2015 stories by Gene Wolfe, Cecilia Holland and Barry Malzberg

In 2015 Baen Books published Onward, Drake!, a tribute to David Drake of Hammer's Slammers fame edited by Mark L. Van Name.  Among the twenty all-new tales and essays in the volume are stories by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and Barry N. Malzberg, as well as one by Cecelia Holland, whose novel Floating Worlds I recently picked up.  Always interested in Wolfe and Malzberg's work, and curious to get a taste of what Holland is all about, I obtained a hardcover copy of Onward, Drake! via interlibrary loan to read those three stories.

(Nota bene: You can actually read Wolfe's "Incubator" and Holland's "SUM" for free at the Baen website.)

"Incubator" by Gene Wolfe

Each story in this book has an afterword in which the author talks about his relationship with David Drake.  Wolfe points out that he, Drake, and Joe Haldeman are perhaps the only speculative fiction writers to have been under enemy fire in wartime.  Wolfe also says, that, while SF strives to present worlds that are more or less plausible, that "The future will not be plausible.  It never is.  Thus, the story you have just read."

"Incubator," less than four pages long, is directly and indirectly about plausibility, about to what extent we can believe what we read and hear and see.  Set in a future in which people have apparently transcended traditional biological conventions (there are androids, "shemales" and "woe men" and some of the characters seem to have had three biological parents), all the characters express doubts about specific knowledge, and one dismisses even the possibility of knowledge.  "No one can see reality.  The mind processes a pattern of light reported by the optic nerves.  The mind interprets that."

As for plot, I guess a person goes to a remote building in response to a summons; at this place she is shown a valuable , "The Egg," which is said to contain "all the old humankind."  The sight of it causes her to flee.  In keeping with the story's theme, it is difficult to tell precisely what is going on.  (It is hinted that this egg is cracking and whatever is inside it will soon be unleashed...maybe 100% all natural men and women who will threaten this future of androids and shemales?)

Deliberately inscrutable, I guess a demonstration of the adage "the past is another country" as well as a discussion of the possibility of true knowledge.

"SUM" by Cecilia Holland

Holland's story is almost seven pages long and, to my surprise, touches on some of the same epistemological issues that Wolfe addressed in his story--it starts with two characters arguing over the possibility that their lives may just be illusions or hallucinations, that instead of being soldiers in the Dutch army searching for Spanish spies for Prince Maurice, they might simply be dead or insane.

The narrator, an officer in charge of five men, enters a house to hunt for the Spanish "cloaked investigators" but triggers an explosive booby trap and ends up buried alive under the wreckage of the house.  Most of the text concerns his efforts to dig himself out of the wreckage.  Holland includes references to Ovid and Nicole Oresme (Drake is a Latinist and an Ovid aficionado) and clues in the text pile up until even an uneducated goofball like myself can figure out by the end that the narrator is in fact Rene Descrates, the famed philosopher.

This is a competent thriller type of story; the literary and philosophical content providing an additional layer of interest and fun.

"Swimming from Joe" by Barry Malzberg

I've never seen Spalding Grey's Swimming to Cambodia or the film The Killing Fields so I am probably missing elements of Malzberg's nine-chapter story here.  (Those nine chapters take up only three pages, so I can't be missing too much, I guess.)

The protagonist of this story is a guy named Hammer who was serving with the U.S. military in Korea in 1954 when Marilyn Monroe visited the American troops there and became obsessed with the actress.  Today, in 1969, he is serving in Vietnam and imagines he sees a huge balloon of Monroe floating over the "killing fields."  Malzberg compares Monroe, who was "killed by Hollywood," to Hammer's comrades ("the Slammers") killed by "the War."  (Malzberg loves the metaphorical construction in which institutions or abstract entities kill people--in his 1980 essay "Mark Clifton: 1906-1963" he says that "the death certificates of all three [Clifton, Henry Kuttner and Cyril Kornbluth] should have listed science fiction under cause of death.")  More interestingly, Malzberg/Hammer suggest that Monroe's death made her immortal, and that the memory of her is what is keeping Hammer alive "in country."

In the afterword to "Swimming from Joe" Malzberg tells the interesting story of how he first came into contact with Drake--Drake wanted to send a fan letter to Raymond E. Banks and Malzberg's former employers at the Scott Meredith Agency directed Drake to Malzberg.  The two writers became friends--Malzberg says "He may be the closest friend I have."  Malzberg also reminds us that he served in the Army briefly stateside, and plugs "Final War," one of his most famous stories.

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Of these three stories the Holland is the most conventional and the most entertaining--it has a plot you can follow, dramatic tension and jokes, and a puzzle for you to figure out, the kind of stuff most people who read fiction are looking for.  "SUM" has made me think Floating Worlds will be a good read.  The Wolfe and Malzberg stories are sort of what we expect from those less conventional writers, though I think "Incubator" is less satisfying than most Wolfe stories, while "Swimming from Joe" is sort of average for Malzberg.

More short stories in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log, but we'll be returning to the mid-20th century for them.