Protostars (1971): D Gerrold, E Bryant, S Goldin, & L P Kelley

Back in 2017 I blogged about David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's anthology Generation, an adventure that occupied us for four blog posts.  That same year I also blogged about their anthology Alternities, an expedition which exhausted three posts.  This grand tradition continues in 2022, as MPorcius Fiction Log takes a long gander at Gerrold and Goldin's anthology Protostars, a caper which, barring sudden death on the road, will occupy four blog posts.  Today, our second foray into Protostars, we'll be wrestling with the fifth through eighth of the book's sixteen stories, those by Gerrold himself, Edward Bryant, and Leo P. Kelley, as well as Goldin's second included story.  Collectively, these pieces take up fewer than 40 pages, so maybe we'll be getting out of the office early today and can beat that rush hour traffic.

"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" by David Gerrold

This is a joke story and a total waste of everybody's time; Gerrold takes a mundane metaphor about how a big rusty old bus is kind of like a large mammal enfeebled by age, and expands this one sentence idea to seven pages, describing automobiles attacking the bus the way you might describe a pack of wolves attacking an elk who just cashed his first social security check or a feeding frenzy of sharks tearing away at a whale with a broken hip as well as each other.  Many of the jokes are what I guess you might call puns, like saying a Mustang whinnies or a Firebird screeches.  Ugh.

Lame.

"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" was included by Leo P. Kelley in his 1974 anthology Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous, and would also show up in a French anthology published in 1976.

"Eyes of Onyx" by Edward Bryant

Gerrold in his intro spoils us, revealing that "Eyes of Onyx" is a retelling of the story of Jesus Christ, and goes on and on about how the story of Christ is the most prominent story in our Judeo-Christian culture and people are retelling it all the time and "Eyes of Onyx" probably wouldn't affect people in, say, Pakistan, as it does us here in America.  

Bryant writes his story in the voice of Juan, a 16-year-old Hispanic auto mechanic living in the dreadful future of rampant crime, promiscuous teenage sex, widespread drug use, (incompetent) government control of the health care system, the decline of religion, and electronic billboards that hover in the sky and obscure the stars at night.  Our narrator works with his Dad at their privately owned garage; Dad refuses to accept welfare or to sell his little garage to one of the big garage conglomerates.  

It is winter.  Into the out-of-the-way neighborhood where Juan's Dad has his garage comes a couple--the female member of the pair is pregnant and about to give birth, but they have no credit (I guess all money is in electronic form in this bleak future) so can't get a room at the inn.  The government doctor that serves this area is out of town on vacation.  So the narrator and his father put up the couple and Dad delivers the baby.  At this time the clouds part and Juan sees that comet he heard about on the news.  Then he has a chance to look at the baby, which has a powerful effect on him--he falls to his knees before this remarkable child!  The baby is a little girl with weird black eyes, and Juan theorizes that this baby is like Jesus, except that the God of Love has been overthrown or has given up because we people are so terrible, and the new God, a God of Hate, has sent his only daughter down here to punish us or force us to behave or something similarly horrible.

A gimmicky horror story, but not exactly bad; I didn't see the twist coming, and didn't even realize it was a horror story until I got to the end--I had expected the baby would be heralding an improvement in human life, not some kind of cataclysmic revolution.  We're calling this one acceptable filler.  Maybe "Eyes of Onyx" will be of particular interest to students of depictions of Latinos in SF?  I'm not exactly sure why Bryant chose to make the main characters Hispanic, maybe because the middle-class white people who are presumably the bulk of the audience for a SF anthology like Protostars have a vision of Hispanics as poor but industrious and more religious than non-Hispanic whites, and so more in tune with the story's down-and-out setting and Christianity-turned-upside down theme?  

"Eyes of Onyx" has been reprinted once, in 1975's The New Awareness: Religion Through Science Fiction.  

"The World Where Wishes Worked" by Stephen Goldin

Goldin's second story in Protostars was considered suitable for children in 1997 and included in a Scholastic anthology edited by Bruce Coville.  Before that, it was reprinted in one of those anthologies of short shorts with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover (in front of Terry Carr's and Martin H. Greenberg's) and in a "Nelson Mini-Anthology" published in Canada.  

Gerrold's intro to "The World Where Wishes Worked" is a sort of woe-is-me thing about how people don't respect writers; even though I was rolling my eyes at its self-pitying tone, it offers some interesting info on the lives of professional SF people of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with particular details on Gerrold and Goldin's own careers, and so I found it more valuable than the story it introduces.

"The World Where Wishes Worked" really is like a kid's fairy tale.  A fool makes foolish wishes and he and the whole human race suffer the consequences.  The meat of the story is little logical conundrums, like how if a foolish person wished that he would stop saying foolish things he wouldn't be able to talk, because as a foolish person everything he tries to say will be foolish.

Thumbs down.

"Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" by Leo P. Kelley

In his intro to this one, Gerrold offers his definition(s) of what a science fiction story is ("Any science can have a story written about it--and that story will be science fiction" and "Science fiction is stories about things that may be possible, but haven't happened") and says there should be more SF about the behavioral sciences like psychology and sociology, and "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" is one of them.

It is the future, the year 2010, an overpopulated world in which you go to a communal cafeteria every morning and push buttons in the wall to get eggs and toast, but the crowds of fat people are so hard to push through most days you don't get to the egg button but only to the toast button.  Our protagonists are Lena and Arnold, a married couple, and the text refers quite a bit to their daydreams and other thoughts, none of which I found interesting.

Floating unnoticed among the humans of the overcrowded city are noncorporeal aliens who feed on the electric impulses that make up human thought.  They feed on Lena and Arnold, and as a result our two main characters forget their daydreams and cease indulging in them.  This, perhaps, is to the good; without these fantasies, they become more engaged in their circumscribed lives, more able to face its challenges with confidence and hope.

This story has almost no plot, the two stock SF elements (overpopulation and aliens who suck something out of you) aren't even connected, and its tone is relentlessly flat and boring.  Thumbs down for "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix."  It seems our friends who eat snails and frogs liked it; they reprinted it in a 1976 anthology.  (I'm toying with the theory that the Frenchies liked "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" and "Afternoon with a Dead Bus" because they thought these stories said something crummy about America, like we're all fat and ruthless and selfish or something.)  

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Am I becoming some kind of hard ass, or has this batch been totally lackluster?  None of today's stories merit the kind of scrutiny I lavished on the Yep and Tiptree stories that appeared in the first batch, and none of them has the emotional power of the first Goldin story in the anthology.  Only Bryant's story is competent and appropriate; Goldin's story today is competent but only appropriate for children, and today's Kelley and Gerrold stories are sterile tedium.

Well, we've got two batches to go; maybe we'll find something legitimately good among the eight stories that make up the second half of Protostars and get out of the rut we found ourselves in today.