Barry N. Malzberg: "Line of Succession," "Reaction-Formation," "A Clone at Last," "Backing Up," and "Cheeseburger"

We find ourselves on page 130 of Barry Malzberg's 1980 collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  No need to be ambitious; let's advance to page 154 today.  That brief stretch, 24 pages, includes five stories, and we can skip one, "Indigestion," because I read it back in 2014 when we borrowed Bill Pronzini's 1986 anthology Tales of the Dead from the library.  That leaves us with four little pieces from the late Seventies--let's hope they are as good as "Indigestion," which I quite liked.

"Line of Succession" (1978)

The editor's page of the October 1978 issue of Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine provides a window into the life of the genre fiction writer, succinctly telling us that the included story "Cheeseburger," credited to John Barry Williams, is in fact a collaboration among John Lutz, Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini, who wrote it together  while attending the Second International Conference of Crime Writers.  "Line of Succession" appears in this same issue of AHMM as "Cheeseburger;" seeing as this issue of AHMM is already open on the desktop of the MPorcius Fiction Log computer system, I'll read "Cheeseburger" as a special bonus at the end of this blog post. 

"Line of Succession" is, apparently, a spoof of public perceptions of crime and politics as well as the role the news media plays in people's lives.  The 1970s was a period of high crime, a development blamed by many on elite sympathy for perpetrators and the resultant lax enforcement of punitive laws and increased care to protect the legal rights of defendants, and Malzberg's story here dramatizes all these phenomena.  Our narrator, who calls himself Scoot, commits a bewildering volume and variety of crimes, from welfare fraud to burglary to speeding to drug pushing to mugging, and always escapes justice because of legal loopholes, police sloppiness, and judicial lenience.  Scoot's thievery, aggression, and dangerous flouting of the law make him famous and attract the hatred of the public.  It is suggested that mysterious forces are using Scoot to engage the attention of the public, to distract them from other issues, offer them a scapegoat for their problems, and give their sad lives meaning.  

Scoot profits from and sincerely enjoys his work, but finds he has gone too far.  His reign of terror has personalized the hatred of the public, focused it on himself as an individual, when the shadowy rulers of our society want him to inspire hatred of "the faceless" and "the multitude."  If Scoot is finally caught and imprisoned, and people are still unhappy, they might turn their hatred on the true masters of America, the true cause of their misery.  So Scoot is killed by his employers and a new Scoot takes his place.

Malzberg here is pushing the standard line of left-wingers that street crime isn't really that bad and ordinary people only worry about crime because of sensationalistic journalism and the use of the crime issue by right-wingers to distract the proletariat from the real crime, which is capitalism.  This contempt for the common run of people and excuse-making for or even romanticization of transgressors is common among the intellectual class of which Malzberg is a member and we see it in our fiction reading all the time, quite to my distaste.  Still, this story is short and moves at a brisk pace and is sort of amusing and is a useful piece of social history so we'll say "Line of Succession" is acceptable.

In the afterword to "Line of Succession," Barry lists what he thinks are the best American novels of each decade from the 1920s to the 1970s.  (He says Lolita is the best novel of the Fifties but doesn't count because Nabokov isn't really American.)  A magazine piece by the writer of The Franchiser, the best novel of the Seventies, is Stanley Elkin, Malzberg credits a piece from Esquire by Elkin as the inspiration for "Line of Succession."  (Barry calls the text in question "A Requiem for Bullies," but looking around online I think the actual title is "A Poetics for Bullies."  Who copyedited The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady?  Does this mistake also appear in the 2021 Stark House edition of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady?)   

In this afterword our sad sack pal Barry seems a little despairing, saying he is a mere bug ("an aphid") compared to the luminous Elkin ("the morning light") and lamenting that he has tried to revolutionize genre fiction from within, and such revolutions are impossible, as suggested by how the leftists of the 1930s became the establishment.  Cheer up, Barry--we love you and revolutions are overrated.

"Reaction-Formation" (1979)

This is another that debuted in AHMM (where it bears the title "The Senator.")  It is similar to "Line of Succession" in that it presents urban elite attitudes but it is slighter--less provocative, less amusing, less elaborate.  "Reaction-Formation" is like Malzberg writing on autopilot, treading the same old ground again--the mentally ill narrator, the political assassination.

The narrator thinks the government is corrupt and, it appears, lives with a roommate who encourages his hostility to the establishment.  This roommate, who is perhaps an hallucination, is a man with a hick accent who chews tobacco and who was a federal senator for a few months and says the experience confirmed all his suspicions about the government.  The two men agree that the only way to change the country is by violence and so the narrator travels cross country to Washington, enters the Capital, and shoots down a senator.  As he is seized by security the narrator has visions of his roommate appearing and disowning him, which confirms his belief that all politicians are untrustworthy.

Routinely Malzbergian, with the present-tense first-person narration and the delusional assassin.  Merely acceptable.  In his afterword to the story, Malzberg suggests he and J. G. Ballard are two birds of a feather, both of them fascinated by political assassinations, and laments that this theme is no longer on the cutting edge.

"A Clone at Last" with Bill Pronzini (1978)

Compared to "Line of Succession" and "Reaction-Formation," which have not been anthologized, "A Clone at Last" is something of a hit.  After its initial 1978 appearance in F&SF, the story was included in Germany's SF Perry Rhodan Magazine, that collection of short-shorts with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover: Microcosmic Tales, and a German "Best of" F&SF collection, and was reprinted in F&SF's 2003 "Special Barry Malzberg Issue."

"A Clone at Last" is a weak joke story about sexual relationships, but very short so we'll call it acceptable.  Lapham is a rich genius of the year 2172 but he can't get women to have sex with him because he has pimples as well as some scars on his face, I guess from his adventures on Ceres or some other distant asteroid or planet.  So he has an altered clone of himself made--altered to be female!  He waits eighteen years for the clone to grow up so he can date what amounts to his twin sister, but she rejects him exactly as other women have.

I suppose the jokes are various beyond the "ironic" twist ending that mirrors the beginning.  Women are shallow and judge men based on their looks.  (Is this even true?  I think rich smart brave guys get women even if they are not so good-looking.)  Men are shallow and just want to spend time with a person exactly like them.  A somewhat more clever angle is the idea that Lapham hates himself, as symbolized by the way his clone rejects him--Lapham is inventing things and travelling around the galaxy and making tons of money to prove to himself that he is worthwhile--it is self-loathing that drives civilizational progress!

I complained that "Line of Succession" was tired left-wing boilerplate, but at least that story had meat on its bones into which to sink your teeth; these stories I call "slight" are worse because there are just the jokes and little or nothing else.  

In his afterword Malzberg says "A Clone at Last" is dedicated to Fredric Brown, master of the short-short or "vinnie."  (We have read a bunch of Brown's vinnies; e. g., "Too Far,"  "Blood," "Nasty," "Naturally," "Sentence," "Daisy," "Politeness," and "Abominable.")  I am a fan of much of Brown's longer work (e. g., "The Wench is Dead," "Little Apple Hard to Peel," and "Don't Look Behind You,") but I'm not crazy about the short-short format in general and usually pan Brown's vinnies, but it seems Brown's short shorts are widely beloved.  Striking a sad note as he so often does, Malzberg tells us that F&SF editor Edward Ferman removed the dedication to Brown from the magazine appearance of "A Clone at Last" and speculates that maybe it was because Ferman expected that, six years after his death, Brown had already been forgotten by the SF community.  Well, take heart, Barry--I am reading and writing about Brown in this crazy 21st century of ours, and I am not alone.

