, like it is still 1945, saying stuff like "They attached the parasite missile beneath a night-fighter," and "They were out on the desert, the ack-ack guns sniffing at the sky, pelting the saucers from six separate batteries"), and is way too long.  Thumbs down!  I can understand Ellison chasing a paycheck from Coville and Coville wanting a big name in his kid's book, but I don't understand putting this junk in an anthology which includes some of Ellison's greatest hits like "Jefty is Five" and the clock man story.  Embarrassing. 

"Incognita, Inc." (2001)

I'm reading this one from a scan of the magazine Realms of Fantasy, an issue which promotes a TV adaptation of Marion Zimmer Bradley's feminist (and I guess anti-Christian?) version of King Arthur.  isfdb is telling me that "Incognita, Inc." debuted in Hemispheres, the in-flight magazine of United Airlines, which is kind of amusing.  This story also appeared in Can and Can'takerous, as well as a yearly best of fantasy and horror anthology edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling and Stephen Jones' 2007 Summer Chills: Strangers in Stranger Lands, which has a joke cover.  I hope this is going to be a sincere horror story and not today's third don't-be-a-racist slash white-people-deserve-to-die joke story.

Well, it is not a horror story, but "Incognita, Inc." is sincere, thank heavens.

"Incognita, Inc." comes to us as a report from a widower, a Chicago-born man who calls himself a "loyal corporate tool."  He has worked for WorldSpan for decades but this report is also his notice of resignation because WorldSpan has made him do something that has broken his heart, fire an employee whose work is not producing revenue for the company--it is this firing that is the topic of the report.  Ellison, that original thinker, is contributing to the volume of media about global corporations doing corporate take overs and defending the bottom line through the practice of corporate layoffs as well as the widespread laments about "mom and pop" local shops getting closed.

WorldSpan, during one of its corporate takeovers, somehow acquired a tiny little map store in Chicago that has one owner and no employees.  The store makes no money so is to be shut down, but it has no phone number or e-mail address, so to sack the map store guy the narrator has to fly to Chicago.  Does any of this makes sense?  Ellison keeps calling the guy in the store the owner but WorldSpan is the real owner?  Well, whatever.  

The store, it turns out, is like Dr. Who's TARDIS, tiny outside but huge inside, and it sells esoteric maps, including maps of places that are not real, and maps of phenomena that the map maker couldn't possibly know about via mundane methods.  For example, if you lose your good luck charm, the guy in the store can draw you a map of where you dropped it.

Ellison loves to present lists to his readers, and we get lots of lists in "Incognita, Inc."  For example, a list of large places when Ellison's narrator wants to tell his bosses that the mysterious map store is not just large, but vast.

I don’t mean to tell you it was large. Large is the rotunda of Grand Central Station. Large is the basilica of St. Peter's Cathedral. Large is Hanging Rock in New South Wales. This was vast. 

We also get our share of lists of imaginary places like Narnia and Barsoom, and the authors who create imaginary places, like L. Frank Baum and Samuel Butler.  

After the long description of the store where there are thousands of cubby holes holding many thousands of maps, and the long description of the map store guy, an immortal in Victorian clothes who has been making maps of places real and imagined since the start of civilization, we get the plot.  Our narrator tells map store guy he has to shut down, feels guilty, map store guy comforts the narrator, assuring him that nothing matters (“Most of us think we’re more important than we really are, Charlie. The universe isn’t watching. It mostly, for the most part, doesn’t care.”) and then the map store just vanishes.  Due to high technology and the capitalist drive for efficiency, some of the magic of the old world has been extinguished.  Outside, a woman asks for directions to a grocery store and the map store guy whips out his fountain pen and draws her a map.  It seems he'll still be able to do the thing that he loves, that some of the magic of the old world lingers on.  The End.

An acceptable filler story that expresses nostalgia for the good old days (the good old days that "The Toad Prince or, Sex Queen of the Martian Pleasure-Domes" told you were endless racism and sexism and imperialism.)  Less sloppy, more economical, and more evocative than our other two stories today--even the jokes in the story (the store offers maps to where O. J. Simpson hid the murder weapon and to the location of the place the singers of "Louie, Louie" gotta go to) are better.  Maybe Ellison revised or copy edited this one?

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It is always nice when the last story in a blog post is the best one, so we can end the post on a happy note and not wonder why we spend so much time reading and thinking about fiction instead of devoting all of our free time to playing Telengard and listening to "Sailor's Tale" or looking out the window at the birds.

   

Stay tuned for more rants and raves here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Really, there are raves, sometimes.

1999 Dozois selections: F Pohl, H Clement and T Lee

Usually here at MPorcius Fiction Log we read old stories, but today we're mixing things up and reading some recent speculative fiction.  Last week I was in the District (you might know it as The Swamp) and took a look at the clearance carts at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.  Among the books available was a copy of the 800-page anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.  A glance at the table of contents revealed stories by Frederik Pohl, Hal Clement, and Tanith Lee that seemed like they might be worthwhile.

If you are like me, it feels like just yesterday that Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend was president, that Kennedies were falling from the sky (so careless, those Kennedies, smh), and that we were introduced to SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward.  Let's relive those happy days by reading these three 1999 SF tales that Dozois saw fit to celebrate as the best of that year, a year which sat at the deceptively smooth tail end of a black century of blood and at the dawn of a new century of upheaval and terror.

