"Best" stories by James White, Bob Shaw and Brian Aldiss

Let's pull a volume off the paperback anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library and read three SF stories by British authors that appear in editor Mike Ashley's 1977 book The Best of British SF 2.  The Best of British SF 2 contains 14 stories over its 378 pages, and I have already read and blogged about two of them, Arthur C. Clarke's 1971 "Transit of Earth," and John Wyndham's "The Emptiness of Space," AKA "The Asteroids, 2194."  That leaves a dozen tales new to me; let's start with three authors of whom I already have a good opinion: James White, Bob Shaw, and Brian Aldiss.  The stories in The Best of British SF 2 by White, Shaw, and Aldiss were selected by the authors themselves and represent personal favorites, and each is preceded by an intro by Ashley that includes a long quote from the author himself which discusses such topics as narrative strategies and recurring themes in his work--these intros, along with Ashley's intro to the volume which discusses the work of British SF writers who do not have stories in the anthology, make The Best of British SF 2 particularly valuable to the student of SF from the UK.

"Tableau" by James White (1958)

I don't think I've read anything by White since I started this blog, but, in that prehistoric era when I read SF and kept my opinions about it to myself, I enjoyed White's novel All Judgement Fled (check out Joachim Boaz's review of it) and his stories "Grapeliner" and "The Lights Outside the Windows;"
those two stories, I felt, had interesting and unusual takes on space travel.

isfdb lists "Tableau" as one of the earliest-written stories in White's famous and long-running Sector General stories, which, I think, are about doctors in space dealing with alien patients, or something like that.  I generally find medical stuff boring, so I have sort of avoided these stories, but today I dip my toe in the Sector General water and read this piece, which was a cover story at New Worlds during the period that periodical was edited by John Carnell and was later selected by Michael Moorcock for 1965's The Best of New Worlds.

"Tableau" starts with an italicized prologue describing an anti-war war memorial on planet Orligia, what appears to be a sculpture of the meeting of an Orligian and a human on the deck of a wrecked spacecraft; the human's guts are falling out of a wound he has suffered during a space naval battle against the alien's ship.  Then we get a narrative of the dogfight which led to the scene depicted by the memorial, and the meeting itself.  Integrated into the description of the battle and the meeting of the two pilots after their crippled ships crash land on a planet is the revelation of how the war began years ago.  The Orligians look like teddy bears, inspiring the first human to meet to be overly friendly to them, because they were so damn adorable!  This premature familiarity backfired, because we humans look like a species of carnivore that haunts Orligia and uses guile to prey on immature teddy-bear people!  In reflexive, almost involuntary,  response to the human's invading the aliens' personal space, the teddy bears killed him and his crew thus starting the war.  (This is a little like Poul Anderson's 1954 "Butch," which we just read in January, in which an alien's instincts led it to kill humans who were actually no threat to it.  "Butch" appeared in New Worlds three years before "Tableau."  Hmmm...come to think of it, Anderson, in collaboration with Gordon R. Dickson, wrote some stories of his own in the early '50s about aliens who look like teddy bears....)

"Tableau" is an anti-war story with a happy ending.  Since the start of the war, the Orligians have developed a telepathy device, and the two crash-landed pilots use one to communicate--they overcome their prejudices, and start the peace process.  "Tableau" also has a twist ending.  That memorial in the prologue is not a work of art, but the two pilots and part of a ship frozen in time by a special device; when medical science has advanced enough the pilots will be unfrozen and the human's mortal wound healed.  White explicitly stresses that these two pilots are true heroes who deserve to be celebrated because they ended the war, and the last line of the story is a reminder that "there was nothing great or noble or beautiful about war."

This story is cleverly constructed, has interesting elements (the weapons and tactics used in the space battle are quite good) and is competently written, but somehow it didn't really excite me.  The teddy-bear business is a little silly, the "this-war-has-no-villains-it-is-all-just-a-misunderstanding" business felt a little contrived, and I thought that the scenes of the telepathic discussions at the end dragged a little.  White tries to inspire in the reader a revulsion at war with his descriptions of the physical and psychological wounds suffered by the servicemen of both Earth and Orligia, but this stuff failed to move me.  I'm judging "Tableau" marginally good, though maybe my own coldness and cynicism are leading me to rate it lower than other people might.

"A Full Member of the Club" by Bob Shaw (1974)

In 2018 I read an entire book of Bob Shaw short stories, and one of them was an affectionate homage to A. E. van Vogt.  (Wikipedia suggests that Shaw's first exposure to SF was reading a story by van Vogt he found in Astounding.)  Well, here in "A Full Member of the Club" we have another story that is reminiscent of a van Vogt tale and is perhaps itself an homage to the Canadian Grandmaster.  In van Vogt's 1943 story "The Search" (later integrated in a somewhat different form into the 1970 fix-up novel Quest for the Future) a guy meets a woman who has some very high tech consumer products, including a super pen, and his investigation into these items gets him mixed up with competing factions of people from the future.*  Well, in "A Full Member of the Club" a guy notices that his girlfriend has a super efficient cigarette lighter on the same day she dumps him, and his investigation of this lighter (and other supergadgets to which she has access, including a super pen) leads him to get mixed up with space aliens!

Basically, the story is about how a bold and persistent businessman who is willing to bend or flout the rules to achieve his goals (he breaks into a mansion in one scene, for example), after discovering the existence of the super consumer goods (better tasting tobacco and coffee and more sharp TVs, as well as the super efficient lighter and other devices) obsessively leaves no stone unturned until he has figured out where the items have come from.  He finds out that aliens are teleporting the items to Earth and renting them to the very rich in exchange for Earth paintings and sculptures.  The aliens consider seizing him and sending him to outer space, but our hero is such a smooth talker and such a talented man of business that he convinces them to let him join their firm, and his contributions make their operations much more efficient and profitable. 

Shaw adds a layer of interest, and I guess what you could call satire, to the story by having the two main human characters expose themselves as shallow nouveau riche types--they care more about accessing the consumer goods and the status they represent than about love and human companionship or high culture.

For some reason (perhaps because the characters in the story are materialistic status-seekers and that is how Shaw--and maybe British people in general--see us Americans) Shaw, born in Northern Ireland and resident in England when The Best of British SF 2 was published (as noted by editor Mike Ashley in the intro to the story) set "A Full Member of the Club" in the northeast United States--Trenton, New Jersey and Philadelphia, PA and their environs--and the story includes what appear to be little mistakes, like having an American say "differently to" instead of "differently from."  Curious, I looked at the version of the story that appeared in Galaxy (you can read it at the link earlier in this blog post) and found in that version the proper Yankee lingo, "differently from."  Did Ashley or somebody else at Orbit simply fail to notice the error fixed by somebody more familiar with US English at Galaxy, or make a conscious decision to retain British usage because an accurate portrayal of US speech (which of course would be appropriate given Shaw's chosen setting and characters) might throw UK readers?   

A good story; the pacing is good, the gadgets are fun, the style engaging.  I prefer the more subtle commentary on materialism and bourgeois striving Shaw employs here to White's in-your-face "war is terrible--look, this guy's guts are falling out!" approach in "Tableau."  Similarly, in Shaw's story here, the rational way the human and alien characters go about their business feels more like how things work in real life than White's wacky "they look like teddy bears to us but we look like ghouls to them so we all act irrationally" premise.

"A Full Member of the Club" has been well received not only by me, but the wider professional SF community, Donald Wollheim including it in the 1975 edition of World's Best SF and Ellen Datlow in 2003 in her 2000-2005 webzine Sci Fiction.

*I read the magazine version of "The Search" at the internet archive today after reading "A Full Member of the Club," and found a reference to Nazis that dated the story had been altered to something more vague in the version of "The Search" that appears in my 1964 copy of Destination: Universe!  

"Manuscript Found in a Police State" by Brian Aldiss (1972)

Aldiss has a large and diverse body of work, including nonfiction and mainstream fiction as well as SF that ranges from the pretty traditional to the very experimental and New Wavey.  I have been unimpressed by some of his more pretentious or boring "literary" SF, but "Manuscript Found in a Police State," first published in the eighteenth volume of Winter's Tales, a yearly anthology of short stories edited by A. D. Maclean and published from the '50s to the early '80s, is a success.

