Five more stories from Bob Shaw's 1973 collection, Tomorrow Lies in Ambush

German edition, which apparently includes
fewer stories than the US and UK printings

In our second episode on the US edition of 1973's Tomorrow Lies in Ambush we look at five more science fiction stories from the late '60s and early '70s by Bob Shaw, whose novels Orbitsville, Night Walk, Fire Pattern and One Million Tomorrows I have enjoyed.  We are reading the stories in the order in which they appear in the book, not chronological order.

"What Time Do You Call This?" (1971)

"What Time Do You Call This?" made its debut in Amazing, in the same issue as the conclusion of the serialized version of Robert Silverberg's The Second Trip, which I consider one of the best of Silverberg's novels.  (Check out Joachim Boaz's blog post on The Second Trip.)  In 1971 Amazing was being edited by Ted White.  For years now I have been recommending to people White's story about his friend Harlan Ellison, "The Bet," and with Ellison's recent death White has produced another such memoir of his friend, available at the Falls Church News-Press website.  (The Falls Church News-Press is, it appears, a tiny free newspaper based in Northern Virginia, but this essay of White's deserves a wide audience--entertaining and insightful, I recommend it to all those interested in 20th-century SF and one of its most colorful and controversial characters.)

OK, back to Shaw.  "What Time Do You Call This?" is a humor story and its first line is a masturbation joke.  But its real theme and inspiration is not self abuse but that genre of SF story about alternate time streams in which characters hop from one time stream to another that includes Richard C. Meredith's At the Narrow Passage and Sam Merwin's House of Many Worlds and a multitude of others.  In this seven-page piece a scientist from another time stream appears in the apartment of a criminal.  After the mouthy scientist explains how his dimension hopping device (a belt) operates, the crook steals it.  This creep robs a bank, and when confronted by an armed guard he activates the belt.  To his dismay he reappears in a very similar time stream, right next to this dimension's version of himself and the armed guard, who captures both of the thieves--the media and the authorities suppose that these two bandits must be identical twins.

Acceptable filler.  "What Time Do You Call This?" would be reprinted in a German anthology with a fun cover illustration depicting a SF fan and his collection of magazines and tchotchkes, including a charming therapod (and a Hugo for best fanzine!)         

It is a lot of fun looking through these old magazines.  The September 1971 issue of Amazing also includes a letter by Bob Shaw, in which Shaw talks a little about his relationship with Damon Knight and responds to charges in a letter from a David Stever appearing in the March issue that his novel One Million Tomorrows was based on C. C. MacApp's 1968 story "When the Subbs Go" and J. T. McIntosh's 1965 story "The Man Who Killed Immortals."   

.

"Communication" (1970)

This one appeared in Ted White's Fantastic.  "Communication" is about Riley, the worst computer salesman in Canada; in fact, he is in the running for worst computer salesman in the world!  After two years of total failure, out of the blue one Friday evening Parr, a man purporting to be a scientist (a sociologist no less--that's the worst kind of scientist!), comes to Riley's home to buy a computer--with cash!  (We are talking about a computer that costs $60,000 here!)  Parr wants it to keep a record of personal data and current location of everybody in the town of Red Deer, pop. 200,000*, and he has come to Riley's office, a lonely one-man operation, in order to keep public knowledge of his research project a secret ("you know, uncertainty principle," he explains.)

Riley deposits the cash in the company account and hands over the computer, but then on the weekend decides to play detective.  He figures out Parr's home address and drives up to Red Deer to snoop on him.  It turns out Parr is a con man, a bogus seer who conducts seances.  He plans to use the computer database of info about Red Deer's citizens to help him fool gullible people into thinking he has the power to communicate with the dead.  (By typing a client's name on a hidden keyboard he can instantly learn such data as the names of dead relatives and their occupations--Parr has hooked up his crystal ball to the computer's printout.)  The lame twist ending of the story comes when it turns out that, while Parr may be a fake, the dead really can communicate with the living, and ghosts appear.  Nonsensically, these ghosts want to use Parr's database to learn how things are going for their living relatives.  (If they were able to learn about Parr from "the other side," why can't they also learn about their own relatives?)  Parr is afraid of the ghosts, opening up an opportunity for Riley to work with them and start a lucrative career as a high tech "spiritualist." 

I'm guessing Shaw sets his story in Alberta to lend it an air of remoteness, but this setting also opens the door for an interesting (to me, and perhaps only me) element of the story: a passing reference to Social Credit, the notoriously incomprehensible economic theory enthusiastically adopted and promoted by expatriate American poet and crackpot Ezra Pound.  I have been trying to get a grasp of Social Credit for a while, as I have been reading the work of, and biographies and criticism of, those three leading modernists, Pound, T. S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis.  So far as I can gather, the moral basis of Social Credit is the claim that all citizens have a right to a share of the wealth that is derived from their society's cultural inheritance (by which is meant ideas and information); the political program of Social Credit is to make sure that the public has purchasing power that matches the level of production—Social Creditors think that production that is not purchased is the root cause of social problems like wars and poverty.  The Social Creditor’s policy is carefully calibrated government handouts and price controls that aim to make sure consumption equals production. Social Credit theory achieved its greatest political success in Alberta, where a Social Credit party dominated provincial politics from 1945 to 1971.  Social Credit theory is closely associated with Christianity, and in fact the Albertan Social Credit Party quickly evolved in such a way that it largely abandoned Social Credit's bewildering economic theories and became a more traditional conservative party, supportive of business and religion and hostile to socialism.  Shaw here in "Communication" exploits this fact for a joke: Riley’s boss is an active member of the Social Credit party and "has a strong Puritanical streak," and Riley foolishly makes a sex joke in his hearing.
 
