"Chances Are" by Alice Laurance
Gerrold's introduction to "Chances Are" is a long discussion of the New Wave and how New Wave stories differ from "traditional" stories. In brief, "old wave" SF stories (says Gerrold) are optimistic adventure tales that focus on story-telling and creating characters in which a hero triumphs over obstacles, in which he masters the environment, while a New Wave story is pessimistic and "arty," focusing on technique rather than plot or character, and shows how individuals cannot change the environment in which they find themselves. Gerrold whips out his Hegel and suggests that the old SF is the thesis and the New Wave the antithesis, and wonders what the soon to come synthesis will look like, and suggests it may look like Don Quixote.
Alice Laurence's "Chances Are" is about the afterlife. A twenty-something woman has just died, and is standing on a road between unscalable sand dunes. As she follows the road, and chooses which way to go at intersections, she reminisces about her life and wonders if God is real and if people have free will. She was a musician who lacked the talent or drive to make a living as a performer or composer, and when she tried to become a mother her child died in the womb. At the end of the story she comes to a door; there is no way to pass around the door, so she opens it, triggering the total loss of her identity and the rebirth of her soul as that of a baby boy.
Each individual sentence and paragraph of "Chances Are" is fine, but the story as a whole is a big nothing. The passages about God and free will are inconclusive things we've heard before. The character makes no decisions (when she chooses between paths she does so at random, as there are no clues as to what lies beyond the next sand dune, no evidence on which to base a rational choice between one fork or another.) Laurance doesn't seem to be trying to make any interesting point with this story (maybe she's saying that you should be decisive but if you aren't you'll be given a chance to try again?), and doesn't engage the reader's emotions.
I'm giving this story a thumbs down, but it only just slips below the "barely acceptable" category; "Chances Are" is not offensively bad, but it accomplishes nothing.
A Belgian publisher would reprint "Chances Are" in French in a 1973 anthology that also includes Pamela Sargent's "Oasis" and Stephen Goldin's "The Last Ghost," and in 1975 Laurance's story would appear in a McGraw-Hill anthology, Heaven and Hell, again alongside Goldin's "The Last Ghost."
"The Naked and the Unashamed" by Robert E. Margroff
"The Naked and the Unashamed" is a series of childish jokes, I guess a satire of the vacuousness of the political protests in which middle-class young people engage--college kids protest because it is a fun social activity that brings excitement and (an illusory) meaning to their easy lives, not because they have any deeply felt or carefully considered views about the way the world works.
In the future, there is no war or crime. And college kids protest the lack of these exciting events--they have been denied the chance to participate in, or at least witness, essential aspects of human life. When they start throwing dirt and shit at the college dean, the police break up the riot by spraying the kids with an aphrodisiac; the horde of protestors fall to the ground and engage in an enthusiastic orgy. Some of the cops and journalists covering the event participate in the fucking.
Thumbs down for this waste of time.
"The Naked and the Unashamed" was reprinted in three different European anthologies. I'll keep this in mind when somebody tells me how sophisticated Europeans are.
"My Country, Right or Wrong" by Andrew J. Offutt
Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we generally think of Andrew Offutt as the guy who writes sword and sorcery novels, sword and planet novels, and planetary romances with covers by Boris Vallejo, Rowena Morrill, and Jeff Jones. But there is a pretentious Andrew Offutt who insists his name be spelled without capital letters, and it this incarnation of Offutt, I mean offutt, who contributes to Protostars. In his introduction to "My Country, Right or Wrong," Gerrold says great stories all have an element of truth, and that he thinks offutt's tale here has that element of truth.
Despite the eye-grabbing absence of uppercase letters, this story is not particularly pretentious or groundbreaking. In fact, "My Country, Right or Wrong," is a traditional sort of SF story that speculates about the future, engages in alternate history speculations, illustrates the law of unintended consequences, advocates limited government and denounces ethnic chauvinism.
Jeff Bellamy is a guy in 1978, a patriot who loves America but thinks the government is too oppressive, too many taxes and so on. He sneaks into a time machine some other guy built and finds himself in 2078. 2078 is a kind of libertarian utopia, with limited government and high technology and all that. But Jeff is shocked and disgusted when he learns how this world of freedom came to pass. You see, in 1980, the Soviet Union conquered the United States! But eventually the shortcomings of socialism became so obvious that reforms were instituted that lead to the current regime which is more capitalistic and democratic than that of America in 1978.
Instead of accepting that everything has turned out alright in the end, Jeff, who thinks America would arrive at this libertarian utopia without suffering the indignity of being conquered by the USSR, goes back in time to murder a young Lenin. But history is very complicated, and somehow killing Lenin causes the Nazis to conquer America, so Jeff goes back in time again, this time to kill Hitler, but this causes a Czarist Russia to take over America. Jeff eventually figures it all out, though it entails time paradoxes and some heavy personal sacrifice.
