Science Fiction and Fantasy from Playboy: Pohl, Sturgeon, Davidson and Ballard

Here's our third (and final) installment of our exploration of 1966's The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy.  Today's stories are all by authors about whose work I have mixed feelings, or, as I like to put it, authors whose work is uneven.  If pressed, I will admit my mixed feelings for some of these authors may be partly a result of my skepticism or hostility to their politics or philosophies.

"The Fiend" by Frederik Pohl (1964)

It has been years since I read any fiction by Frederik Pohl, largely because I read Drunkard's Walk in 2011 and it pushed all my buttons (and I don't mean the good buttons that LeRoy Neiman's male fantasy "the femlin" is trying to push) though I have read lots of stories from books or magazines he edited over the course of this blog's life.  In my youth I read many of Pohl's novels, though the only ones I really remember are the Heechee books (I love the first, the Hugo- and Nebula-winning Gateway) and Man Plus.  It is an odd feeling to look at the covers of Jem, Starburst, Black Star Rising, and The World at the End of Time on isfdb and vividly recall having library copies of them in my New Jersey bedroom and even carrying them around to Nana's house or high school (the feel of the protective plastic jackets on library hardcovers, and the annoying sounds they made, is very distinctive in my mind) and not recall anything about their contents.  Why do I read all these books if I don't remember anything about them?  Am I throwing my life away?

Let's put aside nostalgia and angst and read one of the two stories by Pohl that Ray Russell, anonymous editor of The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy, selected for inclusion, "The Fiend."  (I read the other one, "Punch," back in 2014.) 

I am happy to report that, to my tastes, "The Fiend" is a perfect little classic SF story.  It's about a space voyage, which is nice, because I'm getting a little tired of oppressive dystopias and post-apocalyptic scenarios.  "The Fiend" is also a bunch of speculations about the technology and society of the future, and develops characters and human drama.  And it has a surprise ending which works, because it makes sense and is foreshadowed but still came as a surprise.  The story is also "edgy" because of its hints of sexual mistreatment of a teenage girl and its not exactly flattering depiction of homosexuality.

A space ship carrying hundreds of frozen colonists is crossing the void!  A 16-year-old girl is unfrozen while the ship is only like halfway to its destination.  Angrily, she jumps out of the freezing capsule and starts yelling; she has been warned that the captains of these ships, who pilot them all alone for decades, will sometimes break the rules and unfreeze colonists for sex or companionship.  We readers, of course, expect the captain to rape her or seduce her or something of the kind, but he only watches her, and as the story unfolds we learn why: 1) he is a repressed homosexual and all his life he has dreamed of enslaving women--not to have sex with them, but to treat them as dolls, to, through them, vicariously live a life as a woman!  2) he is a disembodied brain, integrated with the ship and tasked with managing it as punishment for some crime!

Pohl does a fine job in only seven pages of constructing a compelling milieu and fascinating characters and setting up and detonating a surprise for the reader.  Very good.  Five out of five disembodied brains!

"The Nail and the Oracle" by Theodore Sturgeon (1965)

I like a good proportion of Sturgeon's work and think he is an interesting writer, though sometimes his elitist and collectivist attitudes, and the more tedious of his utopias, can get on my nerves.  "The Nail and the Oracle" doesn't have those problems, but is a little oblique and I found it a little hard to understand at first, and then when I did (I think) decipher it I was disappointed that it was, in the end, a kind of pun story aspiring to portentousness.

It is the future of 1970, and our setting is the Pentagon.  The supercomputer called ORACLE that helps guide so many Defense Department decisions is on the fritz, and our protagonist is Jones, the head of the team sent by the manufacturer to repair it.  The way this computer works is that you type out a question on a typewriter and then hold the paper in front of a camera so the 'puter can read it.  ORACLE has read a vast quantity of books and periodicals in many languages in just this fashion ("It's the greatest repository of human thought and thought-directed action the world has ever known") and it uses this base of knowledge to answer your question.

Anyway, our hero and his all-star team of nerds overhaul and test the computer and it seems to be working just fine.  But three very important men who have very important questions for ORACLE report that the machine still refuses to answer their queries.  These men are an admiral, a colonel and a famous and influential adviser who sits on the Presidential Cabinet; Sturgeon doesn't name them, but I thought of them as caricatures or amalgamations of people like Douglas MacArthur and Henry Kissinger, people of great influence and stature with supporters among both the elite and the general public.  It seems likely Sturgeon had specific people in mind, but I'm just not familiar enough with the world of 1965, the world of six years before my birth, to be able to puzzle out who.

Jones tells the three titans that maybe he can fix the computer if they tell him their questions.  They are reluctant to do so, but eventually they each individually and privately reveal their queries to the computer man.  Both military men have been asking a question that reveals they are considering murdering the President or somebody else in order to take power themselves, while the civilian adviser wants to know if throwing his support behind a radical demagogue who advocates disarmament and isolationism will ensure peace.  One of the things I found confusing about the story is the fact that the servicemen would admit to Jones their illegal and prima facie immoral plans--aren't they afraid Jones will immediately expose them to the FBI or White House?  Sturgeon seems to suggest that the admiral and/or the colonel sincerely love the United States and are only contemplating such extreme measures because they think only they can save the country from disaster, and are willing to risk their careers to make sure the essential computer is working.  Anyway, Jones asks ORACLE how to convince the admiral and colonel to refrain from launching their coups and how to convince the adviser to refrain from lending his support to the demagogue, and then follows the machine's advice, saving the USA from domestic strife.

But why didn't the computer answer the three questions when the admiral, colonel and cabinet member presented them?  Jones realizes that the field of view of ORACLE's camera takes in not only the papers people show it, but the wall beyond.  On the wall is a sign bearing the single word "THINK."  Such signs, apparently, were common in IBM offices for decades, "THINK" being a sort of IBM slogan.  It looks like Sturgeon's surprise ending is that the computer was following this exhortation to think as if it were one of its instructions, and couldn't answer the three questions because the result of the admiral, colonel or demagogue taking over the USA was unthinkable.

Image from ebay

This story feels kind of contrived and the ending is a bit of a letdown, and I even think it could have been structured a little better to explain the motivations of the three questioners and the demagogue.  Sturgeon doesn't set a tone of urgency in the beginning of the story, so the revelation that the three bigwigs are all considering such radical expedients seems to come out of left field, as sports fans say.  A few lines about riots or impending war in Europe or something in the beginning of the story, and a mention of the demagogue (who isn't brought up until the middle of the story) would have made the story more effective, in my opinion?  It feels like maybe Sturgeon is relying on the reader's knowledge of current events to set the tone, in the same way he seems to assume we all know about THINK signs, but this doesn't necessarily work on those of us reading the story fifty years later.

I'll call it acceptable.     

"The Sensible Man" by Avram Davidson (1959)

I read Davidson's Mutiny in Space and Rork! years ago and just kind of shrugged.  During this blog's life I have read a couple Davidson stories, including "The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street" which I denounced as "horrible," and "The Sources of the Nile" which I judged "not bad."  I'm kind of planning to read the magazine version of Ursus of Ultima Thule as part of my exploration of Ted White's Fantastic, but I haven't gotten to it yet.  Anyway, "The Sensible Man" has a chance to really change my opinion of Avram Davidson, which is not yet fully formed.

An American scientist, an important member of the team developing the USA's first spacecraft, murders one of his fellow scientists and defects to the Soviet Union!  When the commies ask him if he is a sincere Leninist he tells them he is a practical, sensible man, that he is joining the socialist East because he thinks they have pulled ahead of the democratic West and he wants to be on the winning side!  The traitor is given all the resources he needs to develop the first manned spacecraft, a tiny satellite.  He succeeds, but the bolshies don't trust him.  When the Soviets build the satellite from his designs they leave out any means of the craft--and its one-man crew--returning safely to Earth; the Yankee traitor himself is impressed into service as this one-man crew and blasts off on a one-way trip into orbit!  The satellite will be his grave, and if he wants to prolong his existence a remote-controlled IV will provide him sustenance every time he radios a useful report on conditions up in space back to Moscow.

