Stories by Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Kate Wilhelm from Orbit 8 (1970)

Let's finish up 1970's Orbit 8 with stories by authors beloved by the critics, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Kate Wilhelm.  Four years ago Joachim Boaz wrote about Orbit 8; feel free to click the link and check out what he had to say and then come back to see if Joachim and I are on the same page or at loggerheads when it comes to these three artifacts of the cutting edge of the SF world that prevailed before we were born.

"A Method Bit in 'B'" by Gene Wolfe

I purchased Orbit 8 in our nation's capital back in February largely because it contains a Gene Wolfe story that appears to be unavailable elsewhere.  Like a lot of people I think Wolfe is the best writer SF has produced, and that everything he does is worth grappling with.

Well, even Homer sometimes nods, and I have to admit I am disappointed in "A Method Bit in 'B'," a gimmicky sort of joke story of four and a half pages.  Our narrator is a policeman in a foggy rural part of Britain where there are moors and a crime-plagued manor house.  He realizes he is not a real person but stuck in a series of cliche-ridden B movies.  Acceptable filler of The Twilight Zone species.

Joachim actually really liked the story, giving it four and a quarter stars out of five and calling it "delightful."  You are going to have to get yourself a copy of Orbit 8 and make up your own mind! 

"Interurban Queen" by R. A. Lafferty

This is a clever tongue-in-cheek utopian story, a glimpse at an alternate universe in which the automobile has been outlawed and America is covered in railways.  It starts with theory--a dude with a big inheritance in 1907 has to decide whether to invest in rubber (for car tires) or in trains that will connect small cities, and he consults the experts, who tell him that the automobile will turn America into a living hell by fostering the development of dense cities and suburban sprawl and by turning everybody into an arrogant jerk:

"The kindest man in the world assumes an incredible arrogance when he drives an automobile...it will engender absolute selfishness in mankind...it will breed violence...it will mark the end of the family...it will breed rootlessness and immorality...." 

After the nightmare world of an America on wheels is described by these naysayers, we witness the edenic America in which poverty has been conquered and everyone has access to beautiful countryside generated by ubiquitous mass transit in the form of trollies.

"We are all one neighborhood, we are all one family!  We live in love and compassion, with few rich and few poor, and arrogance and hate have all gone out from us.  We are the people with roots, and with trolleys.  We are one with our earth."    

This utopia has a dark side: in hiding, all across America, toil men who love cars, men with names like "Mad Man Gudge," who illegally construct automobiles by hand and at night drive these noisy contraptions around.  The government is too soft on these outlaws, so ordinary citizens snatch up their rifles and jump off their trolleys and hunt down the drivers and lynch them.

With its over-the-top rhetoric and concluding scenes of idyllic life and extreme violence, "Interurban Queen" succeeds in being both a genuinely amusing parody of utopian and dystopian fiction and a thought-provoking piece that leads the reader to wonder about the effects of such technologies as the automobile and the locomotive on society and the individual.  Good!

(Joachim and I agree on the quality of this one.)

"Interurban Queen" is widely available, later appearing in the strange anthology known as Survival Printout, a copy of which I purchased in my Ohio days, in the Lafferty collections Ringing Changes and Lafferty in Orbit, and a bunch of other places.

"The Encounter" by Kate Wilhelm

I've been avoiding Wilhelm, Orbit editor Damon Knight's wife, because I wasn't crazy about her 1967 novel The Killer Thing, a tendentious retelling of Frankenstein that denounced strip mining and, in a cheap deus ex machina ending, advocated the human race being conquered by aliens.  But today I'm giving Wilhelm another look.  "The Encounter," the blurbs on the back of the book tell us, is a "boy-meets-girl" story in which we can expect "real horror."  Let's see what this Nebula-nominated twenty-four-page tale is all about.

Randy Crane, an insurance salesman riding a bus in a late night snowstorm, gets marooned in a cold bus station, all alone with a woman illustrator.  Through flashbacks we learn he is a failed writer with an unhappy marriage; he suspects his wife Mary Louise of cheating on him and even of trying to murder him on the ski slopes via a bogus accident.  Mary Louise claims he is a phony who is always putting on masks and who has hidden his real personality deep inside, and, in fact, Randy has seen head shrinkers who have told him he is "schizoid" and "had a nearly split personality."  These flashbacks get more and more shocking as we learn about Randy's service in the Korean War and that his wife, perhaps at his insistence, had an abortion.

