"Sales of a Deathman" (1968)
Here we have a rare story--after its debut in Galaxy and its appearance in the French edition of Galaxy ("Galaxie" is what they call it over there--seems legit) "Sales of a Deathman" (groan) has only reappeared in Fear Today, Gone Tomorrow. This issue of Galaxy, edited by Fred Pohl, is full of stories and art by people we like: Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty, Wallace Wood, Vaughan Bode, Jack Gaughan, Gray Morrow. We'll have to get back to this one, as I don't think I've absorbed all of that material.
"Sales of a Deathman" is a satire full of the kinds of jokes 11-year-olds come up with, like "Deadicare" and "Grislyland." Our text consists of extracts from the 2047-2067 diaries of a top government psychologist. In 2047, the world is overpopulated--the USA alone is home to a billion people! Pollution forces those people who still live above ground to wear respirators all the time.
My interest in satires of advertising and stories that fret about pollution and overpopulation long ago withered to close to zero, and Bloch's treatment of these issues is way too childish to coax that interest back to life--"Sales of a Deathman" is just a bunch of lame jokes with no human feeling and nothing novel to say. Thumbs down!
"A Toy for Juliette" (1967)
In Dangerous Visions, "A Toy for Juliette" is preceded by three pages of introduction from Ellison and two pages of autobiography from Bloch. Among other things, we learn that, when Ellison arrived on the west coast, Bloch lent him a large sum of money so he and his wife and child would have a place to stay and food to eat. Ellison dotes on Bloch's famous story "Yours Truly, Jack the Ripper," which, it seems, suggests a scenario in which the Ripper is immortal. Ellison, intrigued by the idea of the Ripper living in the future, commissioned Bloch to write a story on that theme, and "A Toy for Juliette" is that story. Apparently obsessed with the idea, Ellison wrote a Ripper-in-the-future story of his own, "The Prowler in the City at the Edge of the World," apparently a sequel to "A Toy for Juliette," and it is also printed here in DV.
In the autobiographical passages, Bloch avers that his many stories about killers are an effort to "examine violence in our society" and laments that, over the two decades since World War II, American life has gotten more violent.
(I'll note here that Jack the Ripper is one of those cultural phenomena, like the sinking of the Titanic or the murder of JFK, that I am aware consumes millions of people but which interests me very little.)
Juliette is a beautiful blonde living in the high tech future--her ring remotely controls the lighting in her room, for example. This is a grim, subterranean, post-apocalyptic future: only a few thousand people survive, and all the world--all the universe, apparently!--has been polluted by mankind's "meddling with the atomic order." Juliette herself is something of an apocalyptic character. Her grandfather is a time traveler, and he regularly goes back in time to collect weapons and torture devices for Juliette to play with, and people--men and women, children and adults--for Juliette to have sex with, to torture and to murder. Sometimes Juliette lets Grandpa watch. Grandpa, who it is hinted murdered Juliette's parents, jokes that Juliette will one day murder him and then murder the rest of humanity.
Having set the stage and presented the characters, Bloch quickly gives us the twist ending. Grandpa brings back a Victorian gentleman for Juliette to play with. Juliette is eager to have sex with this guy and stab him to death while he (or she, maybe) is having an orgasm. But Grandpa has unwittingly summoned from the past none other than Jack the Ripper! The Ripper outmaneuvers Juliette and cuts her into little pieces.
This is an acceptable macabre entertainment, with its erotic and gruesome subject matter presented in an economical fashion, without any distracting jokes. (I feel like I say this almost every time I write about Bloch--he is a good writer of entertaining genre fiction if he can curb his desire to tell stupid jokes and keep his social criticism disciplined.) "A Toy for Juliette" has been reprinted in Jack the Ripper-themed anthologies and in the many editions of Ellison's Partners in Wonder, a collection of Ellison's collaborations.
"Report on Sol III" (1958)
"Report on Sol III" is rare for a reason--it is a plotless jeremiad against life in the Western world! It reads like communist propaganda! Space aliens--tentacled people who communicate mind to mind and so have no spoken or written language--observe the human race and are horrified and disgusted to learn that humans go to war, compete in the market, eat other animals and have sex in private. These creatures find television and popular music abhorrent and come to believe the family life of humans is oppressive and humans have no appreciation of natural beauty (all the art they see is by Picasso and other moderns.) The final scene of "Report on Sol III" asserts that the only thing humans really care about is money, a concept that is absolutely alien to these E.T.s.
Stupid and lazy--everything Bloch says in "Report on Sol III" is banal, and he doesn't paint a superior alien civilization or present an alternative to bourgeois capitalism, or even really critique American life--he just presents aliens about whom we learn nothing pointing at us and saying "yuck." An even more childish story than "Sales of a Deathman"!
Bad!
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