Three early 1970s stories from 1976's The Best of A. E. van Vogt

In 1976 Pocket Books put out a 256-page collection of stories by MPorcius Fiction Log's favorite Canadian (sorry, Norm!) entitled The Best of A. E. van Vogt.  When I read this book's entry on isfdb a week or so ago I found it irresistible and rushed to ebay to purchase a copy. Why irresistible? Well, there's the Harry Bennett cover, which, with its obvious brushstrokes, collage-like elements, beautiful blues and horrifying faces is more like something you'd see in an art museum than on the cover of a SF book. And then there's the intro by Barry N. Malzberg, another of our obsessions here at MPorcius Fiction Log HQ.

Let's take a look at this baby!

"Ah, Careless, Rapturous van Vogt!" by Barry N. Malzberg  

The intro by New Jersey's own Barry Malzberg is dated "Teaneck, N.J., September 10, 1975" and is over two pages long.  The title is actually a paraphrase of something said of van Vogt by Brian Aldiss.  Malzberg argues that van Vogt is difficult to assess and has been "under-assessed" or ignored by the critics (he lists Budrys, Blish, Knight, Russ and Panshin, just their last names, assuming the reader is a SF junkie who will recognize these worthies.)  Malzberg's own theory of van Vogt is that he is the most unique of the Golden Age SF writers:  

Heinlein, Asimov, Del Rey, Kuttner, are marvelous writers making their contributions as a group to a body of literature; van Vogt is standing off by himself building something very personal and unique.

Malzberg, who is a solipsistic sort, then says that he sympathizes with van Vogt because he feels like he has done the same thing in the 1970s that the Canadian mastermind did in the Golden Age, that they are both "sui generis," above all themselves, writers whose work is distinct from the main group of SF writers of their cohort.

Reading Malzberg compare himself in this way to van Vogt brought a smile to my face, because, for years now, I have been enjoying Malzberg and van Vogt in similar ways and seen them as similar writers.  Both eschew conventions and break the rules to produce strange and confusing work, shit that is so crazy and surprising it makes you laugh; both also hit the same themes and topics again and again, even recycling material in the interests of efficiency--for them writing is a business as well as an art.

I felt like with this essay I had already got my money's worth out of The Best of A. E. van Vogt, but there was much more to come, stories I'd never read and page after page of non fiction from van Vogt himself.  Let's check out three stories from the early 1970s, "Don't Hold Your Breath," "All We Have on this Planet," and "Future Perfect," as well as some of the accompanying nonfiction material.

"Introduction"

In his brief (just over a page) intro to this collection van Vogt brings up Marshall McLuhan and his theory of hot and cool media--"Long before McLuhan I did things with my style that were designed to make it even hotter."  He also defends "pulp" writing, and says "pulp" can be used to describe "fiction that has in it an unusual vitality," not neccesarily low quality junk.  Van Vogt brings up Norman Spinrad, whom he claims "maintains" that "people who enjoy pulp writing" are "lesser human beings." According to van Vogt, Spinrad has contempt for the vast majority of humanity and thinks the only people living meaningful lives are "the dissidents of the 1960s."   (My reading of Spinrad's The Men in the Jungle and my abortive effort to read Child of Fortune make me think van Vogt is not exaggerating very much.)  Finally, van Vogt claims that science fiction (which he likes to call "unreality writing") will be found to be "of greater importance than is now evident."

"Don't Hold Your Breath" (1973)

The stories in The Best of A. E. van Vogt include intros by the author, and some have afterwords.  In the intro to "Don't Hold Your Breath" van Vogt does the kind of thing Malzberg often does, jocularly complaining that nobody has read, and almost nobody has heard about, Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd's anthology Saving Worlds and its paperback edition The Wounded Planet, the venue in which "Don't Hold Your Breath" first appeared.  (I read a Malzberg story from The Wounded Planet and Malzberg's own dim appreciation of the anthology's marketability almost a year ago.)

It is the near future, a time of world government and visiphones, and the Earth is running out of oxygen!  The government is having huge underground complexes of tiny apartments built where people can breathe thanks to oxygen manufacturing plants, and also developing drugs which will transform people into flourine-breathers!  (Flourine is being imported to Earth from asteroids.)

Our narrator is Art Atkins, millionaire.  Atkins got rich by fulfilling government contracts for parts of the many subterranean living quarters--his absolute lack of morals and skill at schmoozing and manipulating people served him well in dealing with all-too-corruptible government bureaucrats.  Atkins has a lot in common with Dr. Carl Hazzard from "The Sound of Wild Laughter;" he's an expert on female psychology who juggles numerous mistresses and has a habit of hiding explosive charges here and there for possible future use!

Our convoluted story begins with Art, just days before the oxygen is going to run out, crossing the deserted city (everybody else is already hiding in the local shelter, but Art can wait to the last minute because he has built a secret personal entrance into the shelter) to visit one of his four mistresses.  He has to punch some sense into this chick because she has been defying him!  He assures us that he won't punch her too hard because he doesn't want to ruin her pretty face or curvy body!

It turns out that this mistress of Art's is working for the terrorist underground that opposes the transformation of humankind into flourine-breathers.  These rebels want Art to detonate the explosives he left in the local oxygen plant.  One of these supposed rebels is a double agent working for the government and Art soon goes from rebel hands into government custody. The government wants to know all about Art's secret entrances and hidden bombs, and to severely punish him for his various crimes, but maybe Art's skills at manipulation will help him escape justice!

I read "Don't Hold Your Breath" years ago when I borrowed 2003's Transfinite from the New York Public Library, but I didn't mind reading it again today--it's pretty good.  Art Atkin's narration--thanks to his quirky outdated slang ("I threw on some threads and ankled outside") as well as his abundant self-confidence and shocking amorality--is amusing.  In the Afterword to "Don't Hold Your Breath" van Vogt makes clear that he thinks the current concern over ecology is no more than faddish alarmism ("emotional madness") and opportunism ("The ecology scare, which extravagantly enriched a few writers....") and tells us he focused his story on Art Atkins instead of environmental destruction because he wanted his story to be timeless, not dated once the current pollution-obsession has been forgotten.