This is a very short story, but it is solid.  I not only appreciate its dim view of the USSR and of treachery, but also like a little noirish touch Davidson (who won an Edgar award for his work writing mystery stories as well a Hugo and a World Fantasy Award) includes: the traitor's final resting place in his satellite/tomb is much like that of his colleague whom he murdered and then put in the trunk of his car, which now lies at the bottom of a lake.

I like it!

"Souvenir" by J. G. Ballard (1964)

I thought Ballard's novel The Drowned World was too long and tedious and its basic conceit silly, and things like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" a gimmicky waste of time, but I liked "Billenium" quite a lot and thought "The Garden of Time" to be very thought-provoking.  ("You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" gave me a chance to put my favorite photo of Norma Jean Mortenson on the blog.)  My reactions to Ballard are all over the place, so let's see what happens with this one.

I really thought that all the stories in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy first appeared in Playboy, but it seems that "Souvenir" first was published in the collection The Terminal Beach under the title "The Drowned Giant," in 1964.  I guess the appearance in Playboy was the tale's first US appearance.

Our narrator in "Souvenir" is a member of a team conducting research at a library when a dead giant's carcass washes up on a nearby pebbly beach.  He goes to look at the titanic corpse, and returns to the scene over several days, witnessing people's reaction to the tremendous carcass, its decay and dismembered by the locals until only a few monstrous bones remain. 

When I read "Garden of Time" I thought it was about the inability of modern people to appreciate the finest achievements of our civilization, their actual propensity to wreck such things, that Ballard was lamenting that in our age, the age of democracy, capitalism and socialism in which the common man calls the tune, high culture was dying.  I think we see the same theme in "Souvenir" as well.   Ballard repeatedly likens the dead giant to a Greek sculpture, in particular a Roman copy of a Praxiteles, and to an heroic Argonaut or one of the fallen warriors about whom Homer sang, while parts of the giant's body are often metaphorically labelled after elements of classical architecture, columns and the like.  The dead giant is (or was) something beautiful and noble, a bigger and better version of ourselves, but the common people show it no respect--they climb over it like "flies" and perch on it like a "flock of gulls" on a big dead fish; children play games on it, marking it with their dirty footprints.  In the middle of the process of decay someone builds a sand castle on the giant's chest (like a medieval fortification built on ancient Roman foundations?) and late in the process business enterprises ("a fertilizer company and a cattle-food manufacturer") cart away pieces of the giant in pursuit of profit; we later learn that people are using some of the giant's bones as architectural elements, as medievals might use stone blocks from classical ruins to build their own homes, and that parts of the giant's body are attractions at circuses and museums, like ancient art and artifacts.  Months later, when the giant's carcass has been taken apart and almost totally consumed, people have largely forgotten the giant ever existed, in the way most people know nothing of the West's classical heritage.

Another theme of "Souvenir," I believe, is our inability to really understand the world around us.  The narrator is, apparently, some kind of professional researcher, a person whose job is to figure things out, to acquire knowledge, but he is consistently deceived or befuddled by the giant.  The corpse looks no bigger than "a basking shark" when he first sees it from a distance, but when he gets closer he realizes it is the size of "the largest sperm whale."  In one scene he looks at the giant's palm in hopes of learning about his character via the lines, but this is impossible because of "the distention of the tissues."  Of course, palm reading is a scam under any circumstances--perhaps Ballard is hinting that the methods of respectable intellectuals are no more reliable than those of mercenary and mendacious soothsayers in trying to comprehend the world around us.  Scientists come to look at the corpse but we learn nothing of their conclusions.

A good story of the ruminative, surreal (the event is obviously very surreal, but Ballard writes about it in a very realistic, matter-of-fact manner) type.

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Nowadays our popular culture is suffused with sex and professionally photographed color pictures of topless women are trivially easy to come by, but this wasn't really the case in 1953 when Playboy debuted, and I think many of Playboy's fans and detractors would argue that Hugh Hefner's magazine played a major role in propelling America down the road to today's more open attitude about sex in general and in the media in particular.  Ray Russell similarly tries to put over the idea that Playboy revolutionized the SF world, giving SF writers more money and more freedom and, in return, getting the best possible SF stories.  I've read the eleven the stories in The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy by authors in whom I have a particular interest, and I have to admit that, taken as a group (especially if we leave out the one clunker) they are pretty good, and perhaps the topics they address were sort of pushing the envelope when they appeared in the 1950s and 1960s.

I also think quite a few of these stories may reflect the brand Playboy was developing for itself, one of sex and sophistication.  (Check out the covers of the various Playboy's Party Jokes volumes that foreground the secondary sexual characteristics of the "femlin" and claim that Playboy is "America's Most Sophisticated Magazine.")  Pohl's "The Fiend," Beaumont's "The Crooked Man," and Clarke's "I Remember Babylon"  incorporate or even revolve around sexual elements.  "I Remember Babylon" betrays a contempt for the ordinary masses (porn will trick the gullible dopes into becoming commies) while Bloch's "Word of Honor" and Sturgeon's "The Nail and Oracle" showcase a sort of sophisticate's cynicism about America's institutions and leaders as well as the common people, who need to be lied to and who will follow any demagogue who comes along.  Ballard's "Souvenir" is a monument to snobbery.  Perhaps most interestingly, the writers who take religion seriously, the Christian Bradbury in "The Vacation" and Talmudic scholar Avram Davidson in "The Sensible Man," subvert such misanthropic snobbery and cynical sophistication, showing them to be hollow and self-destructive.

I feel that my look at The Playboy Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy has been a worthwhile enterprise.  More SF published by Playboy in our next episode!

Three mid-70s stories by Barry N. Malzberg

Via Ebay, I recently acquired the Lake Blackshear Regional Library of Americus, Georgia's withdrawn copy of Barry N. Malzberg's 1976 hardcover collection Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  On the jacket are quotes from Harlan Ellison ("Barry Malzberg is...a better writer than I am") and Brian Aldiss (who sees Malzberg as "a master of sex and depression") which would be reason enough to crack yet again the severely cracked spine of this harried and tattered volume, even if I hadn't, somehow or other, slowly been evolving into some kind of Malzberg obsessive. Today, four pieces from this collection!

"Introduction: A Short One for the Boys in the Back Room" (1976)

Malzberg starts the six-and-a-half page intro, dated "New Jersey: January 1976," to Down Here in the Dream Quarter by describing how he temporarily left off using 1950s issues of Astounding as bedtime reading and absorbed nine ("or perhaps ten") biographies of literary icons ("Ross and Tom and John and Ernest and James and John again and Sinclair"--he just gives the first names, mystifying you or flattering your erudition, though in the next paragraph there are more clues--for example, the James is apparently not Joyce or Boswell but Thurber,) only to find them depressingly similar tales of unhappiness--lives of rejection, failed marriages, and alcohol abuse.

Barry then moves on to describing the start of his own career as a writer and how he got into science fiction (at the same time telling us that his SF career is over--don't believe him!)  This account is both entertaining and interesting and contains numerous memorable tidbits, e.g., "the single happiest moment" of his life was when he learned he had made his first real SF sale, "We're Coming Through the Window" to Frederick Pohl at Galaxy, and that when he wrote his breakthrough story "Final War" (original title, when he was shopping it to literary magazines and slicks like The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, Playboy and Esquire, "Shoe a Troop of Horse") he "did not have Vietnam at all in mind."  In our last episode of this here blog we saw that Malzberg identified with A. E. van Vogt as a fellow sui generis writer--in this book Malzberg identifies with J. G. Ballard because both are (he says) symbols of a certain type of writing:

I never expected to be a major science fiction writer let alone the figure I have become.  (Which if not "major" is certainly that in terms of visibility as best symbol of a certain kind of writing in my field in my country just as J. G. Ballard occupies the same role in England.)      

We'll let you decide if both these self-identifications, written within six months of each other, can be reconciled.

