Four Harlan Ellison stories from 1957

I recently expressed an interest in Harlan Ellison's story "Satan is My Ally," which appeared in the May 1957 issue of Fantastic. Commenter ukjarry helpfully pointed out that you can read old issues of Fantastic at archive.org, but too late; my itchy trigger finger had already ordered from ebay the Spring 1969 issue of Science Fiction Greats, the "All Harlan Ellison Issue."  Let's check out "Satan is My Ally" and three other stories by Ellison that appeared in Fantastic and Amazing in 1957, stories which have never been printed in book form.

"The World of Women"

Science fiction is full of utopias and dystopias in which women are in charge of men or there are no men whatsoever (during the life of this blog we've talked about Joanna Russ' short story "An Old Fashioned Girl," Wilson Tucker's Resurrection Days, and Edmund Cooper's Gender Genocide) and it is good to see Ellison in there swinging with the best of them!

For centuries Arka III, the world where women outnumber men two to one that is ruled by five women made immortal by special "anti-death drugs," has lived at peace with neighboring star systems.  But recently the Arkan women have started bombing and conquering other planets, killing billions of innocent people!  The Earth government receives a message from a secret informant on Arka III: one of the five immortals has exterminated all men on the planet and launched the attacks because her anti-death drugs have driven her insane!  Our narrator, Aaron Deems, sneaks onto the planet, and puts on a "lifeshell," a skintight organic suit that makes him look like a woman.  Elaborate hypnotic suggestion therapy performed on him back on Earth even helps him think like a woman.  Thus disguised, he has to establish himself in the capital city, contact whoever it was who sent the message, and figure out which of the five immortals is the maniac and eliminate her!

A fun fast-paced SF caper full of cool gadgets and processes that can manipulate physical matter and the human mind, complete with a traditional SF ending in which the heroes use technology and logic to outwit the villains.  "The World of Women" is also ripe for some kind of feminist analysis, as it has a nuanced view of women, with resourceful female characters both aiding and opposing the hero and a male character forced by circumstance to act and even think like a woman.  Thumbs up!

"The World of Women" was the cover story of the issue of Fantastic in which it appeared, as well as the cover story of Science Fiction Greats of Spring 1969.  The illustration accurately depicts the fact that Deems stores his lifeshell outside his tiny scout ship and pulls it through space on chains, but the artist's inadequate handling of perspective leaves the viewer suspecting the shell is like a hundred feet tall.

"The Glass Brain"

Paul Vaszovek is a genius scientist, the one man who knows the secret of "the energy probe."  When the armies of the self-proclaimed Superior Race win a world war and take over all of Earth, they try to torture the secret of the energy probe out of Vaszovek.  Meanwhile, Vaszovek's young son Peter is educated in the "Wasps," the Raceist youth corps, indoctrinated with all the beliefs of the world conquerors.

Paul Vaszovek refuses to give up the secret of the energy probe, so the Raceist hierarchy goes to Plan B--hooking father and son up to a brain-reading machine.  Because they share so much genetic material, information can be read from the father's brain and fed into the son's brain.  This process takes months, but in the end young Peter has the information the Raceist leadership wants.  But--twist ending--the brain machine also imbued Peter with his father's anti-racist values!  So Peter uses his newfound knowledge to assassinate the assembled Raceist high command--he points his middle finger at them (groan) and fire erupts from the digit, immolating the Raceists!

The plot of this story is good, and I like almost anything about tinkering with people's brains, but the villains and setting are weak and this undermines the story's emotional impact.  The reader is supposed to feel a catharsis when Peter gives the Raceists the finger and incinerates them, but the villains are too overdone, too cartoonish to naturally inspire a distaste for them in the reader.  (Besides the in-your-face Nazi analogy, Ellison lays the descriptions of the torture inflicted on Vaszovek and how fat, swarthy, jowly and oily the top Raceist is very thick.)  It feels too much like Ellison is just telling us to hate them, rather than painting a believable picture of people who deserve our hatred, that he is stacking the deck in a way that obviates any possible dramatic tension.

