Generation, Part 2: Anthony, Bunch, Bryant (w/ Sutherland & Harper) and Yarbro

Let's continue our exploration of Generation, a 1972 anthology of stories that were probably written in 1969, stories by people promoted as "the brightest talents of the new generation of science fiction masters."  Today we'll read stories by Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch, Ed Bryant (one each with James Sutherland and Jody Harper) and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

"Up Schist Crick" by Piers Anthony

In my teens I read lots of Piers Anthony novels--Xanth novels, the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, the Battle Circle series, the Chthon books, the Orn books, the Apprentice Adept series, and more--because there was a lot of sex in them.  They were practically pornography (at least to my naive mind) and in the pre-internet era pornography (for a teen-aged MPorcius, at least) was hard to find.

"Up Schist Crick" would later appear
in Anthonology

"Up Schist Crick" isn't providing me any reason to revise my view of Anthony as a guy who writes about sex.  Our hero is William Zether, a junior executive at a big manufacturing firm.  In the files Zether has found evidence that a branch of the company has been test marketing a new kind of material in a tiny secluded town, and that the company bigwigs have forgotten about it.  Zether goes to the little isolated town, thinking maybe he can somehow appropriate the invention and make himself rich.

Sure enough, in the little town he discovers everybody is using the new material, an unbreakable one-molecule-thick stretchable fabric which has a wide variety of applications.  The most provocative use is as a transparent one piece suit which keeps the wearer comfortable and safe.  Because the material is so very thin and absolutely impenetrable by liquids, women wearing it can have risk-free sex without any other sort of precaution.  This convenient form of birth control has lead to a culture of casual sex in the little town, a culture which Zether takes advantage of soon after his arrival.

There is a catch, however.  The woman Zether had sex with is very marriage-minded, and her guardian is ready to vigorously defend her honor, so the story's main plot thread concerns Zether's efforts to escape the area and the impending shotgun wedding, a real challenge because his car has broken down on the ill-maintained road leading to the town.  

Looking beyond the story's erotic aspect and its climactic scatological humor, "Up Schist Crick" has much in common with a traditional SF story in which a new piece of technology is proposed and the writer speculates on how it will affect society; there are many passages describing the material and its many uses.

Acceptable.

"The Lady was for Kroinking" by David R. Bunch

I've read a number of stories by Bunch and I haven't been very impressed by him, but here I am, reading him again.  Bunch stories are always short, at least.

"The Lady was for Kroinking" would
later appear in Future Pastimes

"The Lady was for Kroinking" takes place in the future, and is mostly a dialogue between two characters, a man and a woman.  The "point" of the story is that the pace of future life is such that it drives people to sadism. The go-go life of the future fills people with rage and hate, feelings which, if left unvented, will cause dangerous levels of insanity.  So, the people of the future regularly patronize "Enjoy-Your-Hate houses," which are kind of like brothels, but instead of prostitutes these establishments provide realistic rubber dummies for customers to torture. Most of the text of the story consists of the woman's detailed description of the elaborate tortures she inflicted on a particularly interesting dummy earlier in the day.  Sample detail: the dummy had installed in its artificial head real lambs' eyes, so when the torturer penetrated them with red hot rods she could smell burning flesh.  The punchline/twist ending (?) of the story is when the man and woman kiss each other goodbye; they bite each other's lips so hard they both bleed profusely.

At five pages this story isn't quite long enough to get tedious, and I can't help but admire its audacity and bizarreness.  So I think I can give it an acceptable grade.

"Beside Still Waters" by Ed Bryant and James Sutherland

I have read several stories by Bryant, and have a better opinion of Bryant than Bunch; while some of Bryant's more self-indulgent and experimental pieces have aroused my distaste, he has also produced some well-written and well-constructed stories which I have liked.

James Sutherland has only one novel and four short stories listed at isfdb; one of the four shorts was slated to appear in The Last Dangerous Visions and has thus never been published.  (Oh, Harlan....[shakes head sadly.])

"Beside Still Waters" is a silly sort of story, one of those things in which some mythological creature suddenly appears in 20th-century America.  Bryant and Sutherland play it for laughs rather than trying to evoke a sense of wonder or horror.

