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.

**********

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.

**********

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)

**********

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. 

Harlan Ellison: "The Silver Corridor," "Bright Eyes," and "Are You Listening?"

In my last blog post I mentioned that I own a signed paperback copy of Harlan Ellison's Alone Against Tomorrow.  Over ten years ago, at a Half Price Books location in Iowa or Ohio, I paid just two dollars for the volume, a 1979 Fifth Printing.  Let's look at the contents page and figure out which stories I haven't read yet and then read three of them.  And don't fret, I will wash the Ovaltine off my hands before I handle this holy relic.  Read along in your own copy (you got one, right?) or at the internet archive if your copy is on a high shelf or under your sleeping cat or supporting a short table leg or something.

"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" and the evil clock man story I read before I started this blog.  "The Discarded," "Deeper Than the Darkness" and "All the Sounds of Fear" I read in October 2024, "Life Hutch" in September 2024.  "The Time of the Eye" I read in 2022.  "Blind Lightning" I read in 2019.  I think maybe that is it, leaving a lot of stories in this book I haven't read yet.  Today we'll explore "The Silver Corridor," gaze into "Bright Eyes," and give a hearing to "Are You Listening?" 

"The Silver Corridor" (1956)

"The Silver Corridor" debuted in an issue of Infinity with a gorgeous Emsh chess and sex (your two favorite pastimes!) cover.  This issue also has a long Algis Budrys production I read in 2019 and stories by Robert Silverberg and Damon Knight I will probably read some day, and a good analysis by Knight of Judith Merril's very first Year's Greatest anthology. 

The Silver Corridor is the arena in which two politicians of the future choose to fight a duel.  These two guys each have devised a perfect (to their minds) system of government, and they had a huge argument over their differing constitutions in the Council.  The only solution, the only way to decide which system would rule the world, was to have this Silver Corridor duel.  In the Silver Corridor a computer that can read minds will create illusions that both men can see, and even touch and even be killed by.  Don't ask how any of this (or anything in any Harlan Ellison story) works--Harlan don't care.  The illusions will be drawn from their brains, and the illusions will more closely align with the psyche of the man with the more powerful imagination and the more determined will, and we are led to believe this will  proffer him an advantage in the conflict.  All this gobbledygook comes to absolutely nothing, however, so abandon all expectations and don't strain your noggin trying to understand anything that happens in the Silver Corridor. 

Most of Ellison's long tedious story (22 pages in my paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow) consists of descriptions of the scenarios in which the two politicians contest each other.  No matter how interesting or exciting the scenarios might be (and they are not very interesting or exciting, I fear) these scenarios would be boring because we know they are merely illusions.  And we have no reason to root for the protagonist, Marmorth, or the antagonist, Krane, because we don't know which of them has the better system of government, and we don't know a thing about their world, so we don't care if that world gets a good or bad system of government.  Ellison seems to try to make Marmorth a character who evolves, starting out scared and growing more confident as the story proceeds, but that is a pretty thin reed.

The scenarios:  M and K argue in a royal court over what to do with alien prisoners, kill them or do a prisoner exchange.  Ellison, I think, tries to make us like M more than K because K's arguments are emotional and racist while M's are complex and rational.

M and K are in an abstract world of color, each trying to spread his color.

A giant spider approaches; each man argues the merits of his theory of government, and the spider's course shifts towards the man who has less conviction in his theory.

Space warships of which each man is captain exchange broadsides.

A chess game (yes, Ellison's story is the basis of the cover of the magazine, even though his name does not appear on the cover) in which the pieces are made of sharp material that can easily inflict a cut and must be moved gingerly because some are covered in poison.  This is the best idea in the story.

What happens in these scenarios is inconclusive; as far as I could tell, neither man wins any of them decisively, and neither seems to gain any advantages or disadvantages from the outcome of any scenario which might affect the outcome of the next.  These scenarios are filler with no effect on the plot; their traditional components, things we have seen a hundred times before--chess, giant spider, space battle--are supposed to entertain us even though they float in lifeless isolation, totally bereft of context or human feeling.  People like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, and Edmond Hamilton fill their stories with these sorts of traditional elements, but in their stories those elements are entertaining because we know at least some little something about the people who confront those elements and the world in which these confrontations occur, but Ellison here seems to think we'll enjoy seeing a big spider or a space warship just because he uses the words "huge, ichor-dripping spider-thing" and "Magnificent-class destroyer" as if we are Pavlov's dogs who salivate whether there is food or not.  Ellison thinks you are a sap and a sucker. 

