1967 stories by C Kapp, R Zelazny, A Offutt and B Aldiss

Over the last five blog posts we've been reading from paperback anthologies I own.  Well, now we are six.  On the anthologies shelf of the MPorcius Library we find a copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series, a 1970 reprint of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  Back in 2020 I read four stories from the book, Samuel R. Delany's "Driftglass," Thomas Disch's "The Number You Have Reached," and R. A. Lafferty's "The Man Who Never Was" and "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," and earlier this year we read the included story by Larry Niven, "Handicap."  Let's read four more of the book's 16 stories today, those by Colin Kapp, Roger Zelazny, Andrew Offutt and Brian Aldiss.  

"Ambassador to Verdammt" by Colin Kapp   

In 2016 we blogged about Kapp's "The Cloudbuilders" and his novel Patterns of Chaos, and just last year we read his story "Enigma."  I don't actually remember anything about those three works, but I didn't condemn them in my blog posts about them so Kapp is still in my good books and hopefully today's engagement with a Kapp story won't do anything to change that.

In "Ambassador to Verdammt" we have a traditional SF story that I can mildly recommend, a tale that tries to give you that ol' sense of wonder, details super futuristic technology, valorizes the engineer and the scientist (including the psychologist!), describes crazy aliens and offers a sense of hope--conquering the stars will be tough and entail serious risks, and people don't always get along, but mankind us equal to the task and it is a task well worth accomplishing.  (If you read my last blog post you know this is the sort of thing I have kind of been looking for, and I guess it is no surprise I found it in Analog before I found it in Galaxy.)

A space naval officer, an engineer, is dispatched with a bunch of subordinates and many tons of equipment to a planet he thought had no native intelligent life with the job of setting up all the extensive and expensive apparatus to allow a hyperspace ship to land on the planet.  He is skeptical of the diplomats and scientists on the planet, thinking these civilians may have distracted the space navy from its real work in corrupt pursuit of their own personal benefit.  The "landing grid" he is in charge of erecting is to catch the ship carrying the new formal Ambassador, who is the son of the current head of administration of the tiny research station on the planet--if there are no intelligent aliens on the planet, why do they need an Ambassador?  Is the staff here just securing a plum no-show government job for the administrator's flesh and blood?

The administrator and the station's top head shrinker try to explain to the engineer that among the local life are intelligent beings whose physical make up and way of thinking are so alien that their existence at first went unrecognized.  Even now humans are totally incapable of comprehending these natives, and just trying to communicate with them runs the risk of driving you insane.  The shrink suspects the natives are having the same experience as the human visitors, trying and failing to understand the humans.  

The engineer hears the strange noises made by the aliens, sees the evidence that they are able to perform apparently impossible physical feats, and when he tries to look at them he can't even get a handle on what he is seeing.  A brave and determined guy, he plunges into the jungle in an effort to figure the natives out himself and almost goes insane.  Luckily the shrink brings him back from the brink of madness so he is able to finish the landing grid.  When the Ambassador arrives the engineer learns this is no Hunter Biden situation--the administrator's son is a mere infant, and is being brought to the planet on the theory that a baby who grows up in proximity to the natives will be able to fathom their ways, its brain not set in its ways like that of an adult human who was raised among only humans.  The natives have similarly left at the research station what looks like a crystal that seems to shift as you watch it and grows at  measurable rate--presumably this is a baby native who, like the administrator's son, will serve as a liaison between human and native, having come to maturity with a foot in both cultures.

After its debut in Analog its appearance in the many editions of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, "Ambassador to Verdammt" had to wait until 2013 to appear again in print in the Kapp collection The Cloudbuilders and Other Marvels.   

(NB: I read "Ambassador to Verdammt" in a scan of the applicable issue of Analog because I don't want to wreck my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series, which is in quite good condition.)

In Germany, Wollheim and Carr's 1968 anthology was split into multiple volumes;
"Ambassador to Verdammt" was included in Science Fiction Stories 33.

"The Man Who Loved the Faioli" by Roger Zelazny

Back in 2014 I acquired a withdrawn library copy of a 2001 edition of the Zelazny collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth with a cool Lebbeus Woods cover and I actually started reading it and put up three blog posts about it, uno, dos, tres, but I didn't get to "The Man Who Loved the Faioli," which is in the second half of the book.  So I own this oft-reprinted story in multiple books, and will read it in that 2001 volume, which is already in questionable condition.  "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a fun Gray Morrow cover that is quite similar in spirit to, and shares some individual components with, Morrow's cover for Neil R. Jones' The Sunless World, another 1967 production.