Of course I'm too cheap to pay four dollars for a huge book with a mush cover illustration that, after I read just three stories from it, will do nothing more than gather dust atop a pile of similarly forgotten books on the floor of MPorcius HQ.  So I'm reading today's stories in scans made available thanks to internet piracy.  Feel free to read along at the links below, me hearties.

Dozois         Pohl (partial)       Clement        Lee 

"Hatching the Phoenix" by Frederik Pohl

This is a long story, serialized over two issues of Amazing, the pioneering science fiction magazine at that time owned by the people who took over TSR and apparently devoted primarily to promoting television shows.  How the mighty.... The Fall 1999 issue of Amazing is right there at the internet archive, but finding a scan of the Winter 2000 ish was a little more challenging and I gave up, though I did come across a scan of the 600th anniversary issue of Amazing, which has a picture of Harlan Ellison's lovely mug on the cover, though SF's bad boy is perhaps upstaged by a painting of a leggy blonde in a metal bra.  Anyway, I'm reading "Hatching the Phoenix" in a scan of Dozois' anthology.

"Hatching the Phoenix" is an OK story composed of three elements that, in my mind at least, are pretty distinct.  We've got the hard SF business--an expedition to study an astronomical phenomenon.  We've got soap opera business--should the protagonist marry this guy, or that guy, or maybe listen to her nagging feminist friend and swear off men and sex once and for all?  Sort of sprinkled over this is left-wing social politics, attacks on Christians and laments over how poorly men treat women and how warlike people (Christians, mostly) are.  I'll deal with these elements one at a time.  

I read Pohl's famous Gateway as a kid and then again as an adult, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is set in that same Heechee universe.  Our narrator, Klara, a character from Gateway, got rich over the course of that novel and its two immediate sequels, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon and Heechee Rendezvous, books I remember very little about, as compensation for her participation in a disastrous expedition.  With her vast wealth, Klara has financed a major research project, the study of a planet which was wiped out in the supernova that created what we call the Crab Nebula.  The team of scientists conducting this research have dubbed the planet the Crabber planet, its native population Crabbers.

I'm not smart, so it was a little confusing, but it seems that by going to a certain spot in space, the scientists Klara is financing can, by using a nearby black hole as a lens, look back through time by observing old light that was generated thousands of years ago by the Crabber star just days before it went nova and bounced off the Crabber planet.  When their equipment is set up, the scientists can record what was happening on the Crabber planet right before it got wiped out.  It is suggested that Klara has the dream of somehow immortalizing the people who lived on this planet before it was destroyed, the existence of whom we cannot doubt because many thousands of years before the sun went nova, the Heechee recorded videos of primitive tool-using carnivores on the planet.  The question is whether these primitive Crabbers evolved to the point they could build a modern civilization; this is the main thing the scientists are trying to figure out.  Pohl tries to generate tension and suspense by having the camera apparatus that can look into the past only half built when Klara arrives, so the pictures of the past are very low resolution.  As the story proceeds, the pictures get more and more clear until the terrible truth is revealed.  Also meant to build suspense is the fact that the various ships which are the setting of the story--Klara's ship, the ship used by her unfaithful boyfriend, and the research ship--can't safely stick around where they are because the radiation from the supernova might hurt them.  Didn't all three ships already fly through that radiation wave to get to a point where they can see light that preceded that wave?  Isn't the first sentence of the story "We were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova"?  Like I suggested, I am too dim to really understand this story's science component.

The aforementioned terrible truth: Klara's multicultural band of boffins discovers that the Crabbers had developed a 20th-century technology and society just before the supernova exterminated them.  But Klara loses interest in immortalizing them when she finally gets the high quality video that makes clear the Crabbers were engaged in a World War I slash World War II type total war, complete with strategic bombing of cities by aircraft, submarine warfare, and large scale land battles with tanks.  Also, the civilized Crabbers were committing imperialism against the still-primitive Crabbers.

At the end of the story there is also some business about Klara moving people from the research ship to her ship and to her unfaithful boyfriend's ship so they can escape the radiation wave from the supernova--I feel like something similar happened at the end of Gateway.

Now let's consider the human relationship or soap opera elements of "Hatching the Phoenix."  A lot of the story's text is devoted to Klara's relationship with her computer, which she has given a personality and which has a holographic simulacrum with which to express that personality--when Klara is drinking the hologram will sometimes present the illusion that the computer is also drinking.  Much is made of how Klara tries to maintain an illusion of free will and independence when in fact the computer does everything for her, and she almost always takes the computer's advice.  (Gateway, I recall, was largely about a man's relationship with a computer therapist.)  The computer is a man-hating, Christian-hating, feminist, and keeps trying to convince Klara to achieve immortality and escape physical needs and problems by having her consciousness uploaded into a computer.  Of course, Klara herself designed the computer to have this bitchy nag's personality. 

Klara kind of wants children but doesn't know if her current boyfriend, a TV journalist whom Pohl depicts as a total jerk who is terrible at his job, is the right man to have a child with.  In the first half of the story, the chapters in the Fall '99 ish of Amazing (the one with the Star Trek cover), Klara arrives at the research ship and interacts with the sexually and ethnically diverse crew, and then in the final sentences of that installment of the serial we get a soap opera cliff hanger--the journalist is arriving in his TV station's rented ship to interview the scientists, and he has an assistant with him--a hot chick!  Is he cheating on Klara?