Sidney Bates lives in LA, a divorced father with custody of his kids who has trouble meeting his alimony payments to his ex-wife Edna.  (I remember from my childhood viewing of Johnny Carson that California divorce law was a rich mine for jokes in the '70s; wikipedia indicates that California was the first state to pass a no-fault divorce law, in 1969.)  Bates has a pool, and dangerous creatures (a shark, a giant frog, a crocodile, etc.) and weather phenomena (an iceberg, a waterspout) have been appearing in it.  He contacts a psychic detective, who figures out what is going on: the pool draws water from a spring guarded by a beautiful naiad.  The detective summons and opens negotiations with the naiad, and there is a happy ending for everybody: the psychic detective has an affair with the naiad and when the supernatural creature learns that Edna, not Sidney, had the pool installed, one of the naiad's monsters kills Edna when she comes to visit to nag about her alimony payments.

This story is OK.      

"Beside Still Waters" and "Nova Morning" only ever appeared in Generation

"Nova Morning" by Ed Bryant and Jody Harper

This is Harper's only credit at isfdb.  Gerrold tells us Harper is good-looking and worked as a go-go dancer in Beirut, Lebanon, in case you were wondering.  (As Karen at goodreads suggests in her review of Generation, Gerrold talks about the female authors represented in the anthology in a way that probably wouldn't fly today.)

This is one of those arty stories in which almost every line of prose includes a metaphor and in which the paragraphs of prose are separated by snatches of italicized verse.

It is the end of the world!  Almost everybody is dead!  But Lea, a young poet, is still alive, on a college campus in Manhattan.  She goes to an empty classroom and activates the recorded lecture on metaphysical poetry.  Then a young man with whom she has a relationship, for whom she has even written a poem, appears; he wants to have sex, and she is revolted by his blunt overtures.  ("Let's fuck.")  She reads him her poem and he calls it "rotten."

Lea resists the urge to go away with him ("It's incredible, what a wretchedly bad bargain we are together--even if there's no one else"), but then succumbs; after all, how should she expect people to act at the end of the world?  "It's the way it is now," he tells her.  "You got to take it like that."

This story is alright.

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Yarbro is a big success; she has published a huge stack (thirty or so) of those sexy vampire novels which (I assume) are mostly read by women, and she has won a bunch of big awards.  I didn't like her postapocalyptic novel False Dawn when I read it, but what do I know?  Gerrold tells us that this is the third story she ever sold--from little acorns!

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'"
was later included in Cautionary Tales

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'" is about how the impoverished citizens of a tiny isolated village (in some kind of mythical medieval or early modern land, I guess) amuse themselves and enliven their dreary lives by spreading rumors and engaging in absurd speculations.  A mentally ill homeless man spends his time reclining at the "sand pit" where the villagers throw their refuse, singing to himself and tracing designs in the sand. When the tax collector comes to town he chokes to death on a hunk of meat, and, because the madman was scribbling on a piece of paper with a bit of charcoal at the same moment, the villagers begin to think the insaniac is some kind of wizard or holy man, and begin visiting him, hoping to receive sage advice, even making him a crude crown and giving him a fine robe.  The fact that the madman ignores them does little to shake their faith.

This is essentially the whole story.  Merely acceptable.

**********

My reaction to all five of these stories was lukewarm; none of them is actually good, but none excited my resentment, either.  I can imagine people being offended by the Anthony and the Bryant/Sutherland for what they would call sexism (though whether we should admire or deplore the protagonist of the Anthony is left ambiguous, and he does suffer his comeuppance in the end, frustrated in all his designs and humiliated into the bargain); being shocked or sickened by the Bunch; being touched by the depiction of a sensitive woman being treated like a sex object by a brute in the Bryant/Harper piece; and finding the Yarbro piece amusing, but somehow I was not strongly affected by any of them.  Maybe I'm getting blase in my old age, maybe all the stories are successful on their own terms, all achieve what they want to achieve, but I am not really the audience for what they are doing.

More Generation in the future; I've decided to read a bunch of included stories by writers I've never heard of, always an interesting exercise.

**********

My copy of Generation has bound within it a page of full-color advertisements.  Alas, these ads are not for science fiction books.  On one side, the people at Schick exhort us to embrace the new and different, in particular their new single-edged razor.  On the other is an ad for a free book of advice for car buyers; seeing as the book is produced by the people at Ford Motor Company, I doubt it includes my own advice to car buyers, that they buy a Toyota.

