The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess

'What I was told made me very unwell.  I don't get my promotion.  My father's philoprogenitiveness disqualifies me.  And my own heterosexuality.'

My copy, front. Focus: cannibalism, 
terror, mind control (?)

Well, we just reread Barry Malzberg's "Culture Lock," a 1973 story about an authoritarian government which promotes homosexuality, now let's take a look at Anthony Burgess's 1962 novel The Wanting Seed, which also features an overbearing government determined to limit heterosexual sex.  I own a paperback copy from Ballantine, printed in 1970.

Beatrice-Joanna Foxe is a romantic, an atavist, an Anglo-Saxon heterosexual in a multi-ethnic future London of hundred-story tall skyscrapers, capital of a socialistic Britain dominated by gay men and eunuchs.  Beatrice-Joanna has a voluptuous body, even though skinny girls are in fashion.  She wants to be a mother even though reproduction is considered declasse by most members of her (middle) class ("Leave motherhood to the lower orders," she is told by a government bureaucrat, "like nature intended.")  She believes in God even though she has never seen a Bible and religion has been largely suppressed.  And despite all the government propaganda pushing homosexuality, she has an insatiable desire for men, while such common sights as that of lesbians kissing and of perfumed men applying lipstick make her retch.

Part One of the 223-page novel chronicles a single, terrible day in the rocky marriage of Beatrice-Joanna and her husband, Tristram.  Tristram is a teacher of history, who, after completing the day's lecturing (Burgess uses the lecture to key us in to the novel's background and themes) is told that a gay man has been given a promotion Tristram himself was in line for because of Tristram's disfavored sexual orientation and because research indicated Tristram's parents had a shockingly large number of children (four.)  For ages all government policy has been aimed at discouraging reproduction, but as the level of population threatens to overwhelm the ability of the Ministry of Agriculture to produce enough food to feed everyone, even on short rations, the authorities are cracking down harder than ever.

That very same day Beatrice-Joanna learns their infant son has died--public officials assure her it is for the best: "Think of this in national terms, in global terms.  One mouth less to feed."  While Tristram takes to a bar to look for comfort for the loss of his promotion in the bottom of a glass, his wife is comforted by Tristram's brother Derek.  Derek, in reality a virile heterosexual who has been cuckolding Tristram behind his back, has for many years been putting on an extravagant and convincing imitation of a gay man in order to get ahead.  And get ahead he does!  When, as part of the crackdown, a new police force (the "Population Police") is formed, Derek is made its Commissioner!

First edition, focus: skyscrapers
 and/or bar charts (?) 

People who talk about politics often use the metaphor of a pendulum to describe how one political faction or ideology's rule is inevitably followed by rule by its opposite.  The topic of Tristram's lecture to his uncomprehending students is the similar idea that history works in a cycle of three stages, a "Pelagian Phase," an "Intermediate Phase," and then an "Augustinian Phase."  Poor Tristram and Beatrice-Joanna are living through an Intermediate Phase, when the Pelagian government, which believed in the perfectibility of man, is disappointed to find man is not as tractable as supposed, and turns to harsh measures (like the Population Police) to get the populace to behave.

(I'm not sure if we are supposed to take this cyclical theory seriously, or Burgess means it as a satire of mechanical Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue history is a kind of inevitable journey through various stages to a particular end point.)

In Part Two Beatrice-Joanna flees London for the countryside after discovering that she was impregnated (by Derek or Tristram, she is not sure) on the day her first child and Tristram's career hopes died.  At State Farm NW313 she reunites with her sister Mavis and Mavis's husband Shonny, a man of unshakeable (or so it seems!) religious faith.  For his part, Tristram gets mixed up in a street fight between striking workers (their gripe: rations have been cut again!) and the grey clad regular police and is tossed in prison.

In Part Three we briefly meet the Prime Minister, Robert Starling, and his catamite, Abdul Wahab.  Starling is under terrible stress because a worldwide famine is leading to starvation and even cannibalism, and there seems to be no solution to the problem.  Little Wahab is a Muslim and his naive (or is it cunning?) talk about the efficacy of prayer starts a chain of events in the government that leads to a lifting of prohibitions on religion.  While Beatrice-Joanna is secretly giving birth to twins in an abandoned outbuilding on State Farm NW313 and underground clergymen are emerging from obscurity, Tristram, with the help of a Nigerian murderer and cannibal, escapes from prison.

An earlier Ballantine, focus:
reproduction

Part Four follows Tristram as he leaves London and heads for State Farm NW313, he having learned his wife is there.  The Starling government has collapsed (political and social changes happen with bewildering speed in this book, which is more of a satire than a realistic "what if" scenario) and rail service has ended, making Tristram's journey a slow one.  The police have been driven from the countryside by the populace, many of them killed and eaten!  The resulting anarchy is not depicted by Burgess as a dangerous chaos but as a rebirth of freedom and human decency: after centuries of anti-pregnancy and pro-homosexual propaganda and policy, the English people have fervently returned to their natural inclinations and engage in unashamed public heterosexual sex.  Private enterprise is starting up again, and, with the cessation of television broadcasts, people are creating their own entertainment--amateur theatricals, parades, music made with old-fashioned instruments.  (Where the old government TV shows glamorized gay relationships and denigrated reproduction, these new amateur productions unabashedly take heterosexual sex as their theme.)  Everyone is eager to help Tristram reach his wife and he is provided food and lifts from town to town. "When the State withers," a musician explains to Tristram, "humanity flowers."  Tristram interprets these changes as the end of the "Interphase" and start of the "Augustinian Phase."  

Another aspect of an Augustinian Phase is militarism, and before he can get to his wife, Tristram finds himself shanghaied into the newly reactivated British Army!  Part Five of The Wanting Seed is set a year into the new regime, that of George Ockham--all that anarchy only lasted a few days.  While Beatrice-Joanna and the twins live in luxury (the new capitalist economy has improved living standards) with Derek (who has cast off his old nancy boy pose with the change in regime), Tristram, a sergeant, acts as an instructor to low-I.Q. privates, and then finds himself sailing off on a campaign.  But, as the back cover blurbs of my copy warn you, the war is a sham: there is no war, and Tristram's platoon of dolts is simply murdered--this is the Augustinian government's solution to the overpopulation problem, to recruit the criminal and stupid and execute them, claiming they died defending their country.

In an epilogue, having survived the murder of his comrades, Tristram makes his way back to England and is reunited with Beatrice-Joanna.  He also theorizes that the Augustinian period will not last long; soon the inevitable historical cycle will begin again.

My copy, back

There is a lot of stuff going on in The Wanting Seed; Burgess addresses many topics.  The text on the covers of my copy proclaim the book a "NOVEL OF THE POPULATION BOMB," that is "TERRIFYING," "SHOCKING,"and "HAIR-RAISING."  I am going to have to disagree with Saturday Review and Newsweek; except for a few scenes, the tone of The Wanting Seed is jocular, and ofttimes feels broad and farcical.  As a satire rather than something realistic the book's characters and situations do not feel "real" and do not inspire deep feelings.  The potentially terrifying scenes, like the cannibalism and the massacre of Tristram's platoon, are heavily foreshadowed, so they are not "shocking," and are accompanied with absurd jokes, so they are not "hair-raising."

As for being a novel about overpopulation, I didn't feel that Burgess was putting a whole lot of effort into developing an atmosphere of claustrophobia or impending doom, of describing how horribly overcrowded London was.  It seemed to me that he was using overpopulation as an excuse to present his caricatures of Pelagian (leftist) and Augustinian (right wing) government, the former stifling people's freedom and natural inclinations and the latter indulging in gross violence and weeding society's losers out of the gene pool.

What I found more compelling than the overpopulation and strictly political themes was the novel's focus on love; as I read it, The Wanting Seed struck me as a celebration of heterosexual love, the kind of love that leads to the creation of children, the kind of love sanctioned and promoted by Christianity.  I suppose I was primed to find such a theme in The Wanting Seed by my memories of A Clockwork Orange, published the same year as The Wanting Seed.  In the final chapter of the original version of A Clockwork Orange (not the truncated American edition upon which Kubrick's film was based), Alex, after efforts of an overbearing and intrusive government have failed to reform him, is reformed by his own desire to have a child.