"Backing Up" (1978)

Yet another Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine story.  This one is more clever and amusing than the others we've looked at today, taking as its theme how everything has become shoddy and people no longer have any standards, no longer strive to do a good job but instead cut corners.  The narrator works for organized crime, for loan sharks, going around the town, threatening with a pistol various people who are late paying back their extortionate loans.  The narrator himself, we see, is an example of the decline he decries--he doesn't have the nerve to beat up, much less murder, the people he is threatening; he is terrible at his job, just like everybody else in the story, the builders, merchants, bartenders, his criminal masters, his wife.  

I can recommend this one, and of course on a visceral level I agree with its sentiments--so many things seem to be worse today than they were in my youth and before I was born (if you follow my twitter feed you know I spend my time in antique stores and art museums admiring things that are 50 or a hundred or a thousand or two thousand years old) though at the same time I intellectually recognize that so many things are better today than in the past (for one thing, the internet has provided me access to a vast body of film, music and literature I'd never have even known about otherwise.)  

In the afterword to "Backing Up," Malzberg suggests the story is a metaphor or allegory for the life of the writer who has to deal with editors and publishers and agents, and offers the theory that this is what most modern fiction is actually about.

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These stories aren't as good as the last batch from The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, but they aren't actually bad, and provide some insight into Malzberg's worldview and the time in which they were penned, so no regrets.  And this blog post isn't even over yet!    

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"Cheeseburger" by John Lutz, Barry N. Malzberg and Bill Pronzini (1978)

As promised, let's look at "Cheeseburger," a collaboration of Malzberg's with Bill Pronzini, a friend of Malzberg's and a critically acclaimed detective novelist, and John Lutz, whom I never heard of but who was a very successful mystery writer.  Lutz was president of professional organizations for crime writers, and that movie I thought was sexy back in 1992, Single White Female, was based on something he wrote.  

This is an acceptable little crime story with a theme similar to that of "Backing Up": the irony of an evil person decrying the degradation of society.

Wiggins is at a diner which, apparently, has only one employee currently on shift.  A leather-clad motorcyclist comes in and Wiggins and he have a dispute about whether the lone waitress should cook Wiggin's' burger or make the biker's milkshake first.  When the biker gets physical Wiggins shoots him dead, cooks and eats his own burger, and then leaves to go to work.  The twist ending is that Wiggins is not just some ordinary middle-class guy who was pushed too far by our steadily declining society but a professional killer.

There is something in the story which isn't sitting right with me: we are told Wiggins "shot him [the biker] in the right ear."  Since Wiggins and the biker are facing each other, I thought at first that Wiggins had just grazed or shot off the biker's ear, but it seems the biker has been killed, shot through the brain.  The authors have Wiggins shoot the troublemaking punk through the ear because that is his M.O. as an assassin and sets up a parallel with the story's ending--in the end of the story Wiggins sneaks up on the man he is being paid to murder and shoots him "through the right ear, taking careful aim as always."  The authors should have had the biker look over nervously at the waitress or something, so getting killed by being shot in the ear would make more sense.

I wonder if this story was somehow inspired by the scene in Dirty Harry in which Clint Eastwood engages in a shoot out with criminals while eating a hot dog. 

I'm not finding any evidence that "Cheeseburger" has been reprinted since its debut in AHMM, but I'm finding it harder to look up the publishing history of mystery stories than it is the history of SF stories--isfdb has spoiled us SF fans!   

Weird Tales, May 1939: R Bloch, M Prout and L Del Rey

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are trying to read at least one story from each 1930s issue of Weird Tales, the iconic, influential and much beloved magazine edited by Farnsworth Wright.  Having completed nine stages of this ten-stage journey--links below--today we continue working our way through the final stage, exploring further the May 1939 issue of the unique magazine.

1930           1931
1932           1933
1934           1935
1936           1937
1938

The May 1939 issue of Weird Tales includes the first installment of the serialized version of Robert E. Howard's Almuric, a fun novel I read while living in Iowa, shortly before I started this blog.  There is also a story by Henry Kuttner, "The Watcher at the Door," which I thought was just OK when I read it back in 2021.  There's a poem by H. P. Lovecraft, "Harbor Whistles," which isn't bad, invoking the feeling we might have when we hear the characteristic sound of a ship and reflect that people from the other side of the world whom we will never meet and could likely never understand have heard the same sound and so we have a sort of phantom connection to foreign peoples and strange cultures from all over the globe--when we look upon the stars, who can imagine what unfathomably alien beings have also beheld light from those very same stars?  In the letters columns we see correspondence from E. Hoffman Price and Clark Ashton Smith praising the March '39 ish of WT; Hoffman Price in particular seems to like August Derleth's "The Return of Hastur," to which I gave a mixed review back in 2022.  Virgil Finlay offers some illustrations with strong design elements and shirtless musclemen, and both Harry Ferman and Harold S. De Lay contribute effectively creepy drawings of hideous old witches.  De Lay also has a very good picture of a swarm of monsters in some hellish subterranean landscape.  So, a fun issue overall, and we haven't even read the stories by Robert Bloch, Merle Prout and Lester del Rey yet!

"The Dark Isle" by Robert Bloch

Here we have a competent sword and sorcery story from the creator of Psycho.  "The Dark Isle" consists of fifteen pages split into five chapters.  Chapter 1 sets the stage--the Welsh island of Anglesey is the home of diabolical Druids and the Romans are about to try to take the island.  In Chapter 2 it is night and the reanimated corpse of a Druid who drowned years ago climbs over the side of a Roman ship to kill the lone sentry on duty--our hero, Roman soldier Vincius, known as The Reaper, seizes the monster and destroys it, but not before it prophesies Roman defeat on the morrow.  In Chapter 3 the Roman soldiers land on the island and are ambushed--envenomed native arrows slay men by the hundreds, leaving the field littered with grotesquely twisted, hideously blue corpses.  Vincius is lucky to be knocked unconscious in hand-to-hand combat and left for dead.

In Chapter 4 Vincius awakens and meets a fellow Roman, a man whose skin is painted blue like that of so many of the Druids.  This guy, Lupus, has been a captive of the Druids for months.  He tells Vincius about a secret passage under an altar in a clearing--the passage leads to the shore, and maybe they can use the passage to get to the Roman ships.  Lupus warns that that while the Druids have no boats, they will tonight use their magic to sink the Roman vessels.  The men sneak over to the clearing of the altar, where they witness a major Druid ceremony.  The Druids have constructed giant representatives of men out of tree branches, and in the wicker torsos of the giant figures are crammed Roman captives.  The wicker men are set alight and the captives are burned alive while the natives dance about the clearing.