"All We Have On This Planet" (1974)          

In the intro to this piece van Vogt relates how, in the 1960s, a bunch of young SF writers appeared who thought SF should be "relevant" and reflect reality, and how the critics quickly jumped on this relevance bandwagon.  Since our man Van has been telling us that he writes "unreality stories" and thinks writing anti-pollution stories is a waste of time, we aren't surprised to hear that he was at odds with the newly revolutionized SF establishment, which declared van Vogt's work "kaput."  Van Vogt doesn't mention the names of any of those new writers here, but he singles out one of the critics, Algis Budrys.  Apparently, at some point Budrys declared he was leaving the SF field (members of the SF community are always quitting for a few years and then coming back) and one of the reasons he said he was doing so was that he found it frustrating that van Vogt still had a paying audience!

Van brags that, despite elite disapproval, his stories kept selling and getting reprinted.  Then he tells us that "All We Have On This Planet" proves that his success is no accident, because in it "I handle reality material of the inelegant type that has been so popular for so long in mainstream fiction and in 'relevant' science fiction."

"All We Have On This Planet" is a wacky satire in which van Vogt parodies literary writers and critics as people who think realistic fiction must include references to using the bathroom and having sex.  The main character of the six-page story is a novelist who craves the approval of others and produces suspense stories by tapping his subconscious via "automatic writing."  In the newspaper, which he sometimes reads while sitting on the toilet, he reads reviews of his own work (complaints that it doesn't reflect reality because it lacks references to bodily functions like going to the bathroom) and the latest news about the alien invasion.  He has two girlfriends, Sleekania, who is a psychic who can read his mind (and dislikes what she finds there) and Devestata, who is a military history buff.  Combining insights from these two women, the novelist calls his father, a brigadier-general at the Pentagon who can speak fourteen Asian languages, and tells him that the Earth space navy should attack the alien invaders every four hours, when they take an hour off to all go to the bathroom at the same time.  This advice saves the Earth.

I guess as a mocking imitation of experimental stories, "All We Have On This Planet" is sometimes written in the third person, sometimes in the first person, switching without warning.

This is a bizarre but memorable novelty, full of strange elements.  It first appeared in a British anthology edited by George Hay, Stopwatch, (according to van Vogt he was asked to contribute something "subversive") and would later be included in a French anthology with a very strange flesh and blood cover illustration by Chris Foss, famous in the SF world for his cold images of huge space ships and machinery (though also responsible for the drawings in the first edition of The Joy of Sex).

Introduction to "War of Nerves"

"War of Nerves" is one of the famous Space Beagle stories and I am already familiar with it and don't want to spend any time on it today, but the intro to the story is remarkable because in it van Vogt presents a kind of theory of science fiction.  Van Vogt brands mainstream literature and TV as "reality fiction," saying that most people like to read and watch TV about real life: "stories about hospitals, crime in the streets, personal tragedies, romantic and married love, etc."

Van Vogt tells us that his "brand of science fiction"--unreality fiction--is more challenging to the reader than reality fiction.

Each paragraph--sometimes each sentence--of my brand of science fiction has a gap in it, an unreality condition.  In order to make it real, the reader must add the missing parts.  He cannot do this out of his past associations.  There are no past associations.  So he must fill in the gaps from the creative part of his brain.  

Van Vogt argues that reading SF changes the readers brain for the better.

This is a fascinating and persuasive theory, and certainly seems to jive with the often confusing experience of reading van Vogt.  Case in point--the famous last line of The Weapon Makers (Malzberg quotes it in his intro to The Best of A. E. van Vogt) includes a word van Vogt just made up and for which he provides very little context.  This also goes along with McLuhan's theory that distinguishes between hot media--that are direct and easy to understand--and cool media--which demand audience participation--though it sounds like here Van is saying his work is "cool," while earlier he implied his work is "hot."

At the same time, you can't deny that this theory appears a little self-serving, as it suggests that van Vot's notoriously opaque work is difficult by design, not incompetence or laziness, and that it is readers who don't "get" van Vogt who are in fact the lazy or dim ones!

"Future Perfect" (1973)

The fourth piece in The Best of A. E. van Vogt is "The Rull," a great story (Malzberg thinks it may be the best thing van Vogt ever wrote) I have read multiple times already and don't feel like reading again today.  The fifth is a lecture on general semantics, one of van Vogt's interests, which I don't feel like reading today, either. But the sixth piece is a story I've never read, "Future Perfect."  In his intro van Vogt promotes SF as a vehicle for philosophical reflection--the SF writer can extrapolate currently fashionable political ideas and depict what a future society in which the "half-baked schemes" of "bleeding hearts" have been made the "law of the land" might look like.

"Future Perfect" is one of those stories about a future society in which the government is running everything.  Over the course of the story we learn that when boys approach puberty their "sex performance capacity" is "placed under control" by drugs, and, when a young man marries one of the small number of women the government computer judges a suitable match, he gets an injection that allows him to have sex, and then a second injection that causes "hormonic alignment" so he can only have sex with his computer-approved wife.  To ease the adoption of this system, the government has also indoctrinated people with new standards of beauty, so that all women are considered beautiful.

(As van Vogt fans know, the Canadian mastermind studied communism in China in preparation for writing his mainstream novel The Violent Man--in the introduction to Future Glitter he brags that he "read and reread approximately 100 books on China and Communism."  Some of the government workers' dialogue in "Future Perfect" suggests van Vogt based this whole idea of controlling sex and marriage on some Chinese Communist Party policy he read about.)

In the economic realm, there is no cash--all transactions are done electronically and carefully tracked by government agents.  You aren't allowed to inherit any money or property from your parents, and when you reach your eighteenth birthday, the government puts a million dollars in an account for you, and any money you earn goes to paying down this debt.  (Most people never pay off the entire debt, but there is no punishment if you chip away at it every week.)