It turns out in the second installment of the serial in the Winter 2000 number of Amazing (the one with the Babylon 5 cover) that yes, he is.  Is this a big deal?  After all, are Klara and journalist being exclusive?  Anyway, Pohl spends quite a bit of time on the journalist's efforts to have sex with our narrator and Klara's efforts to put him off and to flirt with one of the scientists, a man who is also going through a difficult relationship, his wife back home cheating on him.  In the end Klara and the journalist stop seeing each other, and Klara starts seeing the scientist, but it doesn't work out--Klara is more like a mother to that guy than wife material.

Finally the left-wing social politics component of "Hatching the Phoenix."  Klara's computer's personality is based on Hypatia, who in this story is presented as the first woman scientist whose accomplishment men failed to erase.  The computer is constantly demeaning Christians, and men, and living human beings in general, apparently even trying to sabotage Klara's relationships with other humans as a means of encouraging Klara into being turned into a digital file.  In the computer's voice, Pohl bangs on repetitively at the anti-Christian stuff and misanthropic stuff about how humans are warlike, which is cagey as the computer isn't necessarily trustworthy, so it doesn't necessarily come off as our narrator Klara or our author Pohl droning on and on misanthropically but perhaps Pohl merely depicting Klara's annoying friend.  Though of course we know Pohl wrote this stuff and Klara designed the computer's personality so it really is Pohl and Klara expressing these opinions.  

Popular fiction, I always say, is wish fulfillment fantasy, and it seems possible one of the things Fred Pohl, like 80 years old when this story was published, wished he could have done was set up vast programs to help single mothers and other underprivileged women and girls, as this is something Klara does with her wealth.  There is a lot of talk about Klara's tropical island where she has a refuge for orphans and single mothers and the implication is that Klara doesn't need a child of her own, shouldn't have to settle for a man, seeing as no man is good enough for her, that her motherly instincts should be devoted to helping all those orphans and single mothers.  I suspect we are supposed to consider that she could have been like a mother to the Crabbers in some way I don't understand, seeing as they died thousands of years ago, but the Crabbers, just like the journalist, proved to be unworthy of Klara, what with their war and imperialism.

Finally on this theme, we might note that the lead scientist on the research ship is a woman, and among the scientists who actually have no bearing on the plot that I can remember is a tall muscular Afro-Briton who says "crikey" and a jealous homosexual.  Even if they don't affect the plot, these people have their own sexual relationships and add to the soap opera atmosphere as well as the story's diversity levels.  

All three of these elements more or less work, though they do not excel, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is never actually boring, but it feels a little long and bland.  There's too much boring everyday stuff that I guess is supposed to humanize Klara, like how she likes coffee and what clothes she wears for this or that occasion and how she feels about her face and what plastic surgery she has had to make it less mannish.  The anti-Christian stuff is a little overboard and the anti-war stuff is repetitive, with every different type of warfare the Crabbers engaged in being presented as some new revelation.  "Hatching the Phoenix" also feels inconclusive--the research study of the supernova and the doomed aliens doesn't come to much, as far as I could tell, and the soap opera elements are also inconclusive, as the narrator dumps one guy with ease and picks up another with ease but then breaks up with him a few months later after the narrator has healed his psychic wounds, which I guess serves Pohl's women-are-so-giving-and-men-don't- deserve-them theme, but doesn't really make for a good conclusion to a story.  isfdb is telling me that "Hatching the Phoenix" would later be integrated into the 2004 novel The Boy Who Would Live Forever so maybe we should think of this thing as a part of a larger narrative and thus can't really blame it for feeling inconclusive.

I'm grading "Hatching the Phoenix" acceptable.  Besides Dozois' yearly best of volume, you can find it in The Hard SF Renaissance. 

"Exchange Rate" by Hal Clement 

"Exchange Rate" debuted in a magazine I perhaps have never heard of before, Absolute Magnitude, and I am reading it there.  This magazine feels pretty cheap--each story gets one or two illustrations, and to fill up dead space the same illustrations appear multiple times.  A picture of a vehicle appears within "Exchange Rate"'s 22 pages eight times, and a picture of a satellite five times.  Maybe they should have just made the print bigger if they had a lot of extra space to fill and couldn't find advertisers--my 55-year old eyes would have appreciated it.

Like "Hatching the Phoenix," "Exchange Rate" was included in The Hard SF Renaissance.  But no, I won't put a picture of that anthology's cover in this blog post two or three more times.      

           

The planet humans call Halfbaked is extremely inhospitable.  Gravity is like seven times that of Earth, air pressure 17 times that of Earth sea level.  The planet's tectonic plates are much smaller and numerous than those on Earth and are always scraping against and pushing into and away from each other, so there are constant earthquakes and fissures and ridges are always appearing and vanishing, creating new and forbidding obstacles to travel.  Clouds above this forever changing landscape obscure the sky, and lightning almost never stops.  Rain and dust storms severely lower visibility, while ceaseless emissions of radiation make radar and radio very unreliable.  Clement is of course famous for conceiving of alien planets where extreme conditions prevail and working out how those conditions would affect life and human operations, and much of "Exchange Rate"'s text is taken up with descriptions and depictions of the crazy geographic, geological, meteorological and biological facts of Halfbaked and how human explorers there keep body and soul together and go about their business.