A valuable document for all of you (us?) students of the sage of Teaneck!

"A Galaxy Called Rome" (1975)

This famous story, the foundation of Malzberg's novel Galaxies, which I read back in 2011 in a 1998 anthology of classic novels of space travel and was my first exposure to Malzberg's work, begins by invoking seminal SF editor John W. Campbell, Jr, dead four years when "A Galaxy Called Rome" was published.  (Campbell died on July 11, 1971, within a week of your humble blogger's birth.)

The first line of "A Galaxy Called Rome" is "This is not a novelette but a series of notes," and Malzberg explains that the novelette will "lean heavily upon" two posthumously published editorials by Campbell, in which Campbell posits the existence of a "black galaxy," the product of a neutron star's collapse, a thing with such gravitational power that it is invisible and can constrain not only "light itself but space and time." The novelette Malzberg proposes writing would be about a space ship trapped in this black galaxy, named after Rome by Campbell because all roads lead to it (though none lead away.)

In note form, interspersed with draft fragments of important scenes, we get the outline of the story of ship captain and pilot Lena Thomas, who is the sole waking person on a ship that ends up in the black galaxy, and who thus lives for thousands of years, going insane.  Malzberg's "notes" are full of specific criticism of hard SF ("At this point in the story great gobs of physics, astronomical and mathematical data would have to be incorporated") as well as criticism of fiction in general ("It is to be noted that putting this conventional viewpoint in the character of a woman will give another of those necessary levels of irony with which the story must abound if it is to be anything other than a freak show...irony will give it legitimacy.")

"A Galaxy Called Rome" seems, to me, to be about the impossibility of real knowledge, as well as a reflection on the uselessness of science fiction and perhaps literature in general.  No information can leave the black galaxy, a reminder of the inability of one human being to know another, to transmit information, or to truly know anything with confidence.  Lena Thomas talks to the rest of the crew and passengers, all of whom are in suspended animation and cannot hear her--she is talking for herself, for own psychological benefit, and isn't this like the writer, who writes not knowing if his work will even be published, much less if others will read and understand it? Malzberg muses that SF's pretensions makes little sense--what is the point of speculating about what happens on other planets or in different times when what goes on in one's own town, much less the town one over, is just as unknowable?  ("...it occurred to me that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious as the stars...." Why consider the "sound of pulsars" when "the music of the paddock area at Aqueduct racetrack" is just as, or even more, strange and exciting?  Isn't writing or reading about riding in a star ship just as interesting as writing or reading about riding in a New York City subway car?

Image from Amazon.co.uk--Malzberg's career is plagued with typos!

"A Galaxy Called Rome" is characteristic of Malzberg--it's about being a writer, it shows respect for SF at the same time it calls SF's traditional attitudes into question, it suggests that man's problems will go with him to the stars because those problems are spiritual and psychological, it mentions Freud and the Aqueduct and frustrating sex--but it is better than average for Malzberg because it has more clever turns of phrase and more interesting images per page than most of Malzberg's work, and at about 20 pages it is a good length, neither overstaying its welcome and feeling like it is bloated with filler nor coming off like a half-baked trifle dashed off for a check.  I really recommend this one, not just to Malzberg fans (who of course need to read it) but to people curious about Malzberg who haven't tried him yet, or those who have read one or a few other Malzberg stories and been irritated or unimpressed; this is top shelf Malzberg.

In his Afterword Malzberg tells us he wrote the story for an anthology called Faster Than Light and that it was rejected by the editors, whom he does not name (they are George Zebrowski and Jack Dann.)  Malzberg, who usually says sympathetic things about editors and often expresses his gratitude to them (in fact, Down Here in the Dream Quarter is dedicated to a list of eleven editors) tells us that he is still angry about this rejection; I think Malzberg realizes this is some of his best work.  "A Galaxy Called Rome" first appeared, then, in F&SF, and it has been reprinted many many times, often in books with titles that include the word "Best" or "Top" or "Favorite" or "Great."  (Zebrowski and Dann blew it on this one, but I suppose they made amends in 1998--they were editors, along with Pamela Sargent, of that three book anthology that contains Galaxies!)

"Thirty-Seven Northwest" (1976)

This story, if isfdb is to be believed, has only ever appeared in this book, so you are just going to have to go buy a copy, aren't you?

Our narrator, who is also named Thomas, is an explorer walking around on the surface of Jupiter, in a massively heavy suit which allows him to survive and move in the tremendous gravity of that planet.  He does whatever the people back at base tell him to do, setting up cameras, looking this way and that, etc.  This is all pretty well written in hard SF style, interspersed with Malzbergian descriptions of the narrator's fears about the deadly planet and his worries that stem from the fact that he was supposed to be merely one component of a three-member team, and his comrades, for some reason, have not accompanied him.

At the end of the seven-page story the people at base order him to remove his helmet; when he protests that he will die they threaten to leave him on Jupiter forever.  Then we learn the shocking truth: everybody on this mission is a child!  Why or how this happened is not explored.

A decent piece of work.

In his Afterword to this tale Malzberg compares it to Golding's Lord of the Flies.  He also says that "What all post-technological cultures share is the absolute brutality with which they treat their children, all their children.  (I don't think most other cultures were or are any better but it is this one I know well enough to generalize.)"  This is puzzling. First of all, do people normally think of 1976 USA as "post-technological?"  Does Malzberg mean "post-industrial?"  Secondly, it seems obvious that, compared to most other places and times, that post-World War II America, and the West broadly, coddles and pampers kids.  What "absolute brutality" is he talking about?

Malzberg also uses the afterword to promote Kris Neville, whom he considers "underrated," and to list stories of Neville's which he believes "articulate" the alleged brutality of which Malzberg speaks "with visionary skill."  The Neville stories he lists are "Betty-ann," "From the Government Printing Office," and "Overture;" I have read some Neville but none of these.  Joachim Boaz read the fix-up novel of which "Betty-ann" and "Overture" are a part, and wrote about it in 2015--check his thoughts out at the link.

"Sedan Deville" (1974)

Here's something you maybe didn't know about our pal Barry--he loves cars!  Cadillacs, in fact!  I'm always a little surprised to learn that a smart and/or educated person loves cars or sports, but I hear it all the time, so maybe I should stop being surprised by it.

"Sedan Deville," which first saw light of day in F&SF, consists of letters written to a literary agent by Karl Delvecchio, New Jersey auto mechanic!  Delvecchio writes ungrammatically and refers to himself in the third person with regularity, but he is a published writer, having sold stories to a failing SF magazine, Terrific Science Fiction.  I know you are disappointed about this grease monkey's name, but dry your eyes--the editor of Terrific Science Fiction is named Mr. Walter Thomas!

Anyway, the letters reveal that Delvecchio's stories are all about Cadillacs; in fact, he claims that he is simply the messenger of the Cadillacs, who tell him their stories as he works on them.  He is contacting the agent because Terrific has folded and he desires help finding new markets, but the agent's demands for reading fees and criticism of his stories (the agent suggests he show range by writing about some other make of car) anger him.  The letters conclude with Delvecchio's assertion that the energy crisis is a plot to murder the Cadillacs!

I laughed at some of the jokes in this story, so it gets a thumbs up.  Maybe nowadays the story would be pilloried because it could be interpreted as making fun of a choleric working-class ethnic who may be an immigrant.  It would have been safer to name the mechanic "Thomas," Barry, and reserve "Delvecchio" for the kind but doomed editor of Terrific!

In the Afterword Malzberg talks about the Cadillacs he has owned and describes how each died on him in dramatic circumstances.  (Every day brings new reasons to be glad I drive a Toyota.)  He also points out that when some unnamed "commentator" learned he drove a Cadillac this "enraged" individual listed Malzberg "near the top of the Exploiting Class"--a foreshadowing of the feminist attack on Malzberg in 2013?  No matter how leftist you may be, there's always another leftist ready to slide the knife into you for the least infraction of their ever-shifting creed.

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Worthwhile stuff!