In Chapter 5 the druids have retired and Lupus guides Vincius into the secret passage under the altar.  Down there the two Romans have to fight a swarm of Druid-summoned serpents.  They finally come to a seaside chamber where a bunch of Druids are conducting a ceremony.  On their altar is the severed tongue of a giant beast--Vincius realizes this is the tongue of a sea dragon, and it is the source of the venom the Druids have been putting on their arrows.  Vincius and Lupus fight the Druids; Lupus is killed, but so are all the Druids.  The sea dragon, summoned to sink the Roman flotilla, shows up, and Vincius kills it by piercing the inside of its tongueless mouth with his sword, which he has envenomed on the monster's own disembodied tongue.  (I guess the monster is vulnerable to its own venom.)  Vincius then swims to the ships, confident that now that he has slain the Druids' leadership and their top monster, the Romans will be able to conquer the island.

Bloch describes the slimy revolting passage and its monstrous denizens, the murder of the prisoners, and the living dead Druid assassin, with an infectious enthusiasm.  The action scenes are kind of questionable, but not too bad.  Perhaps most importantly, the story moves at a fast pace from horror to horror, and there aren't any distracting dumb jokes.  I can moderately recommend "The Dark Isle," which would be reprinted in some anthologies and in the Bloch collection Flowers From the Moon and Other Lunacies. 

"Witch's Hair" by Merle Prout 

It looks like "Witch's Hair" has never been reprinted.  Do we have a hidden gem here?

"Witch's Hair" is the story of old man Benedict, the rich guy who owns a factory and a big house on a hill and lots of property, the guy who everybody in town hates because they think he charges his tenants too much and doesn't pay his employees enough.  (Everybody's a critic!)  "Witch's Hair" is also a story of "gipsies."  I know you call them "the Roma" or "the Romani," but Prout in 1939 is calling them "gipsies;" what can I say?  

Our narrator is middle-class guy John Wainright.  He starts the story by telling us that his wife is in the loony bin, and this story, he hopes, will facilitate her release.  She has been incarcerated for quite a while, and it has taken him a long time to piece together the story he is about to tell, but to the relief of us dimwits who prefer being given a straight narrative to a bunch of puzzle pieces we have to assemble, Wainright is just going to tell the story in chronological order and not relate how he figured it all out.  

A few years ago there was a blizzard and a band of gipsies broke into Benedict's house to keep warm.  When Benedict comes home to find these trespassers having a party in his crib, he tells them they have 15 minutes to leave before he calls "the Law."  The leader of the home invaders protests that his pregnant daughter is sick, but Benedict will not relent.  That night, out in the snow, the pregnant young woman dies, and her mother, an old crone, curses Benedict, saying he should suffer a night of torment for each hair on her daughter's head!

In the spring, the narrator, who loves visiting pawn shops, finds in such a shop what I would call a wig but which Prout calls "an artificial hair-dress" of great beauty.  Wearing such "hair-dresses" is currently in fashion, and Mrs. Wainright is always looking for attire and accessories for her amateur theatricals, so Wainright buys it for her.  Buyer's remorse follows immediately, as the beautiful black hair gives him an uneasy feeling.  The first time Mrs. Wainright wears it the narrator is amazed at how if makes his wife seem so much more beautiful and so much more determined; soon he is disturbed by how his wife starts uncharacteristically complaining about Benedict, and about having a headache.  He gets her to agree to stop wearing it, but over the course of some days, days during which his wife is listless, as if she has some unfinished but forgotten business she knows she must attend to, and becomes sort of ill, Wainright comes to realize that his wife is wearing the wig behind his back and hiding it when he is home so he can't find it and destroy it.

We all know where this is going, but the story still is pretty effective.  Benedict's house burns down, and Mrs. Wainright is found at the scene of the crime--she tells her husband she no longer feels anxious about any unfinished business--killing Benedict was that business!  Found around the neck of the charred body of Benedict is an inexplicably unburned mass of woman's hair--the authorities figure it is a memento of Benedict's long dead wife, but Wainright recognizes it for what it is, and eventually tracks down its history so he can relate it in this document.

This is a solid black magic story that exploits not only the suspicions of foreigners and their creepy customs of readers but also their resentment and envy of rich people; Prout also offers an engaging depiction of addiction.  There are lots of stories in which magic items exercise power over innocent people, rings and swords and amulets and cloaks and on and on, but I find the casting of human hair in this role particularly effective.  For one thing, wearing some stranger's hair is kind of disgusting (I am aware of rumors that women in 21st-century America are buying hair from China and Brazil and having it by some uncanny esoteric process integrated into their own hair, but this has gotta be that disinformation I am always hearing about, right?)  For another, the idea that a cast off portion of a person's body carries a portion of his or her consciousness is more believable on a visceral level than that an inanimate object like a ring or cloak might do so.

Thumbs up for "Witch's Hair"!  Prout only has four stories listed at isfdb, and "Witch's Hair" is the last one.  In January I read his 1938 story "Guarded" and found it "acceptable filler."  Maybe I should go back and read his 1933 and 1937 stories.  

"Cross of Fire" by Lester del Rey 

I don't think of del Rey as a Weird Tales guy, but here he is!  

"Cross of Fire" is a first-person stream-of-consciousness thing.  The narrator wakes up with little memory of how he came to be laying outside on the ground with an injury, and when he returns to his house he finds it boarded up and decrepit--it seems he has lost his memory of the last several years!  The narrator spends the brief story in his house and in the village, collecting clues as to what is going on.  It turns out that some years ago a sinister woman turned him into a vampire and he has been committing various outrages ever since, but a lightning bolt, perhaps the work of God, liberated his body from the evil entity that was possessing it.  Among his crimes was turning into vampires his closest friends, and he sets out to free them from this tyranny and usher them, and himself, to a final rest.

Del Rey's style is good, and he makes effective use of Christian symbolism and lays out his own theory of vampirism, producing an idiosyncratic and compelling vampire story here.  Thumbs up for "Cross of Fire."

"Cross of Fire" has been reprinted quite a few times in del Rey collections and anthologies of horror stories.  Its appearance in Early Del Rey is accompanied by an autobiographical account of how del Rey came to submit it to Weird Tales, Farnsworth Wright's response to the story, and why del Rey didn't submit more often to Wright.  Early Del Rey looks to be an entertaining source for info about the 1930s and 1940s SF world; maybe I should read more from it.

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Wow, three good stories!  A great issue of Weird Tales.  Recommended!

           

Merril-recommended stories from '58: R Garrett and J E Gunn

Greetings, folks, and welcome back to another exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.  Today we've got another blog post in which we cherry pick 1958 stories from the list of Honorable Mentions at the back of Judith Merril's SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume and I read and offer my dubious opinions of them.  Merril's list is alphabetical, and today we're sampling the "G"s, looking at stories by Randall Garrett and James E. Gunn. 

I tend to avoid Garrett as I think he's one of those guys who is always making totally lame jokes, but I just read some praise of Garrett from Barry Malzberg and so will give Merril's pick of Garrett's 1958 output a shot.  if we go to the videotape, we see that a year ago I read two Merril-approved 1956 stories by Garrett and liked one and not the other.

As for Gunn, in 2018 I read his sexist story "The Misogynist" and called it "acceptable entertainment."  In 2022 I read the three linked stories "The Unhappy Man," "The Naked Sky," and "Name Your Pleasure" that would go on to become Gunn's fix-up novel The Joy Makers and recommended the third in that list and said the other two were acceptable.  Last year I read Gunn's "Witches Must Burn" and also gave it an "acceptable" rating.

