Night Screams by Bill Pronzini and Barry N. Malzberg

What now?  What did the forces want her to do next?  Leave the house, try to get away in the darkness?  No.  The murderer was out there, watching, waiting; he would see her if she tried to leave, and she couldn't outrun a man through the snow.  Hide?  No.  There wasn't anywhere to hide that she wouldn't be found.

1981 paperback edition

A year or so ago, I guess, I spent four dollars on a 1979 Playboy Press hardcover copy of the novel Night Screams by critically acclaimed mystery writer Bill Pronzini and our hero Barry N. Malzberg.  The time has come to read it!  I'll be reading my physical copy, the jacket of which is severely damaged, though the actual book itself seems to be in good shape; an image of a noose is inscribed on the blue front cover, which is kind of fun.  You can find your own copy of the novel on e-bay for less than ten bucks if you aren't picky, or read a scan available as I write this at the internet archive.

Before we dig into this 260 or so page thriller, here are links to my blogposts about other Pronzini/Malzberg collabs.

The Running of the Beasts

"Fascination"

"Inaugural"

"The Last One Left"

"Night Rider"

"Matter of Survival"

"Another Burnt-Out Case"

"On Account of Darkness"    

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Sad to say, I am pretty down on Night Screams.  We look into a book like this for sex and violence and fear, first and foremost, and very few of the pages actually feature murders, fights, or titillating sex, or actually generate any emotion in the reader.  There are a lot of characters, and none are particularly interesting or likable, I guess so that we don't feel bad when they are killed or revealed to be the killer.  The characters also don't act in a fashion that feels very believable; they are cartoonish, but unfortunately not funny.

The writing of Night Screams is bland and lacks personality, with lots of what I would consider filler passages about scenery that, I admit, are meant to create an atmosphere of isolation and unease (it's a cold snowy winter in the country and many of the characters have an aversion to cold and/or the country.)  Pronzini and Malzberg seem to be trying to appeal to the reader by exploiting in a childish fashion various cultural divides, perhaps catering to who they think will buy a book from Playboy Press, or maybe simply appealing to the prejudices of the editors at Playboy Press.  Basically, on one side we've got hip with-it young urban types who accept the validity of psychic powers with the casualness that you and I accept the validity of electricity, and on the other bigoted rural oldsters who think the paranormal is either bunk or the work of the devil.  Many of the main characters of Night Screams have psychic powers, but their powers rarely actually help them accomplish anything, though the inclusion of premonitions and precognition gives Pronzini and Malzberg a chance to introduce the theme of free will vs determinism; unfortunately the repeated invocations of this theme only serve to strip agency from the characters, who, upon seeing some future, are compelled to make that future come true.  Again and again we are told the psychic characters' choices are circumscribed by these vaguely defined "forces."

As for the plot, it is normal slasher/giallo/Ten Little You Know Whats stuff--we have a bunch of characters who are getting killed one by one and the detective has to figure out which character is the killer while he enjoys a romance with the most attractive and most normal of the cast of suspects/potential victims.  Many scenes feel like dead ends as the characters try one method or another to gather info and come up empty.  I find these ultimately sterile scenes annoying, but I guess such scenes are the norm for detective fiction.

So, thumbs down for Night Screams, even if Robert Bloch [claims to have] liked it.  Despite my serious misgivings, the novel was reprinted in paperback in 1981, by our French friends in 1989, and here in America in 2011--hilariously, the woman on the almost indecipherable cover of the 2011 edition (is that a hand or a snowdrift in the lower half of the cover?) seems to have facial piercings.  

Obviously I am going to blame Pronzini for the weakness of this novel, not my spirit animal Barry N. Malzberg, even though my academic experience has taught me to expect that the second, third or fourth author of a publication probably did more actual work on the text than the top name on the list.  After all, Night Screams is structured and presented as a mainstream detective story with a bunch of suspects and victims and a detective who bangs the top suspect slash potential victim, plus a lot of mainstream pseudo literary gunk in which people look out at the snow; Night Screams does not feel like a science fiction novel or like the typical Malzberg novel which is a series of surreal events that may or may not be the delusions of a madman who is either an astronaut or has some mundane life, spiced up with crazy jokes that reflect the narrator's or the protagonist's insanity.  But we can see Malzbergian elements in Night Screams.  Malzberg protagonists are often self-deluded and/or monomaniacal to the point of insanity, and one of the story's characters, Neal, kind of fits that bill.  Malzbergian protagonists also generally suffer sexual dysfunction, and while our main characters, Brad the FBI man and Leslie the psychic landscape painter, are sexual athletes who are marvelously sexually compatible (on their first date, Brad has two orgasms and is able to maintain his erection between orgasms without having to take any time to recover, while Leslie has three orgasms and tells Brad he can pound her as hard as he likes), the second rank characters and the minor characters all seem to have problems in the bedroom.  