The hero of our story, eighteen-year-old Steven Dalkins, rebels against the system, getting famous by wasting his million dollars and then escaping the government medical facility after his "sex performance capacity" has been reactivated but before he has been conditioned to only have sex with his computer-suggested wife.  After his escape, in theory, he could have sex with any woman he likes!  In practice, he doesn't go on a seduction spree, but instead spends his time organizing a non-violent resistance movement (having thrown away his million, he lives off donations from his followers.)  Much of the story's text follows the conversations of government psychiatrists and bureaucrats as they observe Steven and try to figure out what to do about him; with the help of a computer they try to diagnose whether he is "alienated" or not.  The alienated are dealt with harshly, but since Steven doesn't appear to be alienated, the state can take little direct action against him, as his rebellious acts--the biggest of which is distributing chemicals that allow people to deactivate their "hormonic alignment" and thus choose their own sex partners--are not quite illegal. It also seems like some factions in the government are sympathetic to Steven or see his rebellion as advancing their own not clearly stated agendas.

In the end it turns out that Steven didn't actually want to overthrow the government--he simply wanted to marry a particular woman of his own choice, one the computer would not have accepted because she is his own age (the computer always matches up men with women who are a few years older, because men die earlier than women.)  He is not alienated, but many of his over 50,000 followers are, and some of them have been expressing their alienation through acts of greed and murder.  Steven helps the government round up the alienated (most are exiled to the space colonies, but the murderers, it is hinted, are executed) and it appears that the government will endure, though Steven has made inevitable major reforms of the government's control of sexuality.

Generally, SF writers construct these totalitarian government settings to point out that such government interventions are immoral or inefficient and cause psychological, spiritual or material misery.  In the end of the story it is clear that van Vogt thinks the government control of the people's erotic life has been damaging, having forced them to live lives bereft of love.  But van Vogt doesn't really denounce his future world's economic system, and in his afterword our man Van suggests that the most interesting part of the story is not the oppressive government, but the "alienated."  Taking shots at young people who don't realize how good life is in the 20th century United States compared to life in earlier times and in other countries, he asserts that a certain percentage of people are going to be alienated and rebel due to childhood trauma, regardless of what kind of government they live under: "...in any forseeable future we shall have the same percentage of alienated types as now."  This provocative mechanistic theory of rebellion reminds us again of Carl Hazzard's mechanistic psychological theories in "The Sound of Wild Laughter."

As is typical of van Vogt, this story is a puzzle you have to figure out, but it doesn't have any adventure or human relationship type elements to interest you emotionally--because the fact that the reason for Steven's rebellion is love for a woman his own age is kept as a surprise to the end, there is no opportunity to develop this relationship--this woman has no dialogue and we never even learn her name.  Another issue I had with this story, which may have something to do with the volume's editor and not the author at all, is that there is no indication of when a scene has ended and a new one has begun.  In most fiction there is a blank line or a bunch of asterisks or a transitional phrase ("Three hours later he was in the offices of the head of the department...") to signal that a new scene is beginning, but in "Future Perfect" Steven will be sitting in a room, dealing with a guy, and then he says or does something, we think with that first guy, only to realize a few lines later that it is some time later and Steven is in a totally different room with a totally different guy.  Disconcerting, but, bizarrely, it is disconcerting in a way that van Vogt's writing is always disconcerting, so one wonders if it is a printing error or an intentional van Vogt mind game.

I guess "Future Perfect" is acceptable; I can't say I'm enthusiastic about it.  There are no human relationships or wild images to make it entertaining or emotionally stimulating like we see in some of the work I have mentioned in this blog post like Future Glitter, The Weapon Makers or "The Sound of Wild Laughter."  "Future Perfect" was first published in the third of Vertex's sixteen issues and has since appeared in quite a few American and European collections and anthologies, including Jerry Pournelle's 2020 Vision and a French collection for which it was the title story.

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Reading the first half or so of The Best of A. E. van Vogt has provided some interesting insights into his thinking and career; I'll visit the second half of the volume in the future when I finally read the Silkie stories and reread the Clane and Supermind stories.

In our next episode we take a look at my latest acquisition of work by A. E. van Vogt's largely unrecognized soulmate, Barry Malzberg!

Way Out stories from the early 1950s by Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys & John Berryman

I already have more books and magazines than I know what to do with, but there is a limit to how many slices of pizza I can eat at Whole Foods while waiting for my wife's hair appointment to finish up.  When that limit is reached, I walk a block or two to Half Price Books and sort through the spinner racks of vintage paperbacks and the shelves of 40-, 50-, and 60-year old hardcover SF books. On one such recent trip, I resisted a hardcover Orbit 10, and an anthology of stories about cavemen and dinosaurs, but on the spinner racks my eyes beheld a 2-dollar beauty I could not leave behind.  This find was a paperback whose cover was totally detached from its pages, a volume stained by water and bearing, like a badge of honor, a "CLOSE-OUT .35" sticker, Way Out, an anthology edited by Ivan Howard and put out in 1963 by our friends at Belmont, the people responsible for so many remarkable productions, my love for which I have unabashedly chronicled on this here blog.  I adore the weird Powers cover illo, its starker monochrome reproduction on the back cover, and the book's bold black and yellow spine.  The cover text's convoluted diction elicits a chuckle rather than a sneer.  Let's hope Way Out's seven stories, each "designed to appeal to the far out fiend" also merit my love! Today we'll tackle the first four stories in this charming artifact, the contributions from Milton Lesser, H. B. Fyfe, Algis Budrys and "William C. Bailey."  Just for fun, besides judging whether these stories are any good, like we always do, we'll assess how "way out" they are.

"Ennui" by Milton Lesser (1952)

The cover of this 1963 paperback promises us "seven new and frightful tales," and the first page of Way Out declares: "Seven Science Fiction Stories never before published." But if you know Belmont like I know Belmont, you won't be surprised to learn all the included stories first appeared in the early 1950s.  The surprise is that of the seven stories, six first appeared in Dynamic Science Fiction, and five of them all appeared in the same December 1952 issue of that magazine!   "Ennui" is one of those December 1952 Dynamic stories.

