1973 Tomorrows by D Gerrold, J Blish and G R Dozois

Let's finish up Ten Tomorrows, the 1973 anthology of all-new SF stories (the back cover somewhat questionably calls them "thrillers" and "adventures") edited by Roger Elwood.  The last three stories in the book are by David Gerrold, James Blish and Gardner R. Dozois, and collectively take up like 80 pages, which sounds like a lot of pages, to be honest, but I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....

"An Infinity of Loving" by David Gerrold

I guess you'd call this a philosophical story, more a series of ideas than a traditional story.  

"An Infinity of Loving" starts by describing two good-looking young people who are in love, and how beautiful and wonderful their love is, and talking about all the unlikely coincidences that go into two people meeting each other by chance and falling in love.  Even though these two individuals are young, attractive, straight and white, Gerrold tells us the love of old ugly homosexuals of some other ethnicity would be just as wonderful.  

Then comes the subject of death, another thing that often comes about by unlikely coincidences, but which inevitably happens to everybody, and with it, the end of any wonderful love relationship the deceased was a component of.  This part of the story betrays the preoccupations of the period in which it was written, with allusions to political demonstrations, rock musicians dying of drug overdoses, and politicians getting murdered. 

The two lovers fear death, and take steps to ensure they, and their love, will live forever.  They have their brains networked together via elaborate surgeries and computer implants, and their personalities uploaded into a computer network.  The last section of the story lets us know that this is basically a scam, that the reproduced personalities in the network are not really the people upon which they are based, and each individual personality is experiencing not a true love relationship with another personality, but mere solipsistic self love.  Gerrold's story is a warning against integrating yourself into technology, arguing that it is a bogus sham experience and true life is connected to the body.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis, and I don't disagree with its arguments, but it feels long and the points it makes are sort of obvious and banal, and Gerrold doesn't dramatize his arguments by presenting us with compelling characters or a gripping plot, he just sort of tells them to you.  While I was reading "An Infinity of Loving" I kept checking to see how many pages were left, anxious to put this experience behind me, so I have to give it a, marginal, thumbs down.

"An Infinity of Loving" has never appeared outside of Ten Tomorrows.

"A True Bill" by James Blish

Sacre bleu, the subtitle to this story indicates that it is "A Chancel Drama in One Act."  Do I really want to read a 25-page play ("Time: Today...Place: A courtroom") designed to be performed in churches?  I guess I am doing it anyway.

In the intro to the play provided for its appearance here in a book purportedly filled with "Great New Science Fiction Stories," Blish reports he and his theatre group put the play on in fifteen churches in what we residents call "the DMV" back in 1966.  Blish makes sure to tell us that one of the churches was in a black slum and that one of his group's lead actors was a black man and that this guy was a great actor.

Blish's play is a reworking of the story of the death of Jesus Christ, with the roles of the Romans played by people much like American soldiers, and that of the Jews by people who are supposed to remind you of Vietnamese people.  (Blish doesn't use any of those proper nouns; instead the soldiers are members of "the Occupying Forces" and the natives are called by the non-coms, though not by their officer, "the gooks.")  Two days ago a native judge allied to the Occupying Forces had three troublemakers hanged.  Today the Occupying Forces and a different native judge are holding an inquest to determine if the three prisoners were justly executed.  Witnesses are called, and their testimony, and stuff said by people in the crowd, make it clear that one of the three people executed was a man who preached brotherhood and peace and got caught up in native politics and whose death was desired by his native enemies.  Among the witnesses and in the crowd are characters like Mary, mother of that man of peace, and Magda, a prostitute who was a follower the man of peace, who play the roles of their Biblical namesakes, as well as caricatures or archetypes of stereotypical 1966 Americans, like a teen-aged hippy who says "Don't blow your cool, baby," a doctor who psychoanalyses the man of peace, a housewife who is worried about inflation, etc.

I found "A True Bill" to be a gimmicky waste of time, though I suppose it could be seen as a useful primary source, an artifact that offers insight into the thought of people in 1966 and into the thinking and career of James Blish.   

You are not going to be surprised to hear that isfdb does not list any other printings of  "A True Bill" after its appearance here in Ten Tomorrows.

"In a Crooked Year" by Gardner R. Dozois

Ten Tomorrows ends with another long piece--like 40 pages--that has only ever appeared in Elwood's anthology here.  "In A Crooked Year" has four epigraphs, lines of poetry from Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Aram Boyajian, and an exchange of dialogue from Catch-22.