(Ellison's villains here pose an interesting contrast to the revolutionary mobsters in Barrington Bayley's novel Empire of Two Worlds, which we just read.  Bayley's protagonists commit a multitude of atrocities, but, just like imperialists and revolutionaries and gangsters in real life, they excuse their crimes against humanity as a response to upper class corruption and as part of a big idealistic project.  It is common in real life for people to excuse or even lionize a Lenin or a Napoleon or a John Gotti, so the reader of Empire of Two Worlds has every reason to suspect other readers, and Bayley himself, may well be ready to excuse and praise the scoundrels in the book; this lends the book ambiguity and tension, keeping the reader guessing and maintaining the reader's interest.)

It seems possible that in writing this story Ellison was indulging in some sort of wish fulfillment, giving vent to a desire to get revenge on Nazis (and maybe WASPs?); Ellison seems like the kind of guy who doesn't resist passionate impulses and is into "getting even."  I think the angry-young-man sound and fury of much of Ellison's work appeals to a lot of people, but sometimes, to me, it feels shrill and self-indulgent, even childish; when I read the famous "Tick Tock Man" story I was surprised at how silly it seemed.

Merely acceptable.

"Phoenix Treatment"

This is one of those SF stories about how the cognitive elite can and should manipulate the ignorant masses for their own good.

Ninety-five percent of humanity has fallen to an artificial plague!  The few survivors are very resentful towards scientists because it was scientists who created the plague!  This resentment is indiscriminatory, so the people of Coshocton, Ohio (Ellison's home state and the current location of MPorcius HQ) harass the staff of the laboratory on the edge of town, even though the scientists there are trying to develop a cure for the plague.

The boffins run a complicated and ridiculous conspiracy to get the citizens to leave them alone so they can get on with their work.  They sneak out of the lab at night to kill the proles' cows and even kidnap their leader's child, hoping to egg the commoners on, driving them into burning down their lab!  Then the plebeians will think they have killed the scientists, and then leave them alone so they can continue working in peace in their super secret underground lab!  Most ridiculously, the Ph.D.s manipulate one of the townspeople who has joined them into getting angry enough at them to leave and rejoin the ignorant masses, and then they coax him into helping them once again after the lab is razed.

The plot is very unwieldy and convoluted, and I am prejudiced against these "experts should run our lives" stories anyway.  "Phoenix Treatment" also lacks any particularly good elements to redeem it; gotta levy a negative judgment on this one.

(When I read "The Glass Brain" I wondered if Ellison was using the story to work out some of his anger and animosity towards racists and Nazis, and when I read "Phoenix Treatment" I wondered if it was set in Ohio because Ellison had some issues with the people he grew up among there.)

"Satan is My Ally"

Here it is, the impetus for my purchase of this 48-year old magazine!

"Satan is My Ally" is a wacky and incredible tale, the absurdities of which Ellison papers over by invoking the supernatural powers of Mephistopheles himself! Businessman Paul Dane (is it a coincidence that "Dane" is but one letter away from "Dante?") is a murderer, a thief and a philanderer who is summoned to Hell for an audience with Satan.  Ol' Scratch conscripts Dane and sends him out to California to take over a fraudulent cult (though first Dane kills most of his East coast contacts.)  In La La Land, at Satan's direction, Dane turns the cult into a devil-worshipping outfit and wins converts via a theatrical performance that is broadcast live on television.

Dane's performance consists of having a police officer empty a revolver into his chest on stage at the Hollywood Bowl, killing him.  (This insanity is permitted by the authorities because Satan fogs everybody's mind.)  Then, at a time that was announced just before he was shot full of holes, Dane rises from his grave in front of a crowd of onlookers and TV cameras.  This astonishing event attracts multitudes to join the Satanic cult, and Dane puts on the same exhibition every few weeks, until he finally has his comeuppance.  Satan warned him that if "a good woman finds you out, and labels you what you are, then the show is up," and, sure enough, a naive woman who followed Dane out to the left coast because she is blindly in love with him, once disillusioned, paints the word "DEVIL" on Dane's tombstone while he is still in the grave, making his death permanent this time.

I'm giving this one a passing grade because the first half of the story, out East, is good: the descriptions of Hell and the Devil, and depictions of Dane's journey down to the underworld and the many atrocities he commits, are effective, told with a kind of breathtaking brio.  But the main plot, what with the televised rising from the grave and the inexplicable way Dane's pact with Satan is voided, is just too convoluted and outlandish to take seriously, and it is not funny, either.  Disappointing!

Barely acceptable.