Looking at their mixed records, we see that today Garrett and Gunn both have a chance to rise in my estimation--how will these fixtures of the SF community fare before the cruel eye of Emm Pee Flog?

"Respectfully Mine" by Randall Garrett

"Respectfully Mine" is written in a chatty, colloquial voice and has the feeling of a tall tale--the narrator essentially tells you the story is conjecture and reminds you explicitly of how far from the truth are so many of the stories one hears about historical figures.  Garrett also immediately clues you in that this is a crime story with an epigraph from G.K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday and a mention on the story's first full page of Simon Templar.  

Our narrator describes to us one of the exploits of a famous criminal of a century ago, Leland Hale, an adventure that took place on a planet colonized by ethnic Germans three centuries ago, a planet on the edge of the human space civilization, one relatively poor and rarely visited by people from the rest of galactic society.  The planet is renowned for but one thing, as the place of birth of an artist unrecognized in his lifetime but later considered, galaxywide, as the peer of Leonardo and other immortal painters and sculptors.  This artist did his work early in the history of the human settlement on the planet.  

The plot revolves around the fact that evidence surfaces that a previously unknown work of this great artist may still be on the planet (all his other works were sold to offworlders.)  The planet is split into two polities which don't quite get along with each other (perhaps Garrett referring to the predicament of Germany after World War II.)  The northern of these states, purportedly the more sophisticated one, has a museum; in the celebrated artist's lifetime a time capsule was buried under the museum, and the new evidence just uncovered suggests there is a carving by the artist in the time capsule, which is due to open soon.  This sculpture will be worth a lot of money, and master criminal Leland Hale arrives on the planet, presumably with the aim of seizing the carving.  The interstellar police arrive shortly after him, their aim being to seize Hale.  The southern state then announces that they too have a (previously secret) time capsule which may also contain a sculpture produced by the famous artist; their capsule is set to open the day after the northern one.

We follow the four main characters--interstellar thief Hale, the head of the museum in the northern nation, a corrupt politician in the southern nation, and the interstellar cop commanding the force pursuing Hale--as the politico hires Hale to steal the sculpture in the northern time capsule so it can be placed in the bogus southern capsule and then revealed to great fanfare.  

In the end Hale gets paid, the northern museum director and the southern politico get humiliated, and the cop gets frustrated as Hale escapes.  There isn't much by way of thrills or climax--Garrett's narrator, living 100 years after the events described, just straightforwardly explains how Hale swindled everybody.

This story of a conman in a galactic civilization where some guys have private space yachts reminds me in its content of things written by Jack Vance, but Vance has a good writing style, Vance is actually funny, and Vance is also adept at writing tense and disturbing scenes of action and violence.  Garrett, at least here, doesn't deliver the thrills and chills or the verbal entertainment that Vance often does.  We'll judge "Respectfully Mine" merely acceptable.

"Respectfully Mine" is one of three Hale stories, and has been reprinted recently (2011 is recent, right?) along with its two fellows in a collection of the Hale tales.

"The Immortals" by James E. Gunn

Merril put her stamp of approval on three 1958 stories by Gunn, and here we have the first, "The Immortals," which premiered in an anthology edited by Merril's second husband, Frederik Pohl, Star Science Fiction #4.  (Pohl and Merril were married from 1948 to 1952; Pohl had two more wives ahead of him, but I don't think Merril married again.)  "The Immortals" has been printed time and again; maybe it is fair to say that it is one of Gunn's most successful works, that it is a good representative of his work.  "The Immortals" is also, it appears, one of four stories about the same doctor, Russell Pearce, all of which appear in a collection entitled The Immortals.

(I'm reading "The Immortals" in Isaac Asimov Presents the Great Science Fiction Stories: 20, in which Asimov tells us that "utopia" is "from Greek words meaning 'good place,'" even though I have always heard it was from Greek words meaning "no place.")

It is the dystopian future of almost ubiquitous disease, of mass crime, of widespread terrorism.  The cities are surrounded by electrified walls, and between them lurk roving bands of murderers.  The common people, many of whom are deformed, sell their blood to the elite establishment for use in medical experiments--criminals sell the heads and organs of their victims to the upper crust for the same use!  A small number of people are afforded access to immortality treatments as a reward for their service to the ruling class, and Dr. Harry Elliott, a physician, is one of those men pursuing such a boon.

Today, after a terrorist attack strikes the hospital where Elliott works, Elliott is given a secret mission!  The city has been out of contact with the governor for three weeks!  The phonelines are all cut!  The airwaves are jammed!  Somebody has to get a message to the governor!  An armed convoy will be ambushed, so Elliott has to disguise himself as a common citizen, leaving behind his nose filters and defensive weapons and medical paraphernalia, and walk--on his own two feet!--to the governor's mansion forty miles away!  And he has to bring with him Marla, a pretty 13-year-old girl, a seven-year old boy named Christopher, and a sort of folk healer, the blind and elderly Russell Pearce, who, it turns out despite Elliott's skepticism, has psychic abilities that enable him to diagnose people and even cure people's ailments just by touching them!  Gunn's story suggests that medical science and the germ theory of disease are a scam; among the pearls of wisdom we are gifted in Pearce's voice are that people's "bodies want to heal themselves...but our minds give counter-orders and death-instructions," "Germs can't hurt you unless you want them to" and "Aging is not a physical disease; it is mental."

Elliott's little party is almost wiped out by the headhunters who run a motel that is a death trap, but luckily Marla and Christopher (who also seems to have psychic powers) know what member of the elite Elliott does not--how to avoid such traps.  Pearce heals Elliott's wounds and utters gnomic wisdom.  The girl is captured by a band of "squires" who have motorized unicycles and jet-powered hang gliders and Elliott rescues her in an unconvincing scene in which he uses a machine pistol to cause a minor avalanche instead of just gunning down the bad guys.  Then Elliott is paralyzed by a guy who sells live but inert bodies to hospitals to serve as spare parts; Elliott's companions rescue him.  Marla turns out to be one of the immortals whose blood is the source of the drugs that confer immortality on others, a 17-year-old who just looks 13, and a transfusion of her super blood ends Elliott's paralysis.  I have to admit, it wasn't clear to me until this part of the story, like 40 pages into its 52-page length, that some people were born with immortality; maybe that was clear in the earlier stories in this series and Gunn assumed readers in 1958 would remember the '55 and '57 stories. 

(I'll note here that the way a--physically if not intellectually or chronologically-- 13-year-old girl is a sex object for both the villains and the hero will perhaps raise eyebrows.)

Gunn also waits until the end of the story to explain explicitly the structure of this feudal society in which the governor is a baron for life who resides in a fortress behind a piranha-stocked moat and the squires are his feudatories, rewarded for their allegiance with monthly injections of the immortality drug.  I still don't really understand who exactly are the terrorists who jam transmissions and cut phone lines and stop convoys between the city and the governor's mansion and bomb hospitals from their helicopters--squires from some other barony?  The squires who kidnap and plan to rape or dismember for parts the apparently 13-year-old Marla must be squires of the governor, but it can't be the governor's own vassals who are stopping the convoys to his mansion, can it?