"The Man Who Loved the Faioli" (pronounced like "ravioli"?...I love ravioli...) is written in a semi-poetical fairy-tale or fable-with-a-moral style and is set in a future of technology so advanced it is almost indistinguishable from magic to us poor 20th-century goofenheimers.  Here's a sample of the text that puts on full display the repetition, nature similes, and obvious romantic naming conventions that are giving me that fairyland vibe:

"I said 'hello, and don't cry,'" he said, and her voice was like the breezes he had forgotten through all the trees he had forgotten, with their moisture and their odors and their colors all brought back to him thus, "From where do you come, man?  You were not here a moment ago."

"From the Canyon of the Dead," he said.

"Let me touch your face," and he did, and she did.

"It is strange that I did not feel you approach."

"This is a strange world," he replied.

Anyway, the plot consists of John Auden (a reference to W. H. Auden?) encountering the most beautiful woman he has ever met and having sex with her.  Over the course of the brief story we learn the nature of both John Auden and the beautiful woman.  The Faioli are alien creatures I guess a little like vampires, though Zelazny doesn't use that word.  They can fly through space on their wings of light, and they come to men in the form of impossibly beautiful women.  They cannot see dead bodies, only living people.  A Faioli will spend a month with a man, giving him the best possible sexual experiences, and also serving as a dutiful spouse, cooking and massaging and so forth, then on the 31st day of the affair will suck his life out, killing him.  John Auden is the first ever man to have the upper hand over a Faioli, as he is, more or less, already dead.  You see, in this high tech future, almost nobody suffers diseases, but John Auden unluckily caught some malady nobody knew how to cure.  He didn't want to be put into suspended animation to wait for a cure, so instead died but technology allowed him to maintain consciousness and mobility, I guess as a sort of cyborg.  He took the job of caretaker of the planet to which are brought all the bodies of people, human and alien, who die throughout the galaxy by robots who dump them in the "Valley of Bones."

When the Faioli arrives she can't see John Auden and starts crying because she came to this planet for nothing.  John Auden, who has heard about the Faioli, sees how hot she is and decides he wants to have sex with her, so he pushes a button under his armpit that brings him back to life.  (This story doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense; it's just one arbitrary romantic thing after another.)  So they have sex and play house for 31 days, and when the time comes for the Faioli to suck his life out he explains to her his odd condition.  John Auden is willing to die, now that he has spent a month enjoying the best possible sexual relationship, but the Faioli has the curiosity this story attributes to women and she pushes his armpit button and he dies again, becoming invisible to her.  Once dead, John Auden has lost his interest in dying, and so doesn't bring himself back to life.  The Faioli cries, then flies off.  Zelazny ends the story with a cryptic moral: "life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it."

Gender studies people may find a lot in "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" for them to put their hammers and tongs to work on; seeing as it is a story about women who suck your life out in exchange for sexual favors, a story that employs phrases like "...having taken the form of woman, or perhaps being woman all along, the Faioli who was called Sythia was curious..." and a story which offers a portrayal of the platonic ideal of a perfect marriage.  As for me, maybe I am in a cynical mood today, but the numerous nonsensical elements of the story and its fairy-tale or folk-tale style put me off, had me rolling my eyes.  I'll call this one barely acceptable instead of bad because its lack of appeal to me is more a matter of it not being my kind of thing than of Zelazny failing to achieve his goals--maybe "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" is a stellar example of what it Zelazny intended it to be?

"Population Implosion" by Andrew Offutt 

This is an idea story, with little by way of plot or character, written in a smart-alecky jocular style.  Our narrator is a doctor and one of the first people to figure out the alarming development facing the human race in the second half of the 20th century.  This is also one of the many SF stories that addresses the issue of overpopulation.