Despite the title, this is not a first person narrative, though it does focus on one character and his thoughts and psychological state.  Axel Mathers is one among a group of people being imprisoned in Khrenabhar Mountain, in one of several thousand cells embedded in the perimeter of a colossal wheel buried deep inside the mountain.  This miles-wide wheel rotates on a huge axle when the prisoners during the daily three-hour work period all pull on chains.  It takes ten years for the wheel to make one revolution, and thus each prisoner's sentence is ten years.  Presumably this is all an allegory for life and for society, the environment in which we are all trapped, truly alone, forced to work for individual survival and destined to work together, either voluntarily or at the behest of oft inscrutable and arbitrary authorities, if any progress is to be achieved, though said progress may very well be illusory.

Aldiss describes the various ways the people about to be imprisoned respond to the prospect of their ten-year sentence, their delusions and coping mechanisms, and the impact upon their minds of solitary confinement.  We follow Mathers as he explores his cell and learns the ways of Khrenabhar Mountain and faces unforeseen circumstances, like faults in the tremendous and ancient mechanism that provide access to dangerous creatures and hold out the slim possibility of escape or at least some kind of psychological relief.  We also gradually learn about the origin of the centuries-old prison and the myth-shrouded history of Mathers's world, apparently a planet colonized by humans many generations ago who displaced a native race of primitives and set up the tyrannical state of the title, which is in a perpetual state of civil war.

As I have said on this blog before, I always enjoy the portions of adventure stories in which some guy is confined in a cell and studies the graffiti on the walls and tries to contact the other prisoners and undergoes all kinds of psychological trauma and all that, and I certainly enjoyed "Manuscript Found in a Police State."  This is no adventure story--one of the "literary" aspects of the tale is that there is no plot resolution, Mather's ultimate fate and even the true nature of the planet he lives on being quite ambiguous--but while things like self-delusion and the questions of free will are the meat of the story's themes, Aldiss includes plenty of the horror and violence and strange technology we expect in our genre fiction.  I can heartily recommend this one.

Besides here in The Best of British SF 2, "Manuscript Found in a Police State" has been reprinted in Betty Owen's 1974 Nine Strange Stories.

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Three stories worth reading, each supported by insightful ancillary matter--I'm glad I picked up The Best of British SF 2 and hopefully I'll have time to return to it in the future.

1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, R. A. Lafferty and Gerard F. Conway (plus: a 1942 tale by Dwight Swain!)

In April of 2017 I purchased on ebay a lot of four issues of Fantastic edited by Ted White.  Let's take a look at the December 1970 issue of the magazine; you can save some shekels by just reading it at the internet archive.

I'm skipping the Laumer serial, because I haven't read the earlier novels in the series and my interest in Laumer is limited.  I'm skipping Richard Lupoff's spoof of Harlan Ellison because spoofs have little appeal for me.  And I'm skipping Barry Malzberg's "The New Rappacini" because I read it a year and a half ago; I called it "very good," so don't you skip it if you haven't read it yet!   

In his editorial, White talks a little about his relationships with the artists who have appeared in Amazing and Fantastic since he took over the role of editor, among them MPorcius fave Jeff Jones.  He also quotes a letter from Ursula K. Le Guin praising himself and Fantastic, and explains what his policy is regarding the types of stories that will appear in Fantastic:

Yes, it sounds like he'll take anything.

Alexei Panshin's column, described as controversial on the cover, starts with a long quote from Damon Knight paraphrasing Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Then Panshin takes Kuhn's idea (that the scientific establishment fruitfully follows a paradigm for a long period, during which minor problems with the paradigm gradually accumulate, until those minor "anomalies" and "counterinstances" are numerous enough that the paradigm becomes weak and vulnerable to overthrow by a new paradigm) and applies it to the SF field.  Panshin thinks the old SF paradigm is in a weakened state, and is under attack by the New Wave, but that the New Wavers have yet to come up with a truly new paradigm that is strong enough to replace the old.  Panshin then describes his own writing career, in which (he says) he tried to write in new ways--he loved SF but didn't want to write melodramas or about technology--that were rejected by the SF establishment.  But eventually he and his fellow young innovators, at first accepted only by Ace Books (which he calls "a rightly despised market that poured out such a stream of material that it would seemingly publish anything") fought their way to widespread acceptance, winning many Hugos and Nebulas.  He then exhorts the SF community to continue changing and expanding, while admitting that there is still room for melodramatic stories about technology.  Panshin suggests replacing the term "science fiction" with "creative fantasy," and throughout the magazine we can see White enthusiastically take up this coinage, using it in his editorial as well as in the intro to Malzberg's story.

Panshin's column is interesting, and as somebody who enjoys the old melodramas and sciencey stories as well as the work of many of the newer writers Panshin mentions, like Disch and Lafferty (and Panshin's own Rite Of Passage), I can look on these old controversies intellectually, with a comfortable level of detachment.

In this issue of Fantastic we find eleven pages devoted to letters and White's responses to them.  There is arguing about drugs, overpopulation, the TV show The Prisoner, and, most heatedly, about ZIP codes and the Post Office (Ted worked briefly in the Baltimore Post Office, we learn.)  I found most interesting the discussion of abortive attempts to include comic art in Galaxy (where Vaughn Bode's Sunspot appeared for four issues) and Fantastic (which included a four-page comic section called Fantastic Illustrated in at least one issue--the comic at the link is so lame it is embarrassing.)  White claims that he was going to have Bode in Fantastic and then the deep pockets over at Galaxy stole Bode away with the promise of quadruple the amount of cash poor Ted could offer.

On to the stories! The Aldiss, Lafferty and Conway stories were new; the Swain is a reprint from a 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures.

"Cardiac Arrest" by Brian Aldiss

This story (like 20 pages long) feels long and a little tedious.  An American flies to Hong Kong under an assumed name in order to meet a business contact.  On just about every page are italicized and ungrammatical stream of consciousness passages describing the Yank's fantasies and fears of violence and sex, daydreams and nightmares based on his reading of spy novels.  (Aldiss throws in some poetic "wordplay," like combining Mao's name and the word "drowning" at the end of this aphoristic phrase: "the army and peasants are an ocean in which the invaders will drowsetung.")

Before his scheduled meeting, which is unexpectedly delayed, the American meets an Englishman, an RAF veteran of WWII and the Suez crisis, and this guy's German partner in grey and black market business ventures.  The Yank explains that he is a scientist and he has brought with him samples of a virus which renders those it infects immortal--his idea is to defect to communist China and give them the virus; in return the Chinese Communist Party has offered him a big estate.  The American gets involved in a sort of side deal with these two shady Europeans, whose help he suspects he needs.

The defection effort fails when Hong Kong police interrupt the American's meeting with a Red Chinese representative, and the German is killed.  The American and Englishman flee for Europe, the RAF vet at the controls of a Soviet plane.  Disaster strikes, and at the end of the story we learn the answer to the mystery that was nagging me for many pages: why would an intelligent educated American who was not a communist himself want to move to mainland China, which in the story is portrayed as a pretty menacing entity? 

Along with the Walter Mitty/Owl Creek Bridge gimmick, Aldiss tries to do some interesting things in this story based around people's views of their own nations and other nations.  Characters give voice to American and British attitudes about WWII, American views of China, England and Germany, European views of the USA and China (a subplot has to do with the Portuguese surrendering Macao to the communists) and Chinese views of America.  Having fought in Burma in the Second World War, Aldiss has more first hand knowledge of the Far East than the average Anglophone bear--remember his story "Lambeth Blossom" about a tyrannical Chinese empire of the future?  Another theme is that political leaders (and ordinary people as well!) the world over are hypocritical and untrustworthy jerks who may or may not believe the ideological stuff they say and whose actions may not accord with those stated beliefs..

I want to like "Cardiac Arrest" because immortality, exiles and emigres, socialist tyranny, and British military history are all interests of mine, but while it is inventive and experimental, it can be hard going.  It is easier to admire the story now than it was to enjoy it when I was in the middle of it and finding it not very clear and not very compelling.  I guess I'll say its virtues slightly outweigh the challenges it presents, and recommend it to people who like a story that is puzzling but which more or less puts all the pieces together by the time you get to the end of it.  "Cardiac Arrest" would go on to be included on the DAW Book of Aldiss, behind an impressive Karel Thole cover and the British collection Comic Inferno.

