Let's get dangerous! Today we read three more stories from my First Edition of Harlan Ellison's famous 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions. We have various reasons to believe these are among the best or most important stories in DV, so maybe this will be an exciting adventure for us.
"Gonna Roll the Bones" by Fritz Leiber
Here's a story that won a Hugo and a Nebula--kaboom! "Gonna Roll the Bones," which has been reprinted a million times, is also the inspiration of the cover illustration of the edition of
The Best of Fritz Leiber that I own, and, to my surprise, of a 2004 children's book.
From line one, "Gonna Roll the Bones" certainly feels like a story that would win awards. It is stuffed full of long sentences filled to the brim with metaphors and similes that paint vivid pictures not of charm and beauty but of squalor and decadence. Immediately we are presented intimations of catastrophe to come, predictions of mass death.
In his intro to "Gonna Roll the Bones," Ellison tells us SF writers tend to be specialists--Edmond Hamilton and A. E. van Vogt specializing in world destruction, Ray Bradbury in poetic imagery, etc. But Leiber, your old pal Harlan opines, is a master of all forms, from fantasy to science-oriented "hard" science fiction. "Gonna Roll the Bones" demonstrates this. The story has a sort of Olde World fairy land setting, but is full of references to space ships and alien life forms and astronomical phenomena and is set in the spacefaring future--many of the metaphors and similes are references to space craft:
While among the trees the red-green vampire lights pulsed faintly and irregularly, like sick fireflies or a plague-stricken space fleet.
These metaphors and similes don't necessarily make a lot of literal sense, but strike a mood or fashion an image.
Joe Slattermill works in a mine and lives with his mother and wife and cat (SF people love cats and we hear plenty about the cat.) Mom and wifey make additional money as bakers and the house has a huge fireplace and series of ovens and Joe expects someday the place will burn down, killing all inside.
Stir crazy, Joe, known to gamble and get drunk and beat his wife, heads out to raise hell. There is a new gambling hall on the dark side of town full of sexy girls and craps tables--presiding over the "Number One Crap Table" are the fattest man Joe has ever seen and a pale woman who is alarmingly tall and skinny whose role is to collect the dice once they are thrown. But even more prominent, and obviously in charge de facto if not de jure, is a mysterious figure in black, his face partially obscured, a perfectly poised gentleman gambler. Leiber describes all these people, and the dice and the table, in great detail. As I read of topless girls, the excitement in Joe's crotch, the man in black groping a girl's ass and then killing a guy with a karate chop to the throat, and Joe's and the gentleman in black's use of derogatory terms for people of African descent, I kept wondering what the hell was in that 2004 kid's book. (It turns out the text in that book has been abridged down almost to nothing by Sarah L. Thomson--the main point of the volume is the pictures by three-time Caldecott winner David Wiesner, which are very bland and unfinished and do absolutely nothing to convey the apocalyptic tone, dark power and rococo intricacy of Leiber's baroque images--Joe the wife-beating drunk has a face with zero personality! Thumbs down for that colorless and lifeless thing!)
Joe is kind of a superhero, or a tall-tale figure like Paul Bunyon, when it comes to throwing things, and he can roll dice and make them come up on the sides he wishes. He makes a stack of dough and then passes the dice on after deliberately rolling boxcars, as he wants to see the man in black, who is psychologically dominating all the assembled gamblers and hangers on, throw. The sinister gentleman can also roll whatever he wants, but while Joe makes his throws look natural, making the dice bounce around and going through the rigamarole of rolling the dice and getting a point and then rolling several times before hitting his point, the gambler in black just arrogantly rolls seven after seven after seven, flaunting his power.
The gambler in black, as Ellison hinted in his intro, is of course the devil. He wants to gamble with Joe--the stakes Joe's life and soul! Joe can back out, but he doesn't want to seem a coward. In the end, Joe wins, thanks to his own courage and his wife's love for him and faith in Jesus Christ--at least that is what I think happened; it is a little confusing. As the story ends, Joe is about to enjoy his winnings--when he put up his life and soul, the devil put up "the world," and Joe, a working-class schlub stuck in a mining town up to now, is going to see the world.
A good story that is written elaborately and can be examined from various angles--religion-based, class-based, sex- and race-based. In his afterword, Leiber explains some of what he is doing, suggesting, for example, that the story is in part about how men resent the control over them wielded by women but should recognize that mothers and wives are in fact often a critical support for men. Manifesting the spirit of old time science fiction, even here in this monument to the New Wave, Leiber urges readers to understand that the limits we see in our lives and the universe are in fact bogeymen we can brush aside if we arm ourselves with knowledge--mankind really can cure cancer and conquer the stars the way mankind has already achieved flight and embraced sexual freedom, and science and technology are the key to these overcoming these obstacles and building better lives and a better society. As Ellison suggested it would, "Gonna Roll the Bones," with its poetic style, hope for the future, sympathy for the working class, Christian themes, horror tone and embrace both of psychic powers and space-age tech, cunningly appeals to many factions of the SF community.
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Both Leiber's "Gonna Roll the Bones" and Delany's "Aye, and Gomorah" appear in
both Zelazny's Nebula Award Stories: Number Three and Bova's The Best of the Nebulas |
"The Recognition" by J. G. Ballard
Our friend tarbandu of
The PorPor Books Blog, in a December post titled
"The Most Overrated Science Fiction Writers of the Postwar Era," in the section of the blogpost devoted to slagging Theodore Sturgeon, praises "The Recognition," so let's check it out.