So, there is my sad verdict on, and my Malzberg-centric analysis of, Night Screams.  If you want a plot summary and some additional evidence that back up the various claims I make above about why Night Screams is not very good, read on below.  And remember, I am going to totally spoil the "absolutely stunning surprise ending."

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Part One, nine pages, introduces us to a serial killer as he sneaks into the house of a female flutist, Sandra, and strangles her with a blue velvet cord as she is practicing on the flute.  Once she is dead, he gets another, different piece of rope and hangs up the dead woman with a noose.  It is implied that the murderer is periodically taken over by some supernatural force, that this being or whatever it is drives the killer to commit these foul deeds by giving him premonitory visions of the murder he has to commit--should he not make these visions come true, he will himself die!  In the kill scene, Pronzini and Malzberg focus on the sound of the victim's screams and on the smell of her feces as her bowels relax upon death.  Yuck!

Part One also introduces Leslie Abbot, a woman landscape painter.  She has a vision of the murder of the flutist that includes the sound of the screams and the stink of the feces.  And another vision--of the murderer approaching her own house!

Part Two is the meat of Night Screams, like 240 pages. 

Leslie the painter is a member of a little group of people with psychic powers.  Recently they numbered seven, but today only five remain, as Sandra the flutist was one of their group, as well as a man killed a month earlier, Tony.  Pronzini and Malzberg almost immediately reintroduce the theme of people being compelled to do things against their will, telling us Leslie often has the experience of doing things because "some random events or series of events seemed to be preordained by whatever forces controlled the universe."  I don't like this theme--to me a good story is about people making decisions and succeeding or falling due to the nature and extent of their own personalities and abilities, not because of some decree of fate.  I also don't like invocations of "the universe" and its decrees in modern writing--such ideas feel like a vague, toothless and bloodless substitute religion for people too educated and too hip to believe in Judaism or Christianity.  

The founder and leader of the group of psykers, Oscar, an elderly widower who edits a trade journal for pet dealers (circulation: 10,000), calls a meeting of the five survivors in Vermont, where Leslie has been living for a few months in an old church converted into an artist's studio.  Also among the psykers are skinny Jo from New York City, a chain-smoking theatrical agent who calls people "darling" and "dear;" overweight failed actress Gloria of upstate New York, where she manages a community playhouse; and Neal of Long Island, a married accountant who hopes to use his psychic powers to become an entertainer like his hero The Amazing Kreskin.    

So here we have our core list of potential victims and likely suspects.  Having established this crew of middle-class creatives with whom writers like Pronzini and Malzberg can identify, we get our intro to the agents of the state, beneficiaries of the people's taxes, who are going to end up dealing with the case of the murdered psychics, FBI men Brad Saxon and Stan Walker.  Connecticut-based Walker is a passive by-the-book kind of guy, whom DC-based field agent Brad, the younger but senior agent, a hip urbanite who complains about Hoover, fears the Bureau is fascistic, and wears his hair long, finds annoying.  Brad believes in the ability of psychic powers to help solve crimes, and is eager to meet the assembled psykers.  As all my readers who are attorneys know, the FBI doesn't get involved in the murders of psychic flutists unless the penumbra of their psychic emanations affects interstate commerce; Brad and Stan's real mission is investigating the disappearance from DC of Morris Evers, Atomic Energy Commission administrator--Sandra was his cousin, bringing her murder into the bailiwick of the FBI men.

Having set their tale in New England in January, Pronzini and Malzberg inflict on us plenty of descriptions of snow and ice and slush, many scenes of people looking out the window at the snow and scenes of people putting on and taking off their mufflers and coats and bitching about the weather.  I guess this is supposed to add atmosphere, make things feel more oppressive, more dangerous, but these scenes sort of make the eyes glaze over.  Somewhat more successful at making the reader uneasy and generating suspense is how P & M portray New Englanders as superstitious types who think that psychic powers are witchcraft.  "The old Puritan beliefs died hard up here, if they ever died at all."  The local people all fear and hate the psykers, so we can add them to the list of suspects, I suppose.  Somebody, presumably one of the villagers, regularly makes threatening calls to Leslie, saying stuff like "We don't want your kind here."  I guess P & M are trying to win for the psychics some of the sympathy readers would feel for Jews or blacks under threat from bigots, as well as stoke the contempt for rural people felt by the city folk whom P & M assume make up their audience (Brad considers the little village where Leslie lives to have "an aura of emptiness and provincial and cultural isolation...[to be] a place on the edge of nowhere.")