This story is OK, no big deal. Offutt includes lots of details about life in the future, like what clothes people wear and the way social mores have evolved, as well as political discussions, that are probably superfluous, but they aren't that terribly annoying. Perhaps lefties will find Offutt's championing of the market society and slagging of socialism irritating, as I found David Bunch's broad satire of our market society in "Holdholtzer's Box" tiresome.
Like so many stories in Protostars, "My Country Right or Wrong" has never been printed again.
"Side Effect" by Pg Wyal
I do not agree! "Side Effect," which has a subtitle that appears in parentheses, "(the monster that devoured Los Angeles)," is a ridiculous farce, a rapid-fire barrage of obvious jokes--many of them ethnic jokes and many of them sex jokes--as well as a satire of SF, though more a satire of the SF of the silver screen, like King Kong, the Godzilla films, and 1950s B-movies, than SF literature. Jokes are made about greedy clannish Jews and predatory homosexuals and how women smell like dead fish, but also about Ronald Reagan and anti-communists, and the story, which gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, eventually evolves into a bizarre attack on white racism, so maybe the politically correct will cut Wyal some slack?
Art Noone ("Side Effect" is full of joke names for people and places, like "Judge Glans" and "Cunnilingus City") is a 35-year-old law clerk. When he reads in the paper that an immortality drug is being tested, he is eager to be an early adopter and calls up his Jewish doctor who pulls some strings and acquires a dose. The injection makes Art feels like he is 18 again, and he quits his job and hitchhikes across this great land of ours to Los Angeles. Along the way Wyal makes obvious jokes about what we now call "flyover country" and Art runs afoul of the law and is imprisoned but escapes.
In La La Land, Art finds that he is growing. As he grows, his skin gets darker. Eventually he is like 18 feet tall and his enemies take to calling him "N-word Noone;" well, they don't actually say "N-word," they say the "N-word"--you know what I mean. Art becomes violent, and in the long climax of the story Art leads the black residents of Los Angeles in an attempted revolution against the white establishment. The racist mayor of L.A. transforms himself into a giant monster, and leads the resistance to the revolution and the counterattack of the white military. The black rebels are almost entirely wiped out, and N-word Noone and the mayor climb to the top of City Hall for a final showdown. The mayor is slain by Art, but then aircraft kill N-word Noone.
As I was reading the first 25 or so pages of "Side Effect," I was thinking I would judge it "barely acceptable." But the ending fight is so long and repetitive and the jokes so broad and silly (e. g., the Los Angeles Police Department has a squadron of World War II Messerschmitts) that the story slipped down into "Thumbs down" territory.
Like quite a number of stories lately that I have been telling you are not very good, "Side Effect" may have value as an historical document that provides insight into the concerns and attitudes of people alive when it was written. It was yet another story from Protostars to be included in the French Univers series of anthologies, the only place you will find it besides Protostars.
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And so our exploration of Protostars comes to a close. Sixteen stories have appeared under the pitiless MPorcius microscope, and I've already told you which stories I think are good, acceptable and bad; now I'll go out on a limb, and, below, make a preliminary stab at the sterile and quixotic exercise of ranking them within those three categories. I'm already regretting doing this, as I feel like I graded Bradfield and Goldin on a curve, offering unwarranted charity to the former and punishing the latter unfairly because his second story is in an inappropriate venue, but I'm not going to work on this any more, and I am also not going to just erase the list after spending so much time on it.
Before we sign off, I should point out that several of David Gerrold's introductions to the stories are useful to the student of late 1960s/early 1970s SF because they offer the informed opinions of Gerrold, a successful novelist, editor, and screenwriter in the SF field, about the New Wave and about the working lives and psychologies of people with careers in the SF world in that period.
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PROTOSTARS: RANKING THE STORIES
Good
2. "Oasis" by Pamela Sargent
3. "And Watch the Smog Roll In..." by Barry Weissman
4. "The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin
Acceptable
6. "My Country, Right or Wrong" by andrew j. offutt
7. "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" by James Tiptree, Jr.
8. "Holdholtzer's Box" by David R. Bunch
9. "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" by Scott Bradfield
Bad
12. "Side Effect" by Pg Wyal
13. "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" by Leo P. Kelley
14. "The Naked and the Unashamed" by Robert E. Margroff
15. "Afternoon With a Dead Bus" by David Gerrold
16. "The Five-Dimensional Sugar Cube" by Roger Deeley
There were a lot of anthologies with original stories back in the late 60's through the 70's, This was not one of the good ones. I would stick with the Orbit and New Dimensions series.
ReplyDeleteOver the years I've read a ton of stories that first appeared in those famous and revered anthologies, but here at MPorcius Fiction Log we also like to explore stuff that is a little "out there," books and stories that have been forgotten or are generally looked down upon.
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