All this science and technology isn't necessarily easy reading; here is a sample:

The assumption that the world had a nearly equipotential surface, with strength of crustal materials essentially meaningless, was presumed to be even truer here than on any merely one-gee planet. The drivers had not noticed the changes in actual power needed to keep a given speed; they merely knew they were three thousand kilometers closer to where they wanted to be.

The science in "Exchange Rate" is all interesting and it all makes sense--it is both more complex and ironically easier to understand than the science in Pohl's "Hatching the Phoenix."  Unfortunately, Clement's characters and their motivations are boring--the people in the story are forgettable, one almost indistinguishable from another.  People complain about cardboard characters in stories, how an author will give each character one personality trait and push it to the extreme, but the characters in Clement's long story here have no personality traits and it makes reading "Exchange Rate" sleep-inducing.  

The plot of "Exchange Rate" concerns weeks-long journeys taken by humans in heavily armored vehicles across the treacherous surface of Halfbaked.  Halfbaked, it appears, has native inhabitants, and, after radio communications with them that suggest the aliens are interested in trade, two human women drive a tanker truck thousands of miles, a trip of many days across shifting terrain that makes as-the-crow-flies travel impossible, to what they expect will be a native city to deliver some chemicals to the natives.  The women then, apparently, head back to the human base, but cease transmitting messages to the base.  Their nervous husbands hop in another huge heavily armored vehicle and set out to meet their spouses on the way, but turn back when the women's vehicle seems to be responding to advice transmitted by their husbands and by the base personnel, suggesting the wives--and their receiver--are OK, but their transmitter is out of commission.  

Clement presents "Exchange Rate" as a mystery story, so we never get a view inside the women's vehicle or hear anything from their point of view.  Clement instead focuses on the husbands, and everything we learn about the women's mission comes to us second or third hand--it is like those monster movies in which we barely see the monster and instead the camera spends most of its time in a room with military men and eggheads who look at radar screens and talk on the phone, saying stuff like "the blip on the radar screen shows the target is now heading northwards," or like a detective story in which the detective learns about the murderer and victim not from the murderer or victim but from a police officer who spoke to a witness who perhaps saw the murder from a distance through fog a long time ago.  I find stories that put this kind of distance between the reader and the activity kind of frustrating.

I also didn't appreciate reading about the husbands' journey in excruciating detail only for that mission to be aborted and end up being absolutely moot.    

The men do other work back at the base, then are sent out on a job to survey the height of a cliff, seeing as the cliff's height has probably changed since they last saw it.  While they are out there, satellite and other data sources suggest the women's tanker truck is not behaving properly, so the men again set out to intercept their wives.  Why does Clement abort the first intercept mission to only send the men off on an identical mission a second time?  This is not good narrative structure, in my opinion.

After weeks of driving, the husbands finally find the tanker, and their wives are not aboard.  The rest of the story involves figuring out what happened to the women, detective work that takes place over the course of this story's fourth weeks-long drive--another trip to the alien city to deliver more chemicals.  Yes, the humans decide to deliver another shipment to the aliens, even even though the last shipment suffered 100% casualties and the aliens are suspected of murdering the women.

At the alien "city" the astounding truth is revealed.  There is only one alien, a single huge being with many disposable components that get killed all the time without any long term detriment resulting.  It killed the women due to what you might call an accident or misunderstanding; the alien doesn't even have such concepts as individual personality, love, friendship, or sexual reproduction, and of course is extremely robust compared to a fragile human.  The climactic scene of "Exchange Rate" is when one of the husbands contemplates revenge on the alien and his colleagues talk him down from committing this sin--these future humans have evolved past the "War stage."  The alien knows not what it did and must be forgiven.  The briefly vengeful man talks about the need to teach the alien a lesson so it won't misbehave again, an idea his comrades dismiss, and I wondered if Clement was offering criticism of the justice of punishment as a crime prevention measure.

I have very mixed feelings about "Exchange Rate."  The science and technology stuff is all very good, as I have suggested, ands there are multiple cool sciency things I have not mentioned.  But the actual story is poorly structured and the characters are nonentities, so "Exchange Rate" does not engage the emotions and reading it feels like a long slog.  When Clement at the very end tried to depict emotions and present some philosophy, I was not on his wavelength--of course you should kill an alien who kills your wife so it doesn't kill anybody else.      

I guess we'll be generous and call "Exchange Rate" acceptable.

"The Sky-Green Blues" by Tanith Lee

If you judge by who can write a good sentence and who can paint vivid images, Tanith Lee is one of the very top speculative fiction writers.  And "The Sky-Green Blues" is far and away the best of today's three stories.  Of course, it is not about science, but about sex and danger and the craft and life of the writer and a twist ending that is supposed to blow your mind.   

Our narrator is a journalist, a woman who has reported from numerous dangerous regions.  It is some kind of alternate reality future; our heroine has a chip in her arm that allows her to understand foreign languages when spoken, and even read foreign languages; she carries around a computer with which she can watch TV and send messages back and forth with her employers as well as record her notes; to save time, before interviewing an author, she has his books fed into her brain while she sleeps.  

The author lives in a city in a jungle.  "The Sky-Green Blues" is, I think, set on Earth--"Europeans" and "sparrows" and other Earth people and animals are mentioned, but there are also animals and people from other planets around, or at least that is where I think they must have come from.  As our narrator is interviewing the author over the course of days or weeks, she is also conducting a strange affair with the author's manservant; this servant is a humanoid alien, and every night he comes to the narrator's bedroom and they have sex, sex which never leads to an orgasm for either of them.  At the same time, an enemy army is advancing on the city.  

