1967 SF stories by Brian Aldiss, Fritz Leiber, and Samuel R. Delany

I took my copy of the 1969 paperback printing of Judith Merril's 1968 SF 12 off the shelf to read her commentary on Bob Shaw's "Light of Other Days" for my last blog post.  Before returning it to the bookcase, let's look at included stories by Brian Aldiss, Fritz Leiber, and Samuel R. Delany, all of which were first printed in magazines in 1967.

"Confluence" by Brian W. Aldiss 

This is a New Wave experimental piece, a six-page glossary of over one hundred words and phrases from the language of a race of extraterrestrials.  The definitions provide clues about the aliens' life and culture (for example, they seem to be dominated by robots and computers--machines write novels and determine people's status and actually clean their anuses after they take a dump--and they seem to regret it) but many are also meant to evoke laughter (there's quite a lot of scatological humor) or poignant memories in the reader of his sex life ("YON U SAN" means "The hesitation a boy experiences before first kissing his first girl" and "NO LEE LE MUN" means "The love of a wife that becomes especially vivid when she is almost out-of-sight.")

Aldiss provides specimens of many odd and interesting linguistic phenomena, like homophones which have opposite meanings and euphemisms and metaphors--"PIT HOR" means both "the droppings of pigs" and "the act of name-dropping" while "U" means "the amount of time it takes for a lizard to turn into a bird" as well as "love."

I often scorn New Wave experiments as a waste of time, but Aldiss makes this one work--I really did try to figure out what was up with these aliens, I really did laugh, and moving memories of my relationships really were conjured up.  So, thumbs up!

"Confluence" was first printed in Punch, and has appeared in many Aldiss collections, but only Merril ever saw fit to anthologize it, which speaks well of her.  

"The Winter Flies" by Fritz Leiber 

I have enjoyed lots of Leiber's work in the past, but "The Winter Flies" is quite tedious.  Gott, a middle-class guy who works in an office and once had dreams of being a writer, is bored and depressed, and so has concocted imaginary companions and day dreams he is interacting with them while he sits reading Plutarch in the same room is which his wife is painting and his kid is playing.  There is a man in black flannel who tries to recruit Gott into the cabal that secretly rules the world behind the scenes. and the black-clad jester who plays devil's advocate, enumerating the career failures and physical shortcomings that render Gott unsuited to rule the Earth.  Gott fantasizes about voluptuous young women, but into his thoughts intrudes a skinny old witch who represents his sexual guilt and berates him, pointing out that he is a slave to his lusts.  Finally Death appears, reminding Gott of his plans to commit suicide.  Death is in some way "real," and Gott's wife and child can sense Death's malignant presence, and it is even suggested that Death may actually be able to harm the little boy.  Gott overcomes his ennui and dismisses Death and embraces his wife and son in a happy ending that comes out of nowhere.

I like the topic of middle-class men who are driven bonkers by the tragedies of bourgeois life, the broken dreams of being an artist and the boring job and the annoying brat and the sexually-unavailable wife and all that--I love The Kinks' Soap Opera, for example, and thought Barry Malzberg presented many of these themes very ably in Herovit's World.  But "The Winter Flies" is uninvolving and tiresome, the characters and situations mind-numbing.  The whole thing feels static and flat, and the dialogues of the imaginary figures are long and boring and, as we know they are not real, they feel pointless.  The ending, in which Death is revealed to be real and Gott inexplicably becomes a hero, does not feel like a logical development from what came before.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

In her afterword to "The Winter Flies," Merril tells us Leiber wrote this story in 1959 and sold it to Esquire, but that magazine never published it.  Its first public appearance was under the title "The Inner Circles" in F&SF, and, perhaps showing how out of sync I am with SF professionals, it has been reliably reprinted by such establishment figures as Damon Knight, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Terry Carr.  Maybe the SF literati liked "The Winter Flies" because it is like an avant garde play (Leiber is closely connected to the theatre, remember) and demonstrates SF isn't all astronauts and monsters but can address ordinary life.  Putting such a story in your anthology is a reasonable idea, but it should be an interesting or entertaining example of a "mature" or "literary" SF story, not a boring one.