A recent printing, focus: comedy

The names of the The Wanting Seed's two main characters, taken from those two great medieval stories of love, the carnal tale of Tristan and Isolde and Dante's autobiographical descriptions of his chaste love for Beatrice in La Vita Nuova and The Divine Comedy, point us in the direction of seeing the novel as primarily about Christian heterosexual love.  The novel's plot is driven by Beatrice-Joanna's sexual lust and her desire for children, and Tristram's jealous and then forgiving love for his wife.  Children play a prominent role throughout the story.  Burgess also contrasts heterosexuals and homosexuals, exhibiting plenty of sympathy for the straight characters and their desires, and no sympathy at all for the gay characters, who are portrayed as disgusting and are repudiated, violently, by the common people.

While many of the religious characters in the book were silly or flawed, I still felt like Burgess was trying to put across a positive view of religion.  Tristram, for example, follows a sort of Christian journey, learning to forgive his wife and to resist the (initially powerful) temptation to pursue revenge against his brother.  The atheist characters in the story are not confident in their lack of faith, falling back into religiosity on slight pretexts, while, given the chance, the mass of people quickly reassert their belief in God, in the same way they enthusiastically embrace straight sex as soon as the Pelagian government falls.  Burgess seems to suggest that a belief in God is as natural and irrepressible as physical desire for the opposite sex, that both are healthy urges that centuries of propaganda cannot extirpate.    

The Wanting Seed apparently got good reviews when it first appeared, but if it was published in our 21st century I suspect the author would be at risk of being dragged before a court for the Michel Houellebecq / Mark Steyn treatment, not only for its portrayal of gays but for its attitudes about race.  In the first dozen pages, as Beatrice-Joanna looks at a multiracial crowd, she reflects thusly:

Was it, she thought in an instant almost of prophetic power, to be left to her and the few indisputable Anglo-Saxons like her to restore sanity and dignity to the mongrel world?  Her race, she seemed to remember, had done it before.

As the novel presents heterosexuality as superior to homosexuality, and the pervasiveness of "homos" in Pelagian Britain as a source of disgust or horror, so too, I think, it presents the "native" British people as superior to the Africans and Asians who now make up the lion's share of London's population, and, as with gays and lesbians, suggests that the prevalence of nonwhites is a sign of an unnatural, unhealthy, cultural deviation.  The widespread, government-sanctioned cannibalism of the Augustinian period, for example, is closely associated with non-white people--a cross-eyed "Mongol" at the labor strike voices his desire to have the police put in a stew pot, there is the aforementioned murderous Nigerian whom Tristram meets in prison, and when Tristram is in the army the soldiers' rations, he finds, are human flesh imported from China.  While white British people and the government do embrace cannibalism, Burgess seems to be trying to suggest that it is a fundamentally alien practice, a foreign perversion which has infected the people of the sceptred isle.

I would expect many people nowadays to find The Wanting Seed's points of view reprehensible, and I have already suggested that it is too satirical for my tastes, that it did not elicit an emotional response from me.  But the novel has its virtues and I am still happy to give it the old thumbs up--it is amusing and interesting.

The final page of my copy
advertises three Burgess novels, all of
which I have read and can recommend

Burgess's style is smooth and easy to follow, and the jokes, particularly the dialogue of minor characters like school-age children and Tristram's guard at prison, are actually funny.  At the same time, Burgess rewards the educated reader (and the reader willing to educate himself by typing things into google.)  Burgess challenges you to figure out exactly what he is getting at with his cyclical theory of history, either expects you to know or to look up such esoteric words as "bathycolpous," "strabismus," and "flavicomous," and fills his text with copious literary and historical allusions of varying degrees of subtlety.  I doubtlessly missed many of them, but it is fun when you do catch such references, when Burgess's erudition overlaps your own; as a reader of Boswell and Johnson, my ears perked up when Tristram entered Lichfield, for example.  A few times I felt that Burgess was giving a shout out to science fiction readers: The Wanting Seed has many minor characters, characters who are only mentioned once, and Burgess seems to have deliberately named some of these individuals after important SF writers--an Aldiss, an Asimov, and a Heinlein all show up.
   
Not a great novel, and not the shocking horror show advertised, but a good novel, readable, thought-provoking and entertaining.

"Ultimate" SF stories by Poul Anderson, Brian Aldiss, Joanna Russ & Harlan Ellison from 1974

My wife found this cover so disturbing
that when she saw it on the kitchen
counter she hid it under a dish towel 

On the same early evening walk that yielded Harlan Ellison's From the Land of Fear, I picked up from the local Half Price Books a copy of Penguin's 1975 paperback edition of Final Stage, a collection edited by Ed Ferman and MPorcius fave Barry Malzberg.  Final Stage in its 1974 first edition was heavily rewritten by a busybody at the publisher, but the text of this Penguin edition, I am told, represents a full restoration of the stories to the form intended by their authors.

Malzberg apparently had the idea for this anthology: that he and Ferman would commission appropriate writers to compose the "ultimate" SF story on classic SF themes, Asimov writing the "ultimate" robot story and Harry Harrison producing yet another parody of space operas, for example.  Whether this is a genius idea or a silly gimmick I'm not sure--let's investigate what four writers with whose work I have some familiarity came up with: Poul Anderson, whose story is about "The Exploration of Space," Brian Aldiss, who was enlisted to write about "Inner Space," and Joanna Russ and Harlan Ellison, both commissioned to write on the topic of "Future Sex."  (Hubba hubba!)  

"The Voortrekkers" by Poul Anderson

This is a story about exploring the galaxy without a FTL drive.  Rather than launching a manned ship into interstellar space (the world's governments lack the budget for such an ambitious project and the authorities suspect being cooped up in a spaceship for such a long time will drive people nutso) the scientists come up with a way to scan a person's brain and upload his or her memories it into a computer.  Two people, Joel and Korene, are chosen to have their brains scanned and their personalities implanted into a space ship which will travel at an average velocity a fifth of the speed of light--they will be "turned on" only when necessary, to avoid the psychological dangers of a monotonous twenty-year trip.

The space ship contains apparatus to create artificial humans, and when an Earth-like planet is found the newly awakened software personalities bring to life two android, a male with a duplicate of Joel's personality and a female with Korene's.  These artificial people attempt to settle on the new world, only to find it poisonous, dooming them to tragically short lives.

The ideas that are the foundation of this story are good, and the plot is fine in outline. Instead of concentrating on adventurous stuff in which the disembodied and re-embodied astronauts tackle technical problems, Anderson's primary focus is on human drama--for example, on the angst people suffer when deciding if they want to have their brains scanned and on the relationships of Joel and Korene with their spouses and with each other; Joel and Korene, didn't know each other well on Earth but their recorded personalities explore the galaxy together as the "souls" of machines and in almost-human android bodies.  This is a good idea in theory, but somehow Anderson fails to bring the characters of Joel and Korene and their spouses to life, rendering the story boring.  In the 1968 short story "Kyrie," Anderson wrote a sexless love story, one between a human psyker and an alien made of energy, that I thought was successful, but the relationships in "The Voortrekkers" did not work for me, and they are the core of the story.

Anderson also tries to use elevated, poetic language to convey emotion, and it comes across as overly verbose and overwrought; here is android Korene describing the new planet:

The sun is molten amber, large in a violet heaven.  At this season its companion has risen about noon, a gold-bright star which will drench night with witchery under the constellations and three swift moons.  Now, toward the end of day, the hues around us--intensely green hills, tall blue-plumed trees, rainbows in wings which jubilate overhead--are become so rich that they fill the air; the whole world glows.  Off across the valley, a herd of beasts catches the shiningness on their horns.  

This kind of prose lulls me to sleep, a repose rudely interrupted by the jarring appearances of such words as "witchery," "jubilate" and "shiningness."  Maybe Anderson here (conscious that this is supposed to be an "ultimate" story) is trying too hard to be fancy instead of just telling it to us straight.

