But first, let's take a gander at Wollheim's introduction to The 1974 Annual World's Best SF. Wollheim talks of science fiction being "a literature of prophecy, of prediction, of investigation into the worlds of if...", which I always like to hear somebody say, as I feel like, in the period I have been producing this blog, that all the cool kids have been saying "well, actually, science fiction is not about the future at all...." Many of the men and women who wrote and edited science fiction in the Twentieth Century were absolutely trying to predict the future, prepare people for the future, and shape the future.
Wollheim, however, admits that more important than all that speculation and prediction stuff is the fact that science fiction is "entertainment" and "escape." Wollheim believes that in 1973 science fiction is still in a transitional period, as it has been for a few years, but he doesn't offer any suggestion of what the genre is transitioning into. He notes that science fiction has been getting academic attention, but asserts that the academics misunderstand the genre because they ignore or hope to deny the reality that science fiction is mainly escapist entertainment, not something "world-shaking." Wollheim provides a little survey of the state of the magazines and anthologies, and takes some swipes at the New Wave and in particular Brian Aldiss' history of science fiction, Billion Year Spree, which he accuses of being myopic, of ignoring 90% of the actual science fiction that gets published. Wollheim quotes a review of Billion Year Spree that appeared in TLS (unfortunately, he doesn't provide a date or an author's name or anything) that argues that SF should be clear and straightforward, not focus too much on stream-of-consciousness and the trappings of the "psychological novel," and dismisses the New Wave as a lame revival of the surrealism of the 1920s and '30s.
Well, whatever Wollheim thought of the New Wave, here in The 1974 Annual World's Best SF he reprinted stories by Lafferty and Ellison, people who are at times associated with that vaguely-defined movement. Time to check those stories out, plus a story by a guy who I don't think anybody ever mistook for a new waver, adventure writer Tubb. Note that I am reading the versions of the stories found in the Wollheim/Saha anthology, not in the places they first appeared or in other reprints.
"Parthen" by R. A. Lafferty
"Parthen," no doubt short for "parthenogenesis," is a fun little diversion. Aliens have announced their arrival on Earth, making clear that half of humanity is obsolescent and the other half will be reduced to servitude. But no Earther has spotted an alien! Every day now is cloudy, murky, the sun hidden from sight. Businesses are all going under and men are losing their jobs, running out of money! But are the men sad, desperate, despondent, depressed? No! Because everywhere they look there are beautiful women, women who have suddenly appeared as if from nowhere! Women so beautiful that men's desire for them is not sexual! The beauty of these goddesses has inspired the male consciousness to ascend to a higher plane! Men no longer think of sex, no longer think of money, no longer think even of food! As the dark months go by, men stop having sex with their wives, stop even touching them! Somebody, who knows who, buys up all the businesses, and the businesses now have a strict policy of only hiring women. Every man becomes a harmless, ambitionless vagabond, laying in the street, starving, dying, but dying happy, his mind filled with the beauty of these mysterious women.
A little slight, not as funny or as gruesome or as surprising as more spectacular specimens of Lafferty's work, but fun enough.
"The Deathbird" by Harlan Ellison
This is an important story, I suppose, tit having won a Hugo and a Locus award, serving as the title story of an Ellison collection and seeing reprint in many anthologies. "The Deathbird" first appeared as the cover story of an issue of F&SF with a wraparound cover by Ellison's favorite artists, the Dillons. I hope this story is as good as Ellison's famous "A Boy and His Dog," which I liked, or at least better than that famous Tick Tock Harlequin thing, which really rubbed me the wrong way.
"Evane" by E. C. Tubb
"Evane" didn't debut in a magazine, but in an anthology edited by Call-Him-Kenneth Bulmer. The story would go on to reappear in some European anthologies and a 21st-century Tubb collection.
This is an important story, I suppose, tit having won a Hugo and a Locus award, serving as the title story of an Ellison collection and seeing reprint in many anthologies. "The Deathbird" first appeared as the cover story of an issue of F&SF with a wraparound cover by Ellison's favorite artists, the Dillons. I hope this story is as good as Ellison's famous "A Boy and His Dog," which I liked, or at least better than that famous Tick Tock Harlequin thing, which really rubbed me the wrong way.
"The Deathbird" takes up 27 pages and is split into 26 little chapters or sections. In Chapter I, Ellison uses that caustic yelling tone I associate with him, directly addressing the reader, asserting authority over the reader--he is a teacher and this document is an exam, complete with questions we readers, his students, are to respond to. Good grief.
We meet our characters in the next few chapters, a man, Norman Stark, who has been buried underground for 250,000 years and the huge shadow creature that awakens him. The giant shadow, a snake, gives Ellison a chance to do that mind-numbing list thing--as the mysterious immaterial creature passes through the earth, Ellison lists all the different kinds of rock he could find in the encyclopedia, taking up five lines and using the word "through" over a dozen times: "...through mica schist, through quartzite; through miles-thick deposits of phosphates, through diatomaceous earth, through feldspars, through diorite;" and on and on. I guess this is meant to be poetic.
