Adventures in Otherness by C Smith, R A Lafferty, G Wolfe and B W Aldiss

There are a lot of SF anthologies at the internet archive; let's take a look at one of them, 1977's Another World: Adventures in Otherness, edited by Gardner Dozois.  Dozois provides an introduction to the book in which he brags about how awesome New England is, relates how when he was young (Dozois was born in 1947) the entire community discouraged him from reading SF, and offers the opinion that SF is one of the few vibrant living things in our "weary and sterile" world of "dead art, dead minds [and] dead institutions...."  (Damn!)  SF authors, Dozois tells us, quoting Kurt Vonnegut, are among the few people who actually think through the implications of big events and big ideas, how cities and wars and technology actually affect people.  Dozois also writes little intros to each of the stories.  Today we'll read four of the included stories, those by authors in whom I have a particular interest.  

(Note: Another World: Adventures in Otherness includes Damon Knight's 1957 story "Man in a Jar," which I read and opined about back in 2019.)

"On the Gem Planet" by Cordwainer Smith (1963)

Wealthy planet Mizzer was ruled by Kuraf, a decadent libertine famous galaxy-wide for his library of nasty books, until he was deposed and exiled by reformers.  Soon Mizzer fell into the hands of the most radical of these reformers, the tyrannical Colonel Wedder, a utopian whose rule is far more oppressive than was that of Kuraf.  The Instrumentality of Mankind that loosely governs the human space empire refuses to directly interfere in affairs on Mizzer, but has provided Kuraf's nephew and heir apparent to the throne of Mizzer, Casher O'Neill, the wherewithal to travel from planet to planet, seeking aid in his quest to overthrow Wedder and make Mizzer a happy place again.  "On the Gem Planet" describes O'Neill's visit to planet Pontoppidan.

Pontoppidan is an inhospitable world where you can't grow food or breathe the air; the 60,000 inhabitants live in domed cities and trade with other planets for most of what they need.  Because Pontoppidan is "a fragment from a giant planet which imploded" with a "geology based on ultra-heavy chemistry" it is covered in gems of all sorts and sizes, which provides the Pontoppidanians an all natural-natural product which is always in demand.

Casher O'Neill negotiates with the ruler of Pontoppidan and his beautiful niece, the heir apparent, angling to get some money or weapons to support his liberation of Mizzer from Colonel Wedder.  The ruler of the gem planet agrees to supply something useful in return for an unusual bit of service--a horse, an exotic Earth creature never before seen by the people of Pontoppidan, has been found on their barren planet, and the dictator wants O'Neill's advice on what to do with it.  (As luck would have it, Mizzer has plenty of horses, and O'Neill is familiar with them.) 

Through his relationship with the horse and with various underpeople (Smith's Instrumentality stories are full of these "underpeople," the product of genetic engineering whose DNA is largely that of dogs, cats, snakes, wolves, etc. and who serve as a sort of working class and servant class under the full-blooded humans), and the pretty heir to the throne of Pontoppidan, O'Neill not only acquires a valuable gem that can serve as the core of a puissant energy weapon, but is exposed to enlightening dialogues about the meaning of life, the path to happiness, and the meaning of civilization.  We also witness strong hints that there is some kind of proscribed Christian underground in the space empire, an underground of which O'Neill is a member.  

Pretty good; Smith's style renders "On The Gem Planet" a smooth and pleasant read and all the SF ideas and philosophical ideas of the story are engaging.  Smith published four Casher O'Neill stories in SF magazines in the mid-1960s and this is the first; maybe a near future project of mine will be to seek out the other three.  After making its debut in Fred Pohl's Galaxy, "On the Gem Planet" has appeared in numerous Smith collections as well as a few anthologies, like The Seventh Galaxy Reader and an anthology of SF about equines.      

"Among the Hairy Earthmen" by R. A. Lafferty (1966)

Another piece from an issue of Galaxy edited by Frederik Pohl.  "Among the Hairy Earthmen" was reprinted in a number of anthologies, including Nebula Award Stories 2 and Brian Aldiss's Evil Earths, and collected in 1984's Ringing Changes. 