"Walk of the Midnight Demon" by Gerard F. Conway

I don't think I have ever read anything by Conway before; he seems to be most famous for writing Spider-Man comics starting in the 1970s and TV crime shows starting in the 1980s.  Along with the long list of comic books Conway has penned, Wikipedia offers a writing sample in which Conway complains about how difficult life is for the sons and daughters of Erin:

My grandparents were born in Ireland. They came to America in the late 'teens of the last century and lived a life not very different from the life my housekeeper and her husband live today.... Because they were lower-class Irish, they were the Hispanics of their day...viewed with scorn by the WASP upper class....

Aye, Begorrah!

This story is set in one of those sword and sorcery worlds with witches and druids and people riding on horses and staying in inns and so forth.  Our narrator is Haxx, and in the first scene he is riding across "the death plain" with his buddy Illusiah, who is dying of a stomach injury.  After Illusiah expires and falls off his horse, Haxx subjects us to six or seven flashbacks which are presented out of chronological order.  Haxx and his friends were cursed--as they traveled from inn to inn, everywhere they went people around them would turn up dead.  They consulted various witches in an effort to  find out what was going on, and we get a longish scene of a tarot reading.  The whole story (like six pages) is boring; Conway tries to make it atmospheric with descriptions of faces and scenery and  weather, but these descriptions made my eyes glaze over and the story is vague in every possible way.  In the end we learn that Haxx is a vampire or werewolf or Mr. Hyde or servant of the "Death God" sent to gather souls or some such thing, that he has been killing all these people without any of his friends, or he himself, realizing it until it was too late.

Bad.  "Walk of the Midnight Demon," a pointless exercise, has never appeared elsewhere.

"Been a Long, Long Time" by R. A . Lafferty

A tarot-reading woman figures prominently in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land and in Conway's "Walk of the Midnight Demon," and Lafferty's "Been A Long, Long Time" begins with a direct reference to Eliot's "The Hollow Men": "It doesn't end with one--it Begins with a whimper."  The whimper comes from Boshel, an immortal being at the beginning of time who, faced by a dispute between immortals--the rebellion of Lucifer that culminates in the Fall of the Rebel Angels--is unable to decide which side of the War in Heaven to join.  By default, he ends up with the conservative forces headed by Michael, but Boshel's indecision leads to the introduction of randomness to the universe, and it is determined that he must be punished.  Michael puts Boshel in charge of the practical realization of the famous thought experiment that insists that monkeys striking keys at random will eventually type out an exact text of the complete works of Shakespeare.

The immortal monkeys bang away at their unfailing typewriters for billions upon billions of years--the universe expands to its limit, collapses, and begins to expand again.  This cyclical process repeats itself hundreds, thousands, millions of times!  Boshel, and even more so the cleverest of the monkeys, grow frustrated, and that mischievous simian begins bending the rules a little in hopes of finishing up this absurd project once and for all.

This is a fun little story, and characteristic of Lafferty's work, with its folksy dialogue, entertaining jokes, and allusions to Christian thought.  "Been a Long, Long Time" would go on to appear in Brian Aldiss's Galactic Empires anthology and The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy as well as two Lafferty collections, and has been translated into German, Dutch and Serbian.

"The Bottle Imp" by Dwight V. Swain (1942)

For whatever reason (and let's remember that when we read the August 1972 issue's letters column we learned that Ted's control of the magazine was surprisingly limited) the December 1970 issue of Fantastic includes a reprint of a story from the September 1942 issue of Fantastic Adventures, Dwight V. Swain's "The Bottle Imp."  On the contents page it is hailed as a "Famous Fantastic Classic" but it is not even listed on the cover--maybe it was a last minute selection.  I don't know that I have ever heard of Swain before; Wikipedia suggests he was an important teacher of screenwriters.  In 1942 Fantastic Adventures published stories by better-known SF writers like Robert Bloch, August Derleth, Henry Kuttner, Eric Frank Russell, and Ross Rocklynne, and why they chose Swain over them is a little mysterious to me--maybe Fantastic had lost the rights to those stories, or maybe they were not the right length?  Anyway, let's give Swain a chance.

Irish-American warehouse worker Tod Barnes is sitting in a crummy bar, lamenting his tragic lot and drinking whiskey and chewing Copenhagen (the kids we called "burnouts" in my high school used to chew that stuff) when a six-inch tall devil appears on his table!  The satanic creature introduces himself as Beezlebub and Tod explains to his new friend that he has been laid off from his job at a tire wholesaler's but can't get a new job because the firm's owner won't give him a release (some kind of war-related regulation is involved) and he can't join the army because of a bum leg and his girlfriend Molly Shannahan has left him for middle-class guy Walter Dale (Tod calls him "one of those office lounge lizards...smooth line, all the trimmings.")

Beezlebub tells Tod that his problems are nothing compared to the trouble he could get him in, and proceeds to demonstrate.  Tod vomits all over the new pants of another bar patron, mobster Steve Kroloski, renowned as "king of the rackets."  A brawl ensues and Tod and Kroloski end up in jail.  When Kroloski's lawyer springs him, the mobster also springs Tod.  Tod is soon involved in the burglary of his old place of employment, the tire warehouse.  Kroloski has Molly Shannahan kidnapped and dragged to the tire warehouse so she can open the combination locked door that stands between the gangster and the treasure trove of rubber.  For good measure he tells her that Tod is a willing accomplice in this grand larceny.

Molly refuses to open the door, and Tod is forced to watch while Kroloski beats his former girlfriend until "even Molly's staunch Irish spirit could stand the torture no longer" and she relents.  I guess the sons and daughters of the Emerald Isle really do have it tough!  Beezlebub (whom only Tod can see, of course) takes credit for all the horrible things that are befalling Tod and gloats that Kroloski is going to murder both Tod and Molly to cover up his crime.  Via an elaborate stratagem involving spitting and cutting his own flesh, Tod escapes his bonds, rescues Molly by throwing tires at the gangsters, alerts the police by spitting at burglar alarm wires, and exposes Walter Dale (one of those scornful WASPs, no doubt!) as Kroloski's inside man (the phrase "finger man" is used.)  As the story ends Molly is back in Tod's arms, Tod gets a cushy government job ("warehouse inspector for the tire rationing board") and Beezelbub is exorcised in a dumb twist ending.   

"The Bottle Imp" is a brutal (and somewhat disgusting) crime story full of torture and pain and tobacco juice spitting that exploits people's ethnic and class resentments and fascination with sexualized violence, upon which has been grafted a goofy devil story, I guess as a joke or a justification for printing a weak mystery story in a SF magazine--the imp is actually totally unnecessary to the plot and we are invited to assume it is simply an hallucination.  Thumbs down for Swain, even if he is a member of the Oklahoma Writers Hall of Fame, along with R. A. Lafferty, C. J. Cherryh and S. E. Hinton.  (On the upside, I guess this is an interesting historical artifact, a piece of popular fiction about the lives of American working-class civilians during WWII, written contemporaneously with the milieu it describes.)

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More stories from old magazines in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log!     

Robot stories by Aldiss, Brown, Anderson, Budrys and Miller

Alright, more anthologized short stories (just what you wanted!)  Today we are tackling five stories I have selected from a 1968 anthology edited by Damon Knight and published by our friends at Belmont: The Metal Smile.  I was raking poor Damon over the coals just a few days ago, saying he had the absolute worst story in Tom Boardman's anthology of 26 stories, An ABC of Science Fiction, so today we have a chance to see Knight in a better light, as an editor instead of as a writer.  Another flip of the script: I often praise Belmont for their terrific covers (check out this one and this one and this one) but I own the 1974 edition of The Metal Smile and its cover is absolute garbage!  The colors are foul, the fonts are irritating, and the image is mind-bogglingly bad.  Even the composition of the cover, with the tutti frutti authors' names at the top, the title in the center, and the embarrassing illustration on the bottom, is terrible.  Perhaps most galling of all, the 1968 edition of The Metal Smile has a great cover!  When I saw the original cover on twitter, I was filled with envy! 

I have already read one of the stories in The Metal Smile, "Two-Handed Engine" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, and it is a good one that I recommend.  Hopefully I will be able to recommend the five stories I read today!