The Governor turns out to be an immensely fat man, essentially immobile, who thinks of himself as a god.  Marla is his daughter, and the guv wants to have sex with her in hopes of creating more of the immortals who are the source of the immortality drug.  In the climactic fight Pearce reveals that he is also immortal, but not through heredity or blood transfusions or elixirs, just force of will--I guess there are three (four?) ways to become immortal in this story.  Pearce's apparent decrepitude is a sham--he transforms his body before the governor's eyes into that of a thirty-year-old.  Then Elliott, who has entered the guv's sanctum by disguising himself as Marla(?), kills the governor by throwing a lariat around his neck and strangling him--we are told Elliott has never thrown a lariat before, but he scores a bullseye in one try today.  As the story ends I guess we are supposed to expect that now everyone in the world will have a chance to be healthy and immortal.

The apparent ideology or philosophy of this story, including the idea that advances in medical technique and technology have made public health worse, is kind of stupid and certainly annoying, and the action and suspense scenes are sort of ridiculous, like something out of a cartoon.  Am I supposed to take this story seriously, or is it just a broad satire of class dynamics and economic inequality, a bitter gripe that rich people can afford better stuff than poor people?

I guess I'll call this barely acceptable--the more I think about it, though, the worse it seems.  I guess the over-the-top class envy politics of "The Immortals" appealed to socialists Judith Merril and Fred Pohl; the adventure elements, world-building and the effort to depict a growing relationship between Elliott and Marla are pretty mediocre.  One thing I can say conclusively--I'm not reading any more stories in the saga of Russell Pearce, even if I love the other two Gunn stories I am reading today.

"Powder Keg" by James E. Gunn

James Gunn must have been a big draw in 1958--"Powder Keg" was the cover story of the issue of If in which it appeared.  And it is another long one, like 34 pages, and like "The Immortals" it is the final installment of a series, what isfdb is calling the Amos Danton series (three stories), which is a component of the "Station in Space Universe" series (two additional stories for a total of five.)  Let's hope this is better than "The Immortals."

It is the future of nuclear proliferation!  Every country has atomic weapons, even the piddling little ones!  Scary!  America has a slight edge, a space station that tries to keep an eye on everybody and is capable--we hope--of bombing into oblivion anybody who misbehaves, but the station has been up there for like twenty years and in the interim many nations have moved their factories and missile facilities underground where they are essentially invisible, limiting the effectiveness of the station.  

Our protagonist for this caper is Captain Lloyd Phillips, an Air Force shrink!  The top Air Force general, Ashley, summons Philsy boy to his office deep under the Pentagon to give him a special assignment.  The general fears the crew of the space station may have been driven insane by the stress of the job and of being away from Earth for years at a time (yeah, this is reminiscent of Kris Neville's 1949 "Cold War.")  Ashley wants Phillips to go up there and evaluate the psychology of the crew; Phillips just assumes the men up there are unstable and that he will doubtlessly return with a recommendation that the station be shut down, and that is what Ashley wants.  The general suggests that while he is up there Phil might check out the rumors that the station crew is undertaking some major construction project on the side of the station that can't be seen from Earth.

This is a great job for Phillips, as he is fascinated by the psychology and sociology of space travel: why do individual men choose to run the terrible risks and suffer the life-shortening effects of being in space?; and why does our society devote to the space program such a volume of resources that could be more profitably spent on Earth?

Gunn in this story takes psychology seriously, accepting jazz like "sublimation" as totally legit and presenting psychology as a real science like biology or astronomy that is able to explain the world and make reliable predictions.  Phillips even compares people who are skeptical of the science of psychology to illiterates who fear books.  Sick burn!

Phillips doesn't just reserve his mad psychoanalytic skillz for the peeps up in orbit--he wields them on that REMF Ashely as well!  Looking at Ashley's file (a real psychologist can psychoanalyze you just by reading about you!) before leaving Earth, he sees the general suffers from space sickness that has made him unable to leave this big blue marble; Phillips determines that the general is pursuing the shutting down of the space station due to subconscious envy of those who can go to space, due to a need to see space flight as a useless waste of time; of course, Phillips agrees with Ashley that the station should be shut down, that the space program is a dead end and a waste of money, that Man Belongs On Earth, for his own reasons that he considers rational.

Once on the station, Phillips diagnoses all the crewmen except for the commander, Colonel Amos Danton.  All the personnel hate the shrink because they love the station and their commander Danton, and they are aware Phil is here looking for an excuse for Ashley to close down the station.  Phillip's method is to allow the men to fidget with "Rorschach clay" while he interviews them.  The shapes they form in the clay are a door to the unconscious and subconscious, providing surefire indications of their neuroses and psychopathologies--by looking at the blobs he leaves behind, Phillips can tell if a man is a homosexual, a sadist, a paranoid, or whatever.  Phil concludes that everyone on the station is mentally ill (he thinks Danton is paranoid just from talking to him) and the station should be shut down because any one of them could snap at any moment and bomb Earth, but the clay blob analysis is his only evidence--to all outward appearance, morale on the station is high and the men are doing a sterling job of maintaining the station's many mechanical and electronic systems.  Ordinary people without psychological training won't trust blob analysis--Phil needs more concrete evidence to convince the mundanes!

Finally, Phillips realizes that the station crew is falling down on the job when it comes to one facet of their duty--watching for enemy activity on Earth and keeping the bombs ready for retaliatory strikes!  When he pays a visit to the enlisted man who is supposed to be monitoring activity on Earth he finds this joker taking a nap!  And when he is alerted, Colonel Danton doesn't care!  The whole point of the station is to serve as an early warning system and a deterrent, and Danton is failing to perform either function, so the station is useless!

We get some action scenes as a saboteur sent to the station by Ashley tries to wreck the place but is foiled; this crisis occasions the story's big revelation, that--there are no retaliatory bombs!  Danton and his men have repurposed the missiles to build a spaceship with which to travel to Mars!  Danton knew years ago that the responsibility of commanding the space missiles was too much for anybody to handle, and came up with his own theory of how to ease the pressure of the powder keg that is Earth--by exploring a new frontier!  Danton unleashes some serious metaphors: 1) powder only explodes dangerously if contained--if allowed to spread out freely it just creates pretty flashes; and 2) the human race is like the fish of prehistoric days--to grow and thrive some people must evolve into amphibians who can live outside the Earth the same way some fish evolved to walk on land.  Danton's talk is pretty persuasive, and Phil is fully convinced when Danton picks up the clay and produces a beautiful sculpture that proves not only that he is not paranoid, but that he is a genius!  

Phillips' beliefs do a 180; he realizes that mankind's destiny is to explore space, that space is where mankind's problems will be solved, and that he is one of those amphibians.  He joins the illegal Mars expedition wholeheartedly.

While in structure "Powder Keg" is similar to "The Immortals"--a guy is sent on a mission by one strata of society and meets a sort of heroic figure and joins that hero in rebelling against the ruling class and causing a paradigm shift--"Powder Keg" is better than "The Immortals" in every possible way.  The action scenes are not silly, but believable and appropriate.  The social commentary is not broad and absurd and the "world-building" is not vague and unbelievable; instead everything is easy to grasp and easily creditable.  All the twists and turns of the plot are foreshadowed in a way that helps make them satisfying and believable to the reader--nothing just "comes out of nowhere" but follows logically from what came before.  The most prominent speculative science in the story--the Rorschach clay--while impossible to take seriously, is not so offensively stupid as what was going on in "The Immortals," and all the stuff about space ships and space suits and dealing with meteors and recycling the air is interesting and believable.  