This is a gimmicky sort of story that supposes that the explosions of intrigue, war, and cultural and technological development of the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries, things like the career of Lucrezia Borgia, the fall of Constantinople, the Divine Comedy, and the invention of the printing press, were the work of mischievous alien children who came to Earth on vacation and were able to inhabit or imitate human bodies.  Much of the story is just lists of figures and events, sometimes vaguely referred to as if to present a puzzle to the reader.  The end of the story features some social commentary and social satire as a character called the Pilgrim, who may be a representative of the human race--or maybe just the West or Christendom--or may even be the God of Abraham, upbraids the alien brats for all the death and destruction of those wars and of the way the Renaissance and Reformation have sundered the unity of Christian civilization.  The aliens retort that mankind was always violent, and that the diversity they have introduced is of greater value than the Pilgrim's vaunted unity.

There isn't a hell of a lot to this story, really, besides its core idea and its-against-the-grain theme (that maybe the Renaissance and Reformation were not so great); it is odd and different, and thus worth reading, but not particularly entertaining.

A German edition of Nebula Award Stories 2 and a Dutch edition of Evil Earths 

"Straw" by Gene Wolfe (1975)

I read "Straw" years ago in my copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel, but that was before this blog staggered forth from its tenebrous place of birth to haunt unheeded the series of tubes that is the interweb.  Dozois in his intro here tells us it is set in an "alternate Dark-Age Europe which never was."  Jim Baen, introducing the story where it first appeared, in as issue of Galaxy during his editorship, suggests it might be set in an alternate world, or maybe on a post-apocalyptic Earth or on a lost space colony which has degraded politically and technologically, standard SF settings.  My copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel isn't accessible to me right now, but in his afterword to the story in The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe says "I decided to put the hot-air balloon in the Dark Ages, and I threw in a few other things too."  The text of the story itself includes no clues that I could find as to where or when it might take place.  

"Straw" demonstrates why Gene Wolfe is widely recognized as some kind of genius; as in so much of his fiction, "Straw" is written in an easy, smooth, pleasant style, but again and again the reader is confronted with mysteries and surprises.  Wolfe doesn't straightforwardly explain all the odd circumstances of this world, which the narrator and characters take for granted the way we take computers and the internal combustion engine and penicillin for granted--we readers learn about them from the characters' natural speech as the story moves along.  Our narrator, Jerr, a soldier, describes the day on which he first killed a man, when he was the youngest member of a small company of mercenaries armed with armed such weapons as the "pincer-mace" and pikes whose heads can be shot by some sort of spring or maybe electric mechanism who travel over the countryside via a hot-air balloon whose fire is fed by straw.

(I feel like there are a lot of weird maces in Wolfe's fiction; Baldanders fights with a high tech mace in The Book of the New Sun, and the narrator of The Wizard Knight fights with a mace that looks much like a sword.)

Times are tough for the mercs, and they are hungry, and their talk suggests that they are quite willing to turn bandit, attack some people, and then turn cannibal!  When they have run out of straw they land at a villa, and meet the baron who lives there, the baron hires them because there is some kind of war or unrest nearby and the villa could be attacked very soon.  There the story ends--we never find out who Jerr ended up killing, how the relationship between the mercenary company and the baron's household worked out, if there was a siege or battle at the villa, etc.  

"Straw" is a great piece of writerly technique.  The "problem" with it is that it feels like a chapter out of an awesome picaresque adventure novel or one of a series of brilliant short stories about Jerr and his comrades, in each of which Jerr learns some lesson or has some major life experience or the company faces some formidable challenge or something.  But "Straw" is all we have of this potential epic or saga.

Besides reappearing in several Wolfe collections, "Straw" has been included in a number of anthologies, including anthologies of military SF.        

