Stories of metamorphosis by R A Lafferty, B J Bayley & T M Disch

Let's check out another SF anthology I bought in some small town while I was living in the MidWest.  I believe I acquired Changes, a 1983 paperback edited by Michael Bishop and Ian Watson, at a library sale at some library I only ever went into once, maybe in some burg I only ever went to once; for business and personal reasons I used to end up driving all over Iowa and Ohio and one of the things I would do to kill time (and use the facilities) was drop in to public libraries, and I would always check out the book sale.  

Changes has as its theme metamorphosis, changes both physical and psychological, as it tells us on the title page, and contains reprints as well as brand new stories on the theme.  Today let's read two reprints from the 1970s, one by R. A. Lafferty and one by Barrington J. Bayley, and one fresh 1983 story by Thomas M. Disch.

"Once on Aranea" by R. A. Lafferty (1972) 

"Once on Aranea" was first printed in the hardcover collection Strange Doings; I own the 1973 paperback edition of Strange Doings, but I'll read "Once on Aranea" here in Changes.  

This is an entertaining little story with numerous classic SF elements like the risky exploration of alien worlds and an alien invasion of Earth based largely on subversion of Earth people; added to the mix is a truly disgusting horror scene, and it is all written in Lafferty's colloquial and folksy style.

In the spacefaring future, exploration parties will leave a man alone on an unexplored asteroid for a while, the idea being that an alien menace that would cower in hiding from a squad of men might reveal itself and attack a lone man.  These solo explorers are provided with a prodigious supply of booze, but many of them go insane anyway.  (One of the subtle jokes of the story seems to be that this system of exploration does not work--often the man left alone disappears without a trace or when picked up tells a horrible story of danger which nobody believes because they assume it is the product not of accurate observation but of insanity.)

The main character of the story is left with a dog otherwise alone on a planet of intelligent creatures the size of a man's hand who are much like spiders.  The life cycle of these spiders has two phases; to transition to the adult phase, a larval stage spider, which only has four limbs, is encased in a cocoon with a dead animal to eat during its period of confinement; eventually it emerges with a greater number of limbs.  The culture of these spider people is centered on a fanatical love for and devotion to their parents.

The spiders see the man as a parent and, due to his size, worship him as a god.  The arachnid folk also believe he is in his larval form, so they trap him in a cocoon with the body of his murdered dog, expecting him to eat the poor pooch and emerge in a mature multi-legged form.  He succumbs, and upon emergence embraces the role of Emperor of the Spiders and commits himself wholeheartedly to the spiders' conquest of Earth, where awaits a Fifth Column of native Earth spiders that will facilitate the human race's assimilation into his arachnid empire!     

Plenty of fun, thumbs up!

"Sporting With the Chid" by Barrington J. Bayley (1979)

The MPorcius Fiction Log staff is notorious for its aversion to joke stories.  In fact, I considered reading the Michael Bishop and Michael G. Coney stories that appear here in Changes, but there were just too many clues suggesting they were outrageously absurd meta satires of the SF field or some such thing, so I am giving them a wide berth.  "Sporting With the Chid" sounds like a joke story title, I admit, but it is not setting my spider sense tingling too severely, so I'm giving it a shot.

It is the future, and mankind has developed an interstellar civilization, and encountered many other interstellar civilizations.  A large proportion of these alien races are so different from humanity, with radically different values and biologies and so forth, that a stable and productive relationship with them is deemed impossible, and the Earth government forbids contact with them.  What you might call a modus vivendi has developed across the galaxy such that many advanced races simply ignore each other, both civilizations confident that they are so incompatible that any relationship whatsoever can only lead to trouble.  Members of such incompatible species take pains to avoid each other should they find themselves on the same planet.

Our protagonists are three humans on a hunting expedition on a planet with no native intelligent inhabitants.  Early in the story one of them announces his ancestors were Boers, making me wonder if this was perhaps a signal to readers that we should have no sympathy for him, and that Bayley's story should be seen not simply as a dramatization of the idea of cultural relativism, but also some kind of allegory of or comment on apartheid and racism.