In the final scenario, which is set in a volcano, a "woman-thing" appears.  We are told Ellison is some genius wordsmith, but in the book version of "The Silver Corridor" I am reading he writes "She grazed into being between them."  "Grazed" seems so inappropriate I thought it might be a typo, so I looked at a scan of the ish of Infinity in which "The Silver Corridor" debuted.  There we see "She plopped into being between them," which at least makes sense, but makes you think she is fat or fluid something.

Anyway, she is not fat; she has "high breasts, trim stomach, exciting legs."  (Ellison couldn't come up with a physically descriptive adjective for the legs like he did for the breasts and stomach?  "Shapely," Harlan, did you consider "shapely?")  She also has a reptilian monster head and bat wings.  For some reason Ellison doesn't just say she has a crocodile head or a lizard head or whatever, but goes into detail about her eyes and nostrils and teeth, even though all she then does is call the men egomaniacs who are too "ensnared in themselves" and then disappear.  The men decide to collaborate, and then lava kills both of them.  That is our twist ending--two characters we know nothing about both die instead of just one of them dying.  "The Silver Corridor" is a shaggy dog story in which not only the story as a whole but each individual section is at best meaningless, and often irritating or boring.

Thumbs down!

Besides Alone Against Tomorrow, "The Silver Corridor" has been reprinted in the Ellison collection Ellison Wonderland, a collection which has appeared under the title Earthman, Go Home in the English- speaking world and Der Silberne Korridor over in Jerryland--yes, "The Silver Corridor" is the title story of the German version of the collection.  You can also find "The Silver Corridor" in the British collection All the Sounds of Fear, which is the first volume of a two-volume version of Alone Against Tomorrow.

"Bright Eyes" (1965)

One of Ellison's narrative strategies is the list.  We get one of his lists on the first page of this 14-page story.

He knew about almost everything.

The worms. The moles. The trunks of dead trees. The whites of eggs. Music. And random sounds. The sound fish make in the deep. The flares of the sun. The scratch of unbleached cloth against flesh. The hounds that roamed the tundra. The way those who have hair see it go pale and stiff with age. Clocks and what they do. Ice cream. Wax seals on parchment dedications. Grass and leaves. Metal and wood. Up and down. Here and most of there. Bright Eyes knew it all. 

Zzzzzzz....

The title creature of "Bright Eyes" is an immortal of some vaguely defined species (he has fur and feet that lack toes) who has lived a long long time in some vaguely defined building, maybe like a castle (we got "spider-thing" and "woman-thing" in "The Silver Corridor;" well, we get "castle-place" here in "Bright Eyes.")  The last of his race, Bright Eyes sees portents and must go on his vaguely comprehended final mission, so he climbs atop his steed--a giant rat--and off he goes, carrying with him his collection of skulls.   

Bright Eyes eventually realizes he has been living underground for centuries, and his compulsion to complete his final mission is leading him outside.  Outside he and his rat are attacked by feral dogs.  Ellison's description of the dogs is kind of funny:

Noses with large nostrils, as though they had had to learn to forage the land all at once, rather than from birth.

Sentences don't need to mean anything if they sound good, and if you don't think they sound good, it's on you, not on the "man of passion" who writes with "feverish intensity" as he "leads a crusade to make science fiction more pertinent to today" who penned these sentences.

Luckily Bright Eyes has powers, powers his people attained before the solar system was formed, and one is the power to cause fear in other living things, and he uses this power to drive off the dogs.  He later uses a different super power to remove the thousands of corpses that are damming up a river.  

A flock of birds flies overhead, a flock numerous enough to obscure the sun.  These birds are ill and bleed down on Bright Eyes.  This triggers a vision of one of Bright Eyes' people, a vision implanted in his mind many centuries ago, just before all his fellow furry people departed the Earth, leaving Bright Eyes the last of his kind on this planet.  I guess we are supposed to think these furries all committed suicide to give us humans room on Earth, not that they flew off to the Undying Lands or to a retirement community on Mars or something.  This guy tells Bright Eyes to take a bag of skulls and go to a certain place...which is already what Bright Eyes is doing, rendering this vision superfluous to B.E. and to us readers.  Why didn't Ellison start the story with this vision?  Ellison just makes these stories up as he goes along and just sends his first draft to the editor, doesn't he?  Ellison thinks his editors are saps and suckers.

It is implied that the human race has destroyed the world with a nuclear war, mankind's weapons not only killing everybody but causing earthquakes:

At one point he passed through a sector of trembling mountains, that heaved up great slabs of rock and hurled them away like epileptics ridding themselves of clothes. The ground trembled and burst and screamed and the very Earth went insane to tunes of destruction it had never written.