Brad and Walker come to the meeting Oscar has organized and ask questions of the assembled psykers.  (The word the characters use is "clairvoyants.")  All of the clairvoyants act like weirdos or jerks with the exception of Leslie the painter.  Leslie is also the prettiest of the women and Brad immediately develops a crush on her.  So, it is Leslie whom Brad enlists to use her psychic powers to help the investigation.  The next day Brad and Leslie go to Sandra the flutist's place to see if Leslie can get any psychic insight into what happened to Sandra.  Leslie has such powerful visions that she almost collapses, but these visions don't add much to the visions she had when the murders took place.  This book is full of people with psychic powers, but these powers don't actually accomplish much until the last 20% or so of the novel.  That evening the painter and FBI agent have a date at Leslie's house, and share their love of jazz (holy crap, P & M really are aiming to please the Playboy audience with this book) and then go to bed together, where they have the best sex of their lives--after another of the menacing calls from the anti-psychic harasser comes through, of course.

In the first hundred pages of the book we get a bunch of scenes with goofball Neal and cynical jerk Jo, helping us to get to know them, but little exposure to Gloria, even though it is Gloria who is the victim in the book's second murder scene.  Leslie, asleep in bed with Brad, has a vision of the murder.  P & M arrange things so that we have reason to suspect Oscar.  Walker arrives on the scene in time to chase the killer, but the killer gets away--after all, as one of the novel's skeptics of psychic powers and a by-the-book guy with a crew cut instead of a cool hip jazz aficionado with long hair, we have to expect Walker to fail.  This chase is actually pretty exciting, probably the high point of the novel.

Brad brings Leslie to the site of Gloria's murder, but, as usual, her powers don't turn up any useful info.  The next actual bit of excitement is Leslie finding her house vandalized, all her paintings destroyed--except the painting inspired by her vision of the killer approaching her home!  Dun--dun--Dunnnn.  

Brad and Walker get the news that Evers has been found--he was killed by his homosexual lover.  Now there is no reason for the FBI to be involved in the murders of the three clairvoyants.  (Why did P & M make their protagonist an FBI man, anyway?  So he would be a city slicker that Playboy staff and readers could identify with in the way they would not identify with a county sheriff or state trooper?)  Of course Brad wants to stay on the case, and luckily a blizzard rolls in and the FBI men are stuck in Leslie's psyker-hating burg.  At the novel's halfway point, Brad assembles all 20-odd citizens of the village at the inn to interrogate them, hoping to figure out who has been telephoning and now breaking, entering and vandalizing Leslie's home.  This allows P & M to present to us for comic relief some starry eyed ex-hippies turned Jesus freaks who say stuff like "Praise Jesus" and suggest the psychics are possessed by the devil.  Of course, no clues emerge from the interrogations.  Leslie does not attend this event, even though she wants to, because "The controlling forces again, the sense of inevitability: She was here because she was supposed to be here."  Night Screams is the kind of book in which people who believe in Christ are portrayed as idiots but people who believe in psychic powers and do things because abstract ill-defined "forces" make them are considered eminently sensible.

Neal sneaks away from the big village get-together organized by the FBI because he had a vision of himself in the basement of the local antique store--the alcoholic antiques dealer is one of the most vociferous anti-psychics, a prime suspect in the harassment campaign against Leslie and, according to Neal, a prime suspect in the slayings of the clairvoyants.  Neal has been portrayed as a comic relief nerd loser, but he doesn't just break into the antique store because he is foolish--he has to do what he saw in the vision.  "You couldn't deny a precognition; you could get into trouble that way, trying to change what you were destined to do."  What is the point of psychic powers if they don't help you make decisions, to avoid trouble?  Why are the psychic powers even in this story?--I swear the plot would work just the same if they were left out, just have the villagers fear "city folk" instead of "clairvoyants."

The trip to the antiques store leads to a scene, maybe supposed to be funny, of Neal and the alcoholic antiques dealer almost coming to blows and Brad stumbling upon their confrontation and calming them down by "rocking" his revolver, which I guess is a typo for "cocking."  I hope it's not a typo for "racking."  Neal's psychic vision and the whole antique store sequence, which is pretty lengthy and includes Brad doing a top to bottom search of the antique store, contribute nothing to the plot.

