In
our last exciting excursion into the world of mid-century speculative fiction, we read two stories that appeared in the May 1959 issue of Robert P. Mills'
F&SF (as we people who hate to type call it), A. Bertram Chandler's quite good "The Man Who Could Not Stop" and Rosel George Brown's pretty lame "Lost in Translation." Let's read four more stories from this publication, a long story by J. T. McIntosh and short stories by Chad Oliver, Miriam Allen deFord, and Avram Davidson. That is the order in which they are printed in the magazine, and by coincidence (?) this correlates with how much I am expecting to like each story.
"Tenth Time Round" by J. T. McIntosh
Many have been the times I have told you that J. T. McIntosh sucks. But last year I found McIntosh's novel The Rule of the Pagbeasts AKA The Fittest an involving and enjoyable read. So there is a chance that I will find worthwhile "Tenth Time Round," a story that takes up 19 pages of this ish of F&SF and was reprinted in Japan's premier SF magazine in 1960 and, in 2019, in the British Library's Beyond Time: Classic Tales of Time Unwound.
"Tenth Time Round" is one of those stories about timelines and branching points in history that create new universes and all that. You see, in 1986 an amazing new service opens for business. For over $100,000, this firm can send your consciousness back to an earlier iteration of yourself, though no further back than 1975. You will take over your old body, but retain your current memories, all the knowledge you have accumulated. Your greater experience and maturity, and your knowledge of the future, will offer you a lot of advantages, so maybe you can succeed in this new universe where you failed in your original universe. There are limits, though. For one thing, if you behave differently than you did the first time around, which is inevitable, you will cause changes in this timeline, and so your memories of the first 1978 you went through won't match one-for-one this new 1978. Second, some historical events, labelled "immutables," cannot be changed, no matter what you do.
The protagonist of "Tenth Time Round" is Gene Player, a writer. He is in love with a woman, Belinda, and keeps going back in time to restart his life in 1975, a few weeks before he meets Belinda, in hopes of getting her to fall for him. As our story begins, he is going back in time from 1986 for the tenth time--he has failed to win Belinda nine times, spent 99 years trying to win her, and each time losing to a guy named Henry. Player is beginning to wonder if Belinda's love for Henry isn't one of those "immutables."
Most of the text of "Tenth Time Round" is romance movie stuff. There's the "meet cute" that Player experiences for the tenth time. There's Player plotting to win Belinda over Henry. There's the surprise appearance of a fourth character, Doreen, who falls in love with Player. This universe is far different than the last nine--this is the first time Doreen has entered the equation, and it looks like Henry's position with Belinda is not as secure as it has been in the earlier versions of 1978. Will Player end up with Belinda or with Doreen?
This story is OK. It is pretty well written, though maybe a lot of it is not very substantive. The various elements of the story--Belinda, Doreen, the legal and the cosmic rules of time travel, the effect of this story's version of time travel on stuff like Gene Player's literary career (Player writes the same novel in every universe, but having written it nine times already, this tenth version is the most streamlined)--are each handled competently, but do they really all mesh together well, buttress and complement each other to further a single theme? Maybe not.
A little better than acceptable, maybe a mild recommendation for "Tenth Time Round."
"The One That Got Away" by Chad Oliver
Anthropologist Oliver often tells us that life as a stone age barbarian is better than life among skyscrapers and books and factories and motor cars*; let's see if he's banging the same drum this time or has something else going on.
*(See "Let Me Live in a House," "Rite of Passage," and "The Marginal Man.")
"The One That Got Away" is set out in the great outdoors, a valley where there are lots of ranches for
"dudes" and cabins for tourists to rent so they can go fishing and engage in other rural-type activities. The last two years there have been many fires in the valley; multiple people have perished in the conflagrations, and everybody suspects an arsonist is at work.
[C]ome to think of it, just about every modem building in the town had burned down.
The protagonist, who rents "rustic cabins," is glad he didn't build any such "modern buildings" on his own property, but our hero is not immune to the other problem plaguing the valley--the fishing is getting worse for some unknown reason.
