Joachim Boaz, SF blogger extraordinaire and generous supporter of this here blog, read Orbit 8 and wrote about each story back in 2015. Enough time has passed that my memories of his opinions are a little hazy, and I think I can read and assess these stories without being unduly influenced. After I read each story and draft my own opinion I will check out Joachim's blog post and see if we are at loggerheads or seeing oculum ad oculum.
"Horse of Air" by Gardner R. Dozois
This is a well-written and compelling piece, a strong start to the book; Knight must have been excited to get it. At least he included it in the 1975 Best from Orbit anthology.Dozois employs an interesting narrative strategy: we get an unreliable first-person narrative, interspersed with a more honest stream-of-consciousness (or unvoiced inner monologue) narrative and a third-person omniscient narrative; these latter two texts emphasize or undermine the claims in the main text. This is quite effective at presenting and distinguishing between different facets of the character, those he wants to display and those he'd rather not.
Our narrator is one of the few people left in a big city (I guess New York), trapped in a high rise apartment far above the street with a fenced in balcony like those one sees in public housing projects. The start of the story consists of the narrator looking out over the city, of descriptions of his view and his intellectual and emotional responses to what he sees. As I have told readers of this blog before, I love the kinds of descriptions of rooms and views we find in literary fiction like Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Marcel's room in Balbec, for example, and his view of the church steeples from a moving carriage) and Wyndham Lewis's Self Condemned (Rene Harding's Canadian hotel room) and Dozois really succeeds in painting an absorbing picture in the reader's mind here.
Then the back story is filled in. Our narrator, who studied at Annapolis, is a member of what he calls "the upper class" and even "the aristocracy." (This isn't really the way educated Americans talk, especially self-described "liberals" as this guy is--perhaps a hint this is all a dream or fantasy?) His class of people, in response to black crime, secluded themselves in these high-rises, and (shortsightedly) handed over political power to the managers of the high-rises. Eventually the management company sealed the high-rises' inhabitants in, "for their own good." (The plumbing is maintained and twice a week food and supplies arrive via a dumbwaiter.)
The narrator hates blacks because they "are responsible for the destruction, for the present degeneration of the world," but the third-person omniscient narration indicates that his hatred largely stems from envy--reminding me of the scene in Henry Miller's Plexus (Chapter 15) in which the narrator goes to hear W. E. B. Du Bois speak, Dozois enumerates the many ways (in the eyes of the narrator, at least) black people are better than white people; their easy sexuality, their depth of feeling, their exuberant and happy culture, their rebellion, all a contrast to the square and bland and boring and obedient ways of whites.
In the final third of the story we are given an increasing number of clues that suggest that some, maybe all, of this SF stuff is the delusion or dream or fantasy of an ordinary man, maybe a businessman, who is stressed out by the pressures of city life in the late '60s/early '70s and a failed relationship with a woman.
"Horse of Air" is quite good, like a Malzberg story that has been carefully polished over a number of drafts instead of being slapped together at high speed as Malzberg's work so often appears to have been. Joachim also liked it, saying it is the best story in the book. Whoa, does this mean I should quit now? "Horse of Air" would reappear not only in The Best of Orbit but the Dozois collection The Visible Man and the seventh Nebula anthology, it having been nominated.
"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison
I tackled this one, the second story in Orbit 8, back in 2016 when I read Donald A. Wollheim's 1972 edition of World's Best SF.
"Rite of Spring" by Avram Davidson
This is a trifling little vignette (less than seven pages of text) from some weird (post-apocalyptic?) future or alternate world. I am guessing it is an acknowledgement and demonstration of the fact that customs and social arrangements are arbitrary and silly. Davidson's story is full of hard-to-decipher allusions and hints about the alien milieu it vaguely depicts; maybe it is supposed to recreate in the reader the feeling of spending the briefest moment in a foreign culture or being exposed to only a few snatches of information about a foreign civilization, to give us the sense that all the apparently bizarre things these people are doing have deep roots and layers of meaning it would take a lifetime to fully understand. Maybe Davidson is trying to put us in the shoes of an explorer or traveler confronted by alienness, like an 18th-century European who found himself briefly among people in China or Persia or sub-Saharan Africa, or an Eskimo or Yanomamo who suddenly found himself in Victorian London or the Paris of the Second Empire.