Phthor by Piers Anthony

In my teens I read lots of Piers Anthony, largely because of all the sex.  Earlier this year I reread Chthon, and thought it an OK adventure story about a guy imprisoned in a mine and having to go on a long underground trek and fight weird creatures.  Last week I reread the sequel to Chthon, 1975's Phthor.

Phthor is the story of Arlo, a young man living alone with his parents in the tunnels and caverns of Chthon.  This subterranean world is inhabited by many dangerous creatures, but Arlo is in psychic rapport with the god of Chthon (a sort of "mineral" entity, hostile to all life) which can control all the monsters and protect Arlo; Arlo, it seems, is the "chosen one" of the god of Chthon.

As the novel opens Arlo is 16, and meets, for the first time, another young person, a girl who calls herself Ex.  Apparently, she has escaped from the prison section of Chthon. (Interstellar human civilization has abandoned the death penalty and sentences the worst criminals to life imprisonment in the caves of Chthon.) Arlo is fascinated by Ex, and rescues her from various dangers.  She is also the cause of a rift that develops between Arlo and the god Chthon - she is, in fact, a sort of advanced scout for an all-female commando team from the planet Minion that is about to land on Chthon and try to destroy the god - the mineral sentience, it turns out, will soon have the power to kill all life in the galaxy.

Anthony includes in Phthor some of the sexual/erotic elements that have made his work controversial.  He concocts situations in which sadism, masochism, incest, and sex involving minors is "natural" for some of the characters.  The women of the planet Minion, for example, are emotionally telepathic, but perceive emotions in reverse, so that if someone hates them, they perceive it as love and enjoy it, while if someone were to love them, they would feel pain.  These women are almost indestructible, and so can safely enjoy being beaten. A woman of Minion lives for centuries, always looking young and beautiful (of course), and when her husband dies, usually at around fifty, she takes her son as her next husband.   

To what extent Anthony includes this sort of thing in his book to explore a bizarre alien society, to shock the bourgeois attitudes of the reader, and/or to appeal to people with unconventional sexual appetites, I cannot say.  Anthony presents the incestuous desires of many of the book's characters as a direct challenge to traditional mores; Arlo, who has never left Chthon's caverns, learned to read from a compendium of pre-space age Earth literature, and we are reminded more than once of the incest taboos he learned from this compendium.  Most of the human characters in the book are forced to choose whether to violate or honor these taboos.

Arlo's mother tells her son that "There is no right and wrong, objectively," and perhaps this is Anthony talking; Anthony certainly argues that in the war between Chthon and Life (and implicitly in any war) neither side is fully Good or Evil.  Perhaps Phthor is meant to be a refutation of most or all ideas of morality, of Good and Evil.  Anthony does seem to be using the novel to argue in favor of compromise and against war, and maybe he would claim he rests his argument on practicality, not morality.

Phthor also includes many references to Norse mythology, and showcases Anthony's interest in coming up with alien life forms with novel means of reproduction.  The first half, in which Anthony introduces his strange setting and concepts is interesting, but the second half, with boring action scenes and a lot of dialogue as the mineral sentience Chthon and the alliance of Life both try to get Arlo to join their side in the war, drags a bit.  I have to admit, the very end, when we don't know which side will win or if instead Arlo can negotiate a mutual peace, had me guessing.

I guess I'm giving Phthor a marginal recommendation.  My life would be easier if everything I read was as obviously laudable as Gene Wolfe's Pandora by Holly Hollander or Tanith Lee's short stories, or as blatantly irritating as Judith Merrill's Tommorow People and Algis Budrys's Rogue Moon, but much of the fiction I read falls on the vague borderline between "acceptable" and "unacceptable."

I read the Berkley paperback, from 1982.  The cover painting is by Clyde Caldwell.  Through the 1980s my brother and I played lots of RPGs, mostly Basic/Expert D&D, 1st ed AD&D, and Star Frontiers, and we had a subscription to Dragon magazine.  Caldwell was one of the artists who did work for TSR, and so we saw many of his illustrations.  Caldwell always seemed to include in his depictions huge translucent gems, whether or not they were appropriate, and so my brother and I called him "The Gemster" and felt like art connoisseurs because we could always identify a specimen of his art.

Proscription List #2: Silverberg, Fast, Anthony

To help defray the expense of the Lafferty and Van Vogt books I recently purchased, and to make space on my book shelves, I have decided to sell eight SF paperbacks which I have read and am not in love with.  I had decent notes on the last four I blogged about, but the notes about today’s four were lost in a computer hard drive related disaster.  (Always back up your files, kids.)  Still, I think I can dredge up something from the old gray matter to say about each of them.