The protagonist takes a nap behind a rock at a river, and when he wakes up observes a space alien (E.T. doesn't notice our protagonist). We realize this is a joke story, even though we've been hearing about innocent people getting killed. The alien stuns the human anglers by the river side and uses advanced technology to catch a huge haul of fish with ease. Our protagonist approaches the visitor from the stars and fast talks his way onto the alien's space boat and up into the orbiting star ship. Our hero knows how to deal with tourists from the city who want to enjoy nature for a few days, which is just what the aliens on the star ship are--they have been burning down the "modern buildings" in the valley so as to preserve its rustic charm, the charm they travel light years to experience, their own worlds being totally urbanized.
"We come a long way every year to find what we want, and we simply cannot permit this commercialization. That’s what we’re trying to get away from, don’t you see?”
“So if we build something you don’t like you bum it down?”
“Naturally."
I guess the point of this joke story is that businessmen are evil. The alien businessmen casually slay native Earthers, and threaten to kill our hero. But our guy figures out how to persuade them to stop monopolizing the fishing in his neck of the woods and move to a different valley, where, he convinces them, there are even better fishing spots. The fishing in his valley recovers and local buildings stop burning down, though now other Earthpeople are getting mysteriously burned up--not that our protagonist cares.
"I don't care a used salmon egg about men from another world, and I never worried any about Earth either. I care about my business...."
"The One That Got Away" is a sort of traditional light science fiction story in which an intelligent human outsmarts aliens, resolving the plot conflict with quick thinking, but it has the anti-modern bias we see in so much of Oliver's work as well as the hatred of businesspeople we expect to see from college professor types. Oliver's reprehensible politics and his many references to fishing (Oliver himself was an avid angler) give "The One That Got Away" more character and substance than a filler story, so I can't dismiss it as such, but I still don't care for it. It doesn't commit any literary blunders, so we'll call it merely acceptable--pinkos and fly fishermen will likely enjoy it more than I did.
"The One That Got Away" was reprinted in the Japanese magazine I mentioned earlier, the British Venture, and right here in the USA, where the businessman has achieved his ultimate expression, in the 2003 Oliver collection A Star Above It.
"First Dig" by Miriam Allen deFord
This will be the second deFord story we have addressed here at MPorcius Fiction Log. Two years ago we read
"The Margenes," which I deemed, as I do so many stories, "merely acceptable." Hopefully "First Dig" will be more entertaining or enlightening. The editor's intro to the story makes us expect it is some kind of ironic gag story, but we're going to "keep hope alive!" and read this thing (five pages) anyway.
One of my pet peeves about fiction is the shortcuts writers take in their task of manipulating the reader's emotions. For example, writers know that putting a child in danger will get a rise out of readers because people have a natural sympathy for defenseless children. The writer doesn't have to convince the reader about anything, the reader will naturally worry about the child. Similarly, if a writer wants to serve the bloodlust of readers with depictions of a sympathetic protagonist who kills lots of people, he can make the people getting killed Nazis--all our lives we've been told killing Nazis is good, so the writer doesn't have to put any time or effort into explaining why the hero is justified in killing all these people. The use of these kinds of shortcuts can diminish the tension of the story by absolving the reader of any responsibility, freeing him from doing any kind of intellectual work--nobody sympathizes with or identifies with somebody who harms a child or a Nazi, so the reader doesn't have to figure out if the violence in the story is justified and doesn't have to work through his emotional response to the violence. Much more challenging, for reader and writer, would be to put not children or Nazis in danger, but government bureaucrats, wealthy businessmen, nagging spouses, African-American burglars, communist spies, or Christian clergy. Such types of characters inspire a range of attitudes in readers; plenty of readers will sympathize or identify with such characters while at the same time plenty of other readers will hope to see such figures punished; this generates tension because readers won't know where the story is going and are forced to think through intellectually what the story is trying to say and whether they agree with it. And to achieve the desired result from a maximum number of readers, the writer will have to make a convincing case, and he or she can play games with us readers, getting us to change our minds about the characters over the course of the story.
(A story can use these shortcuts and still be a good story, of course, if other elements of the story generate tension or if the story has other virtues--the most cliched and obvious plot and characters can be the foundation of a great story if it is well-written by some savant like like Gene Wolfe, Jack Vance, or Tanith Lee, with sentences that are beautiful and/or paragraphs that are economical.)
Anyway, in "First Dig" I think deFord is taking a shortcut by appealing to people's admiration for William Shakespeare. In the same way we all are disturbed when we hear a child is in danger or feel justice has been served when we see a Bf-109 go down in flames or a U-boat sink with all hands, we all know Shakespeare is awesome, so by putting the Swan of Avon at the center of her tale, deFord has liberated herself from the need to convince us to go along with one of her main themes.