Anyway, after passing the insane mountains that are like nudist epileptics, B. E. comes to a ruined city full of dead humans and cries for the first time in his long life.  He buries the skulls and the story ends.  Just like the suicide of his race, the burying of the skulls is a futile gesture--Bright Eyes' adventure, like the adventure of Marmorth and Krane, has accomplished nothing.

"Bright Eyes" is not good, but it is better than "The Silver Corridor" because it is shorter, somewhat better structured, and its surreal visions are somewhat more interesting and original than the banal images we find in "The Silver Corridor."  (I mean the bleeding birds and the river choked with corpses, not the stripping mountains.)  We're condemning "Bright Eyes" as marginally bad, not very bad.         

"Bright Eyes" debuted in Cele Goldsmith's Fantastic, and its main berth since that day has been the collection Paingod and Other Delusions, though in 1969 it was included in the reprint magazine Strange Fantasy. 

"Are You Listening?" (1958)

"Are You Listening?" here in Alone Against Tomorrow is preceded by a one-page intro in which Ellison simultaneously channels his inner 75-year-old and his inner 13-year-old, bitching that large organizations use computers and assign people ID numbers ("they steal your name, then they go after your individuality") and bragging that he makes intentional errors on his check when he pays his phone bill because he thinks it will cost the phone company fifty bucks to trace the error (Ellison characterizes this childish behavior as "fighting back.")

"Are You Listening?" debuted in Cele Goldsmith's Amazing and, according to isfdb, has, in some editions of Ellison Wonderland and Earthman, Go Home, appeared under the title "The Forces That Crush."  "Are You Listening?" also shows up in an issue of the men's magazine Adam and in Terry Carr's anthology Into the Unknown as well as the Ellison collection The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

Of today's three stories, this is the best-written and has the best premise and theme, though perhaps that is small praise, seeing as "The Silver Corridor" has no real theme and the theme of "Bright Eyes" is so utterly banal.  "Are You Listening?" really fulfills the promise made by the subtitle of this book ("Stories of Alienation in Speculative Fiction"), it being about a middle-aged professional with a fat inattentive wife and work colleagues who barely notice him.  This guy's name is Winsocki, and Ellison makes much of the fact that this name is featured in a popular song that I, born in 1971, never heard of until today.

Anyway, Winsocki's status as a forgettable wallflower reaches its ultimate expression when his wife, his boss, people on the street, etc., can no longer see or hear him.  They can't even feel him when he touches them!  In desperation he smacks a high school girl's ass and punches people in the face, and he receives no response--his victims just keep going about their business as if nothing has happened, even if they are bleeding!  Sure, this makes no sense, but this is Harlan Ellison we are reading, and you know it's fine because you've been told so many times that Harlan Ellison is a good writer that you believe it.

For two weeks Winsockiu wanders around, stealing food, watching as his wife takes up with his boss, and knocking people over out of frustration--no matter how much he hurts people, they act like he isn't there.  Then he meets other men suffering his condition, including a college professor!  Prof and the others have accepted this new life, seeing as it is easy, there being no responsibilities.  Prof also explains what has happened to them, in the vaguest and lamest possible terms.  You see, 

"There are forces in the world today, Mr. Winsocki, that are invisibly working to make us all carbon copies of one another.  Forces that crush us into molds of each other....when these forces that crush us into one mold work enough to get us where they want us, we just--poof!--disappear to all those around us."

This doesn't make any sense, of course, but there it is.  Winsocki rejects the prof's acquiescence in his own erasure, and begins a campaign, of which this story is part, to get people's attention again.

I like the theme of the unappreciated middle-class man (as I've told you before, I love those Kinks productions like "Mr. Pleasant" and Soap Opera) and how the path-of-least-resistance prof embraces a life of ease and irresponsibility, but Ellison drops the ball in depicting and explaining the story's central phenomenon and I think the ending could have been more cathartic and/or more bleak, and certainly more exciting--I was expecting Winsocki to kill the prof, for example, an act which Ellison could have portrayed as a righteous act of justice and resistance or a sign Winsocki had been driven totally insane.

Acceptable.

**********

Can we handle three more stories by the universe's greatest scribbler?  Tune in next time to find out.

Merril-approved 1959 stories by G C Edmondson and George P Elliott

We're still doing this, looking at the list of Honorable Mentions at the back of Judith Merril's 1960 Year's Best SF anthology and reading selected stories from it.  Last time was "D"s, today is "E"s.  Only two stories today, because Merril only has three "E" recommendations, and one is Harlan Ellison's "The Abnormals," which we read in 2024 under its later title "The Discarded" in my signed paperback copy of Alone Against Tomorrow.