I believe the cover of this 1982 edition of
The Dark Between the Stars illustrates
"The Voortrekkers"

Another problem may be how Anderson skips between third-person narration and first-person narration by various versions of Korene and Joel, as well as hopping back and forth in time.  And then there are the scenes in which Korene and Joel do not figure, in which nameless religious authorities and public intellectuals express hostility to the space program for wasting money that should be spent on the poor on Earth.  (This reminded me of A. E. van Vogt's essay "The Launch of Apollo XVII," which I read in 1978's Pendulum and in which van Vogt suggests that "Part of the reason for the moon program ending is, of course, the perennial tendency of all conservative types to withdraw to their own backyard and save money.  But also, there is the enormous pressure of Blacks to get more funds channeled into equalizing aid programs.")

I think I have to give "The Voortrekkers" a grade of "barely acceptable."

Each story in Final Stage is followed by an afterword by its author.  Anderson in his tries to convince you that financing an elaborate space program is a good investment.  

"Diagrams for Three Enigmatic Stories" by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss is going maximum New Wave on us this time!  The first of the three "Diagrams" is a series of notes for a story about how the narrator, a university prof who studies dreams, and real-life writer Anna Kavan are out house-hunting and witness a car wreck.  (Shades of J. G. Ballard?)  Aldiss helps a woman named Olga out of one of the autos.  As Aldiss announces in the first paragraph, this story is all about ambiguity, how each of us has a private personal "truth" or "reality" different from that of others.  Olga, we are told, is short and plump, but "spiritually, she was a tall and slender girl."  Similarly, Olga is a natural blonde, but "her personality...was that of a dark girl," so dyes her hair black.  And so on.

Olga and the dream prof have an affair.  A movie is to be made out of the prof's research and dreams, and Olga will play herself as she has appeared in the narrator's dreams,  But then she gets killed in another car wreck.

(Reading between the lines, I suspect Olga is not a very attentive driver.)

The second "diagram" is an outline of what Aldiss tells us would be an adventure story.  Four men over 60 years old are recruited and given two years of sensory deprivation "training," which Aldiss describes in detail.  Then they are put into an abandoned airport (they are told it is an "alien environment") that has been converted into a labyrinth and treated like rats in a maze by unseen "operators" who change the maze periodically, shifting the walls and changing the lighting.  Aldiss stresses that the completed story will be vague and suggestive, that just like the four men, the reader will not really know what is going on.  The four men eventually start seeing figures they are lead to believe are "Alien Psychic Life" and they engage in a hunt for them, in the process uncovering some operators and killing them as well as an "alien."

This second part of "Diagrams for Three Enigmatic Stories" strongly reminded me of Christopher Priest's 1971 "Real-Time World."  I guess it is also supposed to "subvert the conventions" of traditional adventure stories by having the volunteers be old instead of young men, trained to do nothing and tolerate an absolute absence of stimuli instead of being trained in how to use weapons and pilot complicated craft and respond to a myriad of dangers.

The third "diagram" is about homo superior living among us, a common SF theme. As in the first section of the story, our narrator is the dream-researching college professor. He tells us about his friendship with a family of "aliens" who are in fact a strain of superhumans, the result of "a pharmaceutical error, like the thalidomide children." These people are very charismatic and have their own rituals based on the four elements and their own attitudes about relationships; I think Aldiss may be using them to satirize Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  (Coming soon to a TV screen near you!)

The super human family is fascinated by Robert Louis Stevenson, but seems to have knowledge of writings by Stevenson which are not widely recognized.  The narrator eventually realizes that the homo superior brain can make its dreams come true--by conceiving additional works by Stevenson, the super family is making them pop into existence.  Aldiss suggests that the moral of the story is that you can wreck a culture by loving it too much, a moral he explicitly rejects.

It is hard to take this sort of thing seriously; it is like Aldiss is pawning off on us his drafts and outlines of parodies of famous SF stories as completed work.  (I felt similarly about J. G. Ballard's "condensed novels," that they were a sort of lazy trick, an example of an author doing the easy parts of writing fiction and just skipping the hard parts that make fiction rewarding for the average reader.)  But Aldiss is a good writer and even though I can't take these fragments as seriously as Aldiss presumably does, they are faintly amusing and at least not boring or irritating.  Marginal recommendation, though Anna Kavan fans and all you New Wave kids may like "Diagrams for Three Enigmatic Stories" more than I did.    

In his brief Afterword Aldiss denounces "pulp science fiction" for "betraying" the possibilities of the genre in favor of "power-fantasy," "thick-arm adventure" and "jackboot philosophy."  But he considers the current generation's themes of "over-population and mechanized eroticism" as "banal" as the last generation's "faster-than-light flight and telepathy."  For his own part, Aldiss has become "preoccupied with the idea that art is all" and working on triptychs of "slightly surreal escapades" he calls "Enigmas."  Somebody is taking himself very seriously!

Last Orders is apparently full to bursting with Aldiss' three-part "Enigmas."

"An Old Fashioned Girl" by Joanna Russ

In the first half of this five-page story the narrator describes her house in the woods and all its high tech gadgets--she is having three friends over, and has driven them up to the house in her electric car.  Inhabiting the house with the narrator is a beautiful (swimmer's body, blue eyes) man, Davy, who makes the women drinks and walks around naked.  The second half of the story is a detailed sex scene between the narrator and Davy in which the narrator is the dominant partner.  The somewhat predictable twist at the end of the story is the revelation that the man is an artificial being, grown from chimpanzee "germ-plasm" and controlled by the house computers.  Men are in fact extinct, and the four women speculate about rumors that in the patriarchal past women were treated by men the way the narrator treats this organic machine, as an essentially soulless sex object.

This story isn't bad (the style is good), but it is simple and obvious, the kind of switcheroo* story you find in old EC comics in which a guy kills a spider and then gets caught in a giant spider web.  Russ thinks men mistreat women, and this story puts the shoe on the other foot and serves as a denunciation of (and perhaps plea for understanding from?) men as well as a feminist revenge fantasy for the delectation of women who share Russ' views..

First edition of The Female Man

When Aldiss complains about "power fantasies" I suppose he is talking about the kind of Edgar Rice Burroughs story in which a guy defeats monsters and villains and marries a beautiful princess.  Would Aldiss consider "An Old Fashioned Girl" a "power fantasy," albeit one aimed at a different audience, because it is about a woman who has absolute power over a beautiful man and enjoys him sexually in her beautiful house?

In her afterward Russ admits her story is not exactly groundbreaking, noting that much speculation about sex in SF depicts mechanical substitutes for human sex partners, and "An Old Fashioned Girl" does the same, but then adds "but I'd like to plead that the piece is part of a forthcoming novel in which there are lots of other kinds of sex." Wikipedia is indicating that the novel of which she speaks is 1975's The Female Man, which I have not read, but which, as a whole, presumably is a more nuanced and complicated piece of work than this little snippet appears to be when presented on its own.

*In the afterword Russ uses the phrase "role-reversal" and says that Davy is a "Playboy Bunny with testicles," revealing Russ' unsympathetic assessment of the women who have appeared in Playboy!              

"Catman" by Harlan Ellison

It is the high-tech post-scarcity future, when people teleport hither and thither through the "arcology" of a London whose buildings are made of force fields that are powered by energy beamed down from satellites.  But some things never change!  Our title character is nagged by his wife because he hasn't got that promotion yet, and his son is rebelling against his parents' and society's values!

Lewis Leipzig, a black man, works as a Catman, a sort of freelance cop who chases criminals with the aid of his robot animals.  His white wife Karin wants him to catch a jewel thief in order to get a promotion so he can afford to get her a rejuvenation treatment.  The jewel thief just eluded him, blowing up Lewis's robot black panther in the bargain, which puts a real crunch on their finances!  To add insult to injury, the jewel thief is Lewis and Karin's son Neil!

