MPorcius Flashback: Early 2014

In 2014 I was living in central Iowa; I recall that there were lots of cicadas there.  Growing up in New Jersey we would hear cicadas, but I don't think I ever saw one--in Iowa, on the other hand, I saw thousands of them.  I also saw quite a few bald eagles on the Des Moines river, another sight I never beheld in New Jersey.

Well, enough about the Hawkeye State's wildlife.  Judging by my fascinating twitter feed, an important primary source for future historians, I purchased a lot of SF books in March, April and May of 2014.  But did I actually read these books, or was I merely engaging in what the kids call "retail therapy," blindly driven to blunt the misery of my exile from Gotham?  Let's run the numbers and find out!

March 14, Des Moines, Iowa:  The Central Branch of the Des Moines Public Library, a modern copper clad thing whose footprint resembles an airplane and which is sited next to a modern sculpture garden, was unloading books that, I guess, nobody was borrowing, for a dime each and I got seven SF bargains on this day.

I think I got my money's worth out of this stack.  I have read six of the 30 stories in 2001's Redshift: Extreme Visions of Speculative Fiction, those by Gene Wolfe, Thomas M. Disch,  and Barry Malzberg and Kathe Koja (discussed in one blog post), and--assessed in a second post--those by Al Sarrantonio, Larry Niven and Joe Haldeman. All six of those were worth reading.  I've read a dozen of the 17 stories in the 2001 edition of Roger Zelazny's The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth, which I wrote about over four blog posts, here, here, here, and here.  I read stories by Fritz Leiber, Theodore Sturgeon and R. A. Lafferty from 1977's The Hugo Winners:Volume 3 and declared that two of them deserved their Hugos but one was a Hugo mistake, as well as two stories by Larry Niven.  From Richard Matheson's Collected Stories: Volume 2 I read "Slaughter House" ("solid") and "The Wedding" ("a weak joke story.")

I've read Jack Vance's Maske: Thaery, but that was before I bought this copy, and I've read stories that appear in The First Heroes (the Gene Wolfe story) and in The World Fantasy Awards: Volume Two (like Ray Bradbury's "The October Game," Ramsey Campbell's "The Companion," Dennis Etchison's "It Only Comes Out at Night," David Drake's "The Barrow Troll" and Harlan Ellison's "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs") but that was before I started this blog or in other publications.

March 26, Des Moines, Iowa:  The library sale was still on twelve days later and I got six more books, but I haven't read much from these.  Joachim Boaz considers Michael Bishop's Catacomb Years to be a masterpiece, as does 2theD of the Potpourri of Science Fiction Literature blog.  I've read four stories from Brian Lumley's Screaming Science Fiction, but only one of them, "No Way Home," was good, and two of them were irritating; the fourth, "Snarker's Son" was merely pedestrian.  I've read some stories from the Niven collection N-Space, but in other books (like The 1972 World's Best SF,) and I read A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr. in the 1990s. 

April 6, Des Moines, Iowa:  I believe it was at the I-80 Flea Market (now closed) that I purchased the Ace Double with Barry Malzberg's Final War and Other Fantasies on one side and Treasure of Tau Ceti by John T. Phillifent on the other.  I have read lots of Malzberg's introductory material in this volume, but I don't think I have read any of the fiction in the book, though I have read much of it elsewhere.

There are eleven stories in the book.  "Final War," the story that, as Malzberg says in a letter you can buy on ebay for $75.00 at time of writing, "made his career," has been printed many places and I read it in one of them, The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg, back in 2011, where I also read "Death to the Keeper."  I reviewed The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg at Amazon.com, that place you are ordering all your dry goods and groceries from now that you are in coronavirus lockdown, and will paste my review at the bottom of this already too long blog post along with that Malzberg letter from ebay.  "A Triptych" and "How I Take Their Measure" I read the magazine versions of and wrote about them in my post on Universe Day, the fix-up novel into which they were integrated.  "Cop-Out" I read in The Far Out People.  But that leaves six stories in the book I have not yet read (these six stories add up to like 30 pages total.)

April 15, Creston, Iowa: Down in Creston (wikipedia says Creston has a population of 7834 people) I bought seven books, and damned if I haven't read five of them, The Nets of Space (unforgettable cover), The Pastel City (everybody loves this thing but me), Bow Down to Nul, Alpha Centauri or Die!, and The Cross of Fire. Not bad!