The morning of the day it looks like the enemy is going to take the city, the author commits suicide.  The narrator and the manservant jump in the author's armored vehicle and drive through the jungle--at the coast they hope to be picked up by ships being sent by some authority or other to rescue refugees.

In the jungle, after a day's driving, the alien manservant leaves the vehicle and leads the journalist to a beautiful waterfall by an ancient decaying temple.  Within the temple the narrator is astounded to find the author!  Still alive!  And scribbling away!  The author provides difficult to refute evidence that the journalist and the manservant and even this war-torn world are not quite real, but the product of the author's imagination and pen!  The author and manservant send the narrator on her way, with the prediction that, even though the manservant never ejaculated while they were having sex and their species cannot breed, she will soon give birth to the manservant's child because a hybrid baby like that will be a good plot development.  The narrator makes it to the coast alone on foot and is among the crowds of people taken away in VTOL aircraft by soldiers; the soldiers grope her, but she doesn't take much offense.

I think this story is quite well written, but I'm afraid the resolution of the plot is disappointing me.  The whole this-is-not-real-life-but-a-story-gimmick feels tired and silly.  Admittedly, Lee tries to use the gimmick to talk about life and the profession of writer in a philosophical way, but I'm not convinced this really works all that well.  I'm still recommending the story, but I can't love it like I wish I could.

"The Sky-Green Blues" debuted in the British magazine Interzone.  This magazine suffers a little from the embarrassing expedient of reprinting illustrations in an effort to make sure there are illustrations on most pages, but not as much as the issue of Absolute Magnitude we just looked at.  "The Sky-Green Blues," it appears, has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Dozois' 17th Year's Best anthology, which include a British edition titled The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 13th Annual Collection.

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All three of today's stories leave me feeling uneasy.  Pohl's science I found hard to understand, and while I could grok Clement's science, the story was long and tedious with no human drama, no human feeling.  Lee's story was brilliantly written, but the plot and central gimmick were underwhelming.  Maybe recent SF just isn't for me, even when written by the masters of the field.

Damon Knight: "The Indigestible Invaders," "Backward, O Time" and "An Eye for What?"

We recently read a story from the October 1956 issue of Infinity by Harlan Ellison, and I noticed that advertised on the cover of the issue is a story by Damon Knight I have not read.  So let's read it!  And two other stories Knight published in the same period.  We've already read a bunch of stories by Knight printed in 1956; "The Country of the Kind," "Stranger Station," "The Beach Where Time Began," and "A Likely Story" have all been subjects of MPorcius Fiction Log posts.  I think we've only tackled two 1957 Knight productions, "Man in the Jar," and "The Dying Man" AKA "Dio."  So, in addition to "The Indigestible Invaders," we'll read another '56 piece and an early '57 story, both of them from Galaxy, a magazine with a somewhat more serious and literary tone than many SF mags.   As with Ellison, I think Knight is overrated and have doubts I would like him personally but still enjoy a significant proportion of his fiction and nonfiction, so, as we look into today's three stories, anything can happen!

I'll be reading these stories in their original magazine versions, and the title of each section of this post will be a link to a scan of the magazine in which the story first presented itself to the eyes of Eisenhower-era SF fans.

"The Indigestible Invaders" (1956)

Here we have a joke story.  I guess we might dignify it with the label "satire," its target religious people whose opposition to contraception leaves the world vulnerable to the scourge of overpopulation.  Founded on a convoluted plot that is tedious, lacking in any kind of human feeling or suspense, and sporting jokes that are not funny, "The Indigestible Invaders" is a failure--thumbs down!

It is the 29th century.  Following a cataclysmic war some centuries back, the world is split into two Cold War camps, the Whites of the Western Hemisphere and the Reds of the Eastern Hemisphere.  These two societies have command economies and forever teeter on the brink of starvation, the governments carefully controlling food production and population levels.  For generations, population has been stable thanks to ruthless measures that are now taken for granted as normal; the political situation has also remained stable, as each side has refrained from using weapons of mass destruction or launching potentially decisive military campaigns.

One means of keeping population from growing is raiding--each side regularly sends rocket planes full of commandos and freezers to attack and kill people from the other side.  Slain enemies are brought back home to be added to limited food stores--this static future world in which there has not been technological change for centuries relies on cannibalism to (barely) function.
   

I just told you all this background at the beginning of my plot summary, but Knight doesn't do that, instead springing this stuff on you gradually, as the plot proceeds, you know, to surprise you.

The White civilization is some kind of theocracy--our narrator is the leader or one of a number of leaders, and his title is "patriarch" and council meetings are called "synods."  He is out for a walk one day and a thing he initially thinks is a Red missile lands nearby.  Aliens, apparently from Venus, emerge from the "missile," now revealed to be a space ship; the patriarch believes this is man's first contact with aliens, as he has been taught that Earth has never launched a manned space ship.  The aliens are all killed, and their bodies added to the food supply.  Eating the aliens' flesh causes a chemical change in the humans who eat it.  (Knight gives us a little science lecture on peptides.)  Those who have eaten alien food can no longer digest Earth food.  Somehow, the peptides spread to infect everybody in the Western hemisphere as well as the Western hemisphere's crops--I was too bored to follow this development carefully, maybe it is clear but it wasn't clear to me--so the Whites won't starve, at least not immediately.  But Reds can no longer safely eat Whites nor Whites eat Reds.  The raids must cease, so population begins to grow, putting pressure on food supplies and threatening starvation in the long term.