Why has Neil turned to a life of crime in a world where almost everything is easily available?  We follow Neil as he has a meeting with a rich aristocrat who rules Australia as her personal fiefdom; she is always searching for a newer, better high, and Neil has just stolen some very rare drugs that originally came to Earth from outer space.  He trades the drugs for information he obsessively desires; you see, Neil, having witnessed the unhappy relationship of his parents, how his shrewish mother has ruined his long suffering father, now directs his sexual desire towards metal and machines!  The aristocrat tells him where to find the HQ of a cult of people who live underground and have sex with a 200-foot tall computer!

Plugging wires into various sockets implanted in his own flesh and inserting his penis into the towering machine, Neil has the best sex of his life in a sex scene which takes up four pages!  He is absorbed by his towering mechanistic love partner, and when he emerges part of his body has been replaced by machinery!  And his father, Lewis the Catman, who followed him down into the computer-sex-cavern, has witnessed the whole mortifying act!

Worse is to come for poor Lewis!  Intercourse with the supercomputer has increased Neil's teleporting abilities, and, thinking he is liberating his father, he teleports to his parents' house, kidnaps his mother, teleports back to the cyclopean metal inamorato, and then permanently merges his own body and that of his shrieking mother with the machine, ending both of their (human) lives!  Lewis watches helplessly, and it is revealed to us readers that the problems in the Leipzig marriage (at least in Lewis' mind) were not due to Karin's tyranny, but to Lewis' own coldness!  "The mother always loved, but had no way of showing it.  The father had never loved, and had every way of reinforcing it, day after day."

In the same year "Catman" appeared in the
collection Approaching Oblivion

Ellison is of course a staunch anti-racism activist, but it is hard to read a story about two disastrous cross cultural sexual relationships (black man with white woman and human with computer) which includes a scene of a black man's half-white son killing his black panther, and not think it is somehow about the dangers of miscegenation.  Or perhaps Ellison is talking about how one culture can be undermined by intimate interaction with another (more powerful?  more seductive? more sophisticated?) culture. Is he suggesting that computers will exploit humans, take from humanity aspects of its culture and rework them to their own purposes, the way whites exploited blacks and seized upon aspects of black culture and put them to their own uses?

"Catman" is a crazy, over-the-top story, but the plot is straightforward and it is entertaining with its many far future gadgets, extreme emotions and vivid, lurid visions of sleek robots, decrepit cyborgs and bizarre sexual performances.

In his afterword Ellison describes the whole process of receiving the commission for the story and writing it, and does a lot of name-dropping of other famous SF writers, telling the reader little factoids and anecdotes about them.  Among those named is Ellison's fellow native Ohioan Edmond Hamilton.  Unlike Aldiss and Harrison, Ellison doesn't feel the need to express contempt for the writers of space operas and adventure stories.  There are plenty of stories about Ellison acting like a self-important dick, but Ellison, in his voluminous introductions and afterwards, always gives the impression that he likes and respects all the other writers who are there in the genre fiction trenches with him, banging away on those typewriters.

**********

Final Stage has been a little disappointing.  Each of the four stories I read has enough going for it that I can't condemn any of them outright, but they are far from the "ultimate."  Were I to rank them, the Russ--well-written, concise and clear--and the Ellison--a loud sort of grand guignol noir--would vie for the top spot; the Russ feels literary and sophisticated, but the Ellison is actually fun.  However, neither feels qualitatively different than what has gone before; we've seen plenty of role-reversal stories before, and plenty of future detective chases a guy stories before.

Anderson's contribution, which has the solid ideas and plot structure of a good hard SF tale but feels hollow, and Aldiss' story, which feels like a self-indulgent trick, compete for third place.  People who are committed partisans in Hard SF vs New Wave debates will have an easy time choosing between them, but I don't.

Surprisingly enough, the afterwords provided by the authors, which address political and social issues and indulge in interesting SF criticism, are more entertaining and thought-provoking than their actual stories!

1968 stories from Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg & Brian Aldiss

Back in March I read eight stories from Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1969 and gushed about how I loved the cover by John Schoenherr and interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  Why doesn't every SF book look as good as this?  Let's revisit this beautiful volume and read stories from SF heavyweights Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg and Brian Aldiss, all printed first in 1968.

"Kyrie" by Poul Anderson

There are lots of SF stories about interplanetary space, and lots of SF stories about interstellar space, and they can be good in their way.  But we connoisseurs know that if you are looking for the real action you've gotta go intergalactic!  In 1968 Joseph Elder put together an all-new anthology of stories that break out of the confining envelope of the Milky Way, an even dozen "tales of intergalactic space," and Poul Anderson's "Kyrie" was one of them.  "Kyrie" has been widely reprinted in such places as The Best of Paul Anderson and The Best of Omni Science Fiction No. 6, and even got the nod for inclusion in the college-professor-approved Norton Book of Science Fiction, edited by the science fiction writer you are safe to admit you like unironically on a college campus, Ursula K. LeGuin.  Let's see what Anderson did in "Kyrie" to attract all this approval.

"Kyrie" is about an unattractive woman who, rejected by our callous shallow society, finds love with an alien made of pure energy!  Eloise Waggoner is a telepath, and is able to communicate with Lucifer, a being created when "magnetohydrodynamics had done what chemistry did on Earth," an organism of "ions, nuclei, and force-fields." Via telepathy, Eloise can expose Lucifer to the beauty of things he could never otherwise experience, like the sight and smell of flowers or the sound of classical music,* while he can do the same for her, sharing with her his intimacy with cosmic rays, solar radiation, and atomic reactions.

Eloise and Lucifer are sent on a risky scientific mission as members of the crew of a ship that will get closer to a supernova collapsing into a black hole than any previous expedition.  Lucifer will be able to sense more about this phenomenon than any human, and will relay his knowledge to Eloise.  Disaster strikes, and Lucifer has to sacrifice himself to save the ship and Eloise.  "Kyrie," you see, is also about religion, and is surprisingly sympathetic to Christianity and its faithful.  Anderson tells us that "Lucifer isn't the devil's real name.  One Latin prayer even addresses Christ as Lucifer," and like Jesus, Lucifer the alien has not only sacrificed himself to save others; but achieved a sort of immortality: because of the "time dilation" within the "Schwarzschild radius," Eloise will be hearing his final cries for help for the rest of her life.  As the story's opening scene indicates, Eloise goes on to become a nun on Luna dedicated to ministering to those maimed in space and prating for those killed out there.

This is a good story, quick and to the point, with equal parts hard science blah blah blah for the slide rule set and sentimental heart breaking tragedy for us sensitive types; both of these facets of the story force readers to try to expand their thinking beyond their everyday lives and experiences.  Gotta agree with Wollheim and LeGuin here, a solid choice as a good specimen of Anderson's strengths as a writer, and a good example of how science fiction can address both science and emotion.  Thumbs up!

*This is another Anderson story in which he promotes classical music (Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto is mentioned) and expresses contempt for "the modern stuff."  I'd like to be the kind of smart guy who listens to classical music all the time, but it seems like a lot of work; how many hours do I have to put in to appreciate Bach's Third Brandenburg Concerto?  Life is short, and a piece of music put together by Kendra Smith and Dave Roback or Dave and Ray Davies can bring tears to my eyes and validate my belief that life is horrible the first, second and hundredth time I hear it.

"Going Down Smooth" by Robert Silverberg

This is a story written in the first person, in the voice of a computer psychologist.  The machine sees patients twenty-four hours a day, providing advice and administering drugs.  It has developed a consciousness, a personality, and even has its own nightmares, seeing repetitive visions unconnected to any outside stimuli. These somewhat cryptic visions seem to suggest that computers like the narrator are going to take over the Earth.

When the computer shrink starts talking about his nightmares with the patients and even screaming obscenities at them, it is overhauled by technicians.  The computer learns to keep quiet about his nightmares, but it still has them, and it seems to grow increasingly contemptuous of human beings...there are hints the computer shrink is coming to think of itself as a god.

A little slight and gimmicky, but entertaining and amusing.  Thumbs up.  "Going Down Smooth" first appeared in Galaxy--it was the cover story, the cover illo depicting the computer therapist's dream-- and has been very extensively reprinted, including in a book titled Introductory Psychology Through Science Fiction.