Lord Valentine’s Castle by Robert Silverberg

Like everybody, I like Robert Silverberg; he is one of the heroes of SF, from his fiction to his valuable work as an editor to his interesting descriptions of life as a professional writer to be found in the recent collections of his SF short stories and elsewhere.  But in his prolific career he has written many types of books and tried various different styles, and they aren’t all to my taste.

Lord Valentine’s Castle was a big seller for Silverberg and has been followed by many profitable sequels, but it didn’t move me.  It seems like an homage to Jack Vance; as in various Vance novels, a guy loses and must recover his memory, a guy has a picaresque adventure on a huge planet with many different cultures on it, a guy sparks a revolution.  Unfortunately, Silverberg (in this book at least) fails toi provide much of what makes those Vance books enjoyable: a charming writing style, an interesting point of view, some laughs, and/or a wacky or otherwise interesting character.  Also, Vance’s books are pretty economical; Lord Valentine’s Castle seems to go on forever, and there is never any kind of twist or surprise.  Silverberg also does his thing in which a character achieves an altered state of consciousness and so Silverberg can write a surreal dream-like scene; this is the characteristic of Silverberg’s writing I like least.  In The World Inside he did it at a rock concert, in Shadrach in the Furnace he did it in a drug den, and in Lord Valentine’s Castle the guy goes into an altered state of consciousness while juggling.  These scenes always make my eyes glaze over.

I know a lot of SF fans really enjoyed Lord Valentine’s Castle, and I really wanted to enjoy it myself, but I just couldn’t do it.  Borderline thumbs down.   

Conquerors From the Darkness by Robert Silverberg

This one I remember very little about.  It was not offensively bad, but mediocre; I guess I would give it a weak recommendation.  As I recall, the Earth is ruled by aliens who have raised the seas so almost all of the planet is covered with water.  The main character brings together an army of humans and dolphin people to overthrow the aliens.   

The Secrets of Synchronicity by Jonathan Fast

I bought this one because the back cover blurb claims this book is strongly reminiscent of Heinlein’s work.  I am a sucker for advertising.  This book is a satire on our Western materialist society (I think), and strongly influenced by Vedic mythology (so it says).  The protagonist starts out enslaved in a mine.  Is it just me, or do lots of people in SF get enslaved in mines?  Thank God they always seem to escape.  I enjoyed this book, and thought Fast’s writing style pretty good, but once was enough, so it’s back to Half Price Books for this one.

I have actually found a few lines of notes I penned on Secrets of Synchronicity:

This is a decent adventure story, about a guy living in a corrupt, decadent and perverse society in an interstellar empire, who escapes slavery, participates in a safari, becomes spiritually enlightened, and becomes the leader of a prophesied rebel movement.  As it goes on Fast layers on the satire thicker and thicker, and the book becomes more and more outlandish and silly.

Fast’s author bio on the last page is also interesting: he was a child prodigy, spends several hours a day practicing yoga, and longs for a cogent universe.  Sounds good.

People interested in SF work that is influenced by non-Western religions in particular will want to check out Secrets of Synchronicity, but it’s a worthwhile read for the rest of us as well.

Chaining the Lady by Piers Anthony

I read a ton of Piers Anthony in my youth, but this is one I never got to until recently, when, in my 40s, I got curious about Anthony again.  Chaining the Lady, a space opera full of stuff about the Tarot (which I admit is ridiculous) isn’t bad, but it is way too long.  Each of several different alien races gets an adventure, but these adventures parallel each other, and so get a little repetitious.  There’s a lot of shape-shifting psychic jazz going on as the main character infiltrates the various alien races’ ships and then uses aspects of their biology and culture to get them to side with the good guys in the intergalactic war, or something.  Two hundred pages of this would have been good, 340 pages is too much.  One or two fewer alien races would have been a good idea, but the number of races is probably related somehow to the Tarot, so maybe Anthony was stuck.

 

The back cover blurb suggests that the book is going to be full of kinky sex, but I don’t remember any erotic sex scenes, though there is a lot about alien reproduction.  Stick with Anais Nin for the kinky sex, people.    

I can't decide if I should give this one a borderline thumbs up or a thumbs down.  It's teetering on that edge.