Thumbs up for "Powder Keg."  Presumably Merril liked the way the story suggests U. S. military personnel should mutiny against the elected government of the United States and disrupt America's deterrent against communist attack, but I personally like the story's optimism about space travel and the ability of the human race to explore and conquer new frontiers.

It seems that "Powder Keg" has only ever been reprinted in Gunn collections of the Amos Danton stories or the entire Space Station series, including a German edition with a very fun but hilariously inappropriate Michael Whelan killer-bikini-babe cover that originally appeared on a DAW paperback edition of a C. J. Cherryh novel.

"Deadly Silence" by James E. Gunn

  

Another long cover story, this one for Fantastic Universe, looms before us--advertised as a novel, "Deadly Silence" takes up over 50 damn pages.  Wow!  This better be good!  Uh oh!  It seems like this one has never been reprinted in English.  Hopefully the jungen und madchen over in Deutschland who reprinted this thing in 1970 knew what they were about.

"Deadly Silence" is one of those stories, like A. E. van Vogt's Isher stories and Jack Williamson's Humanoids tales, in which a mysterious store opens in town and it disrupts the social order.  Our hero is Kevin Gregg, a freelance writer of fact articles in his early thirties, a naval veteran of the Pacific War who can't stand noise, perhaps because it reminds him of the sound of the anti-aircraft fire of the carrier he served aboard, triggering memories of attacking Japanese aircraft.  He dreads leaving his apartment because the city noise drives him to distraction, but he does venture forth sometimes to see his shrink and to chat at the bar with his pal, the overweight scientist/engineer Hugh Pryor, and talk over ideas for articles.

One day Gregg and Pryor discover a new store, one that sells only one product: a pocket-sized device that, apparently by projecting "cancelling vibrations," creates a zone of silence six feet in radius around itself.  Gregg join the throngs of people who buy one, and immediately falls in love with the pretty girl manning the counter.  She steadfastly rebuffs all Gregg's efforts to learn anything about her or about the device, which is almost indestructible and is powered in some undetectable, but infallible, fashion.

Soon everybody in town has a Silencer and uses it all the time.  Here we have one of the many aspects of Gunn's story here that isn't very believable and really limits the reader's ability to suspend disbelief.  Gunn seems to think people hate noise and love silence, and maybe Gunn does, and it certainly makes sense that war veteran Gregg does, but my suspicion is that many people actually hate silence--everywhere I go people are listening to music or watching TV or yapping on their phones, and unless I am trying to read or write, I am much the same--driving the car I listen to podcasts and rock music and doing the housework I watch Italian crime movies and British horror movies.  Rather than finding silence peaceful and beautiful, I suspect people in the main find silence oppressive and sad.      

Anyway, Gunn dramatizes his speculations on the effect on American society of a mass marketed device that radically dampens sound.  Like "The Immortals," "Deadly Silence" has elements of broad satire and several somewhat silly action scenes.  A target of Gunn's satire is advertising, which Gunn credits with the success of the American economy and blames for America's high suicide rate (Gunn says the US suicide rate is the highest in the world, which I seriously doubt was the case when he wrote it and am quite confident is not the case now) and offers us a goofy caricature of a capitalist grappling with the fact that people everywhere are using the Silencer to escape advertisements.  Gregg walks down the street and in the space of minutes witnesses multiple extravagant fatal accidents that occur because drivers and pedestrians can't hear sirens or warnings.  Murderers and thieves use the device to sneak up on people and to render alarms useless and cries for aid fruitless, and when it becomes clear that committing crime has become easy, people who were previously too scared to steal or murder begin to indulge their natural evil proclivities, leading to a rise in murder of 1000% and of burglary to the tune of 10,000%.  (This is where I agree with Gunn, that a large proportion of people would love to steal, rape and murder, and only refrain from doing so out of fear of being harmed in a fight with their proposed victim or punished by the community or the state.)  

Gregg publishes articles about the Silencers, but he needs more info, so he leans hard on his crush, the salesgirl, trying to get her to divulge the identity of her employer and the manufacturer of the Silencers.  He harangues the attractive young woman with talk of how the Silencers are destabilizing our society by causing accidents, facilitating crime, and severely diminishing economic activity by immunizing people to the advertising that drives sales and thus employment.  When he doesn't get anything from her, he starts investigating trucking companies to see who is shipping the Silencers to the stores.  You'd think this would be easy to figure out by just watching the stores and seeing what truck shows up, but instead Gregg starts visiting trucking companies to ask questions.

Like "The Immortals," you can't take the details of the plot of this story seriously--in real life running a high profile retail business in a city without the government knowing all about every aspect of it would be impossible thanks to business law and tax regulations--the owners and/or renters of the buildings in which the shop girls work, and the shop girls themselves, have to fill out all sorts of legal forms and tax forms and pay all sorts of taxes and so who owns the stores and built the devices would be impossible to keep secret from anybody who took time to find it out, and every city politician and bureaucrat, many federal pols and bureaucrats, and every journalist, would have almost irresistible incentives to seek out this data.  Criticisms like this weigh more heavily on Gunn's "Deadly Silence" than they do van Vogt's Isher stories or Williamson's Humanoids stories because those 1940s stories are set in a far future fictional milieu  and have some of the feeling of a myth or fairy tale, while Gunn makes it very clear that  "Deadly Silence" is set in the real life mid-1950s United States, going so far as to name-check J. Edgar Hoover and describe Gregg's service in World War II.

Anyway, Gregg figures out what trucking company is moving the Silencers, and he sneaks into the back of one of the trucks.  To his amazement, the pretty sales woman is also hiding in the back of this truck!  They fight, and he overpowers her and forces her to sit on his lap during the long silent ride; he even  kisses her against her will.  I wasn't expecting this sort of hubba hubba BDSM content, but it certainly livens up the somewhat tedious story a bit.

When the truck stops Gregg gets out to find he is at some factory; the sales clerk he is so crazy about escapes him but he hides behind a bush to spy on the factory anyway.  He gets shot by someone with a ray gun, and wakes up in the custody not of the makers of the Silencers but of the FBI, whose agents were also watching the factory and scared off whoever it was who stunned Gregg.  The FBI men don't know much more about the Silencers than does Gregg, though they are certain that the Soviet Union is not the source of the devices--they tell Gregg that, in fact, the Eastern Blo's communist masters are losing control because the ordinary people there have also acquired the Silencers.

Gregg pays a visit to his shrink, who professes to not believe Gregg's story of being shot with a high-tech stun gun and picked up by the FBI.  On his way down to the street Gregg witnesses something alarming on the elevator--a man's ear falls off and he picks it up off the floor and reattaches it; Gregg realizes if it isn't the USSR making the Silencers it must be space aliens trying to soften up Earth for conquest!  Aliens who don't have ears and so must be deaf!  Aliens who must communicate via telepathy!  Gregg then confronts the shop girl a third time.  She says she was in the truck spying on the makers of the Silencers herself, and Gregg convinces her she is employed by aliens bent on conquering the Earth and should join him in the resistance group led by Gregg's scientist friend Pryor.

