1974 "Dazzling" stories: Busby, Effinger, Leiber

Back in 2015 I bought a stack of books in Mankato, MN, and among them was the 1975 paperback edition of Terry Carr's 1974 Universe 5, an anthology of new stories.  This paperback printing has an awesome wraparound cover by Patrick Woodruffe featuring so many of our favorite things--a cat, a bug, boobs, lichen, muscles, they are all there.  (Do the disparate elements of the cover reflect the contents of the stories inside?  Maybe!)  I've never actually read anything from this book, so, ten years after acquiring it, fifty years after it was printed, let's read three of the included stories, which were promoted on the back cover as "dazzling" "storytelling triumphs."

But first, you can check out my dumb twitter joke about this cover.

And tarbandu's blog post about Patrick Woodruffe.

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" by F. M. Busby

Years ago I read Busby's To Cage a Man and thought it alright and two Rissa Kerguelen books and found them "competent" but "long and flat."  All three of those novels, at least as I recall them, spent a lot of ink describing people suffering abuse and trauma, and the Rissa books in particular were full of fetishistic sex.  Well, let's see if Busby crams this approximately 25-page story full of torture and perversion.  

"If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" feels a lot like boring mainstream fiction about a writer guy who keeps getting married and divorced and who has trouble keeping his attractive wife of whom he is fond from finding out about his attractive mistress of whom he is also fond and doesn't really know what he wants or how to get it, etc.  We get lots of conversations with women about relationships, lots of assessment and comparison of women's personalities and bodies, lots of sexual encounters, etc.

Our narrator is Larry Garth, a writer who gets married at least three times and divorced at least twice.  He doesn't live his life in linear order, from birth to death--instead, he hops around, backward and forward, often waking up in the morning in a different period of his life, able to recall some chronologically later parts of his life, which he has already experienced, and only some, but not all, chronologically earlier parts.  This, as you would expect, causes problems because he may not remember what happened yesterday, but knows that the woman he finds in his house, wife number two, say, is attractive and fun today but is going to be an obese drunk in a few years and he is going to divorce her, and has to pretend he knows the past and doesn't know the future.  To help himself he leaves little notes in his wallet and a safe deposit box at the bank, and tries to memorize things.  There are also advantages--when experiencing a middle-aged period of his life he reads some of his early novels and then when he is experiencing that younger portion of his life it is easy to compose the novels from memory.

I seem to recall reading stories about people with telepathy, about how they feel alone, and then the big moment of the story is when they finally meet another telepath.  Ed Bryant's "The Silent World" is one such story, and I am sure there are others.  I read Robert Silverberg's Dying Inside in my New York days, long before this blog emerged soft and vulnerable from its chrysalis, and I suspect meeting another telepath is a major event in that book.  Anyway, Larry Garth realizes his third and favorite wife is also a person who lives her life out of sequence when he sees her before they have chronologically met and recognizes her, and she recognizes him in turn.  This is a period during which he is living with, but has not yet married, wife #2.  To spend time with wife #3 requires a little sneaking around.  More importantly for us SF fans, as in a lot of time travel stories, the time travelers grapple with whether or not they can change history.  In this happy ending story the protagonists can change history--Garth figures out how to avoid marrying wife #2 and hook up with wife #3 early; wife #2 never gets fat or becomes a drunk and has a happy marriage with some other guy, and wife #3 escapes dying of breast cancer by taking that lump more seriously than she did in the previous, no longer operative, time line.

We'll call this one barely acceptable.  I think it is kind of boring, but Lester del Rey, Jacques Chambon, and Leigh Ronald Grossman all included "If This is Winnetka, You Must Be Judy" in anthologies.  Maybe we should see it as a typical example of New Wave writing, a sort of conventional mainstream fiction narrative with some science fiction trappings.

Two years ago we read the Lafferty story from del Rey's fourth Best Science Fiction
Stories of  the Year, "And Name My Name," and I really liked it.  The included story
by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, "Mute Inglorious Tam," I read two months ago
and called an "acceptable" "gimmick story." 

"How It Felt" by George Alec Effinger

      

This baby has only ever resurfaced in the Effinger collection Irrational Numbers, which our kameraden over in Deutschland know as Endzeit.  Endzeit uses a flopped version of the cover image to be found on a British edition of Kate Wilhelm's riff on the Frankenstein story, The Killer Thing.

Less than ten pages long, "How It Felt" is one of those stories about people in the far future whose technology is so efficient and so powerful they can do almost anything, making life so easy they have fallen into decadence and spend all their time searching for new diversions to ease their ennui.  Michael Moorcock's Dancers at the End of Time series is I guess the most prominent example.