When Brian Doherty of Reason magazine reviewed the 2013 Malzberg collection The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg he noted that it had typos on every page.  Down Here in the Dream Quarter is not nearly as bad as that, but poor Barry was not well-served by the editors at Doubleday back in the '70s.  When he cites the Neville stories, "From the Government Printing Office" is listed as "In the Government Printing Office" and even though the book's title is printed correctly on the title page, the header on every page that has one reads, nonsensically, "DOWN HERE IN THE DREAM QUARTERS." Sad!

Six stories from 1973-74 by Barry Malzberg

You didn't think I had forgotten about Barry Malzberg and his 1976 collection The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, did you?  I was just taking a little breakypoo!  It's a new year, and time for some more of Malzberg's idiosyncratic fiction and keen insight into the writer's life and the history of genre literature.  This will be the fourth installment in our exploration of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, which we began in October of 2016.  Here are links to the earlier episodes:

October 1, 2016

October 4, 2016

October 30, 2016

And now six more early 1970s tales from the notorious BNZ, whose Underlay was one of my favorite reads of 2016.

"City Lights, City Nights" (1973)

I find the extravagant way people talk about JFK and his murder tiresome, but all that Camelot jazz happened before I was born in 1971; Malzberg lived through it, and it seems to have had a big effect on him.  He tells us in the intro to "City Lights, City Nights" found here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg that he first heard about the assassination while at the Aqueduct racetrack in Queens.  (I lived in Queens myself for like three years, but far from the track; my girlfriend (now my wife) and I lived quite close to the East River, in the border zone between Astoria and Long Island City, in what the landlord called a "garden apartment."  An equally appropriate description would have been "the basement."  One year our place flooded with sewage, and another year it was overrun with swarming winged ants.)  Malzberg admits to being "obsessed" with political assassinations, and seems to think that the literary community has failed to produce a work worthy of the topic.  Specifically, Malzberg argues that J. G. Ballard's "serious body of post-assassination fiction" "does not count" because Ballard is not an American, and that "That Day" by Robie Macauley is "dismal" and Wright Morris's One Day is "cheaply melodramatic."

In the future, Manhattan's skyscrapers are falling apart and its population is limited to those our narrator calls "the lumpen," criminals and dolts who are confined to the decrepit island.  Our narrator is an "Outsider" who has come to Manhattan to direct a film reenacting the assassination of President Kennedy, using local amateur actors. The story largely consists of his bitter complaints that the lumpen actors are terrible and lamentations that the repeated rehearsals are probably a waste of time, may even be degrading the quality of their performances by rendering them more mechanical and less spontaneous.

Kennedy worship leaves me cold, so I was pleased that Malzberg in this story uses the murder of the 35th President as much as an occasion to talk about other things as a subject in its own right.  The complaints of a snobbish artiste having to deal with actors whose incompetence approaches slapstick proportions made me laugh, and I found compelling the central insight of the story: it depicts an educated intellectual (presumably a "liberal") who romanticized and sympathized with the lower classes in the abstract, but finds himself disgusted by them when he actually meets them.  The narrator quickly comes to the conclusion that if the lumpen have it hard in life, it is largely because of their own inadequacies and poor choices.  "Dogs, pigs!" he yells at them.  "You deserve to be in the city!  Once I took pity on you, but that was before I came to know what you are!"

The lumpen achieve their revenge on the liberal who claimed to feel for them but in fact had contempt for them and manipulated them for his own ends (why do I feel like this sort of thing just happened in real life?), making the director play the part of JFK in an all-too-real reenactment of that assassination in Dallas so many years ago.

"City Lights, City Nights" would go on to form part of Malzberg's 1974 novel The Destruction of the Temple, and originally appeared in Roger Elwood's anthology Future City.  I think I've told you this before, but if you are curious about Future City and early '70s SF in general, you should check out the blog posts about Future City by elite vintage SF bloggers tarbandu and Joachim Boaz.  For an alternative take on "City Lights, City Nights"/The Destruction of the Temple, check out 2theD's review of The Destruction of the Temple at Potpourri of Science Fiction; while I here focus on the short story's depiction of the tension between the lower orders and the middle-class liberals who sometimes claim to champion them, 2theD talks about the importance, in the full-scale novel version, of the idea that city life is dehumanizing and that the pressures of urban life have caused many of the social problems we associate with 1960s and 1970s America.

Good!

"Culture Lock" (1973)

Another story from Future City.  In the intro to this printing of "Culture Lock" Malzberg takes pains to tell us again and again that he sees nothing wrong with homosexuality and welcomes the growing acceptance of gays.  You see, while the theme of "Culture Lock" is the dangers of government experts interfering in the lives of the people, the substance of the story is gay anal sex, and Malzberg is certainly vulnerable to the charge of exploiting people's disgust at homosexual intercourse in an effort to give his story, one of many depictions of a tyrannical dystopia, a little extra punch that might help it stand out from the crowd.  Passing the buck, Barry says that this story resulted from a request from "the commissioning editor" (presumably Roger Elwood) for a story condemning homosexuality.

The story's six pages are the tale of Bert, a man living in a hundred-story public housing project in a city where there are absolutely no women.  Weekly group sex sessions are essentially obligatory, and the ritual before each orgy (a "statement" of "the principles") makes clear that the government prescribes these group sex sessions as a means of crushing individualism and artificially creating a collective group solidarity among the men of the city.  "Brothers all, one to one and then together for the greater good."  We learn that sociologists designed this system forty years earlier.

Reminiscent of the policies of socialist countries that ostensibly try to legislate equality and solidarity but instead lead to mass poverty and rampant corruption, the city's policy is a human disaster as well as a failure on its own terms.  None of the men in the story believe "the principles," and they still feel envy and jealousy and desire monogamous relationships, relationships which the mandatory orgies impossible to maintain.  Instead of pursuing brotherhood and working together for the good of the city, the men are violently at odds with each other, the strong preying upon the weak physically and emotionally.

With its graphic depictions of non-consensual homosexual sex and suggestion that gay sex is characteristically exploitative, as well as the story's sexist undertones, (the narrator repeatedly describes the passive participant in anal sex as having been "made the woman,") "Culture Lock" is probably going to disturb almost everybody who reads it.  An effective and unsettling piece of work about the dangers of elite intervention into the private lives of individuals that employs homosexuality as its vehicle.

Thumbs up!

"As In a Vision Apprehended" (1973)

Here's another story from Roger Elwood's anthology The Berserkers--Elwood included three stories by his pal Barry in The Berserkers, and we've already read one of them, "Trial of the Blood," back in October, and will read the third, "Form in Remission," later today.

In his introduction to "As In a Vision Apprehended" here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, the author tells us it is one of the few of his stories which addresses "the Judaic theme."  This is a pretty straightforward philosophical horror story about how people (one of the characters says this specifically of the Jewish people) ignore warnings and fail to plan ahead, though maybe I am missing something.

Mottel, a Jew in Eastern Europe in 1878, is possessed by a demon (sometimes it is referred to as a "dybbuk,") and suffers feverish, agonizing visions of the next century--these prophetic visions indicate that it will be a century of mechanized mass murder! Doctors and conventional rabbis are unable to help Mottel, so a mystic is enlisted.  The mystic meets the sick man on the road; Mottel has decided to walk the 500 kilometers to the capitol to warn the authorities of the disaster that will be the 20th century.  The mystic exorcises the demon, but it enters his old and weak body, killing him.

Not a bad story, but conventional and simple when compared to most components of Malzberg's body of work--this story is actually written in the past tense in the third person!

"Form in Remission" (1973)

This story appears to be a sort of riff on Kafka's famous "Metamorphosis."  Our narrator, an anti-social and depressed office clerk in his early forties, wakes up one morning to find a man-sized insect with eyes all over its body lying in bed with him. The creature tells the clerk that it will accompany him closely, the rest of his days. The punchline of the story, which Malzberg in his intro complains was spoiled by a "blurb" written by "the editor of the anthology in which this piece first appeared," presumably Roger Elwood, comes when the narrator asks the monster "Why are you with me?  This is hell."  The monster responds "you're not in hell.  I'm in hell."  I don't know if I like the way this is worded; if they are both in the same place, aren't they both in Hell?  I guess the point (and surprise twist) of the story is that the clerk and/or his life is so dreadful that spending time with him has been chosen by the deity of some alien planet or dimension to serve as punishment.
   