Oscar has a vision of his own and runs out into the snow.  Jo follows him, only to be ambushed and murdered.  Leslie also has a vision that leads her and Brad to where Jo hangs from a noose, dead, under a covered bridge (like on the book jacket)--Oscar is still there, in a daze, too out of his wits to offer any clues.  Again we get the idea that Oscar may be to blame.  Is this just P & M trying to fool us?  Or is Oscar under the control of some other psyker, the real villain who is using Oscar merely as a tool?

As the final 50 pages of this caper begin, Brad and Leslie go to Leslie's house to have sex; Brad leaves Walker at the inn to look after Oscar and Neal.  Oscar is still out of his mind, and is so for the remainder of Part Two, but Neal has psychic visions that actually offer some value.  Neal has seen images from the past that prove the antique dealer is a fraud who sells fake antiques he makes himself and that he was the one who has been calling Leslie and who destroyed her paintings while drunk.  He wanted to get rid of the clairvoyants because he feared they would uncover his fraud.  (It is never explained why he destroyed many canvases but left one alone, the one influenced by Leslie's vision of the attack on herself--I guess we have to credit the forces of the universe for this, like so much else.)  The antiques dealer runs off and Walker chases him; left alone, Neal has a vision that sends him to Leslie's house.

After banging Leslie, Brad goes downstairs to get a sandwich and sees a figure outside.  Is it Neal?  Oscar?  Who knows?  Brad goes out into the snow to chase this mysterious character and we hear a lot about how cold it is--I thought the line "The wind-chill factor had already begun to suck body heat from him" was pretty funny, though maybe because I am the kind of person who is skeptical of "wind chill factor" and "heat index" and "real feel temp."  The mystery man ambushes Brad and knocks our hero out with some firewood.

This leaves Leslie to deal with the killer alone.  Both Leslie and the killer select weapons and tactics and strategies based on what their visions and what "the forces" permit them--they are both puppets on strings rather than agents who determine their own goals and how to pursue them, and then succeed or fail based on their decisions and abilities.  Totally lame storytelling, though I guess in keeping with Malzberg's pessimistic view of life.

The fight between Leslie and the killer is not bad, but the revelation of who the killer is is total garbage that made angry.  The person who has been killing all the psychics is a minor character I had been paying no attention to, the innkeeper's overweight wife.  (I guess we are supposed to believe her fat body looks like a man's in the distance, like when Walker chased her and when Brad saw her through the window while making a little postcoital snackerino.)  Why would a fat woman who runs an inn with her husband kill psykers?  Because she is possessed by the ghost of her dead brother, a character never mentioned in the story until page 245 of a novel the last numbered page of which is page 262.  (Maybe we are supposed to think this possession by a man gives the innkeeper's wife a masculine gait and masculine strength, at least when in kill mode, making it more believable that she can pass for a man and so successfully fight people and run away from people and lift dead bodies above her head so she can hang them from nooses.)

When she was thirteen, the innkeeper's future wife and her eight-year-old brother were playing cowboys and Indians (maybe you say "Native Americans") and she tied up her brother with a blue velvet cord and accidentally strangled him.  To make the tragic accident look like suicide, she strung her brother up with a noose.  A few years later, the brother's ghost came to inhabit his sister's body.  (This is all kind of reminding me of the Genesis masterpiece, "The Musical Box.")  Dead brother prefers living, even if he has to share a woman's body, to being dead, so when Leslie came to town, and other psykers followed, he decided to kill them because he feared they would detect his presence and send him back to the afterlife.

This little ghost plot isn't terrible but it is very frustrating that there were no clues that this fat innkeeper's wife was important to the story or had a tragic past or had masculine attributes or anything like that.  I thought a good mystery story was supposed to provide the reader an opportunity to figure out who dun it (well, at least I heard T. S. Eliot say that.)  There is no way the reader could figure out a ghost who was possessing a minor character was to blame because said ghost was never mentioned.  Come on, Pronzini!

Neal's psychic powers guide him to the unconscious Brad, whom he arouses--Neal is the only psyker in this book whose powers ever seem to actually produce.  Leslie is losing the fight and is about to die when Brad rescues her.  Instead of surrendering to Brad the ghost decides to direct his sister's body to jump out a high window--the final fight sequence takes place in the belfry; you remember Leslie's house is an old church, don't you?--to their deaths.

Part Three, three pages of text, lets us know that Brad and Leslie live happily ever after in a city apartment, that Oscar recovers his wits, and offers a joke scene in which Neal is a guest on a TV talk show where he has a vision of the host and a guest having oral sex backstage.  We never learn any more about the "forces," or Brad's or Neal's or the innkeeper's reaction to learning that a ghost was forcing the innkeeper's wife to massacre people or what happens to the alcoholic dealer of bogus antiques.  What a load of crap.

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 José 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?

**********

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.