Gather in the Hall of the Planets by Barry N. Malzberg

"Something's happened, William; I can't enjoy a convention anymore. You see, I was visited by these three aliens who said that they were going to plant one of them in human disguise at this convention and if I couldn't detect his identity by the time it was over then they would destroy the planet.  So of course I'm a little distracted."

"That's interesting," Culp says.  "Of course the idea's been a little over-used." 

Our last episode discussed a Barry Malzberg novel about the SF community of New York City, 1970's Dwellers of the Deep.  That worked out pretty well, so I figured I might as well tackle 1971's Gather in the Hall of the Planets, another "meta" NYC-centric novel which paints an unflattering picture of rabid SF fans. Gather in the Hall of the Planets first appeared in Ace Double 27415.  The book is dedicated to Donald Wollheim, famed SF editor, who, Malzberg revealed in 2004, apparently provided the plot for the novel!

Sanford Kvass is a successful science fiction writer who says he doesn't like science fiction (even though it is quickly revealed that he has attended SF conventions for over twenty years, since he was thirteen.)  How successful is he? Check out his publication list below!  Why does he write science fiction if he doesn't like it?  He needs the money, and the porno, western and detective markets are too unreliable!

(In some ways, Kvass seems to be based on Malzberg's own life and career, and to express Malzberg's own frustrations.  I think Malzberg, however, has had a successful marriage and family life.)

One night, drunk and mired in the middle of a long stretch of writer's block, Kvass is visited by tentacled aliens.  They tell him that he has been selected to represent Earth for the purposes of taking a test.  At the upcoming 1974 world science fiction convention in New York City, one of Kvass's close associates will have been seized by the aliens and replaced with an alien in disguise.  If Kvass can spot the alien (he has to ritualistically say "unmask!" to indicate his discovery) Earth has passed the test.  If Kvass fingers the wrong person, the aliens will blow up the Earth.  This is the kind of thing education activists decry as a high stakes test!

Most of the novel consists of funny scenes of Kvass staring into peoples' eyes or trying to have sex with them as a means of discerning whether they are human or alien, descriptions of wacky convention hi-jinks, and Malzberg's satirical takes on famous figures and events of SF history.  As in Dwellers of the Deep, we get caricatures of A. E. van Vogt and Sam Moskowitz, and thinly veiled retellings of the role of Dianetics in van Vogt's career and of the split between Moskowitz's SF fan group and leftist SF fans like Wollheim and Frederick Pohl. Stuart Wiseman, the shady seller of overpriced magazines, also reappears.  It was a little disappointing seeing Malzberg trot out such similar gags instead of amusing us with more caricatures of different SF figures and events.

In Malzberg's defense, there is an extended reference to John W. Campbell, Jr.'s "Who Goes There?", as well as a pair of editors, William Culp and Michael Foote, who are said to have been married to the same woman (at different times, we are assured) who, put on a panel together, without using the phrase, seem to be debating the "New Wave"; one argues that SF has to expand its horizons and focus on "what's closest to our hearts and minds," while the other insists SF is about science and follows particular conventions, and writing that does not follow those conventions ceases to be SF.

There is also a good chapter about the angst and disillusionment felt by writers of popular fiction (at least in Malzberg's conception; I hope at least some genre writers are happy with their careers): guilt at being paid for such a silly occupation; disbelief that anybody could possibly care about one's output; and late in his career, sadness that one has been unable, in the medium of popular fiction, to say anything he really wanted to say.  At various points in the novel Malzberg suggests that being a writer of popular fiction is like being a prostitute, and that writing is no less absurd than looking for a probably hallucinatory alien doppelganger.