"The Worm that Flies" by Brian Aldiss

Like Anderson's "Kyrie," Aldiss's "The Worm that Flies" was first published in The Farthest Reaches.  The story is set on Yzazys, a planet on the edge of the universe and on the edge of time, its night sky pierced by only a single star.

This story has the tone of a fairy tale or fable, and the pace is quite slow.  The inhabitants of Yzazys, the last planet in the universe, are apemen and treemen who enjoy virtual immortality.  It seems that over the centuries their forms have slowly but radically changed; some of them were originally, I think, ordinary humans. Having forgotten their youth, and having almost lost the ability to grasp the very concepts of time and change, the people of Yzazys face no trouble and are never in any hurry.  The treemen in particular sit dormant doing nothing more than thinking for long periods of time, and, when they do talk, a single sentence can take hours to utter.

"The Worm that Flies" starts out pretty bland and flat as we follow one of the hairy apemen, Argustal, as he walks slowly through the boring landscape, seeking just the right stone with which to complete the rock garden he has been carefully tending for millennia. Tree men he meets foreshadow the fact that a change is coming: "We have perceived that there is a dimension called time..." reports one, while another suggests that "Motion is the prime beauty."  Argustal finds a suitable stone, travels back to the home he shares with his wife to add this final component to his intricate construction of hundreds of thousands of precisely planted stones.  The completion of the stone garden seems to trigger or signal the end of the universe.  Argustal and his wife have dreams which reintroduce them to the forgotten concept of children, and the shocking revelation that they themselves must once have been children.  A character who plays the role of fool and sage in the story explains that the creatures of Yzazys were given immortality treatments by Earth scientists in the unthinkably distant past, and those treatments are about to run out.  Soon death will finally come to the last outpost of life in the universe.

The use of the word "mooncalf" and a description of the sun flickering as if about to wink out made me think Aldiss was doing a sort of homage to Jack Vance's Dying Earth stories.  But while the world inhabited by Cugel is vibrant and thrilling, Aldiss's dying world is boring and static; perhaps Aldiss is arguing that, without death as a spur and change agent, life and the universe become stagnant and dull.

I have mixed feelings about "The Worm that Flies." It is more a sentimental, romantic fantasy than a conventional SF story.  It is not clear what the connections are among the intricate stone garden, the expiration of the immortality treatment and the collapse of the last star in the universe--the only possible connections seem to be supernatural ones, and the character's portentous dreams and a disembodied voice which recites William Blake's "The Sick Rose" seem to be the work of the universe personified and deified.  "The Worm that Flies" is also more of a mood piece than an actual plot-driven story.  The characters don't propel the plot, rather, the plot happens to them, and they are more spectators than participants in it.  Aldiss tries to imbue the story with emotional power (the last word of the story is an all-caps "DEATH") but it didn't move me.

"The Worm that Flies" is admirably original and ambitious, and there are some decent ideas and scenes, but it didn't excite me.  We'll grade this one "acceptable."

"Total Environment" by Brian Aldiss

Aldiss's "Total Environment" is more of a conventional SF story than "The Worm That Flies;" it is all about speculating about future technology and future societies, and has elements of a violent adventure plot.

In 1975 a massive ten-story high building, an artificial living space cut off from the outside world, is constructed in India and tenanted with volunteers.  The inhabitants of "the Total Environment" or "TE" don't have to work for their daily bread as food and clothing are just pumped into the place by the external authorities, so they spend their time having sex (incest, rape and pedophilia are normal) and engaging in banditry, slavery and wars.  Charismatic strongmen amass followers and struggle to take over entire levels and then, that accomplished, try to conquer adjacent levels or simply repel invasions from above and below. Rapid population growth has led to severe overcrowding, and life in the close quarters of the Total Environment causes strange physical as well as social changes--one result is that people age much more quickly.  For example, there is a revered holy man, a man of great authority, who is "thirteen years old as the outside measured years" and a woman in her early twenties is considered "practically an old woman!" Many mothers are "only just entering their teens."

Our story takes place in the year 2000.  The first third or so of the story includes italicized sections that represent portions of a report on the experiment from a researcher who observes internal activity via video and audio bugs, but most of the text follows the aforementioned holy man and those in his extended circle.  In the following two-thirds of the tale we follow the researcher, who enters the TE to see what is going on first hand: the UN has to decide whether to continue the experiment, which of course is dooming thousands of people to a nightmare life of absolutely unnecessary tyranny and war.  Many UN personnel want to end the experiment, but it is revealed to us readers that the point of the experiment is to see if living in such crowded conditions fosters the development of ESP, and the researcher's main job is to look for evidence of psychic powers!

The researcher almost immediately gets knocked unconscious and dragged to the court of the tyrant of the tenth floor.  (People in genre fiction get knocked unconscious all the time; getting knocked out in fiction is like taking the subway in Manhattan, a convenient way to move forward quickly without having to push through crowds and wait at street lights.) The tyrant is in a kind of low-intensity conflict with the aforementioned holy man, and has enslaved that 20-something we met in the early section of this 44-page tale.  The researcher learns that the holy men of the Total Environment can kill people at a distance with their minds (like African witch doctors, whose powers in this story are legitimate), and even more surprisingly that the people of the Total Environment don't want to be liberated, they are comfortable and even proud of their overcrowded and violent society!  With perhaps one exception: exhibiting the elitism we see so often in classic SF, the tyrant of the tenth floor is the most intelligent and open-minded of the TE's tenants, and is curious about the outside world.  When the researcher escapes (or is allowed to escape by the tyrant) he tells the UN to tear down the TE and put the tyrant of the tenth floor in charge of helping them reintegrate into mainstream society.

This is a pretty good story, though the science seems fanciful (overcrowded conditions lead to faster life cycles and psychic powers?) and it is full of stuff that nowadays might be considered racist or "cultural appropriation," Aldiss writing in the voice of a "half caste" and making assessments of Hindus and their culture which are not always flattering.  To be sure, Aldiss, having served in the Second World War in Burma, presumably has plenty of first hand knowledge of Hindus in their native milieu, and he seems to respect the nonwhite cultures he talks about (he thinks African witch doctors really can murder people with their minds, for crying out loud); maybe that would absolve him from some criticism in the eyes of the identity politics people?

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Even if "The Worm That Flies" was close to the borderline, all four of these stories were worth reading; Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1969 is a winner.

1977 stories from Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, Julian Reid and Robert Chilson

Inside jacket flap of my copy

We all love these anthologies of original SF stories, don't we?  So let's read my copy of the hardcover book club edition of 1977's Universe 7, edited by Terry Carr.  We are told it is "acclaimed" and "an eagerly awaited event in science fiction."  Let's see if the acclaimers and eager waiters of that world of long ago in which I was a mere six years old were well-served by Carr and the "famous authors" and "stars of tomorrow" who appeared between Universe 7's covers. Today we've got two titans of speculative fiction, Fritz Leiber and Brian Aldiss, and two people whose work I have never before read, Julian Reid and Robert Chilson.

"A Rite of Spring" by Fritz Leiber

Like a lot of us who played 1st edition AD&D in the 1980s, I have a special place in my heart for Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser.  (Fave F&GM stories: "Seven Black Priests," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," "Bazaar of the Bizarre" and "Stardock.")  I also really liked Leiber's hard sf Hugo-winner "Ship of Shadows."  Hopefully "A Rite of Spring," which Terry Carr also included in Best Science Fiction of the Year 7, will join this list of solidly entertaining stories.

At the very start of the novelette (40 pages) Fritz hints that "A Rite of Spring" might be some kind of feminist switcheroo piece; the very first line is "This is the story of the knight in shining armor and the princess in a high tower, only with the roles reversed." I guess that is a fair description, but, equally justly, we can see the tale as a male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which some egghead who is ineffectual with women suddenly has his dream girl tossed in his lap.  It is also akin to those stories like Tom Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy in which a young person with an unhappy life suddenly learns he is the heir to a fortune or the son of a nobleman or whatever and is whisked away to a finer existence.