(You probably remember that we read a story from Dynamic's December 1952 issue, Lester Del Rey's "I Am Tomorrow," back in 2014 when we worked our way through Belmont's Novelets of Science Fiction.  It seems like that issue was the Belmont crew's very favorite SF magazine!  The magazine is actually available at the internet archive should you be interested in taking a look at the original texts and the numerous illustrations.)

"Ennui" is a sort of experimental story that is supposed to blow your mind, and it uses the words "quiddity"  and "solipsism" repeatedly in its nine pages, as well as mentioning David Hume.  Our unnamed narrator believes that he is the center of the universe, that the rest of the universe doesn't really exist, is merely a figment of his own imagination.  He finds he can make people and things vanish merely be willing them to do so.  However, he cannot create anything new.  Out of anger and boredom he begins willing everything out of existence, eventually making the solar system and his own body vanish, so he is a lone spirit floating in the void.  Searching for diversion he travels the galaxy, then other galaxies, but each new phenomenon he discovers eventually bores him and he reacts to this boredom by destroying it.  Finally, he erases the entire universe and, then, himself.

Ultimately sterile and gimmicky, perhaps, but not bad.  I wrote a little about Lesser back in 2015, when I read a story by him that reminded me of Games Workshop's classic game Space Hulk.

Is it good?  Marginally.                                            Is it Way Out?  Yes!

"Knowledge is Power" by H. B. Fyfe (1952)

I recognize Fyfe's name, but I don't think I've read anything by him before.  isfdb lists many stories by him, appearing in many magazines, including Astounding, Amazing, and F&SF. Fyfe was born in New Jersey, so I'm already rooting for him!  "Knowledge is Power" appeared in that December 1952 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction, and Fyfe's name appears on the cover.

"Knowledge is Power" stars Myru e Chib, an alien with four eyes and six limbs who lives in a sort of tyrannical medieval-type society.  A former captain in the army, Myru now lives a down-and-out existence as a thief because he complained when the local ruler stole his girlfriend (she has gorgeous scales!)  The despot also had two of our hero's four hands chopped off and two of his four eyes burned away!  When Earthmen--an advance survey team--land on the planet, Myru makes friends with them, helping them find specimens in return for trinkets and tools. Then he tricks them into helping him overthrow the despot and make himself ruler.  Myru then orders the humans executed, a move he (and Fyfe, more or less) justifies by suggesting the humans were going to exploit or enslave the natives after establishing a substantial colony.

A traditional SF story with elements we've often seen before: pre-industrial aliens, explorers from Earth, anti-imperialism, trickery.  But it is entertaining; Myru is a surprisingly well-developed character, and I wasn't sure who was going to outwit who until the end--Myru is not entirely sympathetic (he murders defenseless people of his own species throughout the story) and he commits some mistakes, so it seemed possible he was going to be hoist by his own petard or simply overwhelmed by the Earthmen's modern weapons.  It is often very easy to predict how an adventure story will turn out, so a genuinely unpredictable ending is welcome.  

Is it good?  Yes.                                            Is it Way Out?  Not really.

"Snail's Pace" by Algis Budrys (1953)

"Snail's Pace" was the cover story of the October 1953 issue of Dynamic Science Fiction.  You probably remember that we've already read a story from that October issue, Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear," when we read Belmont's Novelets.

Budrys has a high reputation (Gene Wolfe is crazy about him) and seems like an interesting guy (check out the interview of him in Charles Platt's Dream Makers), but I think he is a bit overrated, as I have said before on this here blog.  Well, let's see what he is up to this time.

It is the 1960s (I think) and the United States is about to start building the first artificial satellite.  And the world is about to erupt in a Third World War!  The main character, General Post of the Air Force and the US space agency, uses all his influence to make sure the rocket with the parts for the space station takes off, despite the distractions of the coming war--the space station is essential to human progress!  He commands and pilots the flight himself, and leads the effort to build the space station.  When the war starts he even deactivates the communications equipment so none of the astronauts will be distracted by news that their homes and loved ones have been nuked!

After a few weeks the half-built station is running out of food and water, and the scheduled supply rockets from America have not been arriving.  Presumably the USA is kaput.  One of the astronauts mutinies, reactivating the communications equipment to contact the Earth and extort or beg supplies out of whoever won or just survived the war down there.  The mutineer thinks the station, as a symbol of progress or whatever, is more important than mere politics, and if the only help forthcoming is from the people who vaporized all the astronauts' friends and family, well, so be it.  Post, however, orders the evacuation of the station, saying that the radio message will just allow the enemy to target the station and blow it up.  Though the effort to construct the space station was a failure, Post is confident that mankind will eventually reach the stars.

I'm giving this one a thumbs down.  Budrys tries to convey to the reader the tremendous stress everybody is under by having them "shout," "bark" and "bellow" their dialogue and otherwise emote all the time.  On the third page of the story we are told that "Post raked the man's face with his eyes."  Three brief paragraphs later, on the very same page, Budrys writes, "Post bored into him with his eyes."  Give those eyes a rest, General Post!  The story thus comes off as overwrought, and there are lots of typos and weird grammatical constructions, as if the story was not edited.  (Shouldn't an editor have suggested Budrys delete one of those repetitive eye metaphors?)

"Snail's Pace" features too much boring and facile philosophizing about how history works in cycles or on a twisted path or whatever, an annoying reminder of silly Marxist and Whiggish theories that argue that history has an inevitable end point.  The plot is also unsatisfying, feeling like it goes nowhere--a guy works hard to get a thing built because he believes in progress, but he fails to build the thing, and then says it doesn't matter anyway because progress is inevitable.  A story in which a guy builds a thing is a story of triumph, which can be moving.  A story in which a guy tries and fails to build a thing is a tragedy, which can also be moving.  A story in which a guy tries to build a thing, fails to build it, then decides it doesn't matter if he built it or not is a drag.

