Quark/4: Vonda N. McIntyre and Marek Obtulowicz

Let's finish up our examination of Quark/4, the final installment of the 1970-71 anthology series edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker that Donald Wollheim (in The 1972 Annual World's Best SF) called "probably the farthest out of the 'New Wave' original collections."  After Helen Adam and Gail Madonia's pieces, which I dealt with in our last episode, comes Thomas M. Disch's "Bodies," which would later be included in 334.  I wrote about 334 back in 2014 and won't address "Bodies" here.  After "Bodies" is a 24-line poem by Marilyn Hacker, "Nightsong," that I don't have anything to say about (well, I'll say it is better than Marco Cacchioni's poem in this book.)  Then comes Vonda McIntyre's "Cages."

"Cages" by Vonda N. McIntyre

Vonda McIntyre is a big success, with a Hugo and multiple Nebulas.  I think I've read four stories by McIntyre, "Only at Night," "The Galactic Clock," "Recourse, Inc.," and "Elfleda," liking two, disliking one, and finding one merely adequate.  According to isfdb, "Cages," interestingly enough, has never been reprinted, so I get to tell all you McIntyre fans that you have to surf over to ebay to buy yourself a copy of Quark/4.

Sprinkled throughout Quark/4 are
thirteen drawings by Olivier Olivier;
all of them are variations on this
elephant and robed men conceit

"Cages" is like nine pages long, and McIntyre writes it in straightforward direct sentences that focus on the surface of events and provide only glimpses at what is really going on, but those glimpses eventually add up to a full picture.  The full picture: A psychologist doing one of those nature vs nurture experiments has isolated two boys for sixteen years; they have been raised by a computer so that their experiences have been identical--this computer even has the ability to control their minds so that they do identical things, day after day.  The result: even though they have different genetic heritages, they are like the most indistinguishable of twins, with similar bodies, attitudes, beliefs, etc.  On the day the story depicts, the sixteen-year-old boys are set free from isolation, and for the first time meet other human beings, including the psychologist, who hopes they will see him as their father, though he is not their biological father--besides resolving the nature/nurture debate, the researcher also seems to have been trying to create supermen who would be his family and would respect his authority.  But the boys miss the computer, whom they have come to love as if it were their mother, and they do not react well to exposure to the real world--in fact, they kill the psychologist and burn down his research facility.

After I read this story the first time I was going to judge it just OK, but I kept thinking about it and on a second read liked it much more--the first time I read it I expended all my energy figuring out the basic background and plot, and during my second read, as I already knew the framework of the thing, I could focus more on the details and the more emotional elements.  McIntyre does a good job of describing the reactions to the real world of two kids raised in a strictly controlled and isolated environment (e. g., everything IRL smells bad and looks chaotic to them) and the science stuff McIntyre addresses is interesting, even if I don't find her nurture over nature attitude very convincing.  A thumbs up for "Cages,"--McIntyre fans, and those interested in SF treatments of the nature vs nurture issue, should seek it out.

"A Man of Letters" by Malek Obtulowicz

Like so many of the pieces in Quark/4, "A Man of Letters" appeared here and nowhere else.  Obtulowicz has six stories listed at isfdb, and all of them appeared in issues of Quark or in one or another of New Worlds's incarnations (Obtulowicz's first two stories appeared in 1969 issues of the magazine, which ceased regular publication in the 1970s but lived on as a paperback quarterly put together by many people who had worked on the magazine, including Michael Moorcock, Charles Platt and Langdon Jones--Obtulowicz's last two stories were printed in 1972 and 1973 in that quarterly book version of New Worlds.)

The two line bio of Obtulowicz in Quark/4 suggests that in 1971 he was an aspiring novelist living in Canada.  A brief internet search turned up nothing about Obtulowicz's career, though there is a gentleman by the name of Malek Obtulowicz who produces amateur videos of himself discussing Polish politics...at least that is what I think he is talking about.
   

"A Man of Letters" is like a dozen pages, and as the title should have led us to expect, it is written in the epistolary form.  The writer is an old man, an architect, and the surreal letters suggest he is going insane and/or is the prisoner of some kind of tyrannical government or maybe a mental institution.  His cell, if that is what it is, is outfitted like an apartment, and a woman comes in regularly who prepares his meals and sleeps with him.  The letters seem to be written to his wife, who is apparently distinct from the woman who comes to the apartment every day; the narrator advises her to change her and their children's names so their children's life prospects won't be harmed by his bad reputation.  By the end of the story he is on the path to committing suicide.

I guess this is all a metaphor for a stifling career and an unhappy marriage, maybe with some satire of overbearing bureaucratic government/medical establishment.  The only clear and sharp portions of the story are the writer's memories of his childhood and university days--this story would have been a lot more appealing to me if it was just a comprehensible bildungsroman about a poor boy who became an architect and got married and then became disillusioned or disappointed with life.  As it stands, "A Man of Letters" feels like a waste of time, a bunch of elements that don't add up to a coherent whole or entertain the reader.  If somebody were prosecuting a case against the [worst examples of the] New Wave, "A Man of Letters," with its surrealism, explicit but unpleasant sex, and literary anecdotes about a semi-unhappy childhood and a semi-rebellious youth--all of which don't add up to an interesting or fun story--could be Exhibit A.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

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After "A Man of Letters" comes the final story in Quark/4, Larry Niven's "The Fourth Profession," which I liked when I read it back in 2016.

While there are a few stories that repelled me, taken as a whole, I think Quark/4 is a big success, with numerous stories that are worth reading, several of which have only ever appeared in this volume.  If literary SF is your thing, it is well worth worth picking up if you can get it as cheap as I did, especially if you have a particular interest in McIntyre, Davidson, or Platt.