"The Star-Pit" by Samuel R. Delany 

Delany presents to us a universe in which the human race has colonized much of the galaxy over three hundred years of interstellar travel, but is essentially barred from other galaxies.  The space between the galaxies is so empty, is home to so little matter and subject to so few gravitational forces, that in those voids the laws of physics, the very nature of reality, are subtly different.  As a result, most human beings who travel twenty-thousand light years from the Milky Way go insane; we can't explore other galaxies by sending automatic ships, either, because at the same distance human-manufactured computers fail.  Damn!

But it has been discovered that a tiny percentage of humans, like one in 34,000, is able to maintain his or her sanity in that horrible empty space between the galaxies.  These individuals, called "goldens," owe their special ability to a mix of atypical genetic and environmental factors, and tend to be anti-social or actually psycopathic--they behave erratically, treating other people like crap.  Thanks to their ability to bring back to our galaxy valuable trade goods from extragalactic worlds, goldens become rich, and form a sort of distinct upper class to whom the rules do not apply--they are so important to the economy of the galaxy that their crimes, which include murder, are not punished.  Extreme social tensions exist between the goldens and ordinary people, and one of the themes of "The Star-Pit" is the extent to which the goldens exploit the mundanes, and the extent to which the mundane authorities, who manipulate troubled young people in hopes of encouraging or preserving golden abilities, exploit the goldens.  This is related to the larger theme of the story of how people feel trapped when they cannot go places and do things others can.

"The Star-Pit" is a first person narrative of some sixty-odd pages.  Our narrator, Vyme, is a mechanic who works on space ships, a man born in New York City in these future days when Earth is a backwater far from the main trade routes visited by few humans.  We see Vyme in various episodes throughout his life, times when he feels trapped and acts out violently and irrationally; maybe we are supposed to suspect he may be a golden, though this is never explicitly stated.

The first ten or so pages of the story are set on a planet in the Sigma system where Vyme is a member of a group marriage ("procreation group" or "proke group") that resides on a beach; the main topic of this section is a sort of large terrarium or aviary (an "ecologarium") set on the beach in which a variety of strange plants and animals proceed through their complex life cycles, attentively observed by the children of the proke group.  (With its first-person narrator, array of strange but sympathetic alien animals, alternative family arrangements and nudism, theme of growing up, and the prominence in the story of waldos, "The Star-Pit" reminded me at times of Robert Heinlein's work.)  The ecologarium symbolizes all of the story's themes: a sense of being trapped, life-cycles which feature metamorphoses, and the way the individual species in an ecosystem all work in concert, almost as if they together form a single organism.  This Sigma section of the story also features a clever bit of foreshadowing for which there is a very effective and satisfying pay off in the final pages of the story.

Unsuited to married life, Vyme leaves the Sigma proke group and sets up a space ship repair and maintenance business at a space station, the star-pit of the title.  The main narrative follows his relationships with his employees and other friends and acquaintances, goldens among them; as Delany expands on all this themes we learn more about Vyme's own psychology and life and, along with Vyme, learn more about the true nature of the universe, leading up to the big revelation at the end.

Sixty pages might sound long, but "The Star-Pit" never feels slow or boring: the story moves very smoothly and is full of compelling images and interesting ideas, with new revelations coming all the time that keep the reader engaged.  Quite good!

"The Star-Pit" was first published in Worlds of Tomorrow, where it was illustrated by Jack Gaughan, and has since reappeared in the Delany collection Driftglass and in a number of anthologies.    

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I think we can call all three of these stories "literary SF."  Aldiss in "Confluence" does something strange and experimental and the risks of doing so pay off handsomely.  Delany in "The Star-Pit" expertly employs a battery of beloved traditional SF elements like weird aliens, war and trade in outer space, a girl with psychic powers, a wealthy anti-social elite that lords it over the mundanes, and novel ways of organizing sex life and child rearing to tell a very effective story about human relationships on both the individual and social levels.  Leiber, unfortunately, gives us an obvious and boring mainstream story about how some guy's daydreams reflect his unhappy career and family life, a story that feels ten times longer than it actually is.  Still, any blog post in which I can give two strong recommendations feels like a cause for celebration, so, no regrets!