Presumably the "real" plot of the story is how the hero learned something, how he built something spiritually or psychologically and how that is more important than building a physical thing--we've all heard those quotes about how the greatest conquest is over the self or whatever.  I could accept that if Budrys had made the General's intellectual or emotional journey interesting, but he didn't.  This story is weak, and it is not surprising that it was never printed again after its appearance in Way Out.        

Is it good?  No.                                            Is it Way Out?  No.

"'X' for 'Expendable'" by "William C. Bailey" (John Berryman) (1952)

John Berryman has quite a few stories listed at isfdb, most under the William C. Bailey or Walter Bupp pseudonyms.  Berryman is another son of the great state of New Jersey, so let's help he will make us Garden Staters proud--according to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction he was an economist and business executive, so maybe he'll provide us a different perspective than those of the engineers, scientists, and professional genre writers we usually get our SF from.

So much for new perspectives--"'X' for 'Expendable'" is like a mash-up (the kids still say that, right?) of genre conventions.  Berryman writes his story, a first-person narrative, in the style of a hard-boiled detective tale.  Here's a para from the first page:

The cashier had a sharp, knifey eye, keen enough for a big-shot in the System's biggest bank.  He slashed a glance at my badge and at me.  "How much do you want?" he asked in a tone as cold as a frog's belly.

It is the post-nuclear war future, in which the surface of Manhattan, the center of my world and the setting of my nightly dreams, is a  "drab" and "glassy" "atomic slag" and the Earth has colonized the solar system.  Our hero is a detective working for the IPO, which I guess is like the future's FBI or CIA.  The current iteration of New York City is an underground "warren," and the narrator spends the first half of the 47-page story in subterranean nightclubs and offices, interrogating people involved in the black market sale of cadmium.  He isn't afraid to use a little muscle to get the info he needs, and when he gathers clues that direct him to the colonies on the Jovian moons he uses the IPO's authority to requisition a space navy vessel and blast off for Jupiter to look for the illegal nuclear reactor that is using that unregistered cadmium to develop nuclear weapons.

Out Jupiter way he and the local IPO guys figure out which moons to investigate, and our shamus of the future requisitions a "rocket-plane" armed with a "proton gun" to do the investigating.  The second half of the story is like a James Bond movie (though "'X' for 'Expendable'" was published before the first James Bond novel was released in 1953.)  The narrator is captured while investigating the criminals' base, escapes in one rocket plane and is pursued by another. The extended chase scene is where we get all the hard SF stuff--Berryman unleashes a lot of science and engineering on us during the chase, as the narrator calculates orbits and manipulates all the technical aspects of his rocket plane to keep ahead of his pursuers and send a message to IPO via unconventional means because his radio has been knocked out by enemy fire.

The writing style of the story was tiresome, and the detective stuff in the first half bored me, but I liked the violent adventure and space race business of the second half.  I guess I'm giving "'X' for 'Expendable'" a grade of "Acceptable."

"'X' for 'Expendable'" appeared in that December '52 issue of Dynamic.

Is it good?  Half of it is.                                           Is it Way Out?  No.

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So far, so good, I guess.  In our next installment we finish up with Way Out.

Mid '60s stories from Edgar Pangborn, Algis Budrys & Philip Latham

Let's take a look at Terry Carr's 1970 anthology On Our Way to the Future, Ace 62940.  The little bio at the start of the book tells us Carr lived in Brooklyn with his wife Carol, also a writer in and out of the SF field, and reminds us of his collaborative work with Donald Wollheim.  Oh yeah, and that he and Carol had two cats, Gilgamesh and George.  Meow!

We've already read the story by Kris Neville in On Our Way to the Future, as well as James Schmitz's contribution, "Goblin Night;" today let's look at the included pieces by Edgar Pangborn, Algis Budrys and Philip Latham (the pen name of professional astronomer Robert S. Richardson.)

"A Better Mousehole" by Edgar Pangborn (1965)

No doubt you remember when we read Pangborn's novels Davy and West of the Sun. Let's see what he does in a shorter format.

"A Better Mousehole," which first appeared in a special issue of Fred Pohl's Galaxy, is written in the voice of the uneducated bartender of a little hick town.  He speaks in a kind of redneck dialect ("The back room gets lively Saturday nights, and I ain't been sweeping up too good, last couple-three weeks"), saying "desecrator" for "decorator" and "thermostack" for "thermostat" and misattributing cliches to the Bible and that sort of thing.  Through the medium of his garbled text we learn all about the various wacky characters in this little town and their strained relationships with each other.  We also learn the plot of the story, somewhat obliquely.  One of the town's inhabitants is a wealthy intellectual who will leave his decaying mansion for months at a time to explore unpopulated corners of the world.  From his most recent trip he brought back to the little town a basketball-sized blue sphere which turns out to be the vehicle of tiny alien invaders!

These aliens, whom our narrator calls "blue bugs," are sort of interesting.  Those they bite have wonderful dreams; being bitten also seems to improve a  victim's mood.  It is hinted that the "bugs" might be able to make the world a better place by rendering people more mellow... but there are also clues that suggest being bitten drives some to insanity, murder, even death.  I compared Pangborn's novels to the work of Theodore Sturgeon, and the possibility that alien invaders might improve human society, as well as references to love and sex in "A Better Mousehole," also brought Sturgeon to mind.  [UPDATE 12/6/2016: In the comments ukjarry sheds light on the Sturgeon-Pangborn connection!]

The plot of "A Better Mousehole" is basically straightforward traditional SF stuff, but Pangborn gussies the story up by having it told via an idiosyncratic and unreliable narrator and by not telling the story in strict chronological order.  I found it entertaining.

"Be Merry" by Algis Budrys (1966)

When it first appeared in If, "Be Merry" was billed as a "complete novel" and it takes up like 50 pages of On Our Way to the Future.