Gather in the Hall of the Planets appeared in the
German collection of Malzberg stories
 Der Letzte Krieg under the title
  Die Arena der Aliens

In the final scene of the novel, after it is clear that Kvass's career is kaput and that the aliens (if they are in fact real) have lied to him, Kvass snatches up a mirror and says "unmask!", declaring that he himself is the alien.  Even though this revelation was foreshadowed, I am not sure it makes any sense in relation to the novel's plot (if the aliens are real), but I suppose it is a spoof of those classic SF stories by people like van Vogt, Alfred Bester and Robert Heinlein in which a guy, in the climax, is revealed to be multiple characters or his own ancestor or some such thing, due to time travel or some similar gimmick.  Also, it expresses the idea that Kvass is alienated not only from the world and his community (other people at the convention keep telling him that his published work is poor, or not as good as it used to be, or that they simply have never read it or even heard of Kvass) but from himself, that he is not the man he used to be and not the man he wanted to be.

Another fun read aimed directly at those familiar with the history of SF and its prominent figures, distinguished from Dwellers of the Deep by its focus on the plight of professional writers and editors who, like Malzberg himself, think perhaps they (and SF as a whole) could have achieved something more.

Eight stories by Barry Malzberg from the period 1974-6

The time has finally come!  Today we conclude our epic journey through Barry N. Malzberg's 1976 collection, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  It has been an exciting trip, and we still have eight stories to tackle before we can return this baby, with its terrific Robert Schulz cover and surrealistic Harlan Ellison back cover blurb, to my dusty shelves.  Let's get to it!

"Twenty Sixty-One" (1974)

In the intro to this one Malzberg tells us he has "long been a fan of schizophrenia" (remember, his uncle Benjamin was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and author of publications with titles like Migration and Mental Disease: A study of first admission to hospitals for mental disease, New York, 1939-1941.)  He jocularly suggests that schizophrenia, "the only disease that was genuinely artful...might save all of us yet."

"Twenty Sixty-One" was first printed in F&SF and was later translated into Portuguese

"Twenty Sixty-One" is set in a single room, where we find two men.  Their dialogue, and insight into their thoughts provided by the third-person narrator, makes evident that these men live in a future in which so many people are unhappy with their lives that they pay technicians to administer drugs to them that give them mental disorders like paranoia and catatonia.  The twist ending makes us wonder if this scenario is in part, or entirely, a delusion.

As we have seen as we have read The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, our buddy Barry often writes about futuristic institutions which provide strange forms of therapy, forms of therapy which often seem more like self-indulgent recreation than any kind of serious medical regimen.  One of Barry's recurring motifs in these stories is that the therapists are called "technicians," not "doctors," suggesting the mental health professionals portrayed have little compassion for their patients, and that a human being is just a machine, like an automobile perhaps, not something magical with a unique personality or soul.

Pretty good.

"Closing the Deal" (1974)

"Closing the Deal" appeared in Analog (when it was edited by Ben Bova), which gives Malzberg occasion to use his intro here to talk about John W. Campbell, the legendary SF editor.  Malzberg credits Campbell with creating the modern SF field in the 1940s, and argues that, without Campbell's guidance, SF would be a tiny moribund niche market, like westerns, and not the prominent (perhaps dominant?) cultural phenomenon it in fact had become by the 1970s.  (Malzberg here calls SF "the American literature of the last third of the century.")

"Closing the Deal" is actually a good fit for Analog; it not only deals with one of Campbell's hobby horses-- psionic powers--but, compared to much of Malzberg's body of work, it is clear and direct, and has believable characters who are not insane. At the same time it is pure Malzberg: it is cynical and depressing, it portrays an unhappy marriage and an unhappy parent-child relationship, and it deromanticizes one of the most romanticized (and most ridiculous) of SF tropes.