"First Dig" has a science fiction setting but is actually a weird or fantasy/horror story. The intellectual and emotional tension of the story is generated by raising the question of whether our lives have any meaning, whether human excellence matters.
DeFord's story begins with a little prologue in which we observe the attendees of a funeral; the event is described in a vague way, no really famous names of people or places, though deFord offers clues that will indicate to those familiar with the Bard's biography what is going on. Then the main text, set 50,000 years in the future. Earth has long been nothing more than a barren waste, and the billions and billions of humans who live all across the galaxy know almost nothing about the history of the planet upon which their ancestors evolved. They don't even know if Earth humans had a religion, they can't read a single word of any language written before mankind conquered the stars. All they know about the "Old Planet" is its location.
A college professor brings some archaeology students to Earth for a dig; this is a training exercise, and the students are not expected to find anything of value, and the prof, who comes across as cynical, cold, arrogant and dismissive, pooh-poohs the bones and things the students find. The most energetic and romantic student, a kid emotionally committed to the past and the profession of archaeology, finds a gravestone. He senses, without any rational reason, that this headstone is a big big deal, even when the prof dismisses the stone as valueless. Driven by some compulsion, the student laboriously copies by hand the inscription on the headstone, even though he can't read a word of it, the letters mere squiggles to him. Then he drops dead.
The story ends with the revelation that this kid found the gravestone of Shakespeare, upon which was engraved a curse on any who would disturb the Bard's bones. While the realistic portions of the story suggest our lives are meaningless, that even the greatest of the world's artists and their cultures will be forgotten by those who follow them, the fantasy portion of the story suggests that great artists are like wizards, their art--in Shakespeare's case, the written word--like magic, able to shake and shatter human hearts and minds.
"First Dig" was included in the 1971 deFord collection Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow and Helen Hoke dug it up and exposed it to the world in her 1977 anthology Eerie, Weird and Wicked.
 |
Hey, comics fans! Two points:
1) The cover of Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow is by Richard Corben
2) Hoke also included in Eerie, Weird and Wicked Robert Bloch's joke story about
comic books "The Strange Island of Dr. Nork," which last year I told you was terrible |
"The Montavarde Camera" by Avram Davidson
Here comes the story I had the highest hopes for. I gave Oliver a low "C," and McIntosh and deFord low "B"s, so it shouldn't be hard for Davidson to go to the head of the class! Let's hope he's on his game today!
Davidson's style here in "The Montavarde Camera"--the vivid, emotionally evocative, images of people and places, the little subtle jokes--is quite good, so right away the story gets a thumbs up. As for the plot, we are in weird territory again. (I take a break from reading Weird Tales, but they keep pulling me back in!) A guy in turn of the century England is mysteriously drawn to a shop owned by a remarkable figure who is probably the Devil or one of Satan's servants. The protagonist is interested in photography, and the smooth and charismatic shopkeeper sells him a very special camera, one constructed by a pioneer of photography, a somewhat mysterious individual with a chequered history, a man rumored to have produced pornography and to have links to satanic cults.
Clues mount that the camera has a diabolical influence, that it drains the strength, the life force, from objects and people whose image it captures. Will the protagonist do the right thing and try to destroy the infernal device? Or will he be corrupted by it, seek to use it to liberate himself from his nagging penny-pinching wife?
An entertaining weird tale. "The Montavarde Camera" has been a hit with editors and reappeared in multiple anthologies and Davidson collections.
**********
The Davidson piece is the best of today's stories, the most fun to read, but also the hardest to write about, because it seems to be designed solely to be an entertainment that transports you to an earlier age with its references to the technology, events and aspects of daily life of a past era; in contrast, the Oliver story seems to be trying to make a banal argument about our market society while deFord's story seems to be trying to make profound points about the meaning of life and the roles of the artist and of the scientist, favoring the former over the later in a provocative way. McIntosh's contribution is mostly trying to entertain you with a story about human relationships, but has the speculative element we expect to find in "real" science fiction, asking the question, if you could travel back in time under certain parameters, how might it affect your relationship life and career life?
A diverse bunch of stories, none of which is actually bad. So, a good issue of F&SF. Kudos to Mr. Mills and all concerned.
No comments:
Post a Comment