This is one of those post-apocalyptic jobs, but has elements of hope as well as descriptions of ruins and sickly people and depictions of the ruthlessness of people who have been pushed to extremes.  And it takes place in my home state of New Jersey, with a description of a typical Jersey Shore town and references to Route 46, with which I am very familiar, and WOR, one of the radio stations I listened to during my four years of driving between home and Rutgers and then three years driving between home and the kind of job my RU history degree had prepared me for, earning minimum wage at a bookstore.

The background: Space alien lifeboats crash landed on Earth in the 1960s; the aliens were friendly, but carried diseases that killed most of mankind.  The aliens themselves were in turn made ill by Earth germs.  Human society collapsed, but the survivors have been slowly rebuilding a tolerant multi-species society.

The plot: Evidence reaches a center of the fledgling new society that there is a New Jersey town which is surprisingly healthy (of all the outposts of survivors, it is the only one which isn't always requesting drugs and medical supplies.)  Our narrator, a human, and his partner, an alien, are sent to investigate this mysterious town.  What they find could lead to their deaths, or the kind of paradigm shift we often see in classic SF stories, the solution to the problems plaguing the new civilization!

I have been very hard on Algis Budrys' famous novel Rogue Moon, but I liked his novel Man of Earth and I also like "Be Merry."  The writing style is good, there are engaging ideas, and all of the numerous characters play a role in the plot and feel "real:" they are interesting, have believable motivations and act in a logical manner, and the reader can identify with them; none are incredibly virtuous or cartoonishly evil.  Budrys actually had me wondering how the story was going to turn out, and actually caring how it turned out.  

Quite good.

"Under the Dragon's Tail" by Philip Latham (1966)

This is a humor story about an astronomer who is an arrogant jerk.  He works at a county planetarium near Los Angeles and is sick and tired of having to be nice to the taxpayers who pay his salary and having to listen to all the dolts and cranks who call him and write him with their dumb questions and crazy theories.  Most of the story's fifteen pages is this kind of comedy material.  When he is not complaining or running the projector, the astronomer finds time to do lots of calculations about an asteroid.  His calculations indicate that the asteroid is going to strike Los Angeles and cause "more devastation" than would a strike by "many thermonuclear weapons."  Instead of getting upset and calling Washington or other scientists for confirmation of this terrible news, he treasures the discovery to himself!  He's gone mad!

"Under the Dragon's Tail," first published in Analog, is not bad.  I guess it is sort of funny, and the author includes classical references, Shakespeare references, and plenty of stuff about astronomy and the operation of a planetarium, so it keeps the reader's interest, while the question of whether we should identify with the protagonist or deplore him provides a little ambiguity and tension.

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These three stories were all worth my time; Carr made decent selections here.  There are several more stories in On Our Way to the Future by writers I care about, so it is very likely we will return to it in the future.

The Shores of Kansas by Robert Chilson

He studied the skyline around his house, looking hard at everything: Were things where and how he had left them?  Or had he introduced some small, slight change, 130 million years ago, a change that had made a different world?

I purchased Robert Chilson's 1976 novel Shores of Kansas because of its creepy waterbound dinosaur and axe man cover, the work of Mark Mariano.  (When I see a painting in which the feet are hidden I always wonder if it is because feet are so hard to draw--it's not every dauber who can grace the world with depictions of feet as convincing and charming as those of Edward Burne-Jones or William-Adolphe Bouguereau.)  Then I read Chilson's short story "People Reviews" and was impressed by how original and clever it was, which gave me high hopes for this novel.

It is the late 20th century.  It has been discovered that a tiny minority of people (about sixty in the whole world, we are told) have the ability to travel back in time!  Grant Ryal is the only one of these people who can travel back to pre-human times, and he has become rich and famous by bringing back film and specimens from the Mesozoic Era.  Instead of moving to New York and enjoying a life of lavish leisure (that is how I would play this scenario), Missouri country boy Grant has sunk all his wealth into starting the Chronographic Institute, an entity devoted to educating the public about life in the Age of the Dinosaurs.

Years ago I read Algis Budrys' famous Rogue Moon, and was disappointed that very little of the book focused on exploring the alien death labyrinth on Luna--most of the text was a lot of psychological relationship drama revolving around a guy trying to prove he was a real man or whatever.  Somewhat similarly, after that first thrilling battle scene, Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers is mostly philosophical discussion (though I found Heinlein's philosophical talk far more interesting than Budrys' soap opera.)  Like those celebrated SF classics, The Shores of Kansas spends more time on relatively mundane dialogue and human relationship scenes than the life and death struggles on distant landscapes which attract most readers to these books in the first place.  Of the book's 13 chapters, only three and a half, that is, about 60 of its 220 pages, are spent in the Mesozoic.  Fortunately for us adventure-fiction-loving types, as with Starship Troopers, the adventure sequences are very good.

The bulk The Shores of Kansas is concerned with Grant's relationships with the management and employees at the Institute.  Chilson really harps on the fact that Grant is an honest country boy who sees things differently from the self-serving and manipulative executives and scientists whom he has had to hire to operate the Institute; they are obsessed with PR and office politics, while all Grant wants to do is educate the public about the past.  Much of Shores of Kansas reads like a mainstream novel about a self-made tycoon or a talented artist trying to maintain control of the enterprise he built with his own sweat, blood and genius, hounded by people riding his coattails.  There are lots of scenes about how, while Grant was in the prehistoric past collecting specimens and shooting film, Business Manager Martin, Institute Director Dr. Shackelford, and Director Dr. Adrian have been ignoring his orders, allocating more resources to PR than research, and doing elitist stuff like reserving parking spaces for the executive staff (Grant orders the names painted over but then has to do it himself) and moving the copy machine out of the conference room because it looked "vulgar" in there (Grant has it moved back.)  And lots of scenes about how the Institute needs money, and so pure research has to take a backseat to schemes to raise revenue.