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I can wholeheartedly recommend "The World of Women," but as for the other three, well, it is not that surprising that they have never been published in books.  Probably they would have benefitted from revision, but Ellison was presumably a very busy man in 1957 with little time to polish and tighten these things up, especially if editors were buying them in the condition in which he sent them.

There are three more pieces in the 1969 all-Harlan-Ellison issue of Science Fiction Greats, and I'll be reading them soon.

Empire of Two Worlds by Barrington J. Bayley

"Killibol's the world, the world we're going to transform.  It's like a bomb waiting to be set off.  We're going to release all the energies pent up in those cities.  We'll make a society, an empire, where almost anything will be possible...."

His fellow British SF writers Michael Moorcock and Brian Stableford have a very high opinion of Barrington J. Bayley, and when I recently read two stories by Bayley I gave them passing grades, so it seems the time is ripe to read a novel by Bayley.  Now, it is true that, via twitter, Joachim Boaz warned me away from 1972's Empire of Two Worlds, but the John Schoenherr cover of my Ace edition of the novel, and the Karel Thole cover of the Italian edition even moreso, lead me to believe it is the epic tale of a land warship crossing a desert to wage war on or liberate a futuristic city--to a kid like me who watched StarBlazers religiously back in the '80s, this is nigh irresistible!  Let's see if Empire of Two Worlds lives up to its illustrators!

Killibol!  Desert planet!  Colonized by Earthmen approximately a thousand years ago, this barren rock has no native life and cannot support any sort of agriculture, so the people of the labyrinthine cities (compared by our narrator to termite hives) eat goop grown in vats primarily from waste material.  (They call them "tanks" on Killibol, but I prefer "vats," myself.  That's right, I'm editing the "most original SF writer of his generation.")  All you stoners out there, don't worry, somebody somehow and somewhere is secretly growing marijuana on Killibol to help people take the edge off of hive living!  (Don't harsh everybody's buzz by asking why, if they can grow pot, they don't grow wheat, tomatoes and basil and eat spaghetti instead of vat goop.)

These are some serious blurbs!

The upper levels of the hive city of Klittmann* are under government control, but the lower level slums (the "Basement") are in a state of warfare, warfare between various gangs.  Our narrator, Klein, a former metalworker turned muscle for one gang leader, Klamer, finds himself in the inner circle of Becmath, another gang leader, after Becmath takes over Klamer's territory.  Becmath is ambitious and intelligent, and has read some old books, so has developed a sort of Leninist dream of taking over the entire city and, as dictator, putting the vats, I mean tanks, under full government control.  For the good of the people, of course!

*When I was thirteen my friends and I would have laughed at this name for hours, and made jokes like "I'm trying to find Klittmann, where the hell is it, its like the hardest place to find in the world...." for weeks.

The police of Klittmann have big wheeled armored fighting vehicles called sloops, and Becmath has Klein construct a sloop for their gang, one with better weapons than the government sloops.  Then Becmath begins taking over the city, first the Basement and then pieces of the next level up.  Disaster strikes when the upper level police and some Basement dwellers who don't appreciate Becmath's rule combine forces and attack in concert; in the super sloop Becmath, Klein, and a few other ruthless criminal types escape the city into the lifeless wilderness, bringing along Harmen the "alchemist," the most knowledgeable man in Klittmann.

In the desert Becmath expresses his Napoleonic or maybe Alexandrian (with Harmen as his Aristotle?) ideas of a vast empire which, under his rule, will be devoted to "progress," and Klein swears an oath of allegiance to Becmath and his, at this point, purely hypothetical "state." Demonstrating their single-minded devotion to the State, Becmath cold-bloodedly murders a woman (a desert nomad) Klein picked up and has been having sex with, and Klein just shrugs off this atrocity.

A third or so of the way through the book Harmen leads the mobsters to an ancient teleporter thing that brings the scoundrels to the Earth of like a million years in our future.  (There's some mumbo jumbo about time moving faster on Earth than Killibol which is quickly forgotten.)  The human race has evolved, and artistic green-skinned people are at war with tall belligerent grey people who have been living on a terraformed moon for millenias and are now trying to conquer the Earth.  Becmath gets himself and his buddies ensconced high up in the lunar invaders' hierarchy, and soon Klein and the other Killibolians are managing vast factories and the requisite Earthling slave labor, building enough firearms and armored vehicles for an army. Nine years after his arrival on Earth, Becmath, like some kind of Caesar, Franco or Mao, returns to his home city of Klittmann at the head of a green-skinned conquering army!  But will his rule be one that fosters peace and prosperity, or one that, like that of so many revolutionaries in Earth's distant past, is more murderous and oppressive than the corrupt elites he is replacing?  Klein, in the final pages of the book, must decide how to react when he learns of Becmath's final solution for Klitmann and all of Killibol.