Like all of the stories in this book so far, "Communication" is well put together and well-written, but the resolution of the plot is so disappointing I have to give this one a marginal thumbs down.  "Communication," after its magazine appearance, has only ever been reprinted in Shaw collections, including an Italian one.

*Wikipedia suggests that this is like double or more the real population of Red Deer, but maybe this dude is also cataloging people in the surrounding suburbs?

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" (1970)

The German edition of Tomorrow Lies in Ambush takes its title from this story, which first appeared in the anthology Science Against Man, where it was titled "Harold Wilson at the Cosmic Cocktail Party." As all you Beatles fans know, Harold Wilson was prime minister of the United Kingdom in the periods 1964-1970 and 1974-1976. 

This is one of those stories in which people's brains can be scanned and their knowledge and personalities uploaded into a computer so people can still talk to "them" (in fact, simulations of them) after they are dead. Simulating every single neuron and synapse of a human brain takes a lot of memory and computing power, so the company that provides this (very expensive) service, Biosyn, has come up with an economy of scale that can help control costs--they have one huge computer ("the tank") that stores multiple personalities, instead of a bunch of individual computers devoted to single personalities.  This has proven to be penny wise and pound foolish.  The personalities have figured out how to interact with each other, and the strong personality of a Colonel Crowley, an adventurer who administered a colony in Africa, has begun dominating the milquetoast college professor types who make up most of the simulated personalities.  Crowley has created a fantasy world of dragons and barbaric hunts in which he is the hero and all those weak-willed intellectuals are his subordinates and enemies (victims.)  The personalities, thus occupied, have stopped communicating with the outside world, defeating the whole purpose of simulating them at such great cost and putting Biosyn's business model in jeopardy.

When an African politician comes to England to talk to Colonel Crowley in hopes of persuading the adventurer to campaign for him in an upcoming election in the country which Crowley once governed, the Biosyn staff have to come up with a way to lure Crowley back into contact with meatspace.  Their solution is to convince Crowley that the real world needs him to lead the resistance against socialist space aliens who are endeavoring to take over the Earth via hypnotism (to which Crowley, as a computer sim, is immune) and a simulacrum of a relatively benign socialist, one not associated with gulags and mass murder like Stalin or Mao--Harold Wilson.

"The Cosmic Cocktail Party" has some interesting science and the characters and their dilemmas hold your attention, even if it is sort of silly and the cocktail party theme feels forced; I'm judging this one marginally good.

"The Happiest Day of Your Life" (1970)

This is one of those short shorts, and has been reprinted many times in anthologies of short shorts.  These anthologies get printed again and again all over the world, so there must be a lot of people out there who like short shorts.  (Jerry Seinfeld voice: "Who are these people?")  Personally, I am a short short skeptic.  "The Happiest Day of Your Life" was first printed in Analog.

I guess the idea that your schooldays are the happiest days of your life is a sort of truism or cliche.  The joke title of this story is a reference to the future depicted in the story, when the cognitive and economic elite will, through hypnosis, drugs and surgery, get all their education in one day!  This results in eight-year-old attorneys and executives, and heartbreak for the mother in the story, who loses the opportunity to watch her boys mature naturally--they leave in the morning acting like eight-year-olds and come back in the afternoon acting like 22-year-old professionals!  To make matters worse, while her kids have IQs over 140, hers is closer to the mean, and so she has to suffer the indignity of not being able to converse on an equal footing with her kids, who are not even teenagers yet but condescend to her, treat her like a child. 

This one works.

"Element of Chance" (1969)

This eight-page piece first appeared in Galaxy, and stars Cytheron, a member of a race with super psychic powers--he can teleport, make himself invisible, see into the infrared and ultraviolet spectra, etc.  These aliens have apparently evolved beyond having to eat or breathe as well.  Cytheron has seen his thousandth birthday, and the elders of his race want him to mature--to join the "group-mind."  Unwilling to surrender his individuality, Cytheron tries to escape the adults, teleporting from one heavenly body to another, eventually getting trapped in a quasar which is in the process of becoming a black hole.  The gravity of this body is so great no particle can escape it, so Cytheron can't teleport out of it.  The elders break him out of this predicament by causing the quasar to explode as a supernova.  Cytheron is worried that the explosion might damage any life nearby, but is assured that there are no planets with life within range of the blast wave, though the wave will cause one planet that will eventually host intelligent life to have some unusually heavy elements.  This planet, the clues indicate to us readers, is Earth, and those heavy elements will be gold and uranium.  The weak joke of the story is that the wise aliens feel there is no reason to believe that the presence of gold and uranium will have any effect on the development of intelligent beings.

The twist ending of "Element of Chance" is lame, and the story is weighed down by all kinds of lyrical, metaphorical, descriptions of landscapes, "amethyst rain," amethyst snow, a horizon of "shattered silver daggers," and so on, stuff that numbed my poor mind instead of stimulating it.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.  Since its debut it has appeared in the French edition of Galaxy and Shaw collections, including Cosmic Kaleidoscope.

*********

I had to give two of these stories a down vote, but the others are successful or at least acceptable.  Hopefully the final four stories in Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, which we will dissect in our next episode, will blow us away.