OK.

Introduction to "Opening Fire"

I'm skipping "Opening Fire" because I wrote about it when I read some stories from Roger Elwood's The New Mind back in 2014.  In his intro to "Opening Fire" here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, Malzberg tells us that in traditional SF stories aliens are usually ruthless enemies out to destroy humanity or benign beings we should accept as models, and points out that these "views are the opposite sides of the child's reactions toward his parents in middle-class culture...."  Then he says that he prefers a vision of aliens as incompetent low level bureaucrats.

"Running Around" (1973)

In the intro to "Running Around" Malzberg tells us that (unspecified) studies indicate that "the turnover in commercial, genre writing among readers is close to ninety percent in four years...."  This means that, Barry laments, science fiction "has no history," that almost none of the people reading SF in a given year will have any knowledge of SF stories from ten years ago or earlier.

"Running Around" is about time travel, and Malzberg tells us he didn't really want to write a time travel story, but did it because an editor (again, one assumes the unnamed editor is Roger Elwood, as "Running Around" first appeared in Elwood's Omega) requested a time travel story.  Despite his reluctance, Malzberg produces a quite fun little piece of pessimistic humor here, the most entertaining story I'm talking about in this blog post.

A guy in 1973 is so unhappy with his government job and his marriage that he decides to commit suicide.  In fact, he wishes he had never been born!  Luckily, as a hobby, he has invented a time machine in his basement!  He goes back in time to 1903 to murder his grandfather and to 1933 to murder his father.

I laughed at many of the jokes in "Running Around," and I have a weakness for stories about difficult sexual relationships and difficult parent-child relationships, so I am all over this one.

Good!

"Overlooking" (1974)

This one doesn't provide an opportunity to praise or criticize Roger Elwood; it appeared in Amazing, at that time edited by Ted "Spawn of the Death Machine" White.

"Overlooking" is another Kennedy story, one set in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, in an alternate universe, a world in which things are going considerably worse than they did in our own world.  It is strongly suggested, for example, that the current dispute over the Soviet deployment of missiles in Cuba will lead to nuclear war.   Things are so bad that movie theatres have been refitted into "memory palaces," where people gather to watch newsreels from the happier days of the early 1950s in hopes of forgetting the current, disastrous, state of affairs.  Our narrator, who hasn't been able to achieve an erection since the "great depression of 1955" seven years ago, blames the government, specifically the president, for all his and the world's problems.

The central mystery of the story is the question of who is president in this universe's 1962; Malzberg does not clearly state the President's name but instead presents clues that support two alternative theories: one that Richard Nixon is president, another that JFK is in the White House, as he was in real life, though perhaps a JFK less smooth and photogenic than the one my mother swoons over.  I'm going to guess that the clues pointing to Kennedy are red herrings, and the president whom the impotent narrator calls "crazy" and a derelict beggar calls "a fucker" and who is going to lead the world into atomic war against the USSR is Nixon.  

OK.

**********

A good batch of stories that run the gamut--some funny, some potentially controversial and upsetting, some including little puzzles--and are characteristically Malzbergian, with their preoccupation with JFK and sexual frustration and dysfunction.

We're on page 322 of this 398-page volume; keep an eye on this space for the final episode in our look at The Best of Barry N. Malzberg in the coming weeks!

Stories from 1960s New Worlds: Ballard, Platt & Disch

Joachim Boaz was recently singing the praises of Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, in particular singling out the art design work of Charles Platt (whom I have been praising on this blog for his fun and provacative interviews of SF writers.)  So let's check out three stories from The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2, edited by Moorcock and published in 1968, including one by Platt and selections from New Wave icon J. G. Ballard and one of my personal faves, Thomas Disch.

I have the 1969 Berkley printing with a terrific (Paul Lehr?) cover in a beautiful blue that succeeds in simultaneously conjuring up the majesty of both the moon in outer space and a whale in the ocean depths.

"You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

This five-page story consists of 18 paragraphs, each with its own title.  (In his interview with Ballard in Dream Makers, Platt imitates this distinctive formatting.) I have to admit I had to read the story twice to make much of it; befitting (what I take to be) its themes, it is a bit vague and abstract.

The plot, as far as I can tell, is about a guy, Tallis, who goes to a seaside resort, where he meets a woman, Karen Novotny, and has a sexual relationship with her.  He spends a lot of time pacing in her spartan white-walled apartment.  He then meets another woman, Coma, and murders Novotny.

The themes I am getting from this story are decay, alienation and abstraction.  The setting is some kind of post-cataclysmic scenario; the resort is "deserted," a planetarium at the resort is "dead," on the beach there is a car "buried in the sand."  Tallis has some kind of mental illness, and when a doctor helicopters in to see him, we find the doctor has lost his ability to speak, his "jaw moving in exaggerated spasms" but producing no audible sounds.  Novotny feels "a mood of abstraction," a "growing entropy" and an "increasing sense of disembodiment."

The women Tallis encounters, the beach landscape, and the white apartment are described monotonously in geometrical, mathematical terms, and all are linked, one to another, as if they are some bland unified whole, depriving them of any life or personality.  "The white flanks of the dunes reminded him of the endless promenades of Karen Novotny's body....the white recti-linear walls, Tallis realized, were aspects of that virgin of the sand-dunes whose assumption he had witnessed."  (This is a sharp contrast to the seaside resort described by Proust in In Search of Lost Time, where every person, room and element of the landscape glows with life and has a shimmering, distinct personality.)

Marilyn Monroe is mentioned repeatedly, but every mention refers to her in death: her thighs are "volcanic ash," the broken dome of the planetarium is like one of her "eroded breasts," the white walls of the apartment are like her cheekbones.  Like a deserted pleasure resort on the sea, the lush and vivacious Monroe, whose death was so pathetic, is a vivid metaphor for scintillating life fallen into sterile desiccation.  Showing off his erudition and taste, Ballard also brings up the Hindu yantra, vorticism, and Max Ernst's Robing of the Bride.

Edward Wadsworth, Max Ernst, Dearest Marilyn

This story is intriguing, presenting a challenge and even providing an education (I had never heard of yantra before), and there are many mysteries about it I haven't brought up here (e. g., who is the "You" of the title?) and no doubt many I didn't even notice. But I can't say it is truly enjoyable or entertaining.  The suicide of Marilyn Monroe, a madman murdering his lover, a seaside resort and a planetarium falling into ruin, should all make me sad or angry, but the story is too cold, clinical, even a little gimmicky, to affect my emotions.  In the aforementioned profile of Ballard in his book Dream Makers, Charles Platt suggests that Ballard's "obsessions are more with landscape than with ordinary human relationships" and tells us "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" is the first of Ballard's "condensed novels," which dispense with the "usual elements of fiction" like dialogue and conflict and consist primarily of "images, metaphor, landscape, message, and myth-figures."*  Perhaps because I have botched my own, I find human relationships fascinating, and when done well I enjoy the "usual elements of fiction," so maybe Ballard really isn't for me.

I'll give "You : Coma : Marilyn Monroe" a recommendation, as it is a worthwhile experience, but, judged by conventional measures of what we look for in fiction, I think it falls short.

*If I was in a bitchy mood, I'd say this sounds like a way of writing a novel that includes the parts that are fun for the writer but hard for the reader, and leaves out the parts that are hard for the author but fun for the reader.

"The Total Experience Kick" by Charles Platt (1966)

Ballard's story, with its innovative, convention-defying technique, is very "New Wavey," but Platt's story is a traditional SF tale about technological innovation, in which the main character succeeds in achieving his goal through technical expertise and trickery.  Where it is, sort of, reminiscent of the New Wave is in its subject matter: pop music.