This here is an enigmatic weird story which I guess dramatizes sad facts and ambiguities about human life, that we are all truly alone and require psychological and sometimes physical protection from each other and that society and its rules are like both a cage that restrains us and a fence which protects us.
The narrator witnesses a small circus--a mysterious and oddly compelling woman and a dwarf are the only staff and six wagons drawn by exhausted horses the extent of the entertainment offered--roll into a small English town. On the wagons are cages, but in the same way the narrator can't discern the age of the woman, who at times seems young ("her robe revealed a small childlike breast") and other times middle-aged, he can't tell what sort of animals are in the cages--he just has glimpses of pale figures and detects a familiar scent from the cages. Some boisterous sailors come along and terrorize the dwarf, shake up the wagons, and excite the horses--in the excitement our narrator is accidentally knocked out. When he wakes up he realizes there are people in the cages--I guess the sailors.
In his intro Ellison talks about how this story is perhaps a fantasy or an allegory and how Ballard's work is often surreal, and in his afterword Ballard says the story "expresses a cordial distaste for the human race" and complains that people nowadays are narcissistic ("the temper of the times seems to be one of self-love") but a few lines later assures us that "The Recognition" is not "a piece of hard won misanthropy." In fact the story, he tells us, is a comment on "unusual perspectives that separate us." Also, he suggests that the key to the story is figuring out the motivations of the woman and dwarf.
Personally, I'm finding "The Recognition" a little too opaque and obscure--it feels like a put-on, a story that could mean nothing or anything, depending on what the reader decides. We'll call it merely acceptable...maybe barely acceptable. Ballard ably describes the setting and characters and the story isn't boring, but the sum total of it is underwhelming because it is too coy about what the point is.
"The Recognition" has not been anthologized much since its debut in Dangerous Visions, but of course it has been reprinted in Ballard collections.
"Aye, and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany
Ellison starts his intro to "Aye, and Gomorrah" with talk of how meeting writers whose work you like is often a disappointment ("The writer of swashbuckling adventures is a pathetic little homosexual who still lives with his invalid mother"--is this supposed to refer to a real person? Robert E. Howard lived with his unhealthy mother most of his life, didn't he?) But this doesn't apply to Delany, one of the most impressive people Ellison has ever met, a man with a talent like that of Ray Bradbury, Kurt Vonnegut or Theodore Sturgeon who is similarly bound to become prominent in the mainstream. (Did Sturgeon really achieve mainstream prominence?) Ellison also makes much of the fact that while Delany has sold a stack of SF novels already, this is the guy's first short story.
"Aye, and Gomorrah" is like Ballard's "The Recognition" in that it is kind of opaque and mysterious but while Ballard writes in long detailed paragraphs and his narrator is almost as deep in the dark as us readers, Delany's story is written in fragments and jump cuts and snatches of dialogue and the narrator knows exactly what is going but we readers are kept in the dark for a while. Perhaps ironically, while Ballard's text paints detailed images of locations and characters but renders the thematic substance or point of the story quite vaguely, Delany provides very little by way of physical descriptions, but eventually makes the bizarre speculative content of the story quite clear.
It is the spacefaring future. The only people who can safely leave Earth's atmosphere for any amount of time are people whose gonads have been removed. Among the populace there develops a sizable population of people who fetishize astronauts, who are fascinated by and sexually attracted to the sexless neutered people who have the exciting job of exploring and exploiting other planets. Many of these fetishists, known as frelks (short for "free-fall-sexual-displacement complex") are willing, even eager, to pay astronauts good money to have some kind of sexual encounter with them.
I guess the "real" dramatic arc of the story is us readers discovering the facts about this future world. The plot of "Aye, and Gomorrah" concerns an astronaut, a neutered man, and his time on leave in various places on Earth and his encounters (and the encounters of his fellow spacers) with civilians; the astronauts always wear their uniforms so they are easily identifiable by the public. Some astronauts are happy to get paid for whatever limited forms of sex they can provide frelks, others are not so sanguine. Our narrator seems to be looking for something more, a human connection, but such connections are hard to come by, maybe because frelks see him as primarily or only a sex object (even though he no longer has any sex organs) while ordinary people see him as sexless--to nobody is he a whole human being.
This story is alright; by the end, it is more clear and compelling that Ballard's, and certainly more economical. Maybe these two stories share a theme, the idea that human beings are hopelessly separated from each other.
In his Afterword, Delany lists the source material of the story--he has been to the locations that are the settings of the scenes in the story, and he once overheard two women talking about an astronaut in the news, one of them finding the astronaut asexual, the other finding him very attractive. Of course, we readers wonder if the fact that Delany is a black man and a gay man has also informed the story.
"Aye, and Gomorrah" won a Nebula and has been included in many anthologies, including those that appear to be efforts to document a history of SF or to create a SF canon that is "diverse"--the SF cognoscenti are unanimous in their belief that this story is important, and it is not bad, so I can't really take them to task for this belief.
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Of the three stories, the Ballard is the least satisfying and the least "dangerous," though it is not bad by any means. Delany's is the most "dangerous," seeing as it is about creepy sex fetishes and seems to be a rumination on how minorities of different kinds are viewed by majorities and also suggests that the government and society are willing to mutilate young people in order to achieve their goals. But the most entertaining and satisfying of the stories in Leiber's--it is full of evocative images and phrases and handles effectively a host of themes.
An enlightening expedition into the anthology we are always hearing about. Next time a SF novel from the early Sixties!
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