There are also scenes with Grant's family--fiercely independent Missouri hillbillies--that give us an idea of where he came from, and lots of discussion of his relationships with women.  Now that he is famous women are always throwing themselves at him ("Before he became famous, he had never been popular; now even the wives of his best friends propositioned him...."); Grant is not comfortable with the "legend of the ax-wielding superstud" which has grown up around him.  He also resents an up and coming female time traveller, Marian Gilmore, whom Shackelford and Adrian are grooming with the hope that she will become the second person capable of traveling back to the Mesozoic and, as Grant's partner, double the Institute's production.

The main theme of the book is that Grant is an outsider; the only human being ever to have seen the Mesozoic, a hillbilly among college graduates, a rural MidWesterner forced to attend parties in New York and Washington and hobnob with the idle rich and the politically powerful.  In one chapter he finds himself the only white person among a community of blacks when he rematerializes in an African-American neighborhood after one of his trips back in time.  (The blacks prove more eager to help and more competent than any of the whites in the novel.)  This theme is most starkly reflected in Grant's fears that his expeditions are changing history (like in Ray Bradbury's immortal classic of dino-lit, "The Sound of Thunder"), that the 20th century he returns to is not the one he left. Upon returning he carefully scrutinizes the stars, road signs, the hills on the horizon, searching for little differences that might indicate he has returned to an altered future, a similar but alien world.  This is probably my favorite element of the book, Grant's feeling that he perhaps is in a world where he doesn't belong, not merely due accidents of birth, but because of his own choices.  This is a feeling I can identify with; I have paid but little attention to current pop culture for over a decade, and when I have to spend time in doctor's offices or grocery stores, or with my family or inlaws, and see 21st century TV shows or hear 21st century music and talk about sports or politics, I feel like I am an alien in a strange and unpleasant world.

(Early in the novel Chilson gives us a clue that indicates that Grant's world is not our own: he suggests that Theodore Roosevelt was assassinated.  In real life, Teddy survived an assassination attempt and died years later in his sleep.  This brief passage added a sense of unease to the whole novel, as, in the same way Grant scanned the landscape for clues he was in the wrong 20th century, I kept expecting to discover a second clue indicating what was different between my real world and Grant's.  A cool move by Chilson.)  

British hardcover edition

I was sort of expecting a sad or defiant ending, in which Grant died or elected to remain in the Mesozoic because he hated the 20th century.  Instead, in the last 35 pages of the book we learn all about Grant's secret sorrow (a failed relationship with a woman, Nona Schiereck) and he has a psychological breakthrough after getting seriously wounded.  He makes his peace with the 20th century, and starts an intimate relationship with Marian Gilmore, taking her back with him to share with her the pure natural life of the Mesozoic; we are lead to believe that they will live happily ever after, shuttling between both time periods.

I liked Shores of Kansas; it is probably about as good as we can expect a book about a dude fighting dinosaurs with an axe to be.  All the Mesozoic stuff (though I guess nowadays all the science would be considered wrong) is entertaining and the 20th century human drama isn't bad.  However, as they say, your mileage may vary: I perhaps need to include some trigger warnings for anyone considering reading this novel.  The novel's depiction of women (I guess based on crude Freudianism) is not exactly complimentary--they all want to have sex with Grant because he is famous, and are fascinated by the axe he carries with him because it is a phallic symbol.  There is also Grant's exasperated complaint about the way the news media covers women--our hero reads a newspaper article about Marian Gilmore and finds:

...a lengthy parenthesis here about how this would advance the attitudes of women towards themselves, etc., etc., the obligatory refrain over any woman who did anything.

If women's sexual desires are portrayed as shallow and simple, so are Grant's: it feels like he fell in love with Nona Schiereck and then Marian Gilmore simply because they have red hair.  (If I was Chilson's editor I would have suggested focusing a little less on the Institute's finances and a little more on Grant's love life.)  Also noteworthy is how Grant's standoffish attitude towards women leads to rumors he is gay--in a New York lavatory a homosexual wearing makeup and perfume makes aggressive advances, and Grant uses force to dissuade this ardent fan.

All in all, an enjoyable addition to the dino SF canon.  Seven out of ten pilfered sauropod eggs.  If I didn't already own way way too many books I haven't read yet, I would be interested in reading more of Chilson's work.

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The page after the last page of text in my copy of Popular Library's The Shores of Kansas was torn out by a previous owner--jagged little remnants of it peek out at me from the gutter.  Though I would certainly like to see what sort of advertising was on this page, I think this vandalism is a sign of a life well-lived.  Maybe some SF fan ordered more books, using the page as a handy coupon.  Perhaps he or she tore it out to use as a shopping list on his or her next expedition to the local bookstore.  Or maybe the page was called into service as a makeshift notepad, and bore an address or phone number that opened the door to a new career or relationship for the book's owner.  Let's look on the bright side for once!    

Six more from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

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I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.   

Man of Earth by Algis Budrys

Sibley's face burned.  But soon, he knew, with a sudden joy, that would never happen again.  Soon he would be a man.

The central ideas behind Algis Budrys's famous Rogue Moon (lunar death maze, teleportation, the question of what constitutes a man) are great, but as I wrote back in 2007 the execution did not impress me.  It has taken me almost eight years to give another Budrys novel a chance, but this week I read Man of Earth, a 1958 paperback from Ballantine (number 243) which literally fell to pieces as I read it, and I am glad I did.

An earlier version of Man of Earth appeared in Satellite Science Fiction.  The isfdb is leading me to believe that Man of Earth has been published in physical book form in English only once, but that our friends in Italy have put out three different editions, in '62, '72 and '80.  Here is my chance to gauge the taste of the Italian SF community; maybe they appreciate something about Man of Earth that American SF fans missed!

Man of Earth starts out like one of those postwar books or movies about how stressful and corrupt the modern business world is and how our consumer society is devouring our souls.  It's New York, the year 2197!  Allen Sibley is a genius broker who can tell instinctively what stocks to buy and sell, and his firm is one of the most successful in the finance game!  But he feels like something is missing in his life: he has no family or friends; he is a bust with women; he recalls how he used to make model airplanes as a child and, now in his late forties, wishes he could leave his mark on the world with his hands, not staring at a screen and buying and selling shares.  He is naturally shy and nervous, and suffers terrific anxiety because he knows his whole life can collapse all around him if government regulators or business rivals expose some of the corners he's cut and shady deals he's made.  Then a guy from the mysterious firm of Doncaster Industrial Linens tells him our whole society is prone to collapse because we are using too many resources and soon Mother Earth will run out!

