"Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" by Robert Silverberg
This is a New Wave thing, a story that knows it is a story, with a protagonist who knows he isn't real, sometimes acts as the narrator and directly speaks to the reader. "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" is full of topical early '70s references--e. g., the My Lai massacre, IRA terrorism, Kennedy assassinations--and name dropping--e. g., Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Richard Nixon. Various unconventional narrative devices are employed--there are lots of what appear to be transcriptions of real life newspaper clippings, for example, and lists, like a list of Native American tribes and a list of famous assassins.
The threadbare plot of this story, which somebody who liked it in 1973 might have called "a freewheeling phantasmagoria that speaks to today's concerns," upon which the lists and newspaper clippings and various flights of fancy are hung, is about a college student who wishes he had the technology to travel through time, to hypnotize people, to levitate, to travel underground, etc., so that he could change history and the world by, for example (these are the flights of fancy), giving American Indians a nuclear weapon so they can achieve revenge on the white man, destroying the Pentagon, saving Abraham Lincoln from John Wilkes Booth, brainwashing President Nixon, and making it legal for homosexuals to get married. One of the student's fantasies, which I guess enables the others, is that he is a student from the future who has travelled to the 1970s as part of his dissertation research.
In the last paragraph of the story the college student upbraids the reader for enjoying these escapist fantasies (P.S.: I was not enjoying them) instead of actually getting out there and working for the Revolution (P.S.: I'm still not inclined to get out there and set fire to a police station or loot a department store.)
I guess this story is interesting as an historical artifact, a document that offers the 21st-century reader a catalog of stuff lefties in 1973 had on their minds, even if it is unclear to what extent Silverberg is expressing sympathy for those who would radically change our society through brainwashing and other forms of violence and to what extent he is lampooning people who indulge in such sterile and/or self-destructive fantasies. Obviously, if we judge "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" on traditional criteria, like pacing, character development, plot, or style, it is quite bad--the piece is long and tedious and offers not the least shred of entertainment. In some ways it resembles a Malzberg story, but it is lengthy and explicit and disjointed, with lots of extraneous material, while a Malzberg story on similar themes would be brief and allusive, and is not at all funny, the way the better Malzberg stories can be quite funny.
"Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" would reappear in a bunch of Silverberg collections, and Elwood would include it in another of his anthologies--yet another with "tomorrow" in the title!--three years after it appeared here in Ten Tomorrows.
"Yahrzeit" by Barry N. Malzberg
For some reason, I guess overpopulation, in the early 1980s it is legal to assassinate strangers on the street! In fact, the government will give you a reward for sneaking up on people and killing them! But only certain kinds of people, like old people, known as "jerrys." The narrator is a guy who loves slaying people. He's a little bored with killing jerrys, and would like to put a child to death, but that is not permissible--yet! Today is the anniversary of the death of one of the narrator's friends, a fellow bloodthirsty killer who had the balls to murder a little boy, but was caught and thrown in prison. The narrator hunts down a jerry and kills him, and dedicates the kill to his dead friend, even forgoing the government reward for his good deed in honor of his friend!
This story is a great contrast with Silverberg's. Whereas "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" is eighteen pages of tired and obvious leftist boilerplate you've heard a hundred times already that makes your eyes glaze over and inspires thoughts about those dishes that are sitting in the sink and should probably be washed before it's time to make dinner, "Yahrzeit" is two pages of surprise and mystery, a story that grips you, makes you laugh, makes you feel.
Thumbs up!
"Yahrzeit" would later be included in the Malzberg collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.
"A Few Minutes" by Laurence M. Janifer
You are a white scientist with a black wife, with whom you have an adult son. You have created a machine that can look at the future and display to the operator the results of major decisions that change history. (It won't warn you if that second helping of pancakes is going to give you indigestion, but it will warn you if that invasion of Ukraine you have your heart set on isn't going to wrap itself up in three or four days after all.) The machine gives the human race the ability to avoid nuclear war and other cataclysms. It took a long time to get the machine built and accepted by the government, but thanks to the machine, today there is a world government, no fear of nuclear war, and no racism. Today you and your son await the Committee that is going to give you an award or something, and you will have to give a speech. In conversation with your son we readers learn that there was a house fire early in the development of the machine, and your son saved the machine from the fire.
"A Few Minutes" has a sad twist ending that I have to admit I'm not quite sure I really understand. You and your wife initially didn't want to have a son, because you feared you couldn't afford a child and worried how the racist world would treat a mixed race person; in the event, of course, it has been great having a son--he's handsome and strong and smart and you have a great relationship with him full of intellectual discussions and shared jokes and all that; and of course he saved the machine from that fire. But the last two pages of the story seem to suggest that the first six pages, which depict life with a son, are a day dream or a machine-generated vision of an alternate future that didn't come to pass, that the machine, on its first test run, advised you to not have a son, because a son will distract you and delay the completion and adoption of the machine. The reason the story is in the second person is that the voice in which the story is written is that of the son who will not exist, or maybe just what the scientist imagines such a son's voice would be like. At least I think that is what is going on; it is a little opaque.
Acceptable.
"A Few Minutes" has only ever appeared in Ten Tomorrows. Perhaps even worse, the people at Fawcett spelled Janifer's name wrong on both the front and back covers of Ten Tomorrows. Sad!
"The Freshman Angle" by Edgar Pangborn
More college students! The characters in "The Freshman Angle" are attending university 800 years from now. Pangborn's story consists of their conversations about the 20th century--one of these kids is a history student and has to write an essay on the 1900s--and the point of the story is the contrast between the 20th century and the world of the 28th century, which I guess Pangborn is offering up as some kind of utopia. The 20th century is presented as the period in which all the natural resources were practically used up and which ended with a nuclear war and worldwide flooding, cataclysms which were soon followed by a worldwide plague; as a result, the students of the future burn wood for heat and candles for light and write with dip pens; metal is in short supply and the use of fossil fuels is strictly regulated. Theirs is a communal society; the students were raised in communes and they are all obliged to do physical labor at the university, raising and cooking the food, for example. People walk around naked, are apparently all bisexual, and their seasonal holidays are sex orgies.
This story, about thirty pages, is boring and irritating; the surfeit of banalities about 20th-century pollution and warfare, and the advocacy of abandoning monogamy and heterosexuality are lame enough, but even worse is all the cute and erudite flirting among the main characters, which I guess is supposed to show that if you regulate fossil fuels and raise kids in a commune everybody we'll become a race of lovey dovey geniuses, is even more pointless and silly. Like Silverberg in "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine," Pangborn presents arguments you've heard a hundred times before and uses like ten times as many pages as he needs to make them.
Thumbs down!
"The Freshman Angle" takes place in the same universe as Davy, which I read and blogged about seven years ago. Unlike the quite popular Davy, I don't think "The Freshman Angle" has ever been reprinted.
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To sum up, Silverberg and Pangborn offer tedious tendentious polemics, Silverberg abandoning traditional ideas about plot and character to unleash all kinds of New Wave gimmicks on us, while Pangborn tries, with little success, to do the traditional SF thing of presenting a utopia from the inside by developing likable characters (who vocalize their belief that our world sucks) and an attractive setting (which is supposed to make our world look like it sucks by comparison.) Janifer complains about nuclear weapons and racism, but instead of just lecturing us, tries to integrate his trite points with a story of human feeling, and does a passable job of it. The big winner today, however, is Malzberg, who with admirable economy brings to life a totally crazy world and a totally crazy character, both of which are convincing, surprising and entertaining.
Three more tomorrows in our next episode, those contributed by Anne McCaffrey, Pamela Sargent, and Larry Niven.
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