Vivi is one of the handful of these godlike decadents.  She is special in that while the others lack emotion, she still feels loneliness and fear and so forth--this makes her entertaining to the others.  It also helps her entertain herself--at night the stars scare her, and it is one of her few real pleasures to look up into the night sky and feel this fear.

Despite the fact that it makes her special, over the course of this story Vivi strives to deaden her emotions, to become cold--we are given the impression that she regularly tries to reinvent herself, to put on a new personality, and this time the character she is trying to assume is "studied indifference."  Moa, a woman with whom she regularly shares extended lesbian sexual encounters, comes by with a man, Tagea--they have something to show Vivi.  They have discovered a new planet with primitive native inhabitants.  They teleport to the planet, and Moa watches Vivi to see her reaction--Vivi's reactions are usually entertaining, because she is the only person left alive with emotion.  But Vivi is stifling her emotions, so even when Moa causes an earthquake and shifts this planet's largest ocean and blows up a native village, killing all the villagers, Vivi shows no reaction.  Moa even kills Tagea.  Still, Vivi does not respond--she has lost all emotion herself, is no longer even scared of the stars, and Moa loses her will to live--Vivi's emotion was her only pleasure.  

A story in which people can do anything and have no emotion is not going to inspire much excitement in the reader.  We'll call "How it Felt" barely acceptable.

"Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" by Fritz Leiber

Fritz Leiber is a fascinating character with a broad and diverse career, and many are the times I have fulsomely praised his work, as with "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "The Button Molder," but I have also criticized what I have considered his weaker work, like "The Wolf Pack" AKA "Let Freedom Ring" and "The Good New Days."  And again and again I have pointed out potentially uncomfortable elements in Leiber stories, in particular sexual content that leans in the direction of incest, underage sex and rape (see "The Princess in the Tower 250,000 miles High," and "The Glove.")  Well, today I must bring you some unwelcome tidings: "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is an absolute waste of time, an annoying and unfunny joke story in which Leiber seems to be likening Jewish people to cockroaches!  Say it ain't so, Fritz, say it ain't so.

Beetles from all over the world are congregating in New York City, in a plot of grass in Central Park next to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for their biennial convention.  Leiber tries to slot various types of beetles into human ethnic categories, one of the story's many sterile jokes:  

...not just U.S. beetles, but coleopts from all over the world--slant-eyed Asian beetles in golden robes, North African beetles in burnished burnooses, South African beetles wild as fire ants with great Afro hairdos, smug English beetles.... 

I'm not against ethnic jokes per se, but just saying "Asians have slant eyes, black people are wild and English people are smug" isn't actually a joke--it's more like a list of ungenerous observations and questionable stereotypes.

Cockroaches are not actual beetles, but they still resent not being admitted to the convention and launch a protest.

...the New York City cockroaches were out in force, picketing the convention....Round and round the sacred grass plot they tramped, chanting labor-slogans in thick Semitic accents and hurling coarse working-class epithets.

Via the sorcery of the world's finest website, the internet archive, I looked at this passage in later printings of "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum."  In a scan of The Worlds of Fritz Leiber (1976), I found that "Semitic" had been struck, but in a scan of Space Odyssey (a 1989 printing), I found "Semitic" remained intact.

One of the beetles says of the protesting roaches,

"...many of them are mere German (German-Jewish, maybe?) Croton bugs, dwarfish in stature compared to American cockroaches, who all once belonged to the Confederate Army." 

There isn't much plot to this story--mostly it consists of these kinds of anemic jokes.  Leiber manages to work in a few references to rape--studying an English word, the beetles think "B" and "R" are drawings of a snake raping another snake.

What little plot "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" offers comes in the later portions of the story when some of the beetles go to visit the Egyptian section of the museum and come to think the scarabs there are real beetles that have been drugged or hypnotized.  In a satirical reference to Middle East turmoil and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, one Egyptian beetle thinks that these beetles are the victims of some facet of the cockroaches' plan to take over the world:

...part of a World Cockroach Plot carried out by commando Israeli beetles....His wild mouthings were not believed.

The beetles figure out a way to carry off the scarabs, puzzling the museum staff and police.

Whether or not you find this story offensively racist, "Mysterious Doings in the Metropolitan Museum" is definitely not funny or engaging.  Thumbs down!  Find it in Horrible Imaginings or the previously mentioned Leiber collection or anthology, if you must.

**********

These stories are not dazzling!  They are not even good!  How could Terry Carr, Dallas News, Kirkus Reviews and the Chicago Sun-Times do us dirty this way?  Maybe these three stories are an unrepresentative sample and we should read some more...well, we'll see.