A year after the arrival of the aliens another space ship arrives, this one manned by human beings.  It turns out that humans colonized Venus before the cataclysm, something everybody on Earth has forgotten.  The aliens encountered earlier are Venerian natives, now a race of subalterns under the domination of the humans who now rule Venus.  The Venus humans somehow learned that Earthers were resorting to cannibalism, and sent the natives as a means of (again, somehow) getting the human race on Terra to stop practicing cannibalism.  The Venus humans suggest introducing contraception, but the White Earthers refuse, and instead abandon their taboo against eating fellow Whites and begin eating unmarried women, seeing as in their religion a woman has no soul until she has married.  I guess "The Indigestible Invaders" is also a feminist satire of marriage.

Attacks on religion, fear of overpopulation, and feminist sentiments are pretty common in SF, but it seems "The Indigestible Invaders" is so boring that it has never been reprinted, even though SF editors the world over must have been cheering its values between yawns.  

"Backward, O Time" AKA "This Way to the Regress" (1956)

When I was a kid, one of the stories I would hear on the theme of "ordinary people are idiots who deserve the contempt of the educated," a sort of companion piece to the allegations that rural hicks went insane with fear upon hearing Orson Welles' War of the Worlds radio adaptation, was the story of P. T. Barnum's "this way to the egress" signs.  I bring this up because the story that was reprinted many times in Knight collections as "Backward, O Time," including in The Best of Damon Knight, first appeared in Galaxy under the title "This Way to the Regress" and that is the version I am reading today.

Good grief, this is one of those stories in which a guy experiences life backwards.  He's born in a deadly car crash as a middle-aged man.  He works at an "unprinting plant" where the machines take words off of paper, filling cans with the displaced ink.  When it rains he watches water leap from the surface up to the sky.  When he smokes he blows smoke out to create a cigar.  And on and on with the obvious and stupid visuals.  JFC.  Haven't I endured this stupid gimmick enough times already?  There was that four-hour-long movie with Val Kilmer or Brad Pitt (I always mix those guys up) and that Dan Simmons novel I think is overrated, and I'm sure I suffered through this sort of thing elsewhere, maybe in Weird Tales, with a guy who devolves from a man into a monkey and then a rat or whatever and finally down to an amoeba.  

Anyway, the protagonist, as I said, begins life in a car crash and gets steadily younger.  His life is pretty ordinary, and Knight fills this story's eight pages with the sorts of lame jokes I've already described, like his razor adding whiskers to his face, money flowing into his bank account from doctors and dentists, another kid curing his black eye with his fist.  These shit jokes a child could make are the entire story!  Anyway, we see a marriage in reverse, a college career in reverse (even--gag!--a bull session in which a guy wonders what life would be like if cause preceded effect, wow, wouldn't that be crazy!), service in the First World War in reverse, blah blah blah.  Horrible.

I repeat, elbirroH!  Thumbs down!

"An Eye for What?" (1957)

Do I even have the energy to read another Damon Knight story after choking down the last two abortions?  This one is over 20 pages long!  Yikes!  

Well, thankfully, "An Eye for What?" isn't bad.  The style, characters, relationships, and images are all good, and the plot feels pretty original, and it is intriguing and entertaining.  The ending left me disappointed, but I am still willing to give "An Eye for What?" a moderate recommendation. 

It is the semi-authoritarian space-faring future!  Most of our cast of characters consists of astronauts who were subjected to "Pavlov-Morganstern treatments" as children to prevent them committing crimes and who seek solace from a "Church of Marx padre" when under stress.  And they are under stress.  The men and women in the story have been living in a wheel-like starship orbiting an alien planet for years, and most of them have cabin fever because they haven't been allowed to visit the planet, only admire its beauty through the view ports.  

Rounding out the main cast is one alien, a little blob guy they call George, a native of the planet below.  The Terran space federation is trying to open up trading relations with the blob people, to get them to join the federation the way Terra has inducted countless other less-advanced civilizations into the federation, a process that can take months or years, and studying George is part of that process.

The plot of "An Eye for What?" concerns the Terran scientists on the station trying to understand the culture of the blob people.  You see, George and the humans were getting along just fine for quite a while--in fact, George has been quite submissive and obedient--but then at a banquet the blob stole a human woman's dessert.  When asked why, Georgie boy, again tractable and innocuous, says something incomprehensible about its relationship with the woman.  When the humans consult the blobs on the planet surface, they say their fellow must be punished, but won't make clear how punishment works among their people.  They do darkly hint that if George is not punished, that every human on the ship will deserve to be punished for their negligence in doing their duty of punishing George.  Uh oh.

Many punishments are tried, but neither psychological punishments (like isolating the gregarious little guy) or physical punishments (like trying to temporarily deprive it of oxygen or stretching it on an improvised rack) work--George's body and psyche are very resilient and it responds to these punishments as if they are fun games.  One of the doctors on the station who s particularly stressed out by life in orbit takes the radical step of using drugs to counteract his Pavlov-Morganstern conditioning so he can break the rules and inflict a risky punishment on George, and in an indirect way this unravels the mystery.