A man whose wife abandoned him and their little girl is in discussion with another man.  The little girl, eight years of age, is a voluble genius who has the ability to levitate; she also accuses her father of stifling her. The conversation between the father and the visitor at first sounds somewhat like those between a social worker and a single parent facing difficulties, but we soon learn that psychic powers are relatively common in this world, and the visitor is a talent scout from one of several private firms who train and manage young psychics; he and the father are negotiating a price for the father to surrender custody and "total control" of the girl to the firm.  The father gets a much lower offer than he expects, not realizing how common psychic powers really are and how limited are his daughter's (the talent scout uses the phrase "third string.")  The scout reveals that he himself has psionic abilities, powers much like the little girl's, and these have not enabled him to have any glittering career or win any fame.

In a van Vogt story or a Sturgeon story people with mental powers radically change the world or the universe, leading man to his destiny of crossing the black void between the galaxies or the gulfs between individual consciousnesses, opening up an eternity of adventure or peace.  In this Malzberg story psykers are just people trying to sell their skills on the market like the rest of us, people just as likely to be frustrated with their careers and lives as anybody else.  ("How many violinists are there for every concert master?" asks the scout.  I wonder if Malzberg, who has admitted to dreams of being a professional violinist, had his own career as a writer in mind with this stuff; he was able to make a decent living for his family with his pen and win the accolades of his fellow SF writers, but is obviously disappointed he hasn't achieved the recognition of a Roth or Nabokov.)

It is great to see Malzberg put together a good mainstream story for the most popular of SF magazines without compromising his own artistic vision.  "Closing the Deal" is a better than average example of his work, and a story I can recommend without reservation to all SF fans, not just to those who are into experimental or literary SF.

Very good.  

"What the Board Said" (1976)

In his intro Malzberg warns us that this is another story about the JFK assassination.  I think it has only ever appeared here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg--completists take note!

It is the future!  The Earth is inhabited by thirty-five billion people, and they travel around the globe via a public transportation system of teleporter gates.  Our narrator works for the government, for the "board" which "runs the world;" his in-person report to the board makes up the first part of this story.  The board is an old man, whom it is hinted may be largely a machine and who apparently plays a sort of religious role in this future world; we are told the board is kept alive by a full-time staff and the prayers of half the world's population.  The board has sent the narrator to search the Earth for the answer to some unspecified question, and he has returned to say there is no answer that human beings can understand.  Presumably the question is about the meaning of life or possibility of free will or some other weighty philosophical issue.  The board, whom the narrator considers insane, weeps upon learning that this essential question is unanswerable.

The narrator leaves the broken-hearted board to join a line at one of the teleporters. There is a long queue because the teleporter system, like the board, is in severe decline, breaking down under the pressure of overpopulation and deficient maintenance.  A fat man in line behind the narrator begins complaining, and even proposes confronting the board.  The narrator considers this man insane (the narrator tells us that modern technology has driven many people insane) and tries to stop him; the fat man calls the narrator insane and leads an angry crowd back to the board's room, knocking over the narrator in the process.  The last line of the story reveals that all this has happened in Dallas and suggests that a violent revolution is about to take place.

I really don't see the connection between what happens in this story and the murder of JFK.  Was Kennedy assassinated in response to a severe deficiency of his government or general decline in American society due to overpopulation and technological change?  Did a popular revolution result from his murder? What happens in this story seems more akin to the French Revolution or the murder of Archduke Ferdinand or the Bolshevik Revolution or the fall of the Weimar Republic or something like that. Maybe the murder of Kennedy felt like such a cataclysm to his more ardent fans?  If it wasn't for that last line, and Malzberg telling us the story is about JFK in the intro, the reader would have little reason to link the story to JFK at all.

This story is alright; I think the last line is in fact distracting, and I would probably like it more if that last line was absent or modified; instead of feeling like a story inspired by the tragic death of JFK, it feels like the author wrote a story and then tried to cheaply take advantage of the reader's presumed deep feelings about the assassination to make his story seem more profound.