Empire of Two Worlds is an entertaining science-fiction adventure story, but one which totally lacks any wish fulfillment elements, one which doesn't glorify revolution or imperialism and which does not cater to Victorian morality or liberal sensibilities.  The main characters are drug dealers, murderers, rapists, and torturers, who unlike, say, John Carter, who civilizes Mars when he takes over, murder and exploit everybody who falls under their power.  None of the women in the story are the kind of take-charge kung fu girls who apparently predominate in 21st century SF action movies--the women in Empire of Two Worlds are helpless victims of the callous and cruel empire builders.  Bayley's story is sordid and vulgar: our "heroes" side with the evil invaders of Earth against the pastoral natives, and drug addiction (and not just to the relatively innocuous pot mentioned earlier) plays a major role in the plot and in Becmath's machinations.  This is a SF adventure imbued with elements of a tragic crime drama about low lifes and a cynicism about revolutionary politics.

The mobsters have to wear goggles on
Earth because Sol is much
brighter than Killibol's sun

I found Empire of Two Worlds entertaining, but, as I pointed out before, Joachim Boaz is down on it.  In his blog post of summer 2010 about the novel (which post I put off reading until after drafting my summary and assessment above) he awards the novel only 2 of 5 stars, a "Bad" rating, and complains that the characters are boring and the battle scenes banal.  I actually thought the characters and scenes of violence were pretty good; I enjoy straightforward adventure tales more than does Joachim.  Joachim and I agree that the beginning of the book on the desert planet of hive cities was better than the Earth sequences, and that Bayley has good ideas.  I would also suggest that Bayley does a good job setting the scene--describing various sights and sounds and smells, and describing how the narrator reacts to moving from one weird environment (cramped hive city to vast lifeless waste to fertile Earth to grim Luna and then back again) to the next.  I also appreciate that Bayley seems to be trying to say something about radical politics and imperialism, that men of ambition pursue big projects out of selfish ends despite what they may say about the good of the people and progress.

Moderate recommendation from me, particularly if you like adventure stories, gangster epics and anti-heroes.  Finally, I want to note that Klittmann reminded me of the Warhammer 40,000 setting Necromunda; I also sensed some kind of connection between Bayley and WH40K last time I wrote about Bayley's work.

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My copy of Empire of Two Worlds has fun stamps on its inside front cover that help chronicle its journey since its printing in 1972.  One indicates it was once in the inventory of the Book Nook of Atlanta, GA.  These is no Book Nook at 3889 Buford Highway in Atlanta today, but there is a Book Nook in nearby Decatur; perhaps the store moved there soon after acquiring Empire of Two Worlds?  Another stamp reveals that my copy of Bayley's book was sold by Chapter 1 of Ashland, OH.  Chapter 1's location now seems to be occupied by a business which caters to hipster booze enthusiasts.  ("Whether you’re new to the world of wine, craft beer or cask ale, we hope to be your friend and guide as we continue on this great adventure!")  Too bad!  I'm sure you can medicate yourself with the swill they sell at the many Kroger and Walmart locations in Ohio, but you can't find 40-year old books about a gangster on a desert planet just anywhere!  Fortunately for us scholars of crime on desert planets, Ohio is home to numerous Half Price Books locations; I bought Empire of Two Worlds at the Lewis Center location, along with five other important volumes. 

1960s Stories from New Worlds: Bayley, Collyn & Masson

Clap on your pith helmet!  Load your revolver!  Polish your binoculars, pack your mosquito net and fill your canteen!  Today we're exploring new territory!  Before us lie stories from New Worlds magazine, selected by editor Michael Moorcock as among that flagship of the New Wave's best, all by writers whose work I have never before read.  Let's go!

("The Countenance," "The Singular Quest of Martin Borg," and "The Transfinite Choice" I read in my copy of Berkley X1676, The Best SF Stories from New Worlds #2.  "The Ship of Disaster" I read in my copy of Berkley S1943, Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.)