"Rite of Spring" takes place on a farm, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson. Living there as well are a young man, Roger, a young woman, Betty, and a spectacularly obese woman, Mrs. Machick. The action described in this deliberately opaque story suggests that the Robinsons are responsible for feeding the (apparently idle) Machick, and training young people like Roger and Betty in "the old ways." It is suggested that both Betty and Roger are only the latest in a series of young people who are employed and tutored by the Robinsons; Betty does domestic chores and Roger does farm work, chopping wood and the like. Betty is from the city, where, the characters say, it is difficult to teach young people the old customs. (These 1970s stories are down on city life; I guess I am lucky I moved to the Big Apple after it had been tamed in the mid-1990s.) Roger wants to have sex with Betty, but he is told to wait until the time is right. The arrival of the first robin of spring is the signal that the right time has arrived; Roger catches the bird, it is decapitated and its blood drunk, and then Roger roughly takes Betty, who initially puts up some resistance.
Gimmicky, a story that is technically competent but has no human feeling or real intellectual content. Joachim liked it even less than I do, giving it only one out of five possible stars. I am willing to say it is an acceptable experiment.
"The Bystander" by Thom Lee Wharton
Who is Thom Lee Wharton? Well, this is his only story listed at isfdb, and that is all I know."The Bystander" feels like what I guess the mainstream detective novels I never read are like, if that makes any sense. A retired dentist, in his forties, is now owner/manager of a bar in New Jersey (or as I call it, the greatest state in the union.) An FBI investigator comes by to talk to him about his relationship with his business partner, "Joe the Nuts." The dentist drives the flatfoot to the shore in his antique car (a 1934 Packard) where they talk in an old Coast Guard bunker from World War Two. The bar owner describes how, like the guy in that Kinks song, he was a success as a bourgeois professional but was not satisfied and became a drunk. After hitting bottom he lucked into owning a bar; the FBI man and we readers hear all about his struggles to make the bar a success. And the bar is a success, because the Mafia supplies the food and entertainment.
In the story's last pages we learn that this interview was the first move in a war between the federal government and the Mafia in which many are killed. The dentist is not killed however, and it is implied that he is somehow pulling the strings behind the scenes, that he caused this war because he is bitter that his wife and child died of a disease or something and he sees the Mafia and the government as equally bad. Or something. I don't get it.
This story has no SF content and as a mainstream crime story is a total waste of time. Wharton makes no discernible effort to back up his apparent argument that the government is a racket just like the mob and is equally delinquent in any effort to portray the psychological pressures of a man broken by the loss of his family or dissatisfied with middle class suburban life. I am very open to the argument that the government sucks and that middle class life is a tragedy, but the author offers only the tiniest of crumbs to dramatize these themes. Instead we get twenty pages of pointless details, the literary equivalent of white noise. Bad! Joachim gives it one out of five stars and even admits he couldn't finish it!
Inexplicably, Knight not only included "The Bystander" here in Orbit 8, but in The Best from Orbit! Damon, what are you doing? Was Thom Lee Wharton the pen name of a loan shark?
"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty
I recommended this one, the fifth story in Orbit 8, with some enthusiasm back in 2016 when I read it in Wollheim's 1972 World's Best SF.
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We'll get back to this 1970 anthology, but first we'll take a little trip to the 1920s and to the Moon with Edgar Rice Burroughs.
I have some good memories of the ORBIT series although I seem to remember the early volumes being better than the later ones.
ReplyDeleteGlad you enjoyed Horse of Air. I'm pretty sure I included it among the best short stories I read that year. As you've already identified by the reviews of the first few stories, this is an incredibly varied (in quality and content) collection! And, as with you, I'm utterly mystified by the inclusion and purpose of "The Bystander."
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