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| I have to wonder about the discussion behind the decision to drop Davidson's name and replace it with Lafferty's on the cover. |
In 1970, Ace republished its paperback anthology World's Best Science Fiction: 1967, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, under the title World's Best Science Fiction: Third Series. I own a copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Third Series, so let's crack 'er open and check out well-regarded stories from 1966 by authors we care about here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
"Light of Other Days" made its debut in John W. Campbell's Analog, and it seems to have been a huge hit--it looks like almost every famous SF editor--Judith Merril, Damon Knight, Robert Silverberg, Martin H. Greenberg, Brian Aldiss, and James Gunn, as well as Campbell, Wollheim and Carr--included it in an anthology at some point. "Light of Other Days" is in at least three books I own, but this will be the first time I read it.
Judith Merril, in my copy of SF 12, stresses in her intro and afterword to "Light of Other Days" that Shaw's story is "actually science fiction" (her italics): it presents a new idea about light and time and the effects of technology on human life, and isn't just a detective story or action tale set on another planet or outer space. Perhaps more importantly for those of us who care more about sex and death than particles and waves is the fact that this story is a total heartbreaker about disastrous love relationships!
Shaw's new scientific idea is "slow glass," sheets of glass through which light passes very slowly. A new piece of slow glass (AKA a "scenedow") is black as night, because no light has yet passed through it. But if the pane is, say, "one-year-thick," after it has stood for a year a person looking at the glass will see through it what happened in its environs a year ago. This has great decorative value, as one can take a five-year-thick scenedow that has stood on a tropical beach or before a bucolic meadow for five years and bring it to his city apartment and for the next five years enjoy a 100% authentic view of natural beauty, the pane of glass displaying all the vagaries of weather and season and animal life in a country spot of the recent past while living in the middle of the metropolis.
Personally I loved city life, was thrilled to see skyscrapers and subway trains every day, and find living in the country where I see cows and tractors every day an endless source of dismay, but it is normal to assert the opposite and Shaw in this story exploits that typical attitude--scenedows are big business, as city dwellers yearn to decorate their apartments with living country views. (Presumably somebody like me could get a scendeow of Times Square or the Manhattan skyline for his camel-cricket-infested country house.)
On to the heartbreak. Our narrator is a poet in an unhappy marriage; he and his wife are sick of each other (he even admits to hoping she will be killed in an accident) and their misery is compounded by the fact that they are expectant parents. (I guess nowadays the narrator's wife would just get an abortion, but in Britain in 1966 legal restrictions on abortion were pretty strict and it was more common to think of a fetus as a human being and not just some nuisance to be casually destroyed like the camel crickets in my new home--at least that is the idea I got from watching Michael Caine's finest film, Alfie.)
The narrator and his wife are in Scotland on a vacation (they say "holiday," of course) and the narrator wants to buy a scendow from some old dude who lives in an old farmhouse overlooking a loch. Shaw skillfully foreshadows the depressing revelation that comes at the end: this guy's wife and child were killed in an automobile accident some years before, but their last few years were recorded by one of his pieces of slow glass, and he has set it up in a window of the farm house to provide the illusion that they are still alive. I believe Shaw gives us room to hope that this demonstration of love and the fragility of life will trigger some kind of reformation in the attitudes of the narrator and his wife and save their marriage.
Shaw handles both the science/technology stuff and the human drama stuff quite well in this short and pungent story--I have to concur with all those editors: "Light of Other Days" is very good. Recommended!
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| Two German anthologies which include "Light of Other Days;" "Nymphenburger" is going to be my new pet name for my wife |
"Bumberboom" immediately reminded me of a Jack Vance Dying Earth thing, with its feudalistic far future in which people fight with swords and believe in magic and farcically haughty rapscallions communicate in elaborately embroidered deceptions and highly ornamented rodomontades:
"Important matters," he said, importantly, holding up his chin so that his jowls withdrew, "are not to be discussed where every lack-work may gawp at an inoffensive visitor. Come along with me, my young, and I will not scruple to take time away from my many important affairs and inform you."