Our hero works in the record industry in the London of the near future of 1982, and the story is, in part, a satire of that industry.  It makes the sort of comments about pop music I remember seeing in episodes of The Flintstones: pop audiences are fickle and respond to gimmicks and fads, so the record industry is in constant upheaval, with new acts appearing all the time, rocketing to popularity and then collapsing into obscurity just as quickly.  Platt also includes a joke about how record companies strive to identify and appeal to the lowest common denominator in an effort to achieve a wide audience.

The plot: The protagonist uncovers evidence that a rival record company is about to market some new gimmick, and engages in industrial espionage, getting a job at the rival firm in order to learn its secrets and headhunt its best employees.  The new gimmick is an elaborate electronic device that can amplify listeners' emotions (with rays or something); if a song makes a concertgoer sad or happy or whatever, this device will make him far far more sad or happy.  Our hero tries to get the genius who has invented this device to abandon his current employer for the hero's, but the genius is not interested in leaving, because he is in love with the boss's daughter.  So the protagonist meddles with the device, altering it so that it makes the genius fall out of love with the girl.  This results in the headhunting mission achieving success.

"The Total Experience Kick" is an acceptable story.  People fascinated by the music industry might appreciate it more than I did.  Maybe historians of pop music could use it to get a sense of what people thought about the record industry in the mid-60s?  

"The Contest" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

Three quite brief stories (none is over five pages) by Disch, "The Contest," "The Empty Room," and "The Descent of the West End," all appeared in a single issue of New Worlds, and they appear together in The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2 as well, though they have appeared separately elsewhere.

I think Disch is a very fine writer and an exciting and perceptive critic with a vast store of knowledge and all that, and I wish I could find a way to recommend all of three of these little pieces, but I cannot. Two, including "The Contest," are silly absurdist stories that are supposed to be funny but did not make me laugh.

These three stories have at their centers depressing asymmetrical love relationships and the common Disch theme that our lives are out of our control, subject to callous, irresistible, unknowable forces.  "The Contest" has two men walking the streets of Midtown Manhattan--the Pan Am Building (it was the Met-Life Building by the time I got to Manhattan) and the Seagram Building are namechecked--in a totalitarian near future America.  One tells the other about a sexual relationship he had with a paranoid woman, suggesting that the woman's love for him was fostered rather than stifled by society's totalitarian nature.  The paranoid, he relates, committed suicide.  The second man, revealed as a secret agent, then shoots down the first man, and we readers are left to wonder exactly why.

"The Empty Room" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

This story takes place in a future in which people lacking in skills can rent out their brains part time for use as components of semi-organic computers (Disch compares such people to vacuum tubes.)  A middle-aged man with just such a job is apartment hunting in New York with his twenty-something wife or girlfriend.  They look at a crummy apartment, the only kind they can afford; while investigating it the woman repeatedly asks for assurances that he loves her, and admits that she is not sure she loves him.  They remark that life is not as fun or meaningful as they had thought it would be as children, and when they consider if they are responsible for their own unhappiness, they tentatively conclude they are not.  The couple decides to take the apartment, telling each other, though they know they lie, that they will only live there short term and the landlord will fix the place up before they move in.

This is the best of these three stories; it has a plausibility and an emotional power the other two lack, and includes a few interesting SF touches (e.g., women wear disposable paper bras and panties and carry multiple changes of underwear in their purses.)

"The Descent of the West End" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)  

This is the most outwardly comedic of the three, with lots of jokes.  A cruise liner gets in a collision with another vessel, and begins to sink.  The captain refuses to believe the ship is sinking, and won't order the lifeboats lowered.  (All three of Disch's stories here have authority figures who are derelict in their responsibilities.)  An elderly fortuneteller tries to seduce a young member of the ship's crew; when her husband knocks on the door to warn her that the ship is sinking, she hides the young man in a trunk; he gets locked in the trunk and dies of suffocation as the trunk floats in his septuagenarian pursuer's stateroom.  There's also a bit about an Irish poet giving an incomprehensible reading which the radio officer tries to transmit via telegraph to the world, while the ship is sinking and he should be calling for help.  (Does Disch, an expert on poetry and a voluminous writer of poetry, have some particular poet in mind here?)

**********

The Ballard story is experimental enough and challenging enough that it seems to fit into a "Best" anthology, but the Platt and Disch stories feel like trifles.  Maybe they felt fresh when they were new?
 
More stories from The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2 in our next episode.  Stay tuned!

Important New Wave Stories by Thomas Disch, J. G. Ballard and Langdon Jones

When people talk about the New Wave, one of the things they often mention is Judith Merrill's anthology England Swings SF, first published in 1968.  Now, I don't actually own a copy of England Swings SF, but I do own anthologies by two of the most famous and prolific New Wave writers, Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard, which include some of their stories from England Swings SF. Additionally, Joachim Boaz, indefatigable SF blogger and promoter of SF which has faded from memory and perhaps deserves to be more widely read, has generously provided me access to the story by Langdon Jones which was printed in England Swings SF. So, let's check them out and try to gain some kind of insight into the New Wave phenomenon!

"The Squirrel Cage" by Thomas Disch (1967)

I've already praised Tom Disch on this blog numerous times, but Disch has done work I'm not crazy about (when I read them in the aughts, I thought Genocides overwrought and mediocre and Echo Round His Bones and Mankind Under the Leash left me cold) so there's no guarantee I'm going to love this one. "The Squirrel Cage" first appeared in the issue of New Worlds with Charles Platt's The Garbage World.  I read Disch's tale in my 1980 Bantam edition of Fundamental Disch.

Don't tell my wife, but I have had a
crush on this garbage girl for quite a while

"The Squirrel Cage" is one of those stories in which a guy is trapped in a mysterious high tech prison and has no idea how he got there or who put him there.  For some psychological reason I am afraid to carefully dig into, I love stories in which a guy is in a prison and his cell constitutes his entire universe (Araminta Station by Jack Vance and Cage A Man by F. M. Busby come to mind at once as particularly effective SF examples), so "The Squirrel Cage" was right up my alley.  Disch uses the story as an allegory of life (of course), how we all are truly alone and can't know why we are here and have no real understanding of the universe because we cannot trust our senses.  It is also, more specifically, about the psychological reality of being a writer--the prisoner has access to a typewriter, and the text we are reading is things he has typed on his machine.  However, the narrator's typewriter neither admits nor produces paper--the narrator has no reason to believe anybody is even reading what he is writing! (He hopefully fantasizes that his words are being reproduced electronically somewhere and read by someone, maybe lots of people.)  On the last page of the story, when we learn the name of the narrator ("Disch"), he admits that even more terrifying than this lonely meaningless life in the antiseptic prison is the thought of being forced to leave it; a comment on our fear of death or perhaps Disch's own horror at the thought of having to make a living doing work more onerous than writing?

I think "The Squirrel Cage" also serves as a sort of satire of people who learn everything about the world via the New York Times--every day a new copy of the Times appears in the cell and the previous day's copy vanishes.  The newspaper is the only contact the prisoner has, apparently, ever had with any other living entity, and it is his only source of information.  One passage (in which the narrator wishes he could keep the papers and pile them up into walls and corridors) reminded me of the famous Collyer brothers, and perhaps the whole story is a sort of subtle reference or homage to them.

Both bleak and amusing, "The Squirrel Cage" is well-written (Disch has a smooth and engaging style) and compelling.  I liked the "New Yorkiness" of it, and there's also the sad frisson I get whenever I read references to suicide in a Disch story.  Worth a look!                

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

As with Disch, I have really liked some Ballard, but also been disappointed by him (I know Joachim loves it, but I found Drowned World tedious and silly.)

In this sexiest of blog posts there is even something for the ladies: it's every woman's dreamPTboat, JFK!