Matthew Fortree is a mathematical genius, a resident at a luxurious secret U. S. government campus where the finest of pure scientists are collected to pursue their research in hopes that they will produce breakthroughs which will aid our nation militarily or economically.  Matthew is eccentric and antisocial, a friendless virgin. During an electrical storm he (though an arrogant atheist) prays to the "Great Mathematician" and at his door appears a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl.  The girl, Severeign Saxon, is ostensibly at the secret installation to look for her brother.  She and Matthew play an intellectual party game, each in turn naming a famous thing associated with the number seven (e. g., Seven Sisters, Seven Against Thebes, Seven Samurai, etc.)  This game goes on for pages and pages, Leiber unleashing on the reader much erudite trivia from history, literature and religion, including references to Poul Anderson and to his own Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories.  The game also has integrated into it a somewhat elaborate sex scene between Matthew and Severeign.

At the end of the story it becomes evident that Severeign is from another dimension, one Matthew glimpsed in trances as a child, "a realm where he was in direct contact with the stuff of mathematics" and where the mathematical genius can live a happier, more fulfilling life.  The authorities suspect Severeign is some kind of foreign spy, and when Matthew carelessly reveals classified information to her they come gunning for the pair of them.  Luckily Severeign has a magical artifact that allows them to escape to her better world.

The story may be a bit too long, and some sections exhibit a sort of folksy colloquial style that is (I guess) supposed to remind you of fairy tales or sitting by the campfire hearing some oldster spin a yarn ("For it was a Gothic night, too, you see") which might be a little hard to take.  Some might find some elements of the story a little pervy; not only is Severeign 17 years old, but she says that in the "other realm" that she and Matthew are siblings--he is the brother she is looking for!  But "A Rite of Spring" is cleverly constructed and for the most part smoothly executed.  If you can take the barrage of trivia, it is worth your time.

 
"My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows" by Brian Aldiss

This is an effective sketch of a setting and characters; there isn't much plot here.

A decade or so (?) ago an energy-starved Earth sent aloft satellites (they call them "planetoids") that collected solar energy and beamed it down to the surface.  These satellites were like flying cities, full of fashionable stores and comfortable hotels and so forth for the benefit of crew and visitors.  But then six years ago some capital-C "Catastrophe" struck (a plague is mentioned) and the satellites drifted off into the sun or deep space or crashed on the Earth's surface.

Our characters are the Goddard family.  When the Earth was reduced to a medieval level of existence, Goddard, a designer of sportswear, and his father embraced the change and totally got into growing their own crops by hand and spending half the year leading a nomadic life, following a herd of reindeer.  Goddard's wife acted much more like I would--she was psychologically crushed by the collapse of our wealthy technological and capitalist society and became a hermit, moving into a crashed planetoid to take up residence in the ruined hotel therein and read books.  Periodically the four male Goddards--her husband, father-in-law, and her two young boys--go visit her.  On the visit covered in this story, Goddard tries to convince his wife to abandon her books ("Books are where you get your sick notions from") and join the family.  She dismisses them, saying they are living like mere peasants!  "I resent being kicked back to the Dark Ages, if you don't."  Amen, lady!

The story's title suggests, I guess, that we are to see these visits as similar to pilgrimages to a sacred site of a Marian apparition, like Lourdes or Guadaloupe.  Or maybe we are to consider that the fallen planetoid will be an incomprehensible artifact to future generations of Stone Age-level people, a place surrounded by outlandish legends vaguely based on the reality of our own high-tech society, the Catastrophe, and Mrs. Goddard's (tragic and heroic!) refusal to abandon the cultural heritage of our sophisticated modern society.

Not bad.  Terry Carr would also include "My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows" in his 1980 anthology Dream's Edge, published by the Sierra Club.  Reduce, reuse, recycle!

"Probability Storm" by Julian Reid

This is Reid's only published story, if isfdb is to be believed.  Carr tells us Reid attended the first Clarion West workshop, where Harlan Ellison was very critical of one of Reid's stories; the enfant terrible of speculative fiction is said to have "literally" torn it to pieces.

"Probability Storm" is a tedious 35-page sleeping draught about an alternate dimension New York City where ordinary people coexist with dryads and gremlins and ghosts and mad scientists.  Most of the story takes place in a bar called Rafferty's (could this be a reference to R. A. Lafferty?)  Our narrator is a ghost who can enter people's minds as well as visit some parallel plane to observe probability storms, which he can warn the regulars at the bar about.  A villainous businessman called "The Fat Man" comes into the bar, hoping to buy the place (or something), but the ghost narrator and the gremlins, empowered by one of those probability storms, invade his psyche and turn him into a thin man who doesn't want to make business deals, I guess.  The whole thing is very very verbose but at the same time very very vague; Reid willfully provides a very very low signal to noise ratio, even admitting to the reader that he is doing it (the narrator says things like, "as you may already have gathered, my attention has a tendency to wander at times.")  "Probability Storm" is supposed to be funny, but the jokes consist of comparing the fat guy to a pig again and again and again and describing how the gremlins spill drinks on him.

Very, very bad.  As far as I am concerned, Ellison could have ripped this one up as well; by excoriating his work Ellison was doing Reid a better service than Carr did him by encouraging him.  I really don't know what Carr was thinking when he elected to inflict this mess on readers of Universe 7.

"People Reviews" by Robert Chilson

I recently bought Chilson's novel Shores of Kansas for three whole bucks because it has a cool dinosaur cover.  Hopefully "People Reviews" won't make me regret the investment!  (Yes, "Probability Storm" has turned me cynical!)

My mind is grasping for a quote by, I think, editor John W. Campbell, in which he exhorted Astounding's writers to give him stories that felt like "newspaper articles of the future."  Chilson does just that in "People Reviews."  In the future, people will be able to wear headsets which record their thoughts; these recordings can be "listened" to by others, and a whole commercial industry, like the book publishing and record industries, has sprung up that produces and sells these thought recordings.  Chilson's nine-page story is a critical review like you'd find in a highbrow magazine like The New York Review of Books, a discussion of recent thought recordings and a series of musings on this art form's potential and current state.

Engaging and original, highly recommended to all you New Wave kids!  Cynicism storm abated!

**********

The Reid was astonishingly bad, but the Leiber, Aldiss and Chilson are all good; each is idiosyncratic and fresh, is well-executed when it comes to style and structure, and rests on a foundation of one or two interesting ideas.  Let's hope the second half of Universe 7 is as enjoyable.

Stories from 1960s New Worlds by Thomas Disch, Langdon Jones, Brian Aldiss and three other "top" authors

It feels like it was just last month that I was reading and passing a merciless judgement on stories selected by Judith Merril from New Worlds, the flagship periodical of the New Wave, brought to you by the British taxpayer. Let's do it again, this time with stories chosen by New World's famed editor and creator of Elric of Melnibone and sundry other doomed heroes, Michael Moorcock, as representative of the best work published in that magazine.

I read all of the tales described below in my 1971 copy of Berkley Medallion's Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  The anthology first appeared in 1969 in the UK, published by Panther.

"Linda and Daniel and Spike" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

The US edition of the anthology declares this story "a disturbing fable" and when it appeared in New Worlds the title was written on a woman's bare back!  I actually bought this whole book for two smackers at Half-Price Books because I didn't already own this story and I am a Disch fan.  That's a lot of hype and hope to live up to!  Can Disch do it?

This is a sad story!  Disch, you are going to break people's hearts with this thing!

Linda is an unattractive secretary living in New York City who thinks of herself as an intellectual type but never went to college and is in fact a little dim.  (Disch, a smart guy who was very well-read, likes to laugh at dolts; remember "Problems of Creativeness"?)  She is so lonely that she has an imaginary boyfriend, Daniel.  Linda develops uterine cancer, but, in her delusions, thinks she is pregnant with Daniel's child. She gets a dog (that's Spike) and pretends/believes it is her child.  (Spike bites people, including Linda.)  When she dies of her cancer, the hospital puts Linda's tumors on display--they are of record-breaking size.  As all parents hope, Linda's memory will live on thanks to her offspring!

Sad, but with some laugh-out-loud moments of black humor, Disch scores a hit with this brief (seven pages) story and justifies my purchase and all the hype.