"The Countenance" by Barrington J. Bayley (as by P. F. Woods) (1964)

I shouldn't try to predict or promise things on this blog because I can't tell what I am going to do from one day to the next. I feel like a dozen times I've said, "I plan to read this soon," only to get distracted by some dozen other books and forget all about my "plans."  When I read a bunch of stories from Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4 back in July I said that I was skipping the Bayley story therein because I wanted to accumulate enough Bayley stories to read three or four at once and do a single author blog post about him.  But I recently became curious about his work, and having only two Bayley stories to hand, decided to read them today as part of this New Worlds post.

(Joachim Boaz has written quite a bit about Bayley's work; check out what he has to say here.  Tarbandu read a Bayley novel in 2015 and had good things to say about it.)

In the universe depicted in "The Countenance" the Cold War lasted until 2150 and the Soviet Union won!  Talk about a horror story!  For the two centuries since then, human society's guiding principle has been "Scientocratic Communism" and its rulers the elite caste of "scientocrats."

This is a philosophical story.  Our main characters are Brian and Mercer, childhood friends who meet by chance on an interstellar passenger ship after ten years of separation.  Brian is an oddball who doesn't fit in, is a little skeptical of the scientocrats and their philosophy (Scientocratic Communism bases "science on the Control of Nature by Man") and is always worrying over such philosophical problems as epistemology ("How was anything known?")

Brian becomes intrigued by the fact that the ship has no viewports looking out onto space, only TV screens.  Are the scientocrats keeping something from the people?  He starts sneaking around the outermost corridors of the ship, finds a bolted shut aperture, and opens it up to look upon the universe with his naked eyes.  The sight shatters his brain and kills him.  The ship's captain (a scientocrat, like all ship's officers) tells Mercer that this happens to anybody who looks out at interstellar space.

"The Countenance" is like a Golden Age SF story about space travel and the search for knowledge, but it turns optimistic sense of wonder stories like Robert Heinlein's famous "Universe" on their heads; like an H. P. Lovecraft story it is pessimistic, arguing that knowledge is bad for you.

"The Countenance" also reminded me a bit of Games Workshop's Warhammer 40,000 universe (I have Games Workshop on the brain lately, because I have been playing lots of Blood Bowl: Legendary Edition): a tyrannical government stands between the people and outer space because outer space is a hell which will destroy your mind!   Maybe Bayley was an influence on the GW people?  I see on isfdb that Bayley, from 1998 to 2000, wrote five stories in the WH40K setting.

I like the plot and ideas of the story, especially the idea that the sight of outer space is psychologically overwhelming, an idea I've seen a few other places (unfortunately the only title coming to mind is James White's "The Lights Outside the Windows.")  The style seems a little clunky, amateurish, but I am willing to forgive.  Thumbs up!    

"The Ship of Disaster" by Barrington J. Bayley (1965)

"The Ship of Disaster" reminds me of some of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion books, in which the ancient and sophisticated civilization of the elves (known as Melniboneans or Eldren in Moorcock's books) is collapsing under the pressure of the rise of brutish but vital humanity.  In Bayley's story an elf warship, its oars manned by troll galley slaves, searches the ocean for human vessels to destroy, its crew burning for revenge after their home port was destroyed.  A human merchant ship is sunk and one of its crew captured (the rest are mercilessly burned.)

The elf ship, lost in mist, sails into a ghost world of phantoms showing the future of the Earth.  The ghost images make it clear that in the future there will be no elves or trolls, only humans, and the humans will build vast cities and tremendous ships that will dwarf the achievements of the haughty elves.  The human captive is tossed overboard, where he finds himself transported back to his own dimension, safe, and bearing knowledge of the heroic future that awaits mankind.

The story's most unusual idea is that the Earth is sentient, and chooses which beings will live on her surface.  The crops of the elves and the dinosaur herds of the trolls are failing, not because of biological warfare, as the elves and trolls suspect, but because the Earth herself wants to clear away the elves and trolls to make way for her new favorites, the Men.

No big deal, but entertaining.

"The Singular Quest of Martin Borg" by George Collyn (1965)

This story was included in Judith Merrill's England Swings SF, the famous anthology which we are told did so much to bring attention to the New Wave.  (Back in June I read a few stories from England Swings SF, you may recall.)  Collyn has ten short fiction credits at isfdb.