"Uncoupling" (1976)

In Charles Platt's very entertaining profile of Malzberg in Dream Makers, our pal Barry tells Platt that his favorite of his own stories is "Uncoupling."  In his intro to "Uncoupling" here in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, the author tells us it is a tribute to and a "shameless pastiche" of Alfred Bester, whom Malzberg considers the "best stylist" in the "history of the field."  Malzberg's exact words are "The best stylist pound-for-pound (I'd make him a light heavyweight) in the history of this field is probably Alfred Bester..." but I don't really know what he means by that "pound-for-pound" business; maybe it's just a joke?  Does Malzberg have a list of SF writers in his head, each ranked according to sales or influence or critical acclaim, with (one guesses) Heinlein, Asimov and Clarke the top heavyweights?  What weight class does Malzberg reckon he himself belongs in?

"Uncoupling" first appeared in Dystopian Visions and later in The Road to Science Fiction #4

In the overpopulated future in which the government runs everything and enforces its rules with an army of tentacled robot cops, a self-described fascist goes to the government-run brothel to enjoy his government-authorized monthly act of sexual intercourse.  Bad news--his allotment has been reduced from ten minutes to five!

Being a good fascist the narrator accepts this diminution of his sex ration: "I will not dispute the Government in any area."  But before the story ends we will learn that there are people in this totalitarian world who rebel against the government's control of their intimate relationships, however futilely.

I was expecting more from Malzberg's own fave story (I thought Malzberg's favorite of his novels was really good, the most enjoyable Malzberg novel I've ever read), but I certainly liked "Uncoupling," and it is probably better than average for him, and probably more approachable than average.  It also has what may be considered shocking or salacious elements: the government brothel caters not only to those who favor traditional sexual practices, but every fetish imaginable, and as the narrator is escorted to the "HETEROSEX" wing he passes by the "SADO-MASOCHISM,"
"BESTIALITY" and "NECROPHILIA" sectors, hearing various shrieks, squeals and moos as he does so.

"Over the Line" (1974)

In his intro to this one Malzberg claims he wrote it in an hour, during a break in an argument with his wife!  He also claims that "the writer" is "essentially" a "blue-collar worker."  I find it irritating when college-educated people who sit at desks reading and typing for a living try to don the mantle of the working classes; being a professional creative writer is certainly work and certainly comes with its own psychological challenges, but it is not like toiling in a mine or a factory or driving deliveries or scrubbing floors or whatever.

"Over the Line" first alerted us to the
pointlessness of our lives in
Roger Elwood's Future Kin

Whether or not he really wrote it in 60 minutes, "Over the Line" is quite good.  A generation ship has been crossing the cosmos for generations, so long that the ship's computer is breaking down.  At sixteen years of age inhabitants of the ship go ask the computer a question; this is a rite of passage that marks the line between childhood and adulthood on the ship.  Most of this story consists of our narrator describing his meeting with the computer during his own rite of passage.  He asks when the ship will finally reach its destination, and the computer admits that the files with the ship's destination have been lost--the ship is just going to travel on forever until it crashes or suffers catastrophic technical failure; the ship's voyage and the lives of the space travellers are pointless.  

An allegory for our lives!  And an allegory for (a cynical/practical view of) religion: when the narrator returns to his father he lies, telling Dad that the computer assured him that Mom, who disappeared eight years ago, is "at peace."  Religion is the lies we tell each other to make life endurable.

This is a good one; I like that the computer was programmed to feel emotions, in order to better identify with and serve the passengers, but that this has resulted in a computer that is depressed and miserable, scared of its own death and liable to short-tempered outbursts and self-pity.      

"Try Again" (1974)

"Try Again" and "An Oversight" share an intro.  In the intro Malzberg tells us that, while he is Jewish  ("guilt-stricken and intermittently disbelieving Reform") himself, he has written little influenced by Judaism, but quite a bit of work referring to the New Testament, and these two stories are examples of such fiction.

Both "Try Again" and "An Oversight"
first appeared in Strange Gods.  One
wonders if any of the stories is a
sword and sorcery adventure, as the
color illustration suggests.