Gregg has a brainwave--his shrink must be an alien!  Gregg dashes over to the therapist's office, where the aliens capture him.  As villains do all the time in fiction, the invaders provide their prisoner with fun information; for example, many aliens doing reconnaissance on Earth are posing as psychologists, just the sort of person to whom people are willing to tell all their secrets--in fact, the aliens have largely plotted their takeover based on Gregg's specific psychology, considering Gregg to be "the epitomized neurosis of human society"!  Minutes later Gregg is rescued by the same FBI people who saved him last time in another of Gunn's odd over-the-top action scenes.

Having been discovered, the aliens begin their invasion in earnest, spherical craft landing in all the major cities and deploying armored vehicles.  The aliens take the urban areas, but human resistance endures in the countryside.  Gregg, Pryor, the shop girl and various other minor characters I haven't named play roles in the resistance, firing off bazookas and developing high tech countermeasures and so on.  In a sort of switcheroo ending, Pryor invents a device that projects discordant noise on the wavelength of the aliens' telepathy--this device will work on the aliens in the same way the Silencer works on humans.  As the story ends, a long war lies ahead, but we can assume humanity will win and Gregg and the shop girl will be married.

"Deadly Silence"'s 50+ pages feels quite long, in part because the narrative is not particularly entertaining and does not flow smoothly.  Many scenes feel inconclusive or even extraneous, feel as if they go nowhere and fail to move the plot along.  Gregg goes out looking for clues, then ends up back at his apartment or the shrink's office with little to show for his expeditions.  The narrative doesn't feel like it goes from A to B to C to D, but like it goes from A to B to A to C to A to D.  "Deadly Silence" also feels long because the conventional text is regularly interrupted by newspaper clippings describing representative events which Gregg did not witness, like crimes committed using the Silencer and the alien landing, as well as stuff that Gregg himself experienced--we learn the tale of the ear on the elevator by reading a newspaper column about it for which Gregg was the source.  Why?

Exploring the consequences of a device that causes silence, and how an intelligent race that has no sense of hearing might get along, are not bad ideas, but Gunn embeds these ideas in long boring story with a poor structure and poor action and human drama elements, and some of the other science components of the story are hard to take.  There are animals that can hear without external earlobes, for example.  And in the very start of the story we hear that Pryor has built a "telepathy machine" but he doesn't know whether it is working, or even whether it is a transmitter or a receiver.  This is hard to get your mind around and seems more like a joke than anything serious, adding to the many factors that make suspending disbelief a challenge when reading "Deadly Silence."

I'm wrestling with whether or not "Deadly Silence" is worse than "The Immortals."  "Deadly Silence" feels longer and slower, and its narrative is less coherent and smooth, but the satire and action scenes are not quite so bad as those in "The Immortals."  We'll just say that both of these stories are "barely acceptable," shrug our shoulders at the fact that one is celebrated and one is forgotten, and move on with our lives.

**********

Cripes, this is a long blog post.  It feels like ages ago that I was reading those short Malzberg pieces.  I shouldn't cram four stories into a single blog post when most of them are over 30 or 50 pages long.  Note to self!

Gunn's "Powder Keg" is the big winner today; the other stories are like filler pieces, Gunn's two weak pieces like filler stories that have metastasized to monstrous proportions.  Don't expect to hear anything about Randall Garrett or James E. Gunn for a while here at MPorcius Fiction Log; what you can expect is more Barry Malzberg, more World War II era Weird Tales, and I think more crime from Fredric Brown. 

Barry N. Malzberg: "On Account of Darkness," "Impasse," "Varieties of Technological Experience," "Varieties of Religious Experience" and "Inside Out"

Let's visit the late 1970s, when MPorcius was still skinny and still thought girls were icky!  Today five stories from Barry N. Malzberg's 1980 hardcover collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady will fall under our gimlet eyes ("gimlet," "rheumy," choose whatever cliche you feel appropriate.)  We're like halfway through this volume, having already wrestled with about a dozen stories from it over the course of three blogposts (one, two, three.)   

"On Account of Darkness" with Bill Pronzini (1977)

This story serves as the title piece of a 2004 volume of Malzberg-Pronzini collaborations, a book I actually held in my hands when I was living in Iowa and exploring the SF section of the Des Moines Public Library.  I read the short story "On Account of Darkness" in those pre-MPorcius Fiction Log days, and thought it a piffling trifle; let's see what I think today.

Before the internet age I paid a lot of attention to the mass media--every morning I listened to Howard Stern and every evening I watched Johnny Carson, David Letterman and/or Conan O'Brien, and to get all their jokes and references you sort of had to watch the nightly news and prime time TV.  (In my defense, I didn't sit and stare at the screen unless Dana Delany or Isabella Rossellini was on; I played video games or painted Warhammer 40,000 models or looked at books about Horatio Nelson or something.)  One of the odd topics that would come up on local public service commercials and the local news was musicians or artists moaning that kids today didn't get enough exposure to jazz or classical music or painting or whatever at school, that we had to increase public funding for arts programs.  I always rolled my eyes at this stuff (people under the influence of Howard Stern and David Letterman during the period when they were actually funny rolled their eyes at everything) because why should I care that some other guy's hobby was going extinct--why should the taxpayers pony up to ease your worries that your favorite thing was no longer going to be popular after you were dead? 

Anyway, "On Account of Darkness" exhibits this no-doubt heartfelt attitude I found silly, Malzberg and Pronzini lamenting that some day one of their hobbies--following professional baseball--would be extinct.  The story also seems to reflect the experience of creative people compelled to supplicate before business people or other funders to achieve their visions; a lot of people who want to make a TV show or a movie or a record album or paint or sculpt have to make a "pitch" to some network or film studio exec or some government flunky or non-profit parasite who hands out grants (and of course Malzberg and Pronzini were often in the somewhat analogous position as writers submitting the stories and ideas to editors and publishers), and this sort of thing is what the protagonist of "On Account of Darkness" does.  Needless to say, artistic people think business people and government flunkies and non-profit goofs are ignorant jerks, and sometimes they are right.

I seemed to see myself in ten other offices like Evers', past and present, at the mercy of people like him who understood very little and yet, somehow, controlled everything....*  

It is the future.  The protagonist has invented what we might today call a simulator or sandbox video game that recreates 20th-century baseball games in miniature and can project a holographic image of the game of life-size or smaller.  He goes into the office of a guy called Evers to get financing for mass producing the invention or maybe sell the rights to hold public performances of the simulated games.  He demonstrates its use, and talks a lot about baseball players, some of whom even I have heard of.  Evers, however, has never even heard of baseball before, and our hero is only able to get a pretty meagre offer, which he accepts grudgingly.  The last line of the story indicates that he has similar devices that simulate hockey, basketball, and horse racing, calling into question whether he is as passionate about baseball as he professes to be, or just another business man with a product to sell. 

This story is minor and parochial, aimed at people just like Malzberg and Pronzini, but it is actually well constructed and the style is not as opaque as so many Malzberg stories.  When I first read it years ago, I thought, "Is that it?" but today I read with a little more care and thought, and can give "On Account of Darkness" a moderate recommendation.  Like A. E. van Vogt says, science fiction requires a little work on the part of the reader, and today I was willing to put a more work into "On Account of Darkness" than I was in the past, and consequently I got more out of it.