Mallian, a sort of Cugel figure, is a prince ("son Hazelip, High Man to the Hereditor of Land Qanaras") travelling on foot, on a quest for some kind of "medicine," which in this context means "magic" or "knowledge," needed to succor his native land. (This quest is never resolved--maybe "Bumberboom" was meant to be one of a series of stories about Mallian.) While he is passing through the Land of the Dwerfs (who are short) on his way to the Land of Elver State (where people wear caps with fake ears attached to them), from atop a high hill Mallian sees that the Bumberboom Juggernaut is following a course similar to his own, though on a different road. Bumberboom is a huge artillery piece, laboriously propelled by hand by its Crew, an army of inbred imbeciles (as a kid I would have called them "retards.") From natives of the Land of the Dwerfs and The Land of Elver State Mallian learns that Bumberboom has been crisscrossing this region for generations, and everywhere it goes people surrender food to the idiotic Crew, in fear of the implicit threat represented by the monstrous gun. We readers, and Mallian, soon realize the Crew members, who are so stupid they can barely talk, are totally incapable of operating the weapon their ancestors apparently designed, built and employed to terrorize the countryside. Mallian makes himself master of the Crew with ease (through violence), figures out how to operate the gun (there are longish scenes of making gunpowder and firing the gun's first shot in generations, which providentially reveals the burial place of the Statue of Liberty), and then tries to use the gun to conquer a region where there is no formal government--due to negligence he fails and the Juggernaut is knocked out of action, permanently.
"Bumberboom" is an "actual" science fiction story, in that it is about a smart guy who tries to achieve his goals through intelligence and knowledge of science, and an adventure story in that there is a quest, conflict and danger, but the science is pretty elementary (class, what are the three ingredients of gunpowder?) and the adventure is not thrilling. I believe Davidson meant the story's strengths to be its rococo dialogue and his efforts at humor. Because the fancy style is more of an obstacle than a source of pleasure, and the jokes are not funny (sample joke: an inbred moron gets run over and killed by the vehicle his idiot relatives are pushing), I have to give this overly long exercise a thumbs down.
The only thing that is really good about "Bumberboom," and probably the most noteworthy thing about it, is that it is a hardcore anti-government and anti-taxation story. Mallian the prince is a thief who dominates others through duplicity, threats and direct violence. The governments of the Dwerfs and Elvers are portrayed as incompetent and tyrannical. The towns of the ungoverned zone are prosperous, their citizens characterized by foresight, alacrity and independence, as well as a sense of fun. If only this welcome message was embedded in a more entertaining story--we aren't going to beat the commies with mediocre stories like this one!
The point of the story is that people ten thousand years from now will be very different from today, almost incomprehensible to us (the last line of the story reminds us that Attila the Hun and Tiglath-Pileser would find mid-20th century middle-class American office workers very strange) and that all our opinions and attitudes, like what we find sexually attractive, are irrational and arbitrary. Pohl posits that in that far future it will be routine to radically physically alter people's bodies, starting in the womb, and as an example presents omicron-Dibase seven-group totter-oot S Doradus 5314, who as a zygote had XY chromosomes but has since been modified to have mammary glands, ovaries and a vagina, as well as gills and a tail and a silky pelt--the mature "Dora" is a transwoman furry who lives underwater.
Pohl offers a second example of an altered person, Dora's lover, a cyborg who has travelled to a thousand different star systems. These two meet only once, but trade electronic simulacra of themselves ("mathematical analogues") with whom to later have sex via simulation computers ("symbol manipulators") they plug directly into their brains.
Proponents of the story can argue that it is prophetic, seeing as we all now live in a world in which we are enjoined to celebrate sex changes and anticipate designer babies and integration into computers, where millions of people spend their free time masturbating while watching internet porn or playing hentai computer games, but "Day Million" fails as a piece of literature or entertainment--it is an idea, not a story.