We're reading G. C. Edmondson's "'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" in the November 1959 ish of F&SF, which also includes part of the serialized edition of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers and Damon Knight's criticism of Algis Budrys' The Falling Torch and Merril's 1959 Year's Best SF anthology--Knight considers the question of how many stories that are published under the banner of science fiction actually are science fiction, arguing that Merril's anthology and Budrys' novel contain little or no new ideas or actual science.  Is science fiction in 1959 just mainstream lit superfluously set in the future, or just fantasy?  "Invasion of the Planet of Love" by George P. Elliott we are reading in a scan of the January '59 issue of F&SF, even though Merril cites as her source the ninth Best From F&SF anthology, because a scan of the magazine is easier to find than a scan of the book.

Feel free to read along by clicking the links in the preceding paragraph.

"'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" by G. C. Edmondson

It looks like I haven't read anything by Edmondson since 2014 when I read his "Technological Retreat," a joke story to which I gave a passing grade because I was a softy back then.  The years have made me hard, my droogs!  The title of this one, and those extra quote marks which I always find so annoying, make us expect that this too will be a joke story.  And then there is the fact that isfdb is telling me this is the second of eight or nine stories in the "Mad Friend" series.  Red flags all around!

"'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" is a pile of supposedly clever nonsense, two smart ass characters, our narrator and his "mad friend," talking about reincarnation and transmigration as they hang around a zoo, the zoo affording Edmondson the opportunity to make lame scatological jokes--we hear all about animals spitting, farting, shitting, chewing, etc.  The final joke is that the narrator's grandfather was reincarnated or transmigrated as a carrot and/or as the narrator's son so said son doesn't want to eat carrots because that would render him a cannibal.  Or something like that.  

As I was reading "'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" I found it irritating and thought it a total waste of time, but after finishing it (and it is a mere merciful four pages) I found the way Edmondson has sort of constructed and wrapped up the thing sort of intriguing, and wondered what the other seven or eight Mad Friend stories might be like, so I have to grade this thing "acceptable."   

I'm still a softy.

"'From Caribou to Carrie Nation'" was reprinted in a 1964 issue of Britain's Venture, a magazine which reprinted lots of F&SF material, and in the 1965 Edmondson collection (half of an Edmondson Ace Double) Stranger Than You Think, which collects most of the Mad Friend stories.

This Ace Double has cover illos and nine little interior illos by Jack Gaughan, so
fans of Gaughan's should try to find a copy or scan of it  

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" by George P. Elliott

This is a broad satire that tells you that the space program is a waste of time and resources, and besides would only lead to the spread of white racism, exploitive capitalism, hypocritical Christianity, and murderous imperialism.  Was this story specifically written to appeal to Judith Merril?  Thumbs down!

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" is a report produced for public consumption by one of four men on a pioneering mission to Venus.  Only one of the men (not the narrator) has a distinctive personality; that guy is an Anglican minister who carries a cross in one hand and a submachine gun in the other.  The United States is devoted to spreading war and Anglicanism to other planets, but all expeditions to Mars have failed, vanishing without a trace, so this expedition to Venus has been mounted.  (Elliott obviously chose Venus for his story because Venus is the goddess of love.)  The four men make it to the surface of Venus, but all they find is barren waste, acre after acre, plain and mountain, consisting solely of granite--no natural resources, no life.  The men detonate an atomic bomb and in the crater discover what they are looking for, valuable minerals and the entrance to a subterranean settlement inhabited by bipedal people.  The Venereans are like hippies or figures from a Ted Sturgeon story, dancing and expressing their love for each other nonstop.  They try to express their love for the Americans, but our boys gun them down  by the score, capture and torture some of them, and are disappointed that these natives don't put up a good fight, don't offer the prospect of an exciting and challenging war.

Eventually the natives combine their psychic love powers and the Americans are so overwhelmed with love that they have to leave.

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" is so "out there" (picking out that most milquetoast and moribund of sects, Anglicanism?) it seems possible it is not an attack on the United States and Christianity but a spoof of such attacks, but I think we have to assume it is sincere.  Elliott's satire of marriage, "Sandra," which I read in 2015, was a lot better, while his treatment of an African-American academic dealing with primitives, "Among the Dangs," which I read in 2024, was significantly better.  Of course, I was a softy back then.

"Invasion of the Planet of Love" was reprinted behind an ooh la la cover in the French edition of F&SF and in the aforementioned Best From F&SF anthology, plus in a 1968 Elliott collection.   

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You might say our guide Merril has led us down the garden path this time, presenting us with a trifle and serving of heavy-handed leftist slop.  (In Merril's defense, her Ellison pick is not bad.)  Hopefully we won't be similarly effed by Merril's 1959 "F"s.  Stay tuned to find out.