"The New Father Christmas" by Brian W. Aldiss (1958)

Brian Aldiss is on my good side today, having written one of the top three stories in An ABC of Science Fiction.  Let's hope he can stay there!

It is the year 2388!  Robin has been caretaker of an automatic factory for 35 years—he and his wife Roberta are the only humans authorized to live in the factory.  Robin is decrepit-- bedridden--and Roberta is an absent-minded softie who is letting three homeless bums live in the factory. These tramps have figured out a way to escape being thrown out with the trash by the robot who cleans up the factory every day.

In An ABC of Science Fiction we saw some relatively benign robots (in Daniel F. Galouye's "A Homey Atmosphere") and even robots who are nicer than people (in Robert F. Young's "Thirty Days Had September") but the cover text of The Metal Smile ("MAN VS. MACHINE") suggests that we can expect some scary robots today, and Aldiss here sets us off to a good start on our journey through mechanized mayhem.

Our story takes place on Christmas Day; Robin even receives a Christmas card in the mail from the Minister of Automatic Factories, possible evidence that there are other human beings alive beyond the factory—R and R never leave the factory themselves and sometimes suspect there are no people left alive out there.  (We are given some reason to believe that the robots consider humans obsolete and have been replacing them.)  One of the tramps decides that the factory owes them a Christmas present, setting off a course of events which results in all five characters coming to the unwelcome attention of the robotic security apparatus.

An entertaining little story, written in a fun jocular style that does not prevent it from feeling real or from generating a sense of menace.  Short and satisfying.  "The New Father Christmas" first saw print in F&SF and has since appeared in numerous anthologies and Aldiss collections.

I really like the Powers cover on No Time Like Tomorrow; it looks like a fungoid
Manhattan, and achieves a strong sense of size and depth

"Answer" by Fredric Brown (1954)

This is one of those short-shorts--one page long!

The story of "Answer" is that a society which has colonized many star systems and built many computers decides to network all the computers in the galaxy together to create what amounts to a single super powerful computer.  Once connected this computer is essentially a god, and not perhaps a kindly one!

I feel like I've already read a story with this exact plot--connecting a bunch of computers creates a dangerous deity--in the last few years, but I'll be damned if I can remember the author or title, and I guess I haven't been cataloging and labeling these blog posts efficiently enough for me to find any clues.  Frustrating!  Maybe I actually read this story long ago--"Answer," after first appearing in Brown's hardcover collection Angels and Spaceships, has been anthologized many times.  [UPDATE SEPTEMBER 23, 2018: The story that "Answer" reminded me of is probably Arthur C. Clarke's "Dial 'F' for Frankenstein.")

"Quixote and the Windmill" by Poul Anderson (1950)

Well, here's a story that has not been anthologized widely.  "Quixote and the Windmill" was first published by legendary editor John W. Campbell, Jr. in Astounding, and, excepting Damon Knight's The Metal Smile, has never appeared in an anthology, though it has been printed in five or six different Anderson collections, including two different German ones.  Did Campbell and Knight see something in the story other editors didn't?

Anderson starts his story off at a high literary pitch, with powerful metaphors (the robot has "the brutal maleness of a naval rifle or a blast furnace") and a brief sort of history of the philosophy of the robot that mentions "the Golem, Bacon's brazen head" and "Frankenstein's monster" and ends by telling us that the people of the utopian future of government handouts and copious leisure time in which Anderson has set his story are a little uneasy about the recently constructed super-strong, all-seeing prototype robot, equipped with the first artificial "volitional, non-specialized brain" that for the last year has been wandering around among them.

After the literary prologue we move to the down-to-earth primary scene of the story, a bar where two drunks complain that they don't fit into this utopia.  One is a technician who was smart enough to find his job so boringly routine that he quit, but not smart enough or creative enough to find a job among the elite planners and artists of this society.  The other is a laborer who can't find work because the machines do all the labor; his wife left him because she wanted a man who would amount to something other than a recipient of the "basic citizen's allowance."  With nothing to do these guys have become dedicated drinkers.

The robot walks by the bar, and the two drunks, seeing it as emblematic of their plight and a harbinger of a future with no humans, only efficient robots, rush outside to violently confront it.  The robot calmly explains that 1) even if the drunks are ill-suited to current society there will always be men with ability ("who think and dream and sing") who will carry on the human race and keep its glory alive and 2) that the robot itself is useless like the drunks are.  What need is there for a humanoid self-aware robot when we already have self-aware humans and a vast array of mindless automatic machines that can build things and grow food and accomplish menial tasks?  The reason this robot is just walking around is that its builders have no use for it!  SF is full of self-aware humanoid robots who do ordinary jobs, robot maids and so forth, so I thought this was an interesting tack for Anderson to take, proclaiming that humanoid robots are pointless.

If you read classic science fiction you encounter quite a few of these stories about how utopia is a bore because man needs challenges and accomplishments, and this one is hardly groundbreaking, which is perhaps why "Quixote and the Windmill" hasn't been anthologized much.  On the other hand it is entertaining and it is fun to see Anderson whip out all the literary and historical references (showing off that he is a member of the cognitive elite who need not fear being rendered obsolete by a machine!)  The problem of what role unskilled workers can play in an advanced society is of course an interesting topic, and Anderson doesn't offer any comfortable solution to this quandary--a certain percentage of people are just going to be unhappy and/or decadent parasites, and this percentage is going to go up as technology and the economy get more efficient.

For a second opinion, check out Thomas Anderson's review of "Quixote and the Windmill" at Schlock Value.

"First to Serve" by Algis Budrys (1954)

Another piece from Astounding.  Budrys is an unusual person with a strange biography and career, and I certainly want to like his work, but he doesn't always cooperate and produce stories that I think are good.  I was unhappy with his famous novel Rogue Moon, for example, though I thought Man of Earth a success.  Let's see what we've got this time.

"First to Serve" comes to us as a bunch of government records, mostly the diary of a robot who has been programmed with so much intelligence it has achieved self-awareness!  Rogue Moon and Man of Earth explore the question of "what is a man?", and "First to Serve" touches on the same topic; on the second page the robot writes "I'm still having trouble defining 'man.'  Apparently, even the men can't do a very satisfactory job of that."

Why has a robot with such intelligence been created?  It is the high tech future of the 1970s, and the armed services are looking for the perfect soldier in the form of a robot.  The scientists in the story have come up with the diarist, a prototype that fits the bill--the perfect soldier needs to be able to think independently and to improvise when confronted with unexpected obstacles or conditions, so such a robot soldier needs human-level intelligence.  But there is a problem--nobody really wants a robot that can think like a human because such a robot would be superior to a human; after all, it lacks a human's frailty and biological needs.  Such a superior being would threaten to replace humanity--one scientist, actually a spy who has been assigned to the project by one of the armed services, asks, "Suppose they decide they're better fit to run the world than we are?"

The climax of the story is when the aforementioned spy, drunk, tells the robot that the head of the project (whom the robot sees as a friend) has been neutralized and that the robot itself is slated for some unspecified grim fate.  We learn the aftermath in some letters and memos written by government officials.  In response to the spy's taunting the robot killed the spy and wrecked the lab; the authorities have encased it in concrete and sunk it in the Patuxent River.  The head of the project is on trial, but will probably be acquitted based on the evidence in the robot's diary.

This story is OK.  Perhaps because of the voices it employs, that of a robot and government employees speaking officially, it lacks the style and characterizations that enliven the Aldiss and Anderson stories.  Budrys flings a literary reference at us (Trilby) that flew over my head, so maybe there is more I'm missing?  "First to Serve" was reprinted in some Budrys collections and some anthologies with Isaac Asimov's name on them.

"I Made You" by Walter M. Miller, Jr. (1954)

Astounding strikes again!  I liked Miller's "No Moon For Me," a story about a guy who tricks the human race into exploring outer space that had adventure and hard SF elements as well as Malzbergian components, so I am looking forward to this one.

Whoa, this is a great military SF story, full of futuristic but believable equipment and weapons; it is also a good tense action story in which guys match wits with an alien "other" in a fight conducted under all kinds of restrictions--in some ways it reminded me of Fredric Brown's "Arena" and A. E. van Vogt's "The Rull."