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" first appeared in the magazine Ambit, and in New Worlds the next year.  This is a two-page gimmick story, an imitation or pastiche of a similarly brief gimmick story by Alfred Jarry ("The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race"), larded with dumb jokes and lame puns.  I guess the story is supposed to say something about our society's obsession with celebrity and political violence, and also to suggest LBJ and/or the citizens of Dallas or the American people as a whole are somehow complicit in or responsible for the JFK murder. There are lots of people who like this sort of flashy cleverness and irreverence, but to me this kind of thing is hollow and a waste of my time--as I suppose I have said before online, I'm sick of absurdist humor in which any random shit can happen and of humor based on references to other works of fiction or to celebrities or historical events.

You gotta read this thing because it is "important," but I think it is a facile scam.

"Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

Woah, maybe this post needs a
NSFW tag or a trigger warning!

Here we have a story in the same vein, a gimmicky JFK murder-related story about how people are sexually aroused by violence and by automobiles.  This one is in the form of a dry scientific report about therapy involving catering to the desires of mental patients to assassinate celebrities. Jokes include a clinical reference to a man inserting his penis into a car's exhaust. Presumably this was shocking in 1966, but we are now living in a permissive society in which some of us, me included, are almost entirely shocked out.

Like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" first appeared in Ambit.  I read both of these stories in my copy of the 2001 edition of The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

While the Disch story deals with timeless issues, these Ballard stories are very time sensitive, very topical, very much focused on celebrities and events current in 1966.  I sometimes think including references to some "iconic" contemporary celebrity or event is an act of laziness on the part of the writer--instead of doing the work of inspiring the reader to feel by creating a character or a mood, the writer takes the shortcut of just invoking our ready-made feelings about, in this case, the bogus "Camelot" of the early '60s.  This maybe works on people who were old enough to pay attention to the news in 1963, but I was born in 1971, so the murder of JFK has no more emotional resonance with me than the murder of Julius Caesar or Cicero.

(If I am comparing them, Disch's story also has good writing, while these Ballard stories seem like loud jokes meant to dazzle you with their irreverence.)

"The Hall of Machines" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Hall of Machines" first appeared in New Worlds along with its two companion pieces, "The Coming of the Sun" and "The Eye of the Lens;" together, there three pieces form a triptych known as "The Eye of the Lens."  Joachim has shared with me all three of the components of "The Eye of the Lens," and I will discuss them all here, even though only the first appeared in England Swings SF.

(Check out Joachim's review of this triptych, and Langdon's entire collection of the same name; we actually cover different ground and have somewhat contesting and complementary views of the work.)

I guess Jones is one of the "etceteras."

"The Hall of Machines" consists of the notes of a scholar from some alternate universe (though see below) about an indescribably vast building which houses massive automatic machines of numerous types.  Most of the text is detailed description of various of the machines; one that consists of shiny blades making elaborate cuts (a "Death Machine"), one which extrudes tiny machines from a tube ("The Mother"), a colossal "Clock" made up of a huge spring and innumerable precise gears whose face is turned away from any possible viewer, and more.

I'm going to have to guess that the mysterious Hall of Machines represents the universe, and that the story is about how the laws that govern our lives seem mechanistic, predictable, and open to close inspection, but are so complex as to be practically indecipherable, and are bereft of any values or spiritual meaning.  Jones provides a clue, however, that this story does take place in our universe, and that he is making, or the reader is expected to make, some kind of ethical judgement: the word "Auschwitz" is inscribed on one of the three Death Machines.

"The Hall of Machines" reminded me of Herman Melville's 1855 "The Tartarus of Maids," which also includes detailed descriptions of allegorical machines.  It also reminded me of Thomas Ligotti's 1996 "The Red Tower," which, as I remember it, is just a description by an investigator of an old sinister factory, presumably in some alternate universe.

Jones presents vivid and exciting images, sets a powerful mood and gets the reader thinking.  Quite good.

"The Coming of the Sun" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Coming of the Sun" is a series of connected vignettes, spread over 22 pages, dealing with recurring themes that include insanity, fire, sex, religion, and the sun. The first of these 16 vignettes, a compelling character study of a pyromaniac imbecile, is very good, but after this very entertaining beginning the vignettes become increasingly tedious.  One, involving a grocer kicking a pair of mating dogs, is a shocking and memorable piece of "body horror," but some of the other little tableaus, like a one-and-a-half-page-long description of an elaborate clock burning, and a dream sequence about a guy on a motorcycle driving in circles around and then inside a cathedral, were so repetitive and boring I had trouble keeping my eyes open while I read them.  The last five pages of  "The Coming of the Sun" include poetry that is alternately mind-numbing ("Give me the red and the green of your love--my man, my woman, my child, my God") and groan-inducing ("...an old man masturbates his death-tool and spits white glory at the sun....")  Ugh.  The last page has a drawing of the sun, its flares like tentacles or petals, the words of the last poem jumbled all around it..

When tarbandu talks about the self-indulgence of the New Wave I guess this is the sort of thing he means.  I couldn't sincerely recommend "The Coming of the Sun" to anybody, though it is of academic interest and some might find it "so bad it's good" with its poetry about bloody semen and the cleansing venom of the "sun sun sun."

"The Eye of the Lens" by Langdon Jones (1966)

This one is a description of a film.  (I seem to recall Barry Malzberg resorting to this gag a few times; right now only The Men Inside is coming to mind.)  Jones starts by relating the type of film stock and filters used, and then describes the movie's two actors; all you feminists out there will be thrilled to learn Jones describes the female lead in precise detail over 27 lines, lingering on her breasts and body hair, while dispensing with the labor of describing the male lead in an efficient three lines, even though the man plays two parts.

Banned in Britain?

Then we get what amounts to a script, a description of the shots ("She passes out of the frame, kicking the statuettes idly as she walks") and of the soundtrack.  All you masochists out there will be thrilled to learn that the soundtrack includes just the kind of poetry about love that had us scrambling for cover like an 8.8 cm Flak had zeroed in on us back when we read "The Coming of the Sun"--"love me red with bloody arrows...love me brown, brown as leather..." etc.

The girl walks through a desert, encounters a statue that is crying, then men with flamethrowers who immolate any plants that appear on the desert surface.  (When I was in Denmark, the environmentalist capitol of the world, I saw how they killed weeds with a sort of scaled down flamethrower.  In Iowa I found that they spray Roundup on everything.) She visits a cathedral where a "psychedelic freak out" is taking place, and then comes upon Jesus on the cross. She gets into an argument with Christ, accusing him of being rude, stupid and shallow. In the final scene of the film the girl sits in a field of flowers.

I can't tell if this story is a sincere criticism of Christianity and our society or a parody of an art movie full of banal allegories. Either way it is a bore.

***************

Do these stories tell us anything about the New Wave?  (Let's pretend these stories are our first exposure to this New Wave we've been hearing people argue about.)  Well, they certainly lack many of the very things people tend to look for in conventional science fiction: there is no adventure plot (hell, there is no plot at all), there isn't really much science, and there isn't much speculation on what future societies or stuff in outer space might be like.  It is easy to see why casual SF readers looking for entertainment might be uninterested in the New Wave, and why committed members of the SF community who are into science and interested in what the future will bring might be exasperated by such work.

On the other hand, you can see how these stories would appeal to people who are interested in "serious mainstream literature" and think of themselves as free-thinking individuals or educated radicals.  The stories have the trappings of sophistication: they employ experimental literary techniques and/or abandon traditional literary elements like plot and character; they are pessimistic; they are irreverent or rebellious, implicitly or explicitly criticizing our society and traditional attitudes and beliefs; they include frank sexual content.  The Disch story and parts of the Jones stories are also well-written, and all the stories hope to say something about life or society.  The stories are also connected to long literary, artistic or philosophical traditions.  (And there's the fact that parts of the Jones pieces are difficult to read, and, as we see in academia, sometimes obscurity and tedium can pass for profundity.)