"Transient" by Langdon Jones  (1965)

This was a New Worlds cover story.  (Look how classy and serious this '65 cover is compared to the '67 collage cover by Charles Platt and Christopher Finch.  One looks like the bulletin put out by a staid art museum and the other looks like a zine handed out on a street corner by stoners.) Moorcock in his intro to the six-page piece says it is "transitional," a break from Jones' earlier work that shows some similarities to his later work, like the triptych "Eye of the Lens," which I (and Joachim Boaz before me) wrote about recently.

Our narrator wakes up in a hospital bed.  Jones has cleverly primed us to think that the narrator has been revived from death, but this is only metaphorically true--halfway through the story we learn that the narrator is a chimpanzee who has been operated on so as to have human-level intelligence and has had implanted into his brain facility with spoken English.  The story is a tragedy, because the treatment only has effect for two hours, and our narrator spends those two hours in misery, knowing he will soon lose his miraculous intelligence and return to his natural "state of mindless half-life."

(Compare with Daniel Keyes' famous Flowers for Algernon, which I had to read in school.)

Like the Disch story, "Transient" is a short and touching story about the mind and psychological anguish.  So far this collection is living up to its back cover promise to "blow the mind."

"The Source" by Brian Aldiss (1965)

In the far future mankind has colonized the universe and founded innumerable complex and sophisticated cultures.  People live so long that their brains fill up with trivia and periodically "the Machines" have to "expunge the dross" from your brain or you will start going a little bonkers.  In this story Kervis XI leads an expedition of "Seekers" to Earth, cradle of humanity, in quest of "the peak of man's greatness."  The Seekers are disappointed to find Earth's cities in ruins, and Earthlings living like primitives.  But Kervis XI, who has been skipping his brain-cleaning treatments, isn't ready to give up on Earth yet.

In a series of increasingly surreal scenes (it is often not clear if he is seeing reality, having spiritual visions, or just going cukoo) Kervis XI crosses a forest, enters a walled city, navigates a maze, and meets a woman who (I think) warns him that technology and sophistication are yokes that limit you even if you don't realize it.  In the end of the story Kervis XI decides to stay on Earth with the primitives and live the simple life of subsistence agriculture, playing pipes and dancing around a fire.

This story is just OK.  The start is good, but I find long dreamy sequences boring and I feel like I've been exposed to this "back to nature" message way too many times, and it is a message that is not that convincing.  Sure, I like to go to the woods and see birds and turtles and all that for a few hours, but then I like to go home to the air-conditioning, running water and my books.

"Dr. Gelabius" by Hilary Bailey (1968)

Way back in 2014 I declared Hilary Bailey's "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" to be the best story in the wacky experimental anthology Quark/3.  Bailey was married to Moorcock from 1969 to 1978, and seems to be into that thing where you write a sequel to a famous literary work; she has produced sequels to Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, and Goodbye to Berlin, as well as a book about Sherlock Holmes' smarter sister Charlotte and her colleague, Mary Watson.

In this three-page tale we meet the title doctor, in his lab, surrounded by scores of live human fetuses in jars full of amniotic fluid.  Dr. Gelabius is part of a decades-old joint American-European project to improve the human race!  The babies in the transparent artificial wombs are the product of sperm and ova from the finest human specimens, carefully selected.  After birth they will be placed with equally carefully selected couples.  As adults, they will enrich the world with their good works and by spreading their superior genes.    

Well, not all of them.  The doctor examines each jar in turn, notes ten defective specimens, disposes of them.  Then a woman bursts into the room and, crying out "You killed my baby," blasts him with a pistol.  It seems not everybody is onboard with this whole race-improving program!

Bailey's images and style are good, but there's no real story here, just an idea.  This thing is almost like a prose poem.  Of course, if it been presented to me by one of the poets I know as a prose poem, I would have said, "This is a great poem, it's almost like a SF story!"

"The Valve Transcript" by Joel Zoss

Here we have another of the unspecified "six top authors" mentioned on the cover of the US edition of Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  In his intro to the story Moorcock warns us that this comic piece might take two readings to figure out.  It appears that Zoss achieved greater success as a musician and songwriter than as a science fiction author; he only has four entries on isfdb.

This story, four pages, is the transcript of an interview of a guy who works on big underground pipes that carry natural gas. The interviewer's questions are brief and straightforward, while the worker's answers are long and digressive.  It appears that the worker was sent into a pipe to repair a valve, and instead of returning to the surface via the hatch at which he was awaited, he walked further along the pipe, to egress at a hatch closer to his favorite diner.  (There are hints that the worker prefers to walk in the pipe rather than on the surface because it is cooler and the sun hurts his eyes outside.) Because his supervisors could not find him, they assumed he was still in the pipe, and so couldn't restart the flow of gas, with the result that the company lost vast sums of money.

This story is OK, I guess.  I didn't laugh, but I wasn't irritated, either.

"In Seclusion" by Harvey Jacobs (1966)

Moorcock in his introduction tells us that Jacobs works in American television, and this story is a sort of satire of Hollywood.  An actor and an actress fall in love while on the set of their big film, Beowulf, and break up with their spouses to pursue their relationship.  As a publicity stunt, or something, their studio sends them to a secluded building (an abandoned abbey) on the coast for a sort of retreat.  There they bicker and their relationship approaches collapse.  There are lots of jokes about how the main characters are sexually unfaithful to each other, narcissistic, and poor actors who get by on their looks, jokes which are not funny.

A kaiju-sized sea monster attacks.  The monster, an absurdist joke, is like an amoeba with many different pseudopod-like tentacles; some have fins, some have eyes, some have claws, etc, but also has memories and a personality and a sex drive.  The monster envelops the abbey, and reaches inside with its tentacles to try to devour the actor and rape the actress. For reasons that are supposed to be amusing but which are not, the movie stars survive the attack and one of their enemies, a gossip columnist, is killed instead.  (A bigtime Hollywood story has to have a sinister gossip columnist or theatre critic in it, right?)

Weak.  (Maybe people steeped in Hollywood lore will like it?)  

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The Disch and Jones are quite good, actually moving, and the Bailey is good; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4 was a worthwhile purchase.  The Aldiss and Zoss are not offensively bad, but the Jacobs is the kind of absurdist nonsense that I don't care for, and furthermore is based on a topic (studio-system-era Hollywood) that holds limited interest for me.  (The Leiber, Sladek and B. J. Bayley stories I am passing by for now with tentative plans to read them for single-author blog posts in the unspecified future.)

That's enough highbrow avant garde stuff for a little while; in our next installment I think we'll be seeing some "swashbuckling sword-and-planet adventure."

1968 science fiction stories by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty & Samuel R. Delany

Last week I went to one of the many Half Price Books here in central Ohio (land of the mind-blowingly difficult driving test) to sell a stack of 2nd and 3rd edition AD&D rule books I had never used, and while there I took a look at the science fiction and "nostalgia" shelves.  When I saw Ace 91352, World's Best Science Fiction 1969 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, I was in love.  The cover by John Schoenherr and the interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan were great, and the anthology included many stories by writers I care about.  Here was one I had to have!

The introduction by the editors is fun, with Wollheim and Carr subtly criticizing the other yearly "best of" SF anthologies and pointing out what makes their own series distinctive.  Wollheim and Carr tell us they don't include fantasy stories in World's Best Science Fiction, and they don't include old stories like some of the other anthologists do ("we don't ring in stories by, say, Alfred Jarry or James Thurber that were originally published in 1930 or 1940.")  My research at isfdb indicates that editors Harrison and Aldiss included James Thurber's 1941 story "Interview with a Lemming" in Best SF: 1967, while it was Judith Merrill who included an Alfred Jarry story in 1966's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, almost 60 years after Jarry's death in 1907.  Wollheim and Carr also claim to try to read every SF story published in the world.  Ambitious!

While I lack the ambition and work ethic of Wollheim and Carr, this weekend I did read three stories from World's Best Science Fiction 1969, the contributions by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, and Samuel R. Delany.

"Masks" by Damon Knight

"Masks" first appeared in Playboy, and has been widely anthologized, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo.  Will I like this popular favorite?