A huge robot tank with an array of weapons is guarding a piece of territory on the moon.  The tank is damaged, so technicians drive over to fix it.  Unfortunately, the thing's IFF system is among the malfunctioning components, so it thinks every vehicle and person it detects is an enemy, and blasts the technicians.  Only one tech survives by hiding in a cave.  When more personnel arrive to help him out he struggles to figure out a way to defeat the tank in a short period of time (he is low on oxygen!) without blowing up the stuff the tank is guarding.

One of the cool things about the story is that it is largely told (though in the third person) from the tank's point of view; this kind of reminded me of van Vogt's "Black Destroyer." At the same time the humies are trying to figure out how to solve their problem, the robot tank is using logic and engineering knowledge to achieve its own goals!

Very good, an entertaining example of this type of SF--space suits and other futuristic gear, people puttering about on the moon, a life or death struggle, and engineering-based problem solving.

Thomas Anderson, a big fan of Miller's famous A Canticle for Leibowitz, has also written about "I Made You."  The story has deservedly been reprinted quite a lot, including in Joe Haldeman's Supertanks and Brian Aldiss's Introducing SF, both of which have striking covers that I love even though they exhibit very different cover design philosophies.

Car 54, where are you?

**********

Five worthwhile stories, all of them sort of pessimistic; though Anderson is confident that the gifted and talented among us will be fine, all the stories suggest that computers and robots will be a threat to the position or even lives of many of us.

More short SF stories written in the 1950s from the anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

1950s stories by Brian Aldiss, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, and Avram Davidson

When I haphazardly reorganized my SF anthologies a few days ago I put aside five paperbacks containing stories by authors who interest me but which I didn't recall having read, so our next batch of posts will each tackle a selection of stories from one of those five books.  First up, a 1968 Avon paperback printing of the 1966 anthology An ABC of Science Fiction, edited by Tom Boardman, Jr.

An ABC of Science Fiction was constructed based on a goofy premise: it includes 26 stories, each by a different author, each writer the sole representative of those with his last initial.  To make this idea work somebody had to contribute something under the pseudonym "B. T. H. Xerxes" to fill in the "X" slot; "Xerxes" came up with half a page of limp limericks, and isfdb suggests it was likely Boardman himself who penned the ribald verses, or perhaps Brian Aldiss, who was already doing duty in the "A" stall.  Today we'll look at the stories by the delegates from the honorable letters A, B, C and D, Aldiss, Fredric Brown, Arthur C. Clarke, and Avram Davidson.

"Let's Be Frank" by Brian W. Aldiss (1957)

Aldiss's offering first appeared in an issue of Science Fantasy alongside stories by E. C. Tubb and J. G. Ballard, and has been beloved by editors ever since, appearing in ten different periodicals, anthologies and collections since then.

"Let's Be Frank" is a fresh take on the collective consciousness concept we see so often.  In Tudor England, Sir Frank Gladwebb's wife gives birth to an odd child, a boy who remains in a coma until he is nineteen.  At that age he awakens, looks into his father's eyes, and Sir Frank finds that his consciousness has expanded into his son's body--Sir Frank has control of both bodies as effortlessly as you or I have control of both our hands!  When Sir Frank's son Frank has a child of his own, Sir Frank finds that his consciousness expands to inhabit the body of his grandson and he now has control of three bodies.  As the decades and then centuries pass, the number of "Franks" increases, gender and ethnic differences proving to be no barrier!  Will the single consciousness of Frank spread to include every person on Earth, and then colonize the universe?

This is an idea story, and because the idea is new and compelling and Aldiss has a good writing style, I quite liked "Let's Be Frank."

"Pattern" by Fredric Brown (1954)

Fredric Brown has been on my mind recently after seeing an announcement that his autobiographical novel The Office is being reprinted by the good people at Makeshift Press.  You'll remember I enjoyed his novel Rogue in Space and his story "Puppet Show."  

It looks like "Pattern" first appeared in a hardcover collection entitled Angels and Spaceships.  When Angels and Spaceships was released in paperback it was retitled Star Shine and adorned with a beautiful Richard Powers cover featuring not only Powers's famous abstractions but a brilliant and expressive realistic male face and hand, as well as a slinky stylized female silhouette and a biplane.  Gorgeous! 

"Pattern" is a story that takes up one page, a piece of gimmicky filler.  Lots of people like this kind of thing, but I generally find these types of stories an irritating waste of time.  Anyway, in this one, mile-tall aliens land on Earth and a woman thinks they are harmless as they totally ignore us.  Then, while she is spraying insecticide on her garden, the aliens themselves start spraying something in the air high above--is the Earth the aliens' new garden and we humans mere pests minutes away from extinction?

A trifle.

"The Awakening" by Arthur C. Clarke (originally 1942, this version 1952)

isfdb is telling me that "The Awakening" appeared first in the fanzine Zenith in 1942, but then was published in a "somewhat different form...significantly revised," in Future Science Fiction Stories ten years later.  Zenith was the labor of love of British artist and SF fan Harry Turner; read all about Turner here and read all six issues of Zenith here.  I like Turner's art deco-style renderings of nudes, space craft, and Egyptian and Near Eastern bric-a-brac for Zenith and for other people's fanzines; his later work seems to consist largely of optical illusions and "impossible objects" that are reminding me of M.C. Escher.  (I find that kind of thing to be a sterile and lifeless drag, mere mathematical trickery.)

It is the future!  Mankind has conquered the solar system and built a Utopia!  But Utopia is a bore and many people are committing suicide!  Marlan declines to go the Kervorkian route, and instead does what Galos Gann did in Edmond Hamilton's 1936 story "At the World's Dusk," and Professor Jameson did in Neil R. Jones's 1931 story "The Jameson Satellite": put himself in suspended animation to be awakened in millions of years!  When Marlan wakes up we get our twist ending--man is gone and insect people have taken over the solar system!

This story is just OK, its surprise underwhelming.  I guess you could call it juvenilia.

"I Do Not Hear You, Sir" by Avram Davidson (1958)

The back cover of An ABC of Science Fiction
lists Sheckley (presumably Robert Sheckley)
 but in fact it is Clifford Simak who represents
the letter S in the text!

Davidson is something of a stylist, and he includes lots of cute names and jocular wordplay and reworked cliches in the 20th-century beginning of "I Do Not Hear You, Sir," which first appeared in F&SF.  The story begins like a crime story--Milo Anderson is a crook who is in debt to more powerful crooks ("the Syndicate") and needs money fast.  He recently swindled a collector of 18th-century objets d'art out of numerous pieces, and is scrambling to find something to sell among the stolen goods when he stumbles upon what appears to be a working circa 1770 telephone complete with a little telephone directory.  The directory is titled, "The Compendium of the Names, Residences, & Cyphers of the Honorable & Worthy Patrons of the Magnetickal Intelligence Engine;" the gag in the second half of "I Do Not Hear You, Sir" is Davidson's comedic reproduction of late 18th-century speech and writing and caricatures of War of Independence-era worthies like George Washington, Benjamin Franklin and Benedict Arnold, all of whom Milo calls on the phone, looking for help.  Nobody is interested in helping Milo, save Arnold, who transmits through time and space a little box to Milo--it contains pills with which to commit suicide.

"I Do Not Hear You, Sir," strikes me as quite similar to other Davidson short stories I have read; I guess this is a good example of what people who like Davidson like about him, the in-your-face wordsmithery and erudition and assumption of various distinctive voices.  Some people will find jokes which consist of the American Cincinnatus complaining about his false teeth and the author of Poor Richard's Almanac telemarketing Fanny Hill amusing, but while the style shows a lot of ambition, education and verve on the part of Davidson, the tale has no emotional content and the plot is contrived and nonsensical, so I didn't find it compelling or entertaining.  (I find it easier to admire this sort of thing than to actually enjoy it.)  Thumbs down, I'm afraid.

**********

We'll advance further in the alphabet in our next episode.  Aldiss is our star player so far, we'll see if anybody can unseat him.

Harlan Ellison and Brian Aldiss stories from 1966 men's magazines

The internet archive offers to the public, free of charge, scores of pornographic men's magazines.  Flipping through some of the more respectable ones, you can find stories by famous SF writers.  Let's take a look at stories from 1966 by two of our more critically acclaimed SF authors, Harlan Ellison and Brian Aldiss, that appeared in magazines that were purchased by men because they wanted to see girls' boobs.

[NOTA BENE: Some of the links in this blog post are NSFW!]