The world has ended and the text of "Try Again" is that of the journal of a survivor, Steve the mediocre small town sportswriter, who is in a bomb shelter with his wife Eva and his father-in-law Bill, a fundamentalist minister.  (That's our  Barry, putting a woman named Eva in a bunker and suggesting she may be the only woman in the world, getting two allusions for the price of one!)  Bill has been preparing for the end of the world all his life, studying and preaching about the Book of Daniel incessantly for years--Eva, who hates her father, thinks he is happy that the world has ended!  Steve, we readers are given reason to believe, may also welcome the end of the world as a release from a disappointing life in which he never strove to do his best, but instead coasted--if the world was going to end during his lifetime anyway, his taking the easy path and settling for less all these years was justified!

Malzberg's work is often so short and crazy and experimental that he doesn't devote much energy to delineating characters, but in "Try Again" he effectively presents us with people with interesting personalities and motivations, people (in particular, the narrator) who are quite believable.  Malzberg often talks about psychology in his stories, but in an abstract or clinical way, throwing around Freudian terms and portraying characters who are totally bonkers.  In "Try Again" I felt like he was doing the more traditional literary thing, showing us the psychology of a more or less normal person, and I liked it.

Of course, this is still a Malzberg story, so there are some bizarre off the wall twists: can it be that the world hasn't ended after all? And what is up with this friendly tentacled alien who says he is a researcher and has been living in the bomb shelter since long before Steve and Bill and Eva arrived?

Fun and engaging, with a protagonist with whom an ordinary person can easily identify!

"An Oversight" (1974)

This brief story is a wacky trifle.  Our narrator, the head of some tiny apocalyptic Muslim sect with a mosque in the US (I guess in New York), thinks that "the Saviour" is on the Earth, travelling in various disguises.  He chases the Saviour around the world, spotting Him disguised as a hotdog-gobbling sports fan at a football game in St. Louis, as an Armenian Jew on a bus in Israel, as an old woman in Moscow.  Our narrator thinks if he can seize the Saviour that the Apocalypse can begin, but He keeps getting away, so much so that his followers are grumbling and making fewer and fewer donations to the cause.  Finally, on a plane bound for Alaska, the narrator realizes that the sexy stewardess is the Saviour in disguise!  He grabs her, and the "thousand years of war and judgement" begin.

This story is sort of amusing; the apparent preoccupation of the Saviour with money (our narrator suspects He disguised Himself as a stewardess so He could fly for free!) made me laugh.  Malzberg also hints that the narrator's theory that he can start the Apocalypse by grappling with the Saviour, who disguises himself in many ways, may be an excuse to sexually molest strangers.

Not bad, but slight.

"And Still in the Darkness" (1976)

Here it is, the last story in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg!  In his intro Barry tells us that, at age 35, he has made the "irrevocable decision to write no more science fiction."  Say it ain't so!

Malzberg explains that he loves the science-fiction field, but is convinced that even the best SF writers run out of ideas and just repeat themselves after seven or ten years. This fate he does not want to suffer.  (Malzberg's theory, that science fiction "seems to impose a definite time limit upon the creative working life of its practitioners" challenges those of us who are SF fans to look over the oeuvre of our favorite writers and try to figure out if, after the ten year mark, any of them wrote something fresh and different from what came before.  I also think it is fair to consider how much this discovery about SF--if true--matters to readers.  I am willing to admit that The Master Mind of Mars (1927) and Synthetic Men of Mars (1940) are not radically different from A Princess of Mars (1917; magazine version 1912) and Gods of Mars (1918; magazine version 1913), but I remember enjoying all four immensely!)

"And Still in the Darkness," which apparently only ever appeared in this essential volume for all of us SF scholars, bears considerable similarities to "Over the Line."  As a rite of passage a teenage boy has to go talk to the old computer that runs his society: the point of the encounter is to have it explained to him that life is "pain and darkness," that human life, compared to the vast size and scope of the universe, is insignificant.