The protagonist of "In a Crooked Year" is a survivor of World War Three!  A wounded soldier serving in Pennsylvania, he deserted when his unit was about to fight a battalion of enemy paratroopers and so lived on after his comrades were wiped out; apparently all of those invading paratroopers were also killed.  (The enemies are never identified, because the point of a story like this is not to criticize or stoke the readers' resentment of some foreign country or some political ideology--the point of a story like this is to criticize and stoke your resentment of the entire human race!)  Our main character thinks he is the only human being left alive in the world!

The text of "In a Crooked Year" is at times impressionistic and often mind-numbingly overwritten, offering us readers long sentences that signify little.  Lengthy passages describe stuff he sees, and these descriptions are confusing and vague, a reflection of the physical and mental toll the deserter's experiences are having on him; the man's thought processes are also related, illustrating his loosening grip on sanity.  Here's a short, but otherwise representative, paragraph:

I open my eyes again and let the colors rave at me, drinking them, touching and tasting their subtle, oscillating textures.  I am afraid that the world will absorb me, drown me in its intensity until I become just another light wave spinning and vibrating along the color spectrum, or at best a single leaf nodding its head among the vast sea of living green.

We also get lots of sentences repetitively describing the deserter's hardships and wretched efforts to survive--his aches and pains, his crying and vomiting, his meals of raw snakes and slugs, his dreams and delusions.  As the above extract demonstrates, "In a Crooked Year" is sometimes written in the first-person in the present tense, but at other times the text is in the past tense and delivered by an omniscient third-person narrator.

The deserter suffers survivor's guilt, and is reluctant to go to the battlefield where his unit was destroyed, but eventually does so, thinking there may be preserved food and other supplies there that he can salvage--he's not really finding enough bugs, reptiles and roots to make up a healthy diet.  The first chapter of the story ends with the survivor yelling at God and at the human race.

In the first chapter of the story there was a lot of philosophical talk about the protagonist being the last man on Earth, but in the second (and final) chapter it becomes clear that there is at least one other survivor; presumably this is an enemy soldier, as he shoots at our hero, but misses.  Winter comes, making survival even more difficult, and our insane protagonist sacrifices a bird in hopes this will cause winter to end.  He manages to survive the winter.  In spring, he shoots down the enemy soldier.  Then, he shoots himself.  

If I had to guess what this story is trying to convey, I would say that Dozois is suggesting that the human race is arrogant and destructive towards the beautiful natural world as well as self-destructive, and that man and his technology (one of the protagonist's delusions is that the broken pieces of various armored vehicles have assembled themselves like a Frankenstein's monster and this zombie machine is slowly closing in on our hero) are a cruel burden on that beautiful natural world, but that nature will endure man's presence and thrive after he destroys himself.     

"In a Crooked Year" is a slog to read; dense and slow, it goes on forever and you rarely feel like you are getting anywhere.  Thumbs down!  

**********

Three stories with obvious and banal points to make that make them in ways that are not entertaining and chew up lots of the brief time you have left on this Earth.  And I don't even sympathize with Dozois's supposed insights!

Three losers in a row?  Each one worse than its predecessor?  Ouch!  

**********

Folks, it's time for tonight's Top Ten List!  Tonight's list: Top Ten Stories in Ten Tomorrows.

TOP TEN STORIES

IN

TEN TOMORROWS

10. "In a Crooked Year" by Gardner R. Dozois

9.  "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" by Robert Silverberg

8.  "A True Bill" by James Blish

7.  "The Freshman Angle" by Edgar Pangborn

6.  "An Infinity of Loving" by David Gerrold

5.  "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" by Anne McCaffrey

4.  "A Few Minutes" by Laurence M. Janifer

3. "The Defenseless Dead" by Larry Niven

2. "Matthew" by Pamela Sargent

1. "Yahrzeit" by Barry N. Malzberg

**********

Can I recommend Ten Tomorrows, a book with five bad stories and four good ones?  I actually think I can!  Well, to special people with particular interests, at least!  While it is true that two of the good stories in the book--Malzberg's and Niven's--are available in other books (and on the world's greatest website, the internet archive), the other two, Sargent's and Janifer's, are not, so maybe Sargent and Janifer fans should get a hold of the book.  Similarly, students or collectors of Blish, Gerrold, Pangborn, and Dozois have no other avenue to experience the stories included here.  Finally, and I know I have suggested this already, repeatedly, Ten Tomorrows is a primary source for those who want to learn about the New Wave and the 1960s and 1970s from the horse's mouth and not from tendentious secondary sources.

Call me crazy, but another all-new SF anthology from the 1970s in our next episode!  Steel your nerve!