"Delusion for a Dragon-Slayer" by Harlan Ellison

Knight, "The Magazine for the Adult Male," is full of nude women--photographs of nude women, drawings of nude women, paintings of nude women.  But Knight is not merely a rag full of smut!  In this issue we find an article by Jacques Cousteau, a reprint of a 1955 story by John Steinbeck (I think it's about chewing gum that comes to life and tries to kill people!), and a cover by Leo and Diane Dillon, who have done so many SF covers.  Another SF connection in the magazine is the inclusion of some cartoons by William Rotsler, who not only did writing and photography for lots of these men's magazines but has also won numerous Hugos for Best Fan Artist.  (Some gender studies grad student out there could easily do her dissertation on the overlap of the porno world and the SF world!  Maybe one already has!)

The cover illustrates Ellison's story, "Delusion for a Dragon-Slayer," which would go on to be included in several different Ellison collections in the late '60s and the '70s.  This is the story of Warren Glazer Griffin, a middle-class office worker who gets killed in a Rube-Goldberg-esque accident while walking across Manhattan to work.  He goes to heaven, but in this story, to stay in heaven, you have to pass a test, and the nature of the test is determined by your day dreams during your life time.  WGG must have daydreamnt of being a hero from Homer or Robert E. Howard, because he finds himself in a muscular, god-like, body, captain of an oared ship on a stormy sea, and to get into heaven he has to rescue a girl from a monster, sword in hand.  In the event, like Odysseus, loses his ship and his crew, and then he kills the monster by sneaking up on it and attacking it from behind--while it is having sex with the girl!  The girl prefers the monster, so WGG rapes her instead of winning her love.  Having proven himself a poor leader, a coward, and inept with the ladies, WGG has failed to live up to his own fantasies and is barred from heaven.

We readers probably should have been able to predict WGG's bleak fate.  Ellison describes our protagonist's dream body as "Nordic" and "Aryan," with blonde hair and blue eyes, and "Aryan" is a word we generally only hear in pop culture in reference to Nazis.  Also, artistic types like Ellison generally have contempt for the salaryman type, so you can expect him to take an opportunity to puncture the pretensions of such a character.

I found Ellison's style here tedious, characterized by lots of long repetitive sentences that, I suppose, are meant to be poetic and dreamlike, an effort to convey WGG's feelings in the outre milieu in which he finds himself.  An entire column of text on page 51 is devoted to describing the colors in the sky, sentence after sentence like this one:

The colors that top-filled a man to the brim and kept him poised there with a surface tension of joy and wonder, colors cascading like waterfalls of flowers in his head, millioncolors, blossomshades, brightnesses, joycrashing everythings that made a man hurl back and strain his throat to sing, sing chants of amazement and forever--as his ship plunged like a cannonball into the reefs and shattered into a billion wooden fragments, tiny splinters of dark wood against the boiling treacherous sea, and the rocks crushed and staved in the sides, and men's heads went to pulp as they hurtled forward and their vessel was cut out from under them, the colors the colors, the God beautiful colors! 

Annoying!  In a long preface to the story printed in the "Editor's Notebook" department of the magazine Ellison tells us that in this story he is trying to emulate the "saxophone technique of John Coltrane."  Well, OK then.

Maybe "Delusion of a Dragon-Slayer" is supposed to be funny--maybe it is a lampoon of people who read heroic fantasy stories.  But it is not funny, and the style is irritating, at times mind-numbing.  Gotta give it a thumbs down.

"Lambeth Blossom" by Brian W. Aldiss

A paperback edition of
Strange Bedfellows

For its appearance here in Knight, "Lambeth Blossom" is illustrated with one of those NSFW paintings I mentioned before, this one a full two-page spread.  "Lambeth Blossom" later appeared in Thomas N. Scortia's 1972 anthology of SF stories about sex, Strange Bedfellows, and a Dutch anthology of Aldiss stories with a cool cover that will appeal to fish-lovers.

It is centuries, maybe millennia, in the future, and Great Britain has long been a province of the Chinese Universal Republic, a tyranny of commissars and secret police which is currently embroiled in a mass war against a united Africa.  Under a giant viewscreen in London showing anti-African propaganda (a pornographic film of an African soldier raping a Chinese girl) one of the agents of the Chinese overlords, Lob Inson, meets a blue-eyed prostitute named Lambeth Blossom who has just come to London from the countryside.  He takes her home to meet the extended family, including his wife, son, brother-in-law, and servant girl.  The males share Lambeth Blossom in an elaborate sex scene--Lob Inson's wife brings refreshing sherbet to her husband and Lambeth Blossom as they have sex, and when his son is aroused by watching his father coupling with the young woman, the servant girl takes him away to (I believe) provide him masturbatory relief.

Lob Inson and his brother-in-law talk about propaganda, including Lambeth Blossom in their conversation.  They admit the possibility that there is in fact no war on Africa at all, and that everything they know about the English countryside and the history of the Chinese conquest of Europe and America may be lies designed to hide or excuse the economic shortcomings of communist rule or a simply a sign of a collective Chinese mental illness.  Lambeth Blossom's account of life in the country is so different from what the men have read in the newspapers that they consider handing her over to the secret police; in response she commits suicide.

This is a well-written and entertaining story, even if it treads much of the same ground George Orwell covered in 1984.  It creates a new world and inspires some kind of emotional reaction in the reader--"Lambeth Blossom" is far more intriguing and readable than Ellison's "Delusion for a Dragon-Slayer!"  Thumbs up!

"Pride in the Profession" by Harlan Ellison

Adam magazine, "The Man's Home Companion!," where "Pride in the Profession" first appeared, was put out by the same people who put out Knight, and also includes a story by Steinbeck.  This magazine is less attractive however, lacking Knight's color photos and color paintings.  (Perhaps as a consolation we have an installment of a translation of the ancient Roman novel by Petronius, The Satyricon, which on the table of contents page appears under the heading "Book Bonus.")  Adam also seems to be very focused on Hollywood and the entertainment world--that's Raquel Welch, immortal star of One Million Years B.C. and Fantastic Voyage, on the cover, and many of the nude women in the black and white photos inside seem to have some connection to the stage or screen.  "Pride in the Profession" would be reprinted in the Ellison collection No Doors, No Windows, purportedly in a rewritten version.

Ever since he saw an innocent black man lynched as a child, Matthew Carty has wanted to be a hangman--and not any old hangman, but the world's best hangman, a hangman who has raised execution to the status of an art form!  And he achieves his dream, devoting himself to interdisciplinary studies at various universities (taking classes in such diverse fields as architecture, biology, physics, and criminology) and then acquiring practical experience working for various state governments until he is the acknowledged "Picasso of the scaffold."  But will Carty choke when the biggest possible opportunity to ply his trade comes along--for seven months the newspapers and the public have been consumed with the case of a doctor who euthanized his ailing girlfriend, and now that the doctor he has been convicted, Carty is hired to perform his execution!

This is an entertaining enough story, and touches upon hot button issues like racism and different forms of both extrajudicial and government-sanctioned killing.  Thumbs up!

"The End of the Time of Leinard" by Harlan Ellison

The issue of Adam that includes "The End of the Time of Leinard" also includes an ad for Robert Rimmer's The Harrad Experiment, which would go on to be a movie starring Tippi Hedron and Don Johnson.  Rimmer's career as a writer seems to have focused on exploring new forms of sexual and family relationships, themes we see in fiction by important SF writers like Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon and Samuel R. Delany all the time.  "The End of the Time of Leinard" first appeared in Famous Western magazine in 1958, and would later be included in Edgeworks 1 and Midnight in the Sunken Cathedral, a collection of recordings of Ellison reading his own stories.  Ellison must be proud of this story if, decades later, he chose it from among his vast catalog to read aloud!

Actually, this is a decent, economical story, a sort of character study that touches on timeless issues of public and private corruption and ingratitude.  When Bartisville was on the frontier it was a wild place, subject to all kinds of mischief and trouble, and so the town hired an expert gunslinger, Frank Leinard, to be sheriff.  Leinard brought peace and order to the town, and the citizens have prospered.  But, now that times have changed, Leinard's brand of heavy-handed justice is no longer so comfortable, so the local government asks Leinard to resign.  Leinard's whole life is wrapped up in being sheriff (he has no wife, no family), and so he refuses to leave, setting off what amounts to a civil war between him, the bravest man and best gunfighter in the town, and the rest of the establishment, who are neither very brave nor very good at fighting, but have the money to hire people who are.