Inferior to "Over the Line" because it lacks the family dynamics of "Over the Line" and the interesting idea of an emotional computer, so just OK.

**********

The Best of Barry N. Malzberg has been a great ride.  Many of these stories are good, and I love Malzberg's intros about his life as a writer and about the SF field.  This is an absolute must have for fans of Malzberg, and I also reccomend it to anybody interested in "literary" SF, the New Wave, and 20th-century SF criticism.

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.

***********

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.

***********

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.    

No Brother, No Friend by Richard C. Meredith

On the one hand there was a sense of sincerity, of total and complete honesty exuded by the old female Krith, yet, on the other hand, over the years the Kriths had told so many lies, so many lies that had seemed to be totally convincing, I found it hard to credit truth to anything a Krith said without hard objective proof to back it up.

I'm blonde myself, so I think I am permitted to make the requisite
"blonde brings an axe to a ray gun fight" joke

My mother, for reasons I cannot fathom, has become a partisan of Thriftbooks.com, and for my birthday got me a gift card usable at their website.  I'd prefer a gift card usable at amazon, because the people at Thriftbooks.com ruin the appearance of the books they sell by affixing to them large stickers which are impossible to remove.  It is similarly impossible to tell this to my mother, who doesn't let one get a word in, and already thinks I am a snob ("Why do you wear those fancy clothes?  Why don't you wear something comfortable like the rest of us, like jeans and a T-shirt?") an ingrate ("We are very disappointed that you aren't using that education we paid so much money for") and a failure ("We thought you were going to be a professor, and now you have that dead end job....")  My whining to her about stickers on the books she bought me is not going to have a positive effect on our relationship.  So I guess that makes me a steady Thriftbooks.com customer.

Anyway, I liked the first volume of Richard C. Meredith's Timeliner Trilogy, At The Narrow Passage, enough that I used my birthday present to buy the rest, as well as Meredith's The Sky is Filled with Ships.  To my disappointment We All Died at Breakaway Station is quite expensive online; I'll have to hope to stumble on a cheap one in real life.

This week I read No Brother, No Friend, the 1979 paperback edition put out by Playboy.  Originally, the novel appeared in 1976 with a very odd, modern art collage cover that reminded me a little of Max Ernst.  The text of the Playboy edition, with a more conventional sex, violence, and aliens cover, is apparently revised in some way.

I was pretty disappointed as I started No Brother, No Friend.  It felt long and slow, with nothing much happening.  Our narrator from At The Narrow Passage, Eric Mathers, is hiding out with a girlfriend on one of the multitudes of alternate Earths, and after just a few pages they get captured by the Krith.  The Krith are one of two advanced nonhuman races competing for dominance of the multiverse, in part by manipulating the more numerous but less sophisticated humans; in the past Mathers has worked in their employ as a mercenary, but in the course of the earlier novel he became disillusioned with them.

The portion of the narrative covering Mathers's captivity includes lots of flashbacks to scenes from At The Narrow Passage and surreal dream sequences when Mathers gets drugged.  The style is irritating, tedious and overwritten, with unnecessarily wordy sentences (a Krith says "I am rather certain that your murder of Kar-hinter will not go unavenged" instead of just "I am certain you will be punished for murdering Kar-hinter" or "I am certain your murder of kar-hnter will be avenged") and odd and distracting metaphors--check out this sentence on page 17:

This one was tall, a full seven feet, built like a wrestler, but with no fat, and he carried an energy pistol exactly like Pall's--big, black, and ugly as patricide and incest.

Maybe this apparent non-sequitur about patricide and incest is supposed to foreshadow the relationship between humanity and the Krith which is revealed in the final third of the novel?

