1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold and James Sallis

I recently found myself in Myrtle Beach, celebrating the birthday of one of my in-laws.  Of course it is nice to walk on the beach, finding dead crabs and hearing the surf and seeing how the moonlight is reflected on the breakers and all that, and I had a good time at the pottery stores in Seagrove, NC, and the antique stores in places like Weyer's Cave, VA, and Bennettsville, SC at which we stopped on the drive down, but let's be honest: Myrtle Beach is a hideous tourist town where I don't really belong.  So I had ample time to sit in the decrepit condo my in-laws rented and read old issues of Weird Tales and a 1971 paperback SF anthology I brought with me, Nova One.  Nova One, first of a series of four, was edited by Harry Harrison and first published in 1970 in hardcover.  My copy of Nova One once was part of the library of the M. I. T. Science Fiction Society, which is fun.

In his introduction to the volume, Harrison stresses that science fiction is about science, and argues that we should see H. G. Wells as the first science fiction author, obliquely dismissing Mary Shelly's claim ("Modern SF definitely does not date back to the second century and Lucian of Samosata, or even to the Gothic and fantastic novels of the last century.")  Then he crows that, while the mainstream short story is essentially moribund, science fiction writers continue to produce a large volume of short stories in magazines.  Finally, he produces somewhat vague arguments for why stories from a book of new stories like this one (13 of the 15 pieces in Nova One are brand new) should be better than stories written for a magazine.

Ray Bradbury's name is at the top of the list on the cover, but his contribution to Nova One is not a new story but a three-year-old poem, "And This Did Dante Do," which appeared in 1967 in Florida Quarterly.  The angle of this poem is that living in Chicago is hell, its fanciful conceit that Dante Alighieri created the Windy City in a dream or by travelling to the New World via some machine of his own invention.  That the monstrosity Dante is devising is Chicago is revealed at the end of the poem as a kind of surprise punchline, and Bradbury's complaints about the hog butcher to the world--there is pollution; apartments are small--could probably be said of any decent-sized 20th-century city.  This poem isn't all that bad an example of silly verse, but I enjoyed city life when I lived in a real city and so can't get behind the point of view Ray is espousing here.  

Our beloved Barry Malzberg has two stories in Nova One.  "Terminus Est" I read in 2018 when I decided to read all the stories that made up the fixup novel Universe Day as well as the novel itself; I really liked "Terminus Est" and suggested in my blog post that Malzberg was hewing closer to genre literature conventions when he wrote it, to its benefit.  "In the Pocket," which appears in Nova One under the pen name K. M. O'Donnell, is one of the stories upon which Malzberg's novel The Men Inside is based.  I read The Men Inside before I started this blog, and am toying with the idea of rereading and blogging about it; if I do I'll talk about "In the Pocket" in the same post.  Suffice to say here that "In the Pocket" is a pretty good story and doesn't feel like a fragment or anything.     

Now, let's read three stories new to me by authors with whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some familiarity, Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold and James Sallis.

"Swastika!" by Brian Aldiss

This, Harrison warns us in his little intro to "Swastika!," is a joke story about Adolf Hitler!  The jokes in Aldiss's novel about serving in Burma during the Second World War, A Soldier Erect, made me laugh, so maybe the humor in this story will also work on me?  

Or maybe not.  Our narrator, whose name is Brian, has a meeting with Hitler, who survived the war and is living under an assumed name in Ostend.  The bulk of the story, I guess, is satire, the point of which, I guess, is that 1960s politicians are really little better than Hitler.  Lyndon Baines Johnson, Fidel Castro, Moshe Dayan, King Hussein of Jordan, and Sukarno, among others, are all said to have consulted Hitler, begging for his guidance, while Hitler admits to finding admirable qualities in Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace and to having enjoyed the spectacle of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  

Throughout the story Brian expresses admiration for Hitler, and the punchline of the story is that Brian has come to Ostend to get Hitler to sign a contract so that Brian can put on a musical of Hitler's life, the title of which will be "Swastika!"  Mel Brooks's The Producers was in movie theaters in 1967, and it is a little odd to see Aldiss and editor Harrison not spiking this joke and coming up with some other gag for the ending of this 1970 story.  Maybe "The Producers" wasn't shown in England?

This story is not funny or interesting.  Any effect it might have on the reader relies on the shock value of the narrator expressing admiration for Hitler, from the absurdity of Hitler's claims that he hasn't really lost the war because the war isn't really over yet or the idea of a musical about Der Fuhrer, or from reader sympathy with Aldiss's shallow criticisms of 1960s politicians, which essentially amount to name-calling--Aldiss's attacks on LBJ and the rest aren't much more specific or persuasive than Bradbury's attack on Chicago in "And This Did Dante Do."  Aldiss's strategies in this story are basic, even childish, though maybe when the story was published their audacity excited readers.  Thumbs down from me in 2021, though.          