You see, the blobs are single-celled creatures.  If they eat too much, they will explode.  George seized the human woman's dessert because she is fat and George was worried she would explode if she ate more.  There's also a whole bit about how among the blobs the small blobs are revered and have leadership positions because they show self control.  Anyway, the means of punishing George is to give it license to eat whatever it wants so it risks exploding.  Don't worry--they stop George before everyone's favorite blob actually explodes, but George's weight gain does lead to a loss of status among the natives.  

Once the mystery is solved the commander of the base decides to not open trade relations with the blobs after all, even though they have been working to that end for over two years--it would be wrong to expose these people to the vast quantity of mass produced goods the federation could supply them, because it would destroy them-unable to resist over eating, they would all explode.  "An Eye for What?" turns out to be a long fat joke and a somewhat oblique attack on our market society, a suggestion that its ability to produce a wide range and high volume of desirable goods has dangerous drawbacks.

Obviously I am not in tune with the message of this story, the kind of argument a commie would make--I think we should have a productive society, and I don't think naked people living in huts in Amazonian rain forests who survive by hunting monkeys with blowpipes or whatever are living better lives than people in North America or Western Europe.  But I have more substantive and less ideological criticisms, primarily that the theme or message of "An Eye for What?" comes as a surprise at the end.  The clues that indicate that the woman at the banquet is fat are pretty easy to miss, though I suppose if you look at "An Eye for What?" as a mystery story, maybe that is a virtue of the story.  The theme that consumption is a terrible danger I didn't pick up on until almost the very end of the story, and I don't think there are really any hints of it through the beginning or middle of the piece.  I might also quibble that the way the mystery is solved is almost by happenstance, as a byproduct of something else, rather than through a feat of logic or cogitation or something admirable and attributable to the actions of a detective, but I guess that is true of many mystery stories.  The strength of this story is not the theme or even the plot, but the humans and the alien and the relationships among them and the little episodes that illustrate those people's personalities and relationships. 

"A Eye for What?" has been reprinted in a multitude of anthologies, but not in The Best of Damon Knight, though it is certainly more commendable and entertaining than "This Way to the Regress."  The world is perplexing.

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It is a relief that things took a good turn there at the end, but, oof, those first two stories.  Did writers whom Knight, as a pioneering critic of SF, had slagged ever throw such stories as "The Indigestible Invaders" and "This Way to the Regress" back in Knight's face, or at least take solace in the knowledge that the same pen that was denigrating them also gave birth to such monstrosities?  I hope so!

What you might call a change of pace next time at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!

Harlan Ellison: "Try a Dull Knife," "In Lonely Lands," and "Eyes of Dust"

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading stories from my paperback copy (signed by the author!) of Alone Against Tomorrow by Harlan Ellison.  Three stories today from the "man of passion," as Cecil Smith of Los Angeles Times likes to call him, "Try a Dull Knife," "In Lonely Lands," and "Eyes of Dust."  Sounds life-affirming, eh?  To read the exact same versions I am reading of these stories, try these links, but no guarantees--you never know when the pirates of the interwebs are going to be hauled before the authorities!

LINK 1 

LINK 2

"Try a Dull Knife" (1968)

Here we have a story that has been widely anthologized in American and British vampire-themed books and in European anthologies.  "Try a Dull Knife" debuted in F&SF alongside a Larry Niven story that sounds fun, and you can see a photo of Niven on the back cover of the magazine.

We know this will be an "edgy" story from the first paragraph, in which Ellison talks about marijuana use and employs an ethnic slur for Latin Americans.  A man, Eddie Burma, has been stabbed, and staggers into a "slum nightclub" in an Hispanic neighborhood where three different bands are playing, Ellison portraying the musicians and their audiences as grotesque.  Eddie wants the restroom to rest and hide in, and Ellison unleashes one of his lists on us, a list of slang and foreign words for "toilet."

As he tries to rest in the nightclub restroom, and then staggers out into the night, we learn all about Burma.  Burma is a great guy-- clever, charismatic, generous, a good comedian and talented raconteur.  The SF angle is that he is an "empath": "on a level most people never even know exists he felt for the world."  Burma, throughout his life, has attracted to himself losers and sad people, people who feed off his energy as he tells jokes and stories, as he acts as an impromptu counsellor or therapist or priest for them, salving their psychic wounds.  (We get a list of a bunch of these defeated people.)  "Try a Dull Knife," apparently, is Ellison working through his own feelings about being a celebrity, how fans (he thinks) live vicariously through him, build mental and social lives around him and other famous people because they themselves are unable to build satisfactory lives of their own.  Ellison, perhaps, feels exploited by his fans, feels a pressure to please them when he sees them at conventions or reads their fan mail or whatever.  (This kind of pressure is perhaps at the root of such famous Ellison capers as his failure to deliver the third Dangerous Visions volume.)    

Tonight, at a party he held, Burma started running out of the energy he always provided his friends and acquaintances, and these losers bitterly attacked him for, to their minds, refusing them the bounty he had always in the past been ready to supply.  One woman even stabbed him, leading him to flee.

At the end of the story the losers find him, suck him dry.  In his final moments, Burma recognizes that he is as sick as they, that he loved and sought the attention his fans provided, needed to be worshipped and admired as much as they needed someone to fill their empty lives.  Ellison is self-aware.