May 15, Mankato, Minnesota:  A northward drive of some three and a half hours from Des Moines brings you to Mankato, where they have a pretty good used bookstore, and where I purchased fifteen books on this May 2014 visit.  I've read ten of the twelve novels: A Trace of Dreams, Space Prison, The Green Odyssey, On A Planet Alien, All the Colors of Darkness, Three Worlds to Conquer, Outlaw World, The Comet Kings, The Rolling Stones, Quest Beyond the Stars, all of avant garde anthology Quark/3 (blogged here, here, and here) and most of the material in The New Mind (blogged here, here and here.)  Not so bad.

May 22, West Des Moines, Iowa:  At the Half Price Books in West Des Moines I purchased old hardcover editions of Harlan Ellison's famed Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions, from which I have read quite a few stories.

Poul Anderson's "Eutopia," R. A. Lafferty's "Land of the Great Horses," and Roger Zelazny's "Auto-da-fé"

Evelyn Lief's "Bed Sheets Are White,"Andrew J. Offutt's "For Value Received" and Richard A. Lupoff's "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" 

"Ching-Witch" by Ross Rocklynne

"Milk of Paradise" by James Tiptree, Jr.

"Tissue" by James Sallis, "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon" by Josephine Saxton, and "Moth Race" by Richard Hill

I have also read some stories that first appeared in the Dangerous Visions volumes in other places, like Theodore Sturgeon's "If All Men Were Brothers Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?" and Larry Niven's "The Jigsaw Man."

May 24, Boone, Iowa:  At an antiques store in this little burg I found Novelets of Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Ivan Howard, which has one of my favorite SF paperback covers.  Over three blog posts (here, here and here), I read this baby cover to cover.

May 25, Boone, Iowa:  I don't think we spent two days in Boone, so I think I purchased these seven books on the 24th and just tweeted about them on the 25th.  I have read Tanith Lee's collection of stories about her character Cyrion, Poul Anderson's David Falkayn novel Satan's World, Kenneth Bulmer's Cycle of Nemesis, which I thought quite bad, and E. C. Tubb's second Dumarest novel, Derai.

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Typed letter dated "Wednesday Night" from Barry Malzberg to "Dusty"

 
2011 review by yours truly of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg

On the cover of Popular Library's 1975 paperback edition of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg we see a man in a bizarre get up (short sleeve shirt and gloves?), carrying an energy pistol in one hand, fleeing a futuristic skyscraper. From the skyscraper issues a squad of guards, or maybe an angry mob, in hot pursuit. The cover blurbs promise us eleven exciting adventures, full of robots, assassins, a maze, horror, and nightmare.

Of course, what you get inside the covers is eleven literary experiments, bound to disappoint anyone expecting A. E. Van Vogt- or Leigh Brackett-style action and suspense, full of chases, explosions and ray pistol firefights. None of these stories are adventure stories; some of them aren't even SF stories. But some of them are good stories, and most of them are worth the time it took me to read them.

The eleven stories:

Initiation - A noirish story of kidnappers that starts well and then peters out into nothing.

Management - A man's relationship with his robot psychologist in some kind of totalitarian state. OK.

The Union Forever - Attempts to assassinate presidents and presidential candidates are one of Malzberg's recurring themes. In this story a computer runs simulations of such attempts. A little weak.

Reconstitution - One of the better stories in the collection, about a man's relationship with his father.

Final War - An absurdist farce about the madness of war and of military bureaucracies. The longest story in the collection; too long, I say. There is little character, little plot and no drama, the jokes are not very funny, and the point Malzberg is trying to get across is banal conventional wisdom. This story apparently impressed many when it was first published in 1968; Roger Elwood calls it a classic and it has been reprinted in almost a dozen places since its initial appearance. People are into this story, but I am not one of those people, I guess.

Closed Sicilian - One of the better pieces in the book, a chess player indulges in the fantasy, or suffers the delusion, that his matches with his regular opponent are crucial battles in an interstellar war.

After the Unfortunate Accident - Not bad, A Twilight Zone-style look at the afterlife.

The Second Short Shortest Fantasy Story Ever Published - A one page gimmick story.

In the Cup - The fate of a religious person in an atheistic totalitarian state. Not bad.

Death To The Keeper - A famous Jewish actor, afflicted with irrational guilt and sexual dysfunction, is obsessed with presidential assassination attempts, and seeks to use his craft to become a sort of scapegoat for the entire United States. Pretty good.

Chronicles of a Comer - A statistician working for a New York City firm becomes convinced that the Second Coming is nigh; this has radical effects on his marriage, career, and health. Maybe my favorite in the book.

I liked the stories which focused on characters and/or had some sort of plot, and can recommend them to people interested in modern literary fiction. And people who care about SF history should probably read "Final War," which we are told is famous and important. But people hoping for adventure capers should steer clear of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg.