"The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Bagley" by W. Macfarlane
I haven't actually read The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam so maybe this is going to go right over my head. We'll soldier on regardless.
This is a shaggy dog story written in a silly jokey style; it is perhaps somewhat like an R. A, Lafferty story. A Midwestern salesman, the Bagley of the title, is an expert at sales, can sell anything to anybody, but he is unfulfilled. He has heard stories of luxurious cruises out of Hong Kong, and so goes to Hong Kong and boards a cruise liner. The cruise is everything he might have hoped, the food and the accommodations impossibly delicious and comfortable, and he has an affair with a British aristocrat who has amazing erotic abilities. Then he gets back to America, refreshed. I guess the point is that as a salesman he sells things to people and they actually believe his sales pitch and so enjoy the products he offers as if his pitch was true, and now he has had the same experience, enjoying the cruise as much as he has been told he would, and this has made him feel better about his own work.
This one feels like a waste of time. It doesn't seem like "The Rubaiyat of Ambrose Bagley" has been reprinted.
"Gate-O" by Don Picard
It is the near future--the 1990s! In the 1980s there was a nuclear war and the USA, the Soviet Union, and China were all wiped out, and most of Europe as well. The Third World blames the US for the cataclysm, and the Americans who were living in Africa and Latin America at the time of the war today feel the full force of Hispanic resentment of the gringo and black resentment of the white man!
Our narrator's father was an American working in finance in Mexico City when the First and Second Worlds blew each other up and the narrator grew up in the walled ghetto to which Americans are confined; when they venture out of the ghetto they have to go through security, wear a "G" on their clothes and sit in the back of the bus. Picard, in the voice of the narrator's father, directly and explicitly likens the living conditions of Americans in post-cataclysm Mexico to that of Jews in Nazi Germany, while with the back of the bus business indirectly comparing the fate of the last Americans to that of blacks in the Jim Crow South. Picard doesn't seem to be picking out Americans or Mexicans for particular criticism in this story, as there are sympathetic and honorable gringos and Mexicans as well as racist gringos and murderous Mexicans; I guess he is just commenting on racism and destructive class envy in general and trying to get his white American readers to look at the universe through the eyes of marginalized and oppressed people.
As I suggested above, most of the story's text consists of adventure and horror stuff. The narrator is 14 years old when the assassination of a hardline anti-American Mexican politician triggers a pogrom against Americans, and he is the only survivor among his family, his life preserved by an obese Mexican maid and a beautiful Mexican prostitute. Our narrator runs here and there on the torchlit streets, climbs walls, hides inches from discovery, sees the mutilated corpses of his mother and sister, and that of the maid, who sacrificed herself for her white employers. As the adult author of this memoir, he works on a ship crewed by Americans and Australians, and likens the ship to a ghetto; in the final passages of the story he describes his gratitude to the maid who lost her life at the hands of her countrymen while standing up for him and other Americans.
A good choice by Gerrold. At isfdb and on the contents page of Science Fiction Emphasis 1 this story is listed as "Gato-O" but the title page of the story has "Gate-O" and the text of the story makes clear that it should be "Gate-O," as this is a phonetic spelling of how a Mexican character pronounces "ghetto." Gerrold or somebody at Ballantine should have caught this typo on the contents page during copyediting or proofreading.
"Shards of Divinity" by Michael D. Toman
Here's our third story of the day that has never been reprinted. We are really venturing into rarely trod regions today, comrades. We love to don the pith helmet and swing the machete here at MPorcius Fiction Log.
This is an experimental thing--I guess you'd call it very "New Wave"--that mocks Christianity and American pop culture and illustrates the way different cultural products influence each other over time (the word "syncretism," which I've heard people smarter than me use, is coming to mind) and the limited ability of the academics of an advanced society to figure out the culture of a less advanced and/or extinct one. "Shards of Divinity"'s text of 13 pages consists of academic writing and reproductions of primary sources, apparently put together by space aliens who have visited Earth in the future, after a nuclear war or some such catastrophe. The work of these extraterrestrial college professors is focused on unravelling the apparent links between action and adventure films and the Gospels. John Wayne and Clint Eastwood are mentioned in passing, H. P. Lovecraft is quoted, and even Doc Savage is thrown in there, I think (one fragment seems to be an advertisement for a film retelling of the story of the temptation of Jesus by Satan, Damnation Desert, in which Jesus is recast as "Doc Messiah.") Much of the story's page count is taken up by what come across as fragments of screenplays, full of italicized stage directions. In one, Jesus is the "Sarge" in a war movie; in another, the crucifixion is reimagined as an episode of Mission: Impossible in which Jesus has to free Barabbas from Pontius Pilate's maximum security prison. We also get Jesus as a zombie or vampire rising from the grave and Jesus as King Kong breaking out of bondage on stage.
I think of this sort of thing as sterile, as an example of cultural decadence, the mere rehashing of stuff that has already been done, but "Shards of Divinity" isn't very long (there is a lot of extra space between lines of dialogue in the screenplays) and some of the jokes and references are faintly amusing, so we'll say it is acceptable.
"On the Street of the Serpents" by Michael Bishop
The first part of the story, a sort of nostalgic look at the youth in Spain of the narrator, an American who has the same name as the author of the story, and his relationship with a little girl whose father is a Japanese-American and whose mother is a German, reminds us of Proust in its tone and with its theme of jealousy and its literary descriptions of locales. The second part describes Bishop's young adulthood, his fathering of a son and his work as a teacher; there are passages about classical music and snow. A theme of both of these sections is East Asia and its relationship with America; besides the little girl in Part I being the son of an ethnic Japanese who grew up in the US and doesn't speak Japanese, in Part II Bishop repeatedly describes his infant son as looking Asian ("like a small clown from Cathy" and "a pale-blue Buddha, swaddled in terrycloth") and talks about Richard Nixon's famous trip to China.
Part III takes up fifty pages of "On the Street of Serpents," and begins with Bishop, a man in his forties, returning to Seville, Spain, where he grew up as the son of an enlisted man in the United States Air Force. There's an italicized page of somewhat confusing business about how Bishop is writing Part III from the vantage point of 2000, from prison, but it really isn't 2000 or 1992 yet, suggesting Part III is a fantasy or a delusion or something. Anyway, he is in prison in 2000 typing away because in 1992 he went back to Spain to murder Mao Zedong, who had come to Spain to celebrate an alliance between Communist China and Franco's Spain. In 1992 in this universe Mao and Franco are both alive and kicking; in fact, Mao has led the development of a union between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union! Yikes! In this bizarro world, socialism is thriving, and all the nations of the world are uniting to form a world government, except for the increasingly isolated United States, which is in decline, suffering increasing divorce rates and racial strife--Bishop's is among the families that have collapsed.
With its focus on assassination of politicians, alternate history plot, unreliable narrator, and undercurrent of grim humor, Part III of "On the Street of Serpents" reminded me of Barry Malzberg's work. The narrator's scheme to murder Chairman Mao involves him impersonating a blind man; before he kills him, Bishop has long conversations with the blind man and learns that the Chinese Communist Party, as part of its diplomatic overtures to Europe, hired an American doctor to put the brain of the aged Pablo Picasso into a robot body so Picasso might live on and continue creating art. The robot Picasso cannot speak, which I guess symbolizes something, maybe the censorship regimes of Red China and Fascist Spain? (There is a lot of censorship in the United States of this alternate future as well--Americans have no idea what is going on around the world.) With no money for a room, the narrator spends the night in the abandoned ruin of the apartment building in which he lived in his teens--the body of the blind man he has murdered reposes a few floors above. The next day he encounters the Japanese-American girl, now a grown married woman, who lived on the floor above him in this very building in his youth.