In between these flashbacks we observe as Randy and the nameless illustrator try to get the furnace of the bus station to work as the place becomes increasingly, dangerously, cold.  In the start of her story Wilhelm piles on the long descriptions of everybody's clothes and the landscape and so on, making everything very clear, but in the end of "The Encounter" things get somewhat mysterious and confusing.  It briefly appears that the illustrator may not really exist, may merely be a figment of Randy's imagination, and/or that Randy strangles her, but then these suggestions are supplanted by the still more radical possibilities: that the illustrator is some kind of sorceress who absorbs Randy and thereby becomes a more skilled artist, and/or that Randy had a male half and a female half who have been struggling against each other for years, and tonight at the bus station the female half has finally triumphed.  Weird (almost Lovecraftian, really) elements of a flashback to Korea that feature a "chill" that originated  "in the farthest blackest vacuum of space" and a woman who appeared "out of nowhere" during a life or death situation in subzero temperatures hint at the possibility that an alien life form or a witch somehow entered Randy during his war service and that the current snowstorm (and the weakening of Randy's psyche due to his horrible relationship with Mary Louise?) has given the alien invader an opportunity to finally take over Randy or leave his body and destroy him. Whatever the case, when the bus station staff and bus passengers return to the station in the morning only the illustrator is there and she tells them it is her birthday.

In a lot of ways "The Encounter" feels like a conventional mainstream story full of pop psychology with some added feminist overtones; e. g., Randy doesn't really see the illustrator woman--he can't remember what she looks like the way he can remember what his male clients look like; Randy thinks women are manipulative and slutty and to blame for his failed career as a writer; Randy commits and/or hallucinates about violence against women. Wilhelm employs fancy literary techniques, using plenty of symbolism and metaphors.  She links the door to the station through which dangerous cold air comes to the "door" that seals off part of Randy's psyche, and that stream of cold air to the passage of the immaterial alien through Earth's atmosphere.  She also plays with the idea that Randy and the illustrator are failed creators; Randy wanted to be a creative writer and failed, Mary Louise's abortion means he failed to become a father (creator of a child), and during the brief moment we think the illustrator is a hallucination, Randy suggests that by conjuring her up, he has finally successfully created something.  The illustrator, early in the story, laments that she is not a true artist, but after having eliminated Randy she brags that she really is an artist.  (Another theme of the story seems to be woman as parasite.)

The end of the story, in which the alien parasite business is revealed and Randy vanishes, brings the story firmly into the SF realm, and I also suspect all the detailed description of Randy and the illustrator's efforts to get the furnace to work is an homage to or parody of those hard SF stories in which astronauts and scientists struggle to jury rig rocket engines or atomic reactors or whatever.

There is a lot going on in "The Encounter" and the story shows a lot of ambition, but I think it has a real problem.  The fact that Randy really has vanished by the morning undercuts all that Freudian and feminist stuff; if Wilhelm had had Randy kill the illustrator instead of vice versa, she would have left open the possibility that either the supernatural/SF stuff or the Freudian/feminist stuff was real, leaving the reader to wonder if Randy had really been attacked by and fought off an alien or if he was just a sexist agent of the patriarchy suffering delusions due to war-induced PTSD and the rape culture of our bourgeois society.  But since it is the illustrator who survives and Randy who disappears we have to assume Randy really was the victim of strange alien forces and that his psychological issues and politically incorrect behavior were a reflection of this alien invasion and not shortcomings of the male sex and our capitalist civilization.  So all that stuff about sexism and psychoanalysis is just a pile of unnecessary red herrings.

Joachim liked this one more than I did, rating it "Very Good."  He argues that the SF elements are of secondary importance, I guess thinking what makes the story is all the feminist and psychological components.  I think that because Randy actually dies/vanishes that we can't compartmentalize away or minimize the SF elements--they aren't window dressing but at the indispensable core of the story-- but that those SF elements undermine all the feminist and psychological elements, so I'm only grading this one fair, though recognizing all the effort and technique put into it.

"The Encounter" was included in Nebula Award Stories 7 and is one of the three stories by his wife that Knight chose to include in Best Stories from Orbit, Volumes 1 to 10; the story also appears in the Wilhelm collection Somerset Dreams and Other Fictions, and was translated into French, German and Polish. 

**********

The Lafferty is solid, what I would have expected from him, while the Wolfe feels like a trifle and the Wilhelm is an elaborate construction with a near-fatal flaw.

As a whole I think Orbit 8 is a big success, well worth my time and 50 cents.