Despite my thinking "Day Million" little more than a waste of time, it has been reprinted a million times and is considered to be one of Pohl's best stories--among the many places it has reappeared are a collection for which it is the title story, an "author's choice" anthology, and a Pohl "best of" collection. "Day Million" first appeared in the men's magazine Rogue, which seems appropriate because it is more like an article speculating on the future of sex and the family that advocates acceptance of sexual minorities than an actual work of fiction.
It is the future! Our story is set in a vast automated city run by an army of robots and machines and inhabited by a small number of humans. Beyond the city lie the space ports from which are launched the automated spaceships that explore the universe, but in the heart of the city humans conduct experiments and explorations. Hundreds of elderly people who have been given immortality drugs lounge in and around warm indoor pools, wretchedly weak, their emaciated bodies covered in strange patterns, a side effect of the drugs. These men and women, the "immortals" or "Immies" who have aged beyond one hundred and fifty years, have "penetrated the senility barrier" and spend all their time thinking, coming up with all manner of wacky theories. The Immies are regularly interviewed, because among the dross of all the useless ideas sometimes crops up a revolutionary idea of tremendous value.
Most of the main characters of this seventeen-page story work at the Immortality Investigation Project, and we follow them on a typical day as they wake up and go to work and pursue their duties. Theirs is a religious society, and all of them, even the LSD-addicted homeless man who comes to visit one particular Immortal, his great-great-great-great-greatuncle (give or take a great or two), are in close contact with their Gods, with whom they communicate directly via desktop and pocket computers they call "shrines." These Gods seem to know all and offer advice to the dissatisfied ("You must build your own confidence bit by bit....Resolve to use your own judgement at least once today...") and admonitions to the ill-disciplined ("You wenched and fornicated yesterday night: in consequence you will be late on the project today.")
After introducing us to the setting and characters, Aldiss gives us a few pages of plot that satisfyingly tie everything together--all the background stuff turns out to be significant. The Immies are pathetically weak and have an irresistible psychological need to be near water (there is a lot of mumbo jumbo about how this is because life came from the sea and the womb is wet and so forth) and so none has ever left the Immortality Investigation Project's precincts, but the LSD addict tries to spirit away his great-great-etc. uncle to an abandoned country house with a big pool where he and other itinerents are squatting. The escape comes off, and Aldiss gives the reader reason to believe its success is a result of the Gods having set up a Rube Goldberg contraption of psychological manipulations of the main characters. The final sting at the end of the story that ties the whole thing up in a neat bow is the revelation of the origin of the Gods--having the computers who already basically ran the world take on the form of Gods with a direct line of communication to everybody was one of the first ideas of the Immortality Investigation Project that was put into action.
I like it. One can see "Amen and Out" as a cynical attack on the credulity of human beings and a work advocating all-powerful technocratic world government; another big theme of the story is the value of drug-induced altered states of consciousness. Whereas I sympathized with Davidson's apparent argument in "Bumberboom" but found his story tedious and clunky, I am pretty skeptical of what I take to be Aldiss's arguments here, but the story is well-written and smoothly structured, every component contributing to plot and atmosphere in an effective way.
After its debut in New Worlds, "Amen and Out" has been reprinted in several Aldiss collections.
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Looking back on these stories, I think, in three of them at least, we can see a perhaps surprising theme of optimism; Shaw, Pohl and Aldiss all suggest that technology is going to make our lives better. In "Light of Other Days" new technology brings a new source of beauty into the world and get us closer to our roots in the countryside; Pohl tells us a world in which everybody is a cyborg or a furry and has sex with computers is going to be a happy one, and Aldiss argues that replacing politicians and clergymen with computers and giving them total control of our lives will create a world without war and a civilization that will conquer the stars. Even Davidson's anti-government "Bumberboom," in which technology is used to oppress people, has its optimistic side, as he suggests that people can get along just fine without government and ends his story by portraying a would-be tyrant being hoist by his own petard.
More mid-Sixties SF stories in our next episode; we'll see if they are as optimistic as were today's subjects.
In general, I preferred DAW's YEAR"S BEST anthologies better than Merril's. Later, Terry Carr's YEAR'S BEST series became the Gold Standard...until Gardner Dozois launched his series.
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