"The End of the Time of Leinard" is smooth and entertaining, and Ellison maintains a level of ambiguity so that Leinard is a tragic figure without being wholly sympathetic, and readers can identify with his opponents about as well as they can identify with him.  Not bad.

**********

Three enjoyable reads and one irritating failed experiment is not a bad ratio.  The internet archive continues to be a valuable resource!

Three early 1970s stories from 1976's The Best of A. E. van Vogt

In 1976 Pocket Books put out a 256-page collection of stories by MPorcius Fiction Log's favorite Canadian (sorry, Norm!) entitled The Best of A. E. van Vogt.  When I read this book's entry on isfdb a week or so ago I found it irresistible and rushed to ebay to purchase a copy. Why irresistible? Well, there's the Harry Bennett cover, which, with its obvious brushstrokes, collage-like elements, beautiful blues and horrifying faces is more like something you'd see in an art museum than on the cover of a SF book. And then there's the intro by Barry N. Malzberg, another of our obsessions here at MPorcius Fiction Log HQ.

Let's take a look at this baby!

"Ah, Careless, Rapturous van Vogt!" by Barry N. Malzberg  

The intro by New Jersey's own Barry Malzberg is dated "Teaneck, N.J., September 10, 1975" and is over two pages long.  The title is actually a paraphrase of something said of van Vogt by Brian Aldiss.  Malzberg argues that van Vogt is difficult to assess and has been "under-assessed" or ignored by the critics (he lists Budrys, Blish, Knight, Russ and Panshin, just their last names, assuming the reader is a SF junkie who will recognize these worthies.)  Malzberg's own theory of van Vogt is that he is the most unique of the Golden Age SF writers:  

Heinlein, Asimov, Del Rey, Kuttner, are marvelous writers making their contributions as a group to a body of literature; van Vogt is standing off by himself building something very personal and unique.

Malzberg, who is a solipsistic sort, then says that he sympathizes with van Vogt because he feels like he has done the same thing in the 1970s that the Canadian mastermind did in the Golden Age, that they are both "sui generis," above all themselves, writers whose work is distinct from the main group of SF writers of their cohort.

Reading Malzberg compare himself in this way to van Vogt brought a smile to my face, because, for years now, I have been enjoying Malzberg and van Vogt in similar ways and seen them as similar writers.  Both eschew conventions and break the rules to produce strange and confusing work, shit that is so crazy and surprising it makes you laugh; both also hit the same themes and topics again and again, even recycling material in the interests of efficiency--for them writing is a business as well as an art.

I felt like with this essay I had already got my money's worth out of The Best of A. E. van Vogt, but there was much more to come, stories I'd never read and page after page of non fiction from van Vogt himself.  Let's check out three stories from the early 1970s, "Don't Hold Your Breath," "All We Have on this Planet," and "Future Perfect," as well as some of the accompanying nonfiction material.

"Introduction"

In his brief (just over a page) intro to this collection van Vogt brings up Marshall McLuhan and his theory of hot and cool media--"Long before McLuhan I did things with my style that were designed to make it even hotter."  He also defends "pulp" writing, and says "pulp" can be used to describe "fiction that has in it an unusual vitality," not neccesarily low quality junk.  Van Vogt brings up Norman Spinrad, whom he claims "maintains" that "people who enjoy pulp writing" are "lesser human beings." According to van Vogt, Spinrad has contempt for the vast majority of humanity and thinks the only people living meaningful lives are "the dissidents of the 1960s."   (My reading of Spinrad's The Men in the Jungle and my abortive effort to read Child of Fortune make me think van Vogt is not exaggerating very much.)  Finally, van Vogt claims that science fiction (which he likes to call "unreality writing") will be found to be "of greater importance than is now evident."

"Don't Hold Your Breath" (1973)

The stories in The Best of A. E. van Vogt include intros by the author, and some have afterwords.  In the intro to "Don't Hold Your Breath" van Vogt does the kind of thing Malzberg often does, jocularly complaining that nobody has read, and almost nobody has heard about, Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd's anthology Saving Worlds and its paperback edition The Wounded Planet, the venue in which "Don't Hold Your Breath" first appeared.  (I read a Malzberg story from The Wounded Planet and Malzberg's own dim appreciation of the anthology's marketability almost a year ago.)

It is the near future, a time of world government and visiphones, and the Earth is running out of oxygen!  The government is having huge underground complexes of tiny apartments built where people can breathe thanks to oxygen manufacturing plants, and also developing drugs which will transform people into flourine-breathers!  (Flourine is being imported to Earth from asteroids.)

Our narrator is Art Atkins, millionaire.  Atkins got rich by fulfilling government contracts for parts of the many subterranean living quarters--his absolute lack of morals and skill at schmoozing and manipulating people served him well in dealing with all-too-corruptible government bureaucrats.  Atkins has a lot in common with Dr. Carl Hazzard from "The Sound of Wild Laughter;" he's an expert on female psychology who juggles numerous mistresses and has a habit of hiding explosive charges here and there for possible future use!

Our convoluted story begins with Art, just days before the oxygen is going to run out, crossing the deserted city (everybody else is already hiding in the local shelter, but Art can wait to the last minute because he has built a secret personal entrance into the shelter) to visit one of his four mistresses.  He has to punch some sense into this chick because she has been defying him!  He assures us that he won't punch her too hard because he doesn't want to ruin her pretty face or curvy body!

It turns out that this mistress of Art's is working for the terrorist underground that opposes the transformation of humankind into flourine-breathers.  These rebels want Art to detonate the explosives he left in the local oxygen plant.  One of these supposed rebels is a double agent working for the government and Art soon goes from rebel hands into government custody. The government wants to know all about Art's secret entrances and hidden bombs, and to severely punish him for his various crimes, but maybe Art's skills at manipulation will help him escape justice!

I read "Don't Hold Your Breath" years ago when I borrowed 2003's Transfinite from the New York Public Library, but I didn't mind reading it again today--it's pretty good.  Art Atkin's narration--thanks to his quirky outdated slang ("I threw on some threads and ankled outside") as well as his abundant self-confidence and shocking amorality--is amusing.  In the Afterword to "Don't Hold Your Breath" van Vogt makes clear that he thinks the current concern over ecology is no more than faddish alarmism ("emotional madness") and opportunism ("The ecology scare, which extravagantly enriched a few writers....") and tells us he focused his story on Art Atkins instead of environmental destruction because he wanted his story to be timeless, not dated once the current pollution-obsession has been forgotten.

"All We Have On This Planet" (1974)          

In the intro to this piece van Vogt relates how, in the 1960s, a bunch of young SF writers appeared who thought SF should be "relevant" and reflect reality, and how the critics quickly jumped on this relevance bandwagon.  Since our man Van has been telling us that he writes "unreality stories" and thinks writing anti-pollution stories is a waste of time, we aren't surprised to hear that he was at odds with the newly revolutionized SF establishment, which declared van Vogt's work "kaput."  Van Vogt doesn't mention the names of any of those new writers here, but he singles out one of the critics, Algis Budrys.  Apparently, at some point Budrys declared he was leaving the SF field (members of the SF community are always quitting for a few years and then coming back) and one of the reasons he said he was doing so was that he found it frustrating that van Vogt still had a paying audience!

Van brags that, despite elite disapproval, his stories kept selling and getting reprinted.  Then he tells us that "All We Have On This Planet" proves that his success is no accident, because in it "I handle reality material of the inelegant type that has been so popular for so long in mainstream fiction and in 'relevant' science fiction."

"All We Have On This Planet" is a wacky satire in which van Vogt parodies literary writers and critics as people who think realistic fiction must include references to using the bathroom and having sex.  The main character of the six-page story is a novelist who craves the approval of others and produces suspense stories by tapping his subconscious via "automatic writing."  In the newspaper, which he sometimes reads while sitting on the toilet, he reads reviews of his own work (complaints that it doesn't reflect reality because it lacks references to bodily functions like going to the bathroom) and the latest news about the alien invasion.  He has two girlfriends, Sleekania, who is a psychic who can read his mind (and dislikes what she finds there) and Devestata, who is a military history buff.  Combining insights from these two women, the novelist calls his father, a brigadier-general at the Pentagon who can speak fourteen Asian languages, and tells him that the Earth space navy should attack the alien invaders every four hours, when they take an hour off to all go to the bathroom at the same time.  This advice saves the Earth.