Disch, Ballard and Jones are all obviously thoughtful, well-educated, and capable of good writing--if anything good can come of the New Wave, these are guys who can make that happen--and in this selection I think we can see the golden opportunities presented by the New Wave to able writers, as well as the pitfalls for readers in the New Wave's excesses.  In the same way a quest story or a detective story or an alien invasion story, the kind of thing that has been done a billion times, can be emotionally and intellectually thrilling when it comes from the pen of a talented and dedicated writer, but predictable, shoddy and boring in the hands of the lazy or incompetent, we have to expect that there will be some fine New Wave stories, and some New Wave stories which are a waste of our time.  I think we have seen both kinds here today.

1962 stories from J. G. Ballard, Avram Davidson, J. T. McIntosh, & Ward Moore

Because I found the cover illustration by Emsh irresistible, at Jay's CD and Hobby in a strip mall in southern Des Moines, I purchased a crumbling copy of the February 1962 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  The beautiful blue-eyed blonde, the twisting curling thorns, the disparate ill-disciplined crowd of soldiers...I kept looking at the picture, looking away, then looking at it again.  I knew I'd want to look at it yet again after I'd left the store, so I forked over the cash and took the magazine home.

This issue of the magazine includes the novella by Edgar Pangborn, "The Golden Horn," which makes up part of his novel Davy, which I read back in June.  It also includes a reprinted 1954 story by Richard Matheson, "The Traveller," which I read in June of 2013, shortly before this blog arose from its vat and began its march across the landscape, sowing amazement and indifference throughout an unsuspecting land.  (Joachim Boaz read the story, along with ten other Matheson stories, early this year, and proclaimed it "Bad."  My notes on "The Traveller" say "Eh.")

Even though I already had 40 or 50 pages of this one under my belt, so to speak, there were still attractive items I hadn't read yet.  This weekend I read them.

"The Garden of Time" by J. G. Ballard

This symbolist fantasy has been reprinted numerous times in collections of Ballard's work and in various anthologies.  I read a bunch of poems by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot a few weeks ago, and "The Garden of Time" reminded me of one of the more easily digested of these verses, Pound's "The Garden."

Image from the Internet Archive 

"The Garden of Time" is about two good-looking sophisticated people who live in a beautiful Palladian villa full of rare books, fine paintings, busts and vases. Within the outer walls of the estate there is a pool and a fine garden, outside the walls an empty plain as far as the eye can see.  The Countess at her harpsichord fills the house with the sound of Bach and Mozart (my own wife at the TV fills our house with the sound of The Gilmore Girls, which is not the same thing at all.)  Every evening before a stroll around the grounds the Count looks out across the naked featureless landscape; sometimes he sees, miles away, a vast horde approaching, a rabble which stretches from one horizon to the other.  If this sea of filthy unkillable infantry is in sight he plucks one of the "time flowers" from his garden, and as the blossom expires time is shifted and the invincible ill-disciplined mob recedes back out of sight.  But there are almost no flowers left; soon the horde will batter down the walls, destroy the cultural treasures they are unable to appreciate.

Presumably this is a lament that the modern age, the age of mass capitalism and democracy, socialism and the welfare state, overpopulation and mass media, etc (pick your bogeyman), is an age in which nobody will appreciate the finer things, an age in which society will fail to preserve the finer things.  On the one hand there may be something to this, but on the other hand, technological advances in transportation and communication in my lifetime have made high culture more easily accessible, while the elite have been able to manipulate the political class in such a way that the taxpayers subsidize things like opera and poetry festivals, things very few taxpayers actually care about.  For the time being, high culture is available to those who still care about it.  

Vivid and thought-provoking.

"The Singular Events Which Occurred in the Hovel on the Alley Off Eye Street" by Avram Davidson

Years ago I read Avram Davidson's 1960s novels Rork! and Mutiny in Space--I still remember the girl at the checkout counter of the antique mall laughing at the title of Mutiny in Space.  These novels were OK, no big deal.  Tarbandu at the great PorPor Books Blog has reviewed quite a few of Davidson's works--click here to read a tarbandu review of two Davidson novels in which I make an appearance in the comments.  While he praises "The New Zombies," a story Davidson wrote with his wife, tarbandu mostly seems to award Davidson 2 or 3 stars out of 5.  Let's see if this six page story with the 14 word title meets or exceeds these expectations.

This is an elaborate joke story, set in an alternate universe 1961 USA in which there are dragons and magic, with magic spells a sort of consumer good produced by rival firms who commit industrial espionage against each other.  It is full of Shakespearean speech, outrageous puns, and topical jokes about things like Ed Sullivan and the JFK inauguration (occurring a year before this issue of F&SF was on the newsstands,)  No plot, no character, no emotion, just the kind of wordplay that may be fun to write but is a drag to read.

Horrible.

"One Into Two" by J. T. McIntosh

Speaking of horrible, it's once more unto the breach of a piece of J. T. McIntosh fiction.  (Dare I read such a piece?)

It is the future!  Millions of people commute everyday between Terra, Luna, Marsa and Venusa via matta transmittuh.  These are the kind of teleporters that read your atoms, vaporize you, transmit the data to your destination, and build a replica of you at your destination, the kind of teleporters that make every person reading the story say, "Wait, they are killing the person," and vow never to be matter transmitted regardless of whether a Kirk or a Spock or a Scotty tells them it is perfectly safe.  The government carefully regulates the teleporters to make sure what goes into the booth is completely annihilated, otherwise some smart guy would use the booth to duplicate money or hot chicks, and that would cause undesirable inflation.

The main character of the story is Willie Ross, a crook who works for the teleporter company.  Regardless of all that government regulation he duplicates himself so he can be on two planets at once.  While one version of Ross is setting up an alibi on Luna, the other version is on Mars murdering a man he's never met before, a guy who is married to a former partner in crime of Ross's.   I don't think McIntosh makes it very clear why Ross kills this innocent man, vengeance, I guess, or so he can pressure his former associate for money or something.  "One Into Two" is a mystery in multiple senses of the word.

The police very quickly catch both Rosses, either because they betray each other, or because they are able to trick the Rosses and have experience dealing with other assholes who have tried to exploit the teleporter system.  "You never had a chance, Ross....You don't think you're the first to try this, do you?"  Like numerous things in this story, it wasn't quite clear to me.

At the end of the story the police teleport Mars-assassin-Ross and Luna-alibi-Ross to New York, at the same time, to the same booth.  This means there is only one Ross again, but he has the memories of both Rosses--McIntosh even tells us that the food each ate separately is now together in his one stomach!  I don't think this makes any sense.

Bad.

"Rebel" by Ward Moore

I read a story by Ward Moore earlier this year, and liked it.  Can he get me out of this bad story rut?

This is a gimmicky story which reminds you that attitudes, tastes, mores are just faddish opinion and change over time.  In 1962 parents wanted their kids to play outside and sit up straight at the dinner table and conservative people had short hair and rebellious kids wore long hair.  In this story young Caludo's parents have long hair and tell Caludo to recline and lament that he played outside as a kid instead of staying inside to read books and that he now wears his hair short.  Those are just a few examples--the entire story, eight pages, is a conversation between Caludo and his parents that is one obvious switcheroo joke after another--Mom and Dad smoke and drink and think it impolite their son abstains, Mom and Dad are artists and think son is wasting his time becoming a businessman, blah blah blah.

Lame.

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Alfred Bester, who wrote the famous The Stars My Destination wrote the "Books" column in this issue of F&SF, and addresses three books.  The Theodore Sturgeon collection A Way Home he tells us is great because Sturgeon is great--the word "genius" appears.  The novels Battle for the Stars by Edmond Hamilton and Time is the Simplest Thing by Clifford Simak he admits are doing things that have already been done ("space-opera" the former, "conventional persecution" story the latter) but that Hamilton and Simak do these familiar things well.  I have read both Battle for the Stars and Time is the Simplest Thing myself, and those interested can find my Amazon reviews at the links in this paragraph.

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One hit and three misses?  Damn!  Well, you pays your money and you takes your chances, as they say.  Besides, I read these things, in part, to learn about the SF field and the intellectual milieu of the past, so my time reading these stories, no matter how groaningly bad some were, was not wasted.  And I still have that gorgeous Emsh cover to comfort me.