The woman describes how her family fell apart and then was reformed, her parents remarrying in Germany. And how she married a blue-eyed blonde German, an expert on Asian languages. Her husband was committed to the Chinese-led project of unifying the world and became a diplomat, representing Germany at the court of Chairman Mao. So charming was this guy, that he became friends with Mao. When her husband got inoperable brain cancer, he agreed to have Chairman Mao's brain installed in his still-healthy young body! Mao Zedong, a Chinese brain in a European body, has come to physically embody his political objective of a world united under Chinese leadership!
Our narrator, Bishop, goes through with his plan to kill Mao during an event in which Franco and Mao walk down a Saville street, greeting the various local merchants--the blind guy was one of these small business people, a seller of lottery tickets. When the now blue-eyed and blonde-haired Chinese tyrant sees Bishop he talks about how nowadays there need be no blind people, but our narrator kills him anyway. Bishop is imprisoned, and while he is allowed to write, all news of the outside world is kept from him.
"On the Street of Serpents" is a big success, justifying the claim the story is "brilliant" on the back of the book. Bishop handles the human characters and their relationships very well, and the literary touches--the descriptions of light and shadow and all that--are good. The science fiction elements--the alternate history jazz and the brain transplants--are also intriguing and entertaining. So, thumbs up.
What are we to take from the story besides admiration for Bishop's literary skill? Obviously the theme of China reaching out to the rest of the world and uniting the world under its influence is inspired by the Nixon trip to China, though Bishop sort of reverses the polarity of this event--in real life the United States became closely enmeshed with Communist China, while in this story the US becomes very isolated and China builds close alliances with the USSR and Europe. Is Bishop in this story trashing the United States, blaming America for international conflict?--after all, Mao is proposing to cure Bishop's supposed blindness a second before Bishop kills him. The Japanese-American woman and her family, in their sexual relationships and in their relationship with Mao, represent intimate interactions among different cultures and ethnicities, but are these rocky relationships in the end healthy and beneficial, or do they lead to unhappiness and deracination?--the woman and her father are depicted as being cut off from their Asian roots, and other Asians deplore this abnegation of their cultural identity. Francisco Franco and Mao Zedong are essential figures in the story, but it is not clear how Bishop wants us to see them--while the narrator calls Mao a monster and kills him, the narrator isn't exactly sane or admirable, and Bishop doesn't spend any time describing the crimes of the Chinese Communist Party or of Franco, does little to change the opinion of these dictators that the reader held before he started reading the story. Is the alliance between the anti-communist Franco and the icon of socialism Mao supposed to demonstrate that one authoritarian or totalitarian ideology is much like another, or that tyrants are essentially non-ideological and pragmatically and selfishly pursue their own power? What do we make of the fact that the medical technology Chairman Mao deploys in his efforts to court Westerners seems to all come from the United States?--I'm not even sure if we are supposed to marvel at the transplants as medical miracles or recoil from them as Dr. Frankenstein atrocities. The ambiguity with which Bishop treats all these themes is one of the strengths of the story, making it more engaging and thought provoking.
In response to the great merit of this story I am thinking I should read more Bishop.
"On the Street of the Serpents" would go on to be included in the Bishop collection Blooded on Arachne and at least two European anthologies.
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These stories seem to share themes, to present visions of America and Americans that reflect 1970s pessimism; three of them are about Americans abroad and the two serious stories are about relationships between Americans and foreigners that might be considered disastrous. Did 1970s readers consider these horror stories, or savor seeing the white bourgeoisie getting it in the neck? Either way, Picard's "Gate-O" and Bishop's "On the Street of the Serpents" are well-written and entertaining and I recommend them and recommend Science Fiction Emphasis 1 as a whole as an engaging and fun anthology; bravo to Gerrold and associate editor Stephen Goldin.
Looks like there wasn't a SCIENCE FICTION EMPHASIS 2.
ReplyDeleteAnd it is too bad, because Science Fiction Emphasis 1 is valuable to people interested in the New Wave, Seventies pessimism, sex in SF, and race and ethnicity in SF.
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