The men hope to collect the hides of rare beasts which will sell for high prices back on civilized planets.  Such beasts are ferocious fighters, and one of the hunters is slain.  His comrades are able to preserve his body so he can be resuscitated, but the preservation method only works for a limited time, and they doubt they can get to the nearest modern hospital, which is on another planet, before their friend spoils.  

Also on the planet is a group of Chid; the Chid are one of those spacefaring alien races the Terran government has forbidden humans from contacting.  The Chid are famed as skilled surgeons, and the humans decide to risk approaching the Chid in hopes of saving their buddy.

The human's dealings with the Chid provide effective (body) horror scenes as well as a sort of spoof of religion.  One of the few things the Chid know about the human race, and this only in a garbled fashion, is that many Terrans believe the soul is distinct from the body and can leave the body.  So they patch up the dead hunter and bring him back to life, but give his brain the ability to leave his skull and move around on its own like a snail.  When the revived man's friends object, they are overpowered and subjected to the same treatment and forced to participate in a cruel and dangerous sport that may well rob them of their humanity.

Quite good; like Lafferty's "Once on Aranea," "Sporting With the Chid" has humorous elements but entertainingly employs traditional SF themes of dangerous aliens and loss of identity and offers successful and disgusting horror elements.         

"Sporting With the Chid" was first published in the Bayley collection The Seed of Evil and has been translated into Germán and Japanese.  It was also selected by Ann and Jeff Vandermeer for their huge 2016 anthology The Big Book of Science Fiction: The Ultimate Collection.  The Vandermeer's book seems to be designed to appeal to the leftist sensibilities of college professors and to represent an effort to create a new canon of SF which is more "diverse."  "Sporting With the Chid" is a good story so its inclusion in any SF anthology is justified, but one wonders how white Englishman Bayley made the cut for an inclusion in an "ultimate collection of SF" when writers more popular and/or more influential like H. P. Lovecraft, Jack Williamson, Henry Kuttner, Robert Heinlein, Jack Vance, Larry Niven, Leigh Brackett, C. L. Moore, Poul Anderson, Thomas M. Disch, A. E. van Vogt and Barry Malzberg were left out.  Maybe Bayley's association with the New Wave, or that cultural relativism/spoof of religion angle? 

"The New Me" by Thomas M. Disch (1983)

It seems this story was written specifically for Changes and has never appeared anywhere else--Disch completists take note!

"The New Me" is a pretty slight story.  Merely acceptable...maybe barely acceptable.  The narrator is a fat guy, a teacher of trigonometry, but his low IQ students don't like him because he actually tries to teach them--the other math teachers don't bother.  Stung by negative student evaluations, the people in the HR office send him to a head shrinker to get a new personality!  The doctor employs hypnotic methods, refers the narrator to Assertiveness Trainings and finally directs him to be baptized as a born-again Christian, and the narrator affects a whole new character and a whole new set of beliefs.  All these treatments and conversions are a scam--the narrator doesn't really like rodeos and doesn't really believe in the Bible--but by putting on the act of being a guy with a Southern drawl who loves Jesus and calls himself "Tex" he improves his life--he gets raises, he gets women, and he gets respect from others.  Disch darkly suggests that nobody really believes in any of this bunk, that the people who purport to do so are just affecting a pose, like the narrator, and that the narrator's success is the result of people not so much respecting him, but being scared of him, his commitment to his performance a sign he is dangerous.

The uncharitable reader might consider this story the sneer of an intelligent and educated man who is bitter over seeing people he is certain are not as smart as he is achieve greater happiness and greater financial success than he has, and/or an effort to appeal to such individuals--I assume SF fans typically think hypnosis, psychoanalysis and religion are scams and the people who profess to believe in them crooks or dopes.  Unfortunately, Disch here doesn't adduce any innovative new reasons to bolster this conclusion; he just makes fun of therapists, analysts and Christians, and his jokes aren't particularly fresh either, so this story is sort of forgettable.