This story won't change your mind if you think Ellison is a self-important jerk, but it is pretty well-written and more or less makes internal sense and describes a somewhat interesting phenomena.  People nowadays may consider Ellison's descriptions of an Hispanic-American community offensive, but all the references to "fat momma"s and a "Pancho Villa mustache" and "a reject from a Cuban Superman film" paint a vivid picture and add interest to the story, even if Ellison has no specific reason to connect his plot to Latin American culture (unless we are supposed to be reminded of pre-Columbian human sacrifice or something...hmmm.)  I can mildly recommend "Try a Dull Knife"--it succeeds in its goals and is entertaining, and seems to be Ellison expressing his own feelings and reflecting on his own experiences without going overboard into irritating solipsism.

"In Lonely Lands" (1959)

Ellison uses the first half of Tennyson's "The Eagle" as an epigraph to "In Lonely Lands," which gets me on his side from the get go.  And Ellison has me on his side the whole six pages of the story, a story about human feelings and relationships.  If more of Ellison's stories were this good, I wouldn't find his outsized reputation so silly and annoying.

It is the space faring, star-hopping, future!  Pederson scoffed at his father's religion and advice as a young man, and set out on a career of adventure as an interstellar pilot.  Now a blind old man, he lives on Mars, awaiting death--it was on Mars, the first planet he trod upon after leaving Earth, that he was happiest.  A native Martian, a religious man of wisdom, becomes his friend, comforts him in his last few years, as Pederson comes to realize how right his father was about so many things.

"In Lonely Lands" actually has some of the emotional power we are often told Ellison wields, and it isn't the product of hyperbole or lists or yelling, but some subtlety and a natural tone--this is Ellison with a human face.  Thumbs up for "In Lonely Lands."

"In Lonely Lands" is one of the stories included in the massive volume The Essential Ellison and was also reprinted in The Fantastic Universe Omnibus, a themed anthology on Mars, and the men's magazine Adam.  The touching tale of Pederson and his last days on Mars debuted in an issue of  Fantastic Universe that also printed a story by Evelyn Goldstein that we read like eight years ago and which has a cover by Virgil Finlay.  I love Virgil Finlay's black and white work, which is so distinctive and so often strange and/or beautiful, but work by him in color, like this, tends to be just average--not bad, but merely in the normal range of SF art of its period, unlike his excellent and unique black and white drawings.  Don't get me wrong, this cover is better than 95 to 99% of what you'll see on the covers of new fiction and periodicals in a Barnes and Noble today, but place it among its 1950s and 1960s peers and it is just kind of regular.            

"Eyes of Dust" (1959)

"Eyes of Dust" first saw print in an issue of Rogue that bears a charming and sophisticated cover.  Everything is so ugly nowadays, and then you look back 60 years and even the porn mags are beautiful.  What a world.

Some time ago we read the Richard Matheson story from this holiday issue of Rogue and I told you that the story's holiday-time theme was dumb--see, I don't pick out Ellison, I can be mean to anybody.  Also in the issue is an article attributed to comedian Lenny Bruce that, according to isfdb, was co-written by Ellison.  Bruce and Ellison were closely associated with Rogue, and as I write this, if you click this link to an auction site, you can read a letter written by Bruce to Ellison, and another three letters from Bruce to Frank R. Robinson, another science fiction author who, like Ellison, spent time on the Rogue editorial staff.

Speaking of beauty, the city Light on the planet Topaz is the city of beauty!  Every building, every citizen, every smell, is carefully designed, meticulously curated, to be beautiful in itself and to fit into the whole scheme of the city beautifully.  But Ordak has a mole on her face, and Broomall is blind!  These two imperfects, the last imperfects on the planet, are essentially pariahs, and marry each other and set up house out in the countryside in a well-appointed suburban domicile; Ordak even commutes into the city to work a job in the scent factory (she wears her hair so it covers her mole.)

Ordak and Broomall secretly give birth to a son who is deformed; in particular, his eyes are strange and hideous--Ellison tells us they are like dust and like the grey of storm clouds and decaying bodies.  Son has psychic powers that allow him to see visions and I guess see beyond the walls of his little secret room in the basement.  He is twenty when in a freak accident an aircraft crashes into their home, killing  his parents and destroying the ground floor and much of the basement but sparing the psychic son's secret room.  The rescue squad is horrified when they discover the ugly secret room, still intact under the rubble, and the ugly young man who occupies it.  

The psyker can detect how disgusting the three handsome rescue workers find him, so he kills them.  Ellison describes this encounter in oblique poetical terms, so it is not quite clear if the handsome rescue squaddies hate the psyker and so he kills them or if he hates them and so he kills them or both.  And it is not clear if the son of Ordak and Broomall beats these guys up with his fists or uses psychic powers on them.  

Even though he could outfight three healthy adult men, the psyker is captured by the authorities without much ado.  They burn him at the stake and then all on Topaz is beautiful, but the sound of the burning psyker's screams and the grey of his eyes will continue to haunt the people of Topaz and the city of Light, or so Ellison tells us.

This story is OK; it is certainly in the "acceptable" range.  "Eyes of Dust" was included in I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream.

Left: German       Right: Croatian (I think)

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My last blog post may have given the impression that I am on a jihad against Ellison, but I just try to judge each individual story on its merits, and all three of today's stories are successful, and I am happy to report this fact.  I think there are like a half dozen more stories in this collection I have not read yet, and I am hoping they will all be as palatable as today's selection.