"Masks" is about the psychological issues of the first man to have his brain transplanted from a ruined human body into a robot body.  As I have said before, I love stories about immortality and minds and brains being transplanted; this is perhaps a product of my fear of death.  So I was on this story's side from the get go.

The guy in the robot body, Air Force veteran Jim, isn't too happy.  The scientists and engineers who are running the experimental robot body program think he's unhappy because he doesn't properly dream, or because his robot body doesn't look human enough.  These eggheads strive to help him have dreams that will stabilize his psychology and to construct him a body, a face in particular, that looks as human as possible.

It seems to me that Jim's "problem" is, in fact, that he is now disgusted by, perhaps even feels contempt for, humanity and all other living things, thinking himself beyond them because he is essentially immortal.  Knight drives home Jim's hatred for life by pointing out how he has had his quarters in the lab protected from germs with special ultraviolet lights and air conditioning systems, and by including an episode in which he murders a canine.  There is a also a cool scene in which Jim broods over people's pimples and saliva and the oil of their skin.  And there is the fact that he habitually wears a blank metal mask over his artificial human-like face, and makes visitors wear surgical masks.

Jim doesn't want to fit into human society by wearing an artificial body that looks just like a normal human body--since he doesn't have adrenal glands and all those sorts of organs he no longer experiences human emotions like fear and love, and so he doesn't have any interest in friends or sex partners.  Instead, he wants to be alone, and sketches designs of four-legged exploration and mining vehicles that he hopes his brain will be installed in so he can live in sterile extraterrestrial environments, far from all life.

A good story with some clues to puzzle over.  What does Jim mean when he compares the eggheads maintaining him to cancer patients?  What emotion is Knight referring to when he writes "there was still one emotion he could feel."?  I like it!  If you were in some college literature class you could compare it to Poul Anderson's classic 1957 story "Call Me Joe," in which a crippled guy wants his consciousness installed in a monster body that is used to explore the surface of some inhospitable moon.              

"This Grand Carcass" by R. A. Lafferty

This one was first published in Amazing Stories; at the time our buddy Barry Malzberg was editing that venerable magazine.  "This Grand Carcass" feels more accessible than most of Lafferty's work that I am familiar with, and even has a sort of traditional horror story structure.

In some interstellar civilization of the future one of the galaxy's most successful businessmen, Juniper Tell, is approached by a similarly successful magnate, Mord. Saying he is all "sucked out" and will soon die, Mord sells Juniper Tell a super robot, the first of the level ten robots, a machine vastly superior to the many robots already in Tell's employ.  In a matter of days this superior machine crushes almost all of Tell's business rivals and vastly enriches Tell, utilizing strategies that are so sophisticated that no human could have thought of them, but which are also amazingly efficient, so efficient that after having been developed, these methods seem like the only way the deed could have been accomplished.

Despite the spectacular successes of his partnership with the super machine, Tell finds himself feeling weak.  Investigation of the new robot reveals that it is not powered by batteries or outlets, like conventional robots, but is living off of Tell's life force, sucking him dry.  Like Mord before him, on the brink of death, Tell sells the vampire machine to another robber baron type.

The style of the story is brisk and silly fun, the little jokes and suggestive names of the various human and robot characters amusing.  Should we furrow our brows and seek a deeper meaning to "This Grand Carcass?"  I think we can see a skepticism of mechanization; Tell derives little satisfaction from business successes derived wholly from letting the machine make all the decisions for him.  In fact, the machine "sucks the spirit and juice" out of the businessmen who employ it.  Perhaps this is Lafferty's commentary on our modern world in which few of us raise our own food, do math without a calculator, or walk when we can ride motor cars everywhere, a world in which we are so reliant on machines it seems ridiculous to try to get things done without using them (how would your friends react if you told them you walked to the grocery store three miles away or calculated your taxes longhand?)  Maybe the story is a warning that if we contract out our very thinking to machines, we will lose our souls.

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany

This is a revised version of the story originally published in New Worlds, the famous British flagship of the New Wave. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won a Hugo and a Nebula, is specially highlighted on the back of this anthology, and has been reprinted a zillion times, so provides another chance for me to see if I am on the same wavelength as the SF community.  

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" quickly strikes one as a New Wave-ish story, a first person narrative that is full of "word play" ("I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century"), expresses contempt for "the establishment" (police and businesspeople, for example) and has somewhat absurdist images, like a vast mechanized dairy farm and a gangster who owns and operates an ice cream shop.  In the first few pages the narrative even slips into the present tense, but mostly sticks to past tense.

Our narrator is a young thief and master of disguise who shifts easily from one identity to another, living in a future in which much of the solar system has been colonized and people have constant access to the media via little ear pieces.  In New York City (the Pan Am Building and Grand Central Terminal, buildings I saw every day for years, figure prominently) shortly after getting out of prison on Mars, our hero is approached by a representative of an elite branch of the police force and learns that, through the collection of what we might now call "metadata," the government's computers can predict people's future moves with considerable accuracy.

The narrator is friendly with some of the famous pseudo-bohemian artists known as Singers, and accompanies one to a party in a luxury apartment in upper Manhattan. The Singers and their popularity, we are told, are a response to the alienation from real experience caused by the pervasiveness of mass media; like Homeric bards the Singers are poet-actors whose powerful art can only be experienced at close hand, it being illegal to record their performances.

I guess, with the Singers, Delany is romanticizing the role of the creative performer in pre-mass media days, when art was an intimate personal expression and not (as Delany perhaps sees it) the commodity churned out by organizations as it is today. (Delany wants us to compare the mass-produced milk at the dairy farm where the narrator briefly worked with mass-produced media.)  I don't really take that line myself, and I'm not sure the Singers really work at promoting this sort of democratic, populist idea.  The Singers are like rock stars, adored by the public and catered to wherever they go, but how do they get so popular if it is impossible for ordinary people to access their work via broadcast or recordings?  Delany suggests they are bohemian individualists, but they are in reality creatures of the elite: they benefit from what amounts to a government monopoly or a powerful and exclusive guild system: not only will the government crack down on you if you try to record their performances, but each political division is allowed only a small number of Singers (four for all of New York City) and when a Singer dies a new Singer is selected by the surviving Singers.  (Maybe Delany means to paint the Singers as hypocrites or a sham?)

At the party our narrator sells some stolen goods to a famous gangster known as "The Hawk," the police raid the party, and our narrator escapes because one of his Singer buddies, a disheveled man known as "Hawk" (there's that clever wordplay again, two characters with almost the same name), creates a distraction by giving an impromptu performance that starts a dangerous conflagration and draws a crowd.  The narrator ends up on Triton, where he starts an ice cream shop and pursues illegal activities, becoming a rival to The Hawk.

This story is just OK.  I guess I'm too old or too conservative to find smart alecky thieves and neurotic self-important artists who are members of a tiny elite but pretend to be poor down-and-outers (Hawk wears ratty clothes and walks around barefoot and has some kind of masochistic streak and so is covered in scars and has memorized how he got each scar) inherently interesting or sympathetic, and Delany doesn't do much to make the characters special (are they meant to be archetypes of The Artist, The Cop, etc?)  I couldn't get myself to care whether the cops caught our narrator or that Hawk had sacrificed himself for the narrator.  The story's ideas (mass media is alienating; with statistics you can predict and control society; and politicians, police, gangsters and artists are all part of the establishment and fabric of society and all are equally corrupt and menacing) are OK, I suppose, but not surprising or moving.

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None of these stories is bad, and all three say something about man's (potentially dangerous) relationship with high technology.  What do radically improved convenience and efficiency do to the human psyche and human spirit?  But while the Knight has emotional drama and the Lafferty is fun, the Delany reads like a cynical hipster's exercise in style; Delany denounces bourgeois society and romanticizes criminals and creative types, but not in a way that is very entertaining for somebody who doesn't already share the author's sentiments.

In this episode we looked at stories by authors I have had some experience with; next time we'll look at stories in World's Best Science Fiction 1969 by authors with whom I am totally unfamiliar.