We follow Stark and the giant snake on their quest over a desolate Earth; they have to climb a mountain and on the peak, in a crystal palace, Stark has a tedious psychic combat with a powerful figure--the adventure elements of "The Deadbird" are like a C. L. Moore story. Stark is like the Eternal Champion, born and reborn innumerable times throughout history, his first incarnation being Adam. This mediocre quest narrative is broken up by various sections of quite different but similarly over-the-top material. Ellison includes excerpts from the Book of Genesis and then a long list of traditional criticisms of the Bible and Christianity in the form of questions for us readers, his students. For example, if God is all-knowing, why is he angry that Eve ate the apple--didn't He know she would do that? Ellison implies that the Bible is like a slanted news story, that in reality the snake is the hero and God the villain, and Hell (where Stark was resting for a quarter-million years) is a comfortable place to take cover in while the Earth falls into ruin. We also have exposition about the horse trading for the Earth conducted by alien space empires, one empire losing control of Earth to another empire in arbitration--the arbitrators are cricket-people who are absolutely trustworthy and wise and who enforce their rulings by threatening to commit racial suicide. Gadzooks. Then comes a digression in which we hear about somebody's experience of his or her dog dying, a chapter spiced up with references to old Hollywood (The Thief of Baghdad, Jackie Coogan, Viva Zapata, etc.) This chapter is followed by more questions, Ellison being so audacious as to include that tired chestnut about how "dog" is "God" spelled backwards. There's also a section I was falling asleep during in which an earlier incarnation of the Eternal Champion has sex with Mother Earth.
Halfway through "The Deathbird," we get a chapter on the death of Stark's mother back in the 20th century. This and the dog section are competent mainstream fiction, not bad but unremarkable; maybe they represent Ellison working out his feelings about the deaths of his own real life loved ones? Perhaps our old pal Harlan should have just focused on that realistic material instead of trying to integrate it with the Weird Tales / Erekose material about psychic combat and a giant snake made of shadows that gives the hero special equipment. Then we get the psychic fight with the despicable monster whom Jews and Christians have wrongly lionized as God. After Stack's victory over God we learn a little about Stack's bout of pneumonia as a child and his earlier incarnations' service in battles like Agincourt and Verdun. Why are these memories after the climax in stead of before it? Then a chapter about Zarathustra--I don't know much of anything about Nietzsche so this was like a non-sequitur to me and my eyes glazed over like they did during the Mother Earth segment. Then Stark puts the dying Mother Earth out of its misery (foreshadowed in the scene in which he euthanatized his flesh and blood mother), and then we get the five-word final chapter, Ellison's ALL-CAPS dedication of the story to Mark Twain, who also spoofed the Book of Genesis. (This whole exercise is Ellison doing stuff people have already done.)
Pretentious and self-indulgent junk. The criticism of religion is banal college freshman goop; I wouldn't call it wrong, really, but it is like shooting fish in a barrel that everybody has already shot full of holes. The science fiction and adventure material is stuff C. L. Moore and Michael Moorcock have done better. The tear jerking material about euthanizing your cancer-ridden dog and your cancer-ridden mother is acceptable, but all of it together all adds up to a thumbs down. Like that Harlequin story that tock-ticked me off years ago, "The Deathbird" is overrated, self-indulgent, self-aggrandizing and childish slosh. Why did this thing get a Hugo? Because the voters agreed with its boring anti-religious sentiments? Name recognition? Or maybe Ellison's competition in the novelette category, something by Vonda McIntyre and something by James Tiptree, Jr., was even more difficult to stay awake through?
"Evane" by E. C. Tubb
This is a competently written, acceptably produced twist ending story; at a stretch we might say it is a story about the plight of the human male, his relationship to women and to his society, how women and society manipulate men to achieve their goals at men's expense.
Charles is the one-man crew of a space ship travelling at near-light speed. He has been on this ship for decades, and is getting quite old. A computer with a female voice runs the ship. The ship's mission is to find planets suitable for colonization, and carries in its hold frozen and dehydrated organisms and germ plasm and so forth for use in seeding such a planet. The ship carrying Charles across the galaxy is one of a million such vessels. Charles wonders why he is on the ship at all, seeing as the computer does all the real work.
All alone for decades, Charles has developed in his mind a vision of what the computer woman might look like, and their relationship is kind of like that of a man and his nagging wife. The people who built the ship included pornography and an inflatable doll among the equipment, but after trying to use these decades ago Charles destroyed them, apparently because he was embarrassed to masturbate in front of the all-seeing computer.
Anyway, the themes and style of the story are handled well enough by Tubb; the story is OK. The ending is similarly middling to fair. It turns out that men are included on these ships to act as clocks. Not 100% sure how Einsteinian time dilation and cosmic radiation and the stress of being alone on a ship for year after year will affect the human lifespan, an individual person is included on each robotic exploration ship to gauge the limit of how far a later colonization ship will be able to reach before an unacceptable number of the colonists has keeled over. When Charles dies the ship will turn around and seed the colonizable planet it has most recently passed. Charles, having realized this, is killed, his body preserved in itty bitty pieces to help seed the future colony world.
A little better than filler, I guess.
**********
Lafferty and Tubb get a pass, but Ellison is getting a big fat "F" from this grader. We'll see if I can be more enthusiastic about the next three stories I read from The 1974 Annual World's Best SF when next we meet. Stay tuned.
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