I guess as a mocking imitation of experimental stories, "All We Have On This Planet" is sometimes written in the third person, sometimes in the first person, switching without warning.

This is a bizarre but memorable novelty, full of strange elements.  It first appeared in a British anthology edited by George Hay, Stopwatch, (according to van Vogt he was asked to contribute something "subversive") and would later be included in a French anthology with a very strange flesh and blood cover illustration by Chris Foss, famous in the SF world for his cold images of huge space ships and machinery (though also responsible for the drawings in the first edition of The Joy of Sex).

Introduction to "War of Nerves"

"War of Nerves" is one of the famous Space Beagle stories and I am already familiar with it and don't want to spend any time on it today, but the intro to the story is remarkable because in it van Vogt presents a kind of theory of science fiction.  Van Vogt brands mainstream literature and TV as "reality fiction," saying that most people like to read and watch TV about real life: "stories about hospitals, crime in the streets, personal tragedies, romantic and married love, etc."

Van Vogt tells us that his "brand of science fiction"--unreality fiction--is more challenging to the reader than reality fiction.

Each paragraph--sometimes each sentence--of my brand of science fiction has a gap in it, an unreality condition.  In order to make it real, the reader must add the missing parts.  He cannot do this out of his past associations.  There are no past associations.  So he must fill in the gaps from the creative part of his brain.  

Van Vogt argues that reading SF changes the readers brain for the better.

This is a fascinating and persuasive theory, and certainly seems to jive with the often confusing experience of reading van Vogt.  Case in point--the famous last line of The Weapon Makers (Malzberg quotes it in his intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt) includes a word van Vogt just made up and for which he provides very little context.  This also goes along with McLuhan's theory that distinguishes between hot media--that are direct and easy to understand--and cool media--which demand audience participation--though it sounds like here Van is saying his work is "cool," while earlier he implied his work is "hot."

At the same time, you can't deny that this theory appears a little self-serving, as it suggests that van Vot's notoriously opaque work is difficult by design, not incompetence or laziness, and that it is readers who don't "get" van Vogt who are in fact the lazy or dim ones!

"Future Perfect" (1973)

The fourth piece in The Best of A. E. van Vogt is "The Rull," a great story (Malzberg thinks it may be the best thing van Vogt ever wrote) I have read multiple times already and don't feel like reading again today.  The fifth is a lecture on general semantics, one of van Vogt's interests, which I don't feel like reading today, either. But the sixth piece is a story I've never read, "Future Perfect."  In his intro van Vogt promotes SF as a vehicle for philosophical reflection--the SF writer can extrapolate currently fashionable political ideas and depict what a future society in which the "half-baked schemes" of "bleeding hearts" have been made the "law of the land" might look like.

"Future Perfect" is one of those stories about a future society in which the government is running everything.  Over the course of the story we learn that when boys approach puberty their "sex performance capacity" is "placed under control" by drugs, and, when a young man marries one of the small number of women the government computer judges a suitable match, he gets an injection that allows him to have sex, and then a second injection that causes "hormonic alignment" so he can only have sex with his computer-approved wife.  To ease the adoption of this system, the government has also indoctrinated people with new standards of beauty, so that all women are considered beautiful.

(As van Vogt fans know, the Canadian mastermind studied communism in China in preparation for writing his mainstream novel The Violent Man--in the introduction to Future Glitter he brags that he "read and reread approximately 100 books on China and Communism."  Some of the government workers' dialogue in "Future Perfect" suggests van Vogt based this whole idea of controlling sex and marriage on some Chinese Communist Party policy he read about.)

In the economic realm, there is no cash--all transactions are done electronically and carefully tracked by government agents.  You aren't allowed to inherit any money or property from your parents, and when you reach your eighteenth birthday, the government puts a million dollars in an account for you, and any money you earn goes to paying down this debt.  (Most people never pay off the entire debt, but there is no punishment if you chip away at it every week.)

The hero of our story, eighteen-year-old Steven Dalkins, rebels against the system, getting famous by wasting his million dollars and then escaping the government medical facility after his "sex performance capacity" has been reactivated but before he has been conditioned to only have sex with his computer-suggested wife.  After his escape, in theory, he could have sex with any woman he likes!  In practice, he doesn't go on a seduction spree, but instead spends his time organizing a non-violent resistance movement (having thrown away his million, he lives off donations from his followers.)  Much of the story's text follows the conversations of government psychiatrists and bureaucrats as they observe Steven and try to figure out what to do about him; with the help of a computer they try to diagnose whether he is "alienated" or not.  The alienated are dealt with harshly, but since Steven doesn't appear to be alienated, the state can take little direct action against him, as his rebellious acts--the biggest of which is distributing chemicals that allow people to deactivate their "hormonic alignment" and thus choose their own sex partners--are not quite illegal. It also seems like some factions in the government are sympathetic to Steven or see his rebellion as advancing their own not clearly stated agendas.

In the end it turns out that Steven didn't actually want to overthrow the government--he simply wanted to marry a particular woman of his own choice, one the computer would not have accepted because she is his own age (the computer always matches up men with women who are a few years older, because men die earlier than women.)  He is not alienated, but many of his over 50,000 followers are, and some of them have been expressing their alienation through acts of greed and murder.  Steven helps the government round up the alienated (most are exiled to the space colonies, but the murderers, it is hinted, are executed) and it appears that the government will endure, though Steven has made inevitable major reforms of the government's control of sexuality.

Generally, SF writers construct these totalitarian government settings to point out that such government interventions are immoral or inefficient and cause psychological, spiritual or material misery.  In the end of the story it is clear that van Vogt thinks the government control of the people's erotic life has been damaging, having forced them to live lives bereft of love.  But van Vogt doesn't really denounce his future world's economic system, and in his afterword our man Van suggests that the most interesting part of the story is not the oppressive government, but the "alienated."  Taking shots at young people who don't realize how good life is in the 20th century United States compared to life in earlier times and in other countries, he asserts that a certain percentage of people are going to be alienated and rebel due to childhood trauma, regardless of what kind of government they live under: "...in any forseeable future we shall have the same percentage of alienated types as now."  This provocative mechanistic theory of rebellion reminds us again of Carl Hazzard's mechanistic psychological theories in "The Sound of Wild Laughter."

As is typical of van Vogt, this story is a puzzle you have to figure out, but it doesn't have any adventure or human relationship type elements to interest you emotionally--because the fact that the reason for Steven's rebellion is love for a woman his own age is kept as a surprise to the end, there is no opportunity to develop this relationship--this woman has no dialogue and we never even learn her name.  Another issue I had with this story, which may have something to do with the volume's editor and not the author at all, is that there is no indication of when a scene has ended and a new one has begun.  In most fiction there is a blank line or a bunch of asterisks or a transitional phrase ("Three hours later he was in the offices of the head of the department...") to signal that a new scene is beginning, but in "Future Perfect" Steven will be sitting in a room, dealing with a guy, and then he says or does something, we think with that first guy, only to realize a few lines later that it is some time later and Steven is in a totally different room with a totally different guy.  Disconcerting, but, bizarrely, it is disconcerting in a way that van Vogt's writing is always disconcerting, so one wonders if it is a printing error or an intentional van Vogt mind game.

I guess "Future Perfect" is acceptable; I can't say I'm enthusiastic about it.  There are no human relationships or wild images to make it entertaining or emotionally stimulating like we see in some of the work I have mentioned in this blog post like Future Glitter, The Weapon Makers or "The Sound of Wild Laughter."  "Future Perfect" was first published in the third of Vertex's sixteen issues and has since appeared in quite a few American and European collections and anthologies, including Jerry Pournelle's 2020 Vision and a French collection for which it was the title story.

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Reading the first half or so of The Best of A. E. van Vogt has provided some interesting insights into his thinking and career; I'll visit the second half of the volume in the future when I finally read the Silkie stories and reread the Clane and Supermind stories.

In our next episode we take a look at my latest acquisition of work by A. E. van Vogt's largely unrecognized soulmate, Barry Malzberg!