"Swastika!" would be included in Aldiss's oft-reprinted collection The Moment of Eclipse as well as Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss.  

"Love Story in Three Acts" by David Gerrold

Gerrold may be most famous for the tribbles of Star Trek which are so suspiciously like a creature from Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, but I always think of Gerrold as the guy behind the novels Deathbeast and Yesterday's Children, both of which are noteworthy and crazy in their own way; also memorable are the Chtorr books.  Relatively recently I read Gerrold's novel Space Skimmer, which I have to admit is not nearly as remarkable as the aforementioned books.

This story here is about a married couple...of the future!  In Act One they have sex and then consult the computer which has been reading their vital signs through bands on their wrists.  It reports they only achieved 34% pleasure!  The wife pesters the husband about getting a computer that will be even more invasive--I mean helpful--so they can get a better score.

Act Two is at the husband's office.  A salesman comes by; he was contacted by the wife.  He convinces a reluctant husband to invest in a computer system that won't just read the couple's vitals while they are having sex, but guide their movements to better pleasure each other!  

In Act Three the device is installed and the wife convinces the husband that they should use it.  (This entire story is about the husband resisting pressure from others but eventually giving in to their manipulations--the modern world of feminism, capitalism and technology--as depicted in this story--is a world in which men are at the mercy of women, businesspeople and machines.)  They hook themselves up to all the wires and then have better sex than they have had for years.  The optimistic trick ending to the story is the revelation that they forgot to turn the computer on--if their sex was better it was because of some reinvigorated rapport between them...or the placebo effect.

Acceptable.   

"Love Story in Three Acts" would resurface in a Gerrold collection and in anthologies, including a French one and an English one which has what must be one of the worst book covers of the 20th century.

"Faces & Hands" by James Sallis

I've read several things by Sallis, like the experimental "Field," "Delta Flight 281," and "The First Few Kinds of Truth," none of which I thought were worth my time.  But maybe this time Sallis and I will be on the same wavelength--hope springs eternal!

It is the future!  Mankind has achieved the ability to travel between the stars.  The Earth has recently joined a space federation called "The Union" which seems to be culturally dominated by people from the Vegan system--everywhere you go people wear Vegan fashions and speak Vegan.  In his little intro paragraph to "Faces & Hands," Harrison tells us Sallis is a poet, and Sallis employs little word games to make his story feel more alien or futuristic.  On the first page of the story we find that the cliché "playing by ear" is now rendered "playing by air;" on page two we learn that "ziggurat" is now styled "zikkurat" and that the name Stein is pronounced "stain."  

Our narrator, immediately after graduating college, was recruited by a guy named Stein to work as a "Courier," a sort of interstellar diplomat.  He relates how, while on a diplomatic mission, he got temporarily stranded on the planet Alsfort thanks to a labor strike.  While waiting for interstellar travel to resume  he sat in a "wayroom" by the spaceport, drinking and people watching.  Sallis gives us several pages of descriptions of people the narrator sees in the wayroom, giving us an idea of how diverse the Union is.  The most pages get devoted to a bird-like alien woman, a beautiful singer, who sits and talks to the narrator.  She describes how the culture of her race of bird people has been changed by contact with the peoples of the Union, changed in a way that causes social upheaval, with some embracing new technologies and ideas and others resisting them.  Presumably these bird people and their problems are supposed to remind us of the fate of Third Worlders who become integrated into the world economy dominated by Western ideas and technology.  Later Sallis makes his point explicit, that engagement with other cultures/economies/polities can both bring benefits and exact costs, and that whether such engagement is on balance worthwhile is not necessarily obvious.  

"Faces & Hands" is in two parts.  The second part is in the third person and takes place after a space war between Earth and another planet; Vega sided with Earth and was severely bombed, reducing this formerly leading society to penury (there are blackouts due to rationing of energy, as in poor countries nowadays and, according to rumor, California.)  The narrative of this eight-page section of the story concerns a prostitute who has mild psychic powers and a space traveler who spends time with her.  There are animal metaphors and a scene with bohemian artists that, I guess, is meant to show the effect of war on culture and maybe how different generations respond differently to change, echoing something the bird-lady said in the first part.  

Because it presents characters and images and human emotions, seems to be responding to interesting historical events like imperialism, the World Wars and Cold War, and the growth of international trade, and sort of has a plot, this is the best story by Sallis I have ever read.  I don't love it, but it at least is worth reading. 

"Faces & Hands" has been reprinted in Sallis collections (as "Faces, Hands") and in an anthology printed in brave little Belgium.  

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It is always interesting and often fun to look into these old SF anthologies.  So more short stories from one of the anthologies on the shelves of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!