Old people start dying mysteriously, just all of a sudden keeling over without evidence of injury or illness.  Our narrator and an actuary realize the scope and evolving nature of the problem and our narrator is put on the team trying to figure out why these geezers are dying.  It seems that people that reach a certain advanced age all die spontaneously, and that age is getting lower all the time, so that there are no more 75-year-olds in the world, then no more 74-year-olds, etc.  Eventually it is realized that the human race is limited to approximately 5 billion people at a time, and, when a baby is born who tips the world pop over the edge, the oldest person in the world dies instantly.  There are worldwide efforts to limit birth, but the duplicitous Chinese Communist Party secretly initiates a crash breeding program, forcing people to have sex like crazy with the idea that they can thus increase China's already high percentage of world population and dominate the Earth, but the Westerners catch on and the West and USSR ally and then nuke China into oblivion.  

This mass death event only delays the problem briefly, and soon the maximum age is creeping down again.  As the story ends there is no hope in sight and the narrator proposes the theory that the being who created the universe made five billion souls at its start and that is why there can never be more than five billion people alive at any one time.

We'll call "Population Implosion" acceptable.  The satirical elements, largely aimed at politicians and government and other bureaucratic institutions, aren't actually funny but also are not offensively lame.  The story is a smooth read, thanks to the style and to the mystery--the reader is kept curious about what will happen next, what the explanation and solution will be--but those questions are not really resolved so "Population Implosion" isn't what I would call a particularly satisfying read.  We might think of the story as a wish-fulfilment fantasy that absolves readers from the need to worry about overpopulation and eases fear of death by telling you your soul is immortal.

"Population Implosion" debuted in an issue of If featuring an editorial by Frederik Pohl about the New Wave (he diplomatically praises people on either side of the supposed divide between Old and New Wavers) and illustrations by Vaughn Bode--comics fans may also be interested to see an ad for Wallace Wood's Witzend featuring a kid in a space suit.  (I read Offutt's story in a scan of the magazine.)  "Population Implosion" would go on to be included in a 1974 textbook meant to be inflicted on high school kids, As Tomorrow Becomes Today.  

As noted above, German readers were exposed to World's Best Science Fiction: 1968
in dribs and drabs, sections of the book appearing in translation across
multiple entries of the series  Science Fiction Stories; "The Man Who Loved the
Fialoni" and "Population Implosion" appeared in number 35

"Full Sun" by Brian Aldiss 

This story debuted in Damon Knight's Orbit  2 and would be reprinted in various books including Terry Carr's Creatures from Beyond and Bill Pronzini's Werewolf!  At time of writing I can't access any of these books at the internet archive so I am putting at risk the spine of my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series by reading "Full Sun" in there.  Please pray for that beautiful green wraparound Jack Gaughan cover, readers of faith!

Luckily, the risk incurred by reading this story in a physical book I bought with real money is commensurate to how good the story is--thumbs up for "Full Sun," a well-written story full of wild SF ideas and a plot that is one surprise after another.

It is millions of years in the future!  Mankind's relationship to machines and city life is such that almost no human ever leaves the cities, and so the space between the cities--each a paradise of pleasure for men and women--is uninhabited wilderness.  A tiny number of men do leave the cities, and our story concerns three such men.  We've got our main character, a man who, accompanied by a robot, is hunting a werewolf!  Werewolves are, the machines say, mankind's terrible enemies.  On the trail of one such monster, our hero meets another man, a sort of park ranger or forest conservator guy.  This guy lives outside the cities all the time, and has some harsh things ("social criticism") to say about the machines who have been running human life for millennia.  Our protagonist, who still admires the machines, isn't pleased to hear such politically incorrect talk.

Our hero finds reason to change his attitude, however.  He watches the TV news on his wrist phone; there's a new story about the machines' efforts to communicate with the machines who will rule the world of the far future, when the sun is a weak dwarf star.  Our hero realizes that no human beings seem to be alive in this dimly lit future.  Then he finds the timber officer has been killed, and a clue suggests he was killed by the robot and the robot tried to make it look like the werewolf slew him!  Are the werewolves the menace the machines have been claiming, or just rebels against the machine tyranny?  Our hero ends up in a desperate chase, the robot hunting him.  (One of the interesting changes in the story is how when it starts we are led to believe that the robot is a mere tool of the hunter, but later realize that the robot is the master capable of initiative and deception.)  As the story ends, the werewolf watches the cat and mouse game of robot and ordinary man--the werewolf is confident that his kind, the superhumans, will defeat the machines and inherit the Earth long after the machines have eliminated mundane humanity.

I like it.  

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A decent batch of stories, can't really complain.  Maybe we'll read more from World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series as we continue reading anthologies here at MPorcius Fiction Log.