"Old Hundredth" by Brian Aldiss (1960)

Science fiction is full of brute animals who have, thanks to human design or human calamities, evolved into bipedally walking, talking, tool-using people.  We just read one of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind stories, in which such uplifted or enhanced animal people are a major element, and who could forget Edmond Hamilton's 1946 cover story for Weird Tales, "Day of Judgment," in which nuclear war exterminated humanity but gave dogs and cats human intelligence and posture, or A. E. van Vogt's 1971 The Battle of Forever, set thousands of years in the future, when most of the Earth's inhabitants are intelligent bipedal hyenas, hippos, cheetahs, et al, the product of genetic engineering.  Well, "Old Hundredth" is another such tale.   

It is the far future, long after the Moon drifted out of Earth orbit to circle the Sun, long after man dragged Venus into Earth orbit, even long after the final members of the human race essentially ceased to exist by abandoning their physical bodies to "merge with the texture of space itself," employing science to achieve immaterial immortality!  Today the Earth's population consists largely of the products of man's genetic engineering, including intelligent mole people and giant ground sloth people who are practically immortal.  The protagonist of "Old Hundredth" is one of those elephant-sized megatheriums; she has devoted her centuries-long life to the study of music columns.  These columns of energy stud the surface of the Earth, and when an intelligent enough creature approaches one, it produces music composed by its creator, who died in the production of it, making use of the same technology by which humans "merged" with the universe.  The giant sloth has travelled the world on the back of a baluchitherium, examining all the music columns she can get to.  She is in telepathic contact with a mentor, a dolphin who has lived even longer than she, who helps guide her musical studies and offers her advice and can transmit images to her brain and so on.

Over like nine pages Aldiss gives us all this background and sets a sad sort of mood--the sloth's main purpose is to compose her own death song and become a music column herself, she feels sad that the humankind who created her and all her comrades is no more, etc.  Her mentor hints that humans were a bunch of jerks who deserve no credit for anything; their disagreement foreshadows the melodramatic climax and sentimental denouement that come in the story's last five or so pages.  You see, human personalities, when they "projected themselves into the pattern" of the universe, were stored in glowing columns of energy much like the music columns; each of these energy columns houses many human personalities.  Most of the genetically engineered animals who inherited the Earth are meek, and docile and unambitious, but the bears aspire to be like humans.  They stick their heads in the energy columns to gain human energy and they scavenge the world's ruins, seeking old human technological devices to study and refurbish as part of their efforts to rebuild a human-like civilization.  When the sloth lady returns to her home, an old ruin, she finds within a bear with a knife intent on carrying away the ancient video screens and whatnot that litter it.  The human-hating mentor dolphin opposes the project of the bears and tries to take over the sloth's body so she will crush the bear with her superior size and weight, but the sloth is a pacifist who resists her mentor's control and lets the bear get away.

Enraged, the dolphin severs all ties with its ward, ending an intimate, formative relationship that has lasted hundreds of years.  The sloth then elects to die and becomes a music column that produces a piece of music associated with the 100th Psalm.

This story is OK.  I have to admit that, compared to Wolfe's earthy and alive, brisk, economical and direct "Straw," which sounds like an authentic natural voice and manages to be both emotionally familiar and culturally alien, and which leaves you wishing it was much longer, "Old Hundredth" feels long, tedious, pretentious, manipulative, tendentious and self-consciously literary; when you finish it you are glad it is over and kind of wish it had been shorter.  But it is not bad.

"Old Hundredth" made its debut in New Worlds in the period when John Carnell was editor.  It has appeared in a giant stack of Aldiss collections, as well as many anthologies with "best" in their titles.     

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Four stories by critically-acclaimed members of the SF community that are well worth reading, but the Cordwainer Smith and Gene Wolfe stories stand head and shoulders above the Lafferty and Aldiss contributions, I think largely because they are grounded in real human emotion and not gimmicks and high-level philosophizing--Jerr and Casher O'Neill are real people whose emotions and experiences we can instinctively understand, while the alien brats and an intelligent immortal sloth music historian are just artificial constructions propped up to illustrate some abstract or esoteric theme.