"On Account of Darkness" made its debut in F&SF.  In his afterword to the story here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, Malzberg suggests he sent the story to Ben Bova at Analog and doesn't know why Bova rejected it, and claims it is as good a story as he has ever written and in fact his best collaboration with Pronzini.  The tale has been reprinted in multiple anthologies of baseball stories, another volume of Malzberg collabs with Pronzini--Problems Solved--as well as the 650-page Greenberg, Waugh and Waugh 101 Science Fiction Stories AKA The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories.

*There was no apostrophe after "Evers" in the magazine version of the story, or in the version of the story here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady, but I finally looked at the version in Problems Solved and found an apostrophe there, so bravo to whoever had a hand in putting that much needed bit of punctuation in there so I didn't have to put that "[sic]" thing in the quote.

"Impasse" (1976)

"Impasse" first saw print in the issue of the short-lived magazine Odyssey we looked at not long ago alongside stories by Jerry Pournelle, Fred Saberhagen, Thomas N. Scortia and Frederik Pohl.  It looks like it has only ever been reprinted here in The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.

I like it when SF writers refer to the "real" writers I like, and in this story Malzberg refers to Proust and presents us a narrator who is holed up in his room writing a long memoir with a focus on sex, somewhat like Proust writing his semi-autobiographical novel In Search of Lost Time.  This narrator is a graduate student in Political Science at Columbia, and is stuck in his New York apartment because his apartment has been conquered by aliens--his apartment is the beachhead of a general invasion of Earth that could come at any minute.  The aliens are furry, the size and shape of golf balls, and speak English with an accent; they have forbidden the student from attending class, and demand he write his memoir, as they want some documentary record of life on Earth before their conquest.  Besides, political science will be a totally useless discipline after the aliens take over Earth, as the aliens will have total control and, being a corporate entity with a collective consciousness, have no politics.

The narrator comes to believe that the aliens like--even love--his prose (they sit on his shoulders and on his typewriter and desk and read his writing as he types) and that he can save the Earth from invasion by keeping their attention on his writing--as long as they are fascinated by his memoir, they will leave the rest of the human race alone.

Obviously, the narrator is insane and has come up with a fantasy that excuses, even valorizes, his desire to shelter in his room, away from his unrewarding studies and his unsuccessful relationships, and do what he really wants to do--write his memoir.  

This is a good story with themes (wanting to hide from the world, wanting to quit school and give up on relationships with other people, the fantasy of having one's creative work admired) I can identify with; it is also very recognizably a Malzbergian tale--our hero Barry has penned other stories in which insane men think they have been contacted by aliens and have to try to save the world by just doing mundane stuff like playing chess (see 1973's "Closed Sicilian") or making progress at their office jobs (see 1974's The Day of the Burning.) 

In the afterword to "Impasse," Malzberg writes a little about Odyssey and George Zebrowski--you know I enjoy this sort of SF inside goissip.       

"Varieties of Technological Experience" (1978)

Here's a story that Ben Bova did buy for Analog, a gimmicky little story about a scientist.  The corrupt authoritarian government of a Federation apparently encompassing the Solar System imprisons allegedly dissident scientists on a moon of Neptune, providing each laboratory facilities and saying he will be given his freedom if he can accomplish some specific and apparently impossible task.  One scientist decades ago was given the job of creating a perpetual motion machine, for example.  The protagonist of this story is assigned the task of creating a universal solvent.

The main character actually succeeds in creating a universal solvent--it destroys the entire moon and everybody on it.  At the end of the story we learn that the Federation has since been overthrown but it is hinted that the new government is also authoritarian.

Merely acceptable, though it is interesting to see that one of Malzberg's few stories to appear in Analog has the basic structure as well as some of the themes of the sorts of stories that appeared in the magazine when John W. Campbell, Jr. was editing it (van Vogt's Isher stories are a good example) like the scientist who breaks new ground and the space empire that goes through a paradigm shift. 

"Varieties of Technological Experience" would be reprinted in two anthologies of short-shorts, Microcosmic Tales and 100 Little Astounding Alien Stories; wait, are the scientists and Federation apparatchiks not human?  

"Varieties of Religious Experience" (1979)

This is the first person narrative of a minor (very minor--it is implied he has a communications degree) writer of literary stories and denizen of the non-profit world who took up a career as an armed robber who explains to his victims--in the story a used car salesman and the clerk at an IHOP- or Waffle House-style restaurant--like a sort of Ralph Nader wannabe how their businesses in particular and our entire civilization in general are fundamentally corrupt, which he feels renders his crimes unexceptional.  He is captured down in Washington, D.C. when he tries to terrorize or perhaps rape or murder a senator.

The dialogue in this story is amusing, and the story has some level of tension because the reader cannot be quite sure to what extent Malzberg wants us to nod along with the narrator's denunciations of capitalism and bourgeois government, pityingly seeing him as a nut driven insane by C&BG, and/or simply regard him as a rapacious robber who is rationalizing his villainy.  We might see in this story one of the themes we see in "On Account of Darkness"--creative types have contempt for business people and government lackeys, but every day they must face the reality that business people and government goons are more powerful than they and must be appeased if they seek to prosper, or even survive.  I also like the story because I grew up in Northern New Jersey and lived in New York City and so have some familiarity with the highways mentioned in the story, among them Route 46 and Route 80.  My in-laws are from the Midwest and always say "I-80" but I stubbornly insist on saying "Route 80" and even did so when I lived in Iowa and Ohio, and so always like seeing "Route 80," or, as here, "Route Eighty," in print.

"Varieties of Religious Experience" debuted in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine under the title "Every Day in Every Way," something isfdb doesn't know but which I figured out myself by looking through issues of AHMM at luminist.org.  We're doing original research here at MPFLog!     

"Inside Out" (1978)

Here we have another story which debuted in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.  In his afterword Malzberg tells us the premise of the story was suggested by AHMM editor Eleanor Sullivan; apparently Sullivan, unlike previous AHMM editor Ernest Hutter, liked Malzberg's work.  Malzberg also praises Randall Garrett (specifically "Hunting Lodge") and Christopher Anvil ("Mind Partner.")

The story is acceptable.  While your humble blogger loved living in the Big City in the '90s and 2000s, the narrator hates living in town in the '70s.  Everybody gets on his nerves, from the incompetent super of his building to the pathetic wretch who demands money for wiping his windshield to the woman at his office (he's a caseworker for the welfare department) who belittles him for his limited understanding of psychological theory and for spacing out during meetings.  He relieves the tension he feels by having elaborate fantasies in which he murders these people.  Uh oh...did he just flip his lid and actually kill one of these annoying characters in real life?

As in "Varieties of Religious Experience," readers are perhaps expected to sympathize with the criminal, see him as a victim of our society driven to acts of evil, and, in his afterword, Malzberg obliquely notes that these characters share personality traits and life experiences with himself. 

"Inside Out" was reprinted in one of those Barnes and Noble "100 Whatever" anthologies, this one with Isaac Asimov's moniker on the cover!

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Am I going soft?  Am I growing ever more in sync with Malzberg's sensibilities?  Is this a statistical anomaly?  Out of five stories, I'm finding three good and two acceptable.  Whatever the diagnosis, today we've got what I consider a very palatable helping of Seventies Malzbergiana!  And the good news is that there is enough left of The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady for two more servings, so stay tuned to see if we are going from strength to strength or today is a peak from which we are about to sadly descend!