Fortunately around page 60 Mathers escapes to a timeline with a kind of Norse Viking flavor, and the style and pacing of the novel make a turn for the better. In this timeline North America is split up into smallish competing English ("Anglian"), German ("Imperial"), French ("Frankish") and Native ("Skralang") political units, and Mathers falls in with the English, who are allied with the American Indians.

As you may remember, At The Narrow Passage began in a dimension where the Krith were aiding the British, and featured Mathers participating in a British commando raid in France, the object of which was to capture a German aristocrat.  In the Norse world which is the setting for the middle part of No Brother, No Friend the Krith are working against the English, and Mathers participates in an English-American commando raid in Georgia, the object of which is to capture a Krith secret headquarters.  The German aristocrat is back, this time as a leader of the raid and a comrade of Mathers's.  It is nice to see this guy doesn't hold a grudge, even though Mathers not only tried to kidnap him but has been sleeping with his wife.

This middle part of the novel that focuses on the attack is an improvement over the slow and clumsy beginning.  The military and espionage aspects are entertaining, and a new character is introduced who is somewhat interesting, an embittered female spy who acts as a love (or maybe we should say "lust") interest for our narrator.  (She is a lot more interesting than the girlfriend I mentioned.)  The pace is faster, things actually happen, and the writing seems tighter.  I wonder if the first third of the novel got more revision, or less revision, than the rest of the book; this could perhaps account for the differences in style.

The English force falls into a Krith trap, and most of the characters don't live to see the final third of the book.  Mathers survives, of course, and after some shenanigans revolving around him capturing Kriths and Kriths capturing him, back and forth across a variety of dimensions, he ends up in the Krith home dimension.  Here he finds himself before the Krith ruling tribunal, the handful of rare female Krith, who are repulsively obese and wrinkled from age, but also gifted with tremendous psychic powers.  These female rulers explain the crisis facing the universe, hint at the multiverse-shaking importance of Mathers himself, and explain the bizarre origin of the Krith race--they are the descendants of genetically-engineered human beings, created and then abandoned by callous high-tech humans from a particularly advanced timeline.  (Of course, any or all of this could be a lie!)

When I talked about At The Narrow Passage I compared elements of the novel to the work of Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein.  Today I am going to compare elements of No Brother, No Friend to the work of A. E. van Vogt and Alfred Bester.  A few times in these first two Timeliner books a shadowy figure appears out of nowhere to aid Mathers.  In the last few chapters of No Brother, No Friend we learn that this figure is Mathers himself, the Mathers of the future, who has attained great psionic power and travelled back in time to help his younger self.  Van Vogt, of course, is known for having characters who develop super mental powers.  (At one point Meredith actually uses the word "supermind," which I thought might be significant.  While the first edition of No Brother, No Friend was published a year before DAW published Van Vogt's Supermind, Supermind is a fix-up of stories that appeared long before, and, of course, the revised edition of No Brother, No Friend appeared two years after Supermind.)  One of the memorable elements of Bester's well-known 1956 novel The Stars My Destination (AKA Tiger! Tiger!) is how the protagonist's future self travels back through time to periodically appear before him in a dramatic and mysterious fashion.

At the end of No Brother, No Friend, Mathers reunites with the (boring) girlfriend from the start of the book, and with the help of shadowy future Mathers they escape the Krith to a presumably safe timeline.  Of course, they hoped they were safe in the timeline that started the book.

The first quarter or so of No Brother, No Friend is weak, but the remainder has some of the strengths that led me to enjoy At The Narrow Passage--the military stuff, and the uncertainty surrounding  the true nature of the universe and which factions deserved the reader's sympathy.  So, a mild recommendation.  I'm definitely curious about what goes on in the third Timeliner volume, Vestiges of Time.

**********

The back pages of No Brother, No Friend advertise other paperbacks produced by Playboy, including a horror novel, The Siblng by Adam Hall, that Robert Bloch says will haunt your dreams, and a series of adventures by Graham Diamond which are apparently about a sexy princess who fights "the creatures of the forest" in a grim far future.