This is a joke story (maybe it is a parody of a Van Vogt story?), silly and cynical, presenting a sordid view of interstellar civilization.  There are interstellar dope pushers, a planet whose economy depends on sextourism, a mining planet where indentured servants are worked to death, and an asteroid where a pair of neglectful parents leave their offspring to be raised by reprogrammed second-hand veterinary droids.

A drug dealer and a gold-digging adventuress (maybe we should see her as a courtesan) meet on a freezing cold planet (we get a joke about how the courtesan is uncomfortable because she never wears more than a G-string), have a brief relationship and produce a child whom they leave in the care of the aforementioned veterinary robots.  The child's mother is killed in some kind of accident, so she never returns to the lonely asteroid to recalibrate the robots, so they treat her son (the Martin Borg of the title) like an infant, changing his diaper and feeding him formula for twenty-five years!  He gets rescued by bleeding heart do-gooders, who smother him with pity and condescension and prove more interested in using him in their grandstanding publicity campaigns than in actually helping him.  Luckily, his bizarre upbringing has fostered the development of tremendous psychic powers (!) and he teleports back to the asteroid and the veterinary robots.

The robots show Martin a photo of his mother, the beautiful courtesan, and he uses his mental powers to change his body, turning himself into a simulacra of his mother! Somehow he gets his mother's memories (this story doesn't make sense) and follows a career like hers on a pleasure planet, first as a dancer and then as a high class prostitute serving the richest and most powerful of the galaxy's men. Decades into Martin(a)'s career of prostitution the galaxy's red light district is conquered by the space fleet of a dictator who is expanding his empire.  He rapes and murders all the space prostitutes but when he gets to Martin(a) he dies of shock--the dictator is the drug dealer, Martin's father!  Martin moves his mind into his father's body and rules the space empire until he is bored.  Then he tries to use his psychic powers to tinker with the stars, only to arouse the ire of the soul of the universe! The "Cosmic Mind" overwhelms Martin and alters history to end all this evil dictator business; Martin's parents in this revamped universe are decent people with a stable marriage who have a normal son.

"The Singular Quest of Martin Borg" is absurd in its design and tedious in its execution, and feels very very long.  Bad!

"The Transfinite Choice" by David Masson (1966)

Masson has ten stories listed on isfdb.

Naverson Builth is a scientist working at a "five-mile linear accelerator" in 1972.  There is some kind of accident ("trouble in subquark domain" is suspected) and he is transported to the year 2346.

2346 is a totalitarian nightmare due to overpopulation.  Most people live in tiny government-assigned apartments in vast warrens that cover almost all land mass, where they watch TV and eat algae goop.  Luckily (for Builth), the cognitive elite, into which Builth is ushered, has some more greater degree of freedom.  Builth works on a method of teleporting masses of people to other dimensions ("shunting") to relieve the population pressure.  At first this seems to work, and thousands of shunters are built and hundreds of millions of colonists are sent to other dimensions.  Then we get our Twilight Zone-style ending--the Earths of those other dimensions aren't uninhabited as was hoped, but just as crowded as Builth's own!  Those other Earths have also developed shunters and are sending just as many colonists to Builth's Earth as he is sending to them!  Only plague and inter-dimensional war can solve the population crisis!

Much of this story consists of complicated scientific conversations in the streamlined English of the 24th century, an English with fewer articles, verbs, and prepositions. This was irritating to read--I promise to never again take the words "a," "the" and "to" for granted!

The plot of "The Transfinite Choice" is OK (though iffy), but the execution is too annoying and boring.  Marginal thumbs down.  (Masson, however, deserves recognition for his unprecedented enthusiasm in the use of the word "quark.")

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Bayley's stories are good enough that I am not put off reading more of his work, but I feel I need never read a Collyn or Masson story again; their stories are not bad in a garish or amusing way, but in a frustrating and mind-numbing way.  Why did Moorcock and others, like Merrill, think highly of them?  Maybe their irreverence, misanthropy and pessimism fit a 1960s zeitgeist and suited an agenda that saw a need to shake up the SF establishment.  But while a talented writer like Thomas Disch (in 334, Camp Concentration or On Wings of Song, for example) can make irreverence, misanthropy and pessimism work, the Masson story is hobbled by poor technique and foolish artistic choices and the Collyn is just a dumb stunt.  

In our next episode SF stories from 1974; any bets on whether we will see more dumb stunts?