When it looks like Uncle Sam is about to fall on Sibley like a ton of bricks he hires the services of the secretive Doncaster corporation.  In exchange for over 90% of his assets the Doncaster people replace Sibley's eyes and skin so he is no longer identifiable, tinker with his hormones and glands so he will be strong and brave instead of weak and cowardly, provide him forged papers (Sibley is now "John L. Sullivan," a joke I would never have got without google), and then ship him off to the colony on Pluto to start a new life!  Tricky, tricky--until he woke up on the spaceship, Sibley thought he was going to start his new life in the Big Apple, not that barren rock beyond Uranus!

"Sullivan" lands on Pluto 47 pages into the 144 page novel.  Man of Earth is one of those SF stories in which people can walk around on Pluto and breathe the air just fine; there are H2O rivers and the soil can support Earth plants. The Pluto colony has about 20,000 inhabitants, and the place is run along totalitarian lines, with the government assigning people jobs.  Because he doesn't want to blow his cover by admitting he is a business and math whiz Sullivan tells them he has no skills and so they stick him in the army. Why does Pluto need an army?  The people of Pluto feel like the Earth has abandoned them, and the reader is lead to suspect that the Pluto army is going to conquer the Earth Franco-style!  

Sullivan tries to be a good soldier, and with his superior physique and intelligence he soon becomes the best private in the Plutonian army.  He also tries to make friends among his fellow enlisted men, but he has no social skills and is taken advantage of by a conniving bully, leaving him alienated from his comrades.

In the last pages of the book Budrys ties the whole plot together.  Doncaster gave the lonely Sibley a superior body to match his superior mind and sent him to Pluto for military training in order to groom him to be the leader of the first interstellar colonization effort!  Pluto is secretly run by Doncaster, and the army is not going to attack Earth; just about everybody on the planet is going to be leaving the solar system to found a galactic empire, and Sibley/Sullivan is going to be in charge of this heroic adventure!

Man of Earth is pretty good; I certainly liked it more than Rogue Moon.  The style was good, the plot included surprises, the book felt streamlined, and it addresses interesting issues.

While Man of Earth includes all kinds of traditional SF elements (futuristic gadgets like space ships, mass-marketed jet packs for commuters, and pocket typewriters; a morally ambiguous and far-reaching conspiracy; and a sense-of-wonder/paradigm-shift ending) most of the text, and most of the energy, of the novel is devoted to the main character's psychology and relationships, and I think Budrys did a good job with this material. Sibley/Sullivan is a sympathetic and interesting character, and the early scenes which show him as a bundle of nerves, and then the scenes on Pluto, where he blunderingly tries to win friends and earn respect among the working class volunteer soldiers and lower class conscripts, are effective.

Like Rogue Moon, Man of Earth is largely about what it means to be a man.  Sibley wants to be a man, and, thinks he has failed to be one as a weak, cowardly, and lonely, though highly successful, broker.  As Sullivan, the strong and courageous soldier, he tries his damnedest to be a man, but it is not easy.  His life in the Pluto army is as lonely as his life back on Wall Street, and even though he is now too tough to be intimidated by people, he is vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous.

That Sibley/Sullivan is selected to be the leader of the greatest adventure in human history suggests that Budrys thinks that a "real" man is doomed to loneliness, to be (to quote Virgil) "a man apart."  I think Budrys's praise of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, a novel about a tough, self-sacrificing, autocratic leader in a postapocalyptic world, is significant here.  Aeneas-like figures seem to be close to Budrys's heart, and he appears to share with Hubbard a level of skepticism about our middle-class democratic and capitalistic institutions.

I'm happy to recommend Man of Earth, an economical, entertaining novel which has a good balance of human drama and SF elements.  With its preoccupation with manhood and manliness, it might be an especially interesting read for someone interested in gender roles in SF.

1950s stories from Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon

Triskaidekaphobics beware!  Today we are looking at Groff Conklin's 1960 collection of 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction!  It doesn't say so on the cover (sneaky, sneaky), but this is a themed anthology.  In his introduction to the book Conklin tells us that the stories in this volume are all about inventions of one kind or another.  But he assures us that there are no stories about time machines, which Conklin thinks have "become almost tiresomely commonplace in recent years."

13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction, Gold Medal number d1444, includes stories by writers I have never read, or even heard of, before, but I thought I'd start with three major SF figures: Algis Budrys (author of Rogue Moon, and, as Thomas Disch put it, late in his life a full time employee of Scientology), Arthur C. Clarke (one of the "Big Three"), and Ted Sturgeon (famous for his stories about homicidal bulldozers, collective consciousness, and incest.)

"The War is Over" by Algis Budrys (1957)

Budrys receives considerable acclaim from his fellow science fiction writers, but I was quite disappointed in his famous Rogue Moon.  Maybe this story will help change my mind about Budrys?

"The War is Over" first appeared in Astounding in February 1957.

This is a pretty good story.  We witness a race of aliens building a space ship at terrible cost; they spend all their resources constructing the vessel, even though they barely know what they are doing or why they are doing it.  Workers are dying from exhaustion in droves building this thing!  These people seem to instinctively, but not intellectually, know how to build a ship; after many generations have passed and the ship is built, one of them pilots it purely on instinct.  He encounters the Terran Space Navy, and we learn that the entire race of aliens is descended from a single genetically engineered courier creature developed by Earth scientists centuries ago.  This creature was programmed to deliver messages at any cost, and, hundreds of years behind schedule, its descendants have finally gotten the message through to Earthmen.  Unfortunately, nobody cares about the message, which is the report of the signing of a peace treaty ending a war none of the Earth naval officers even remember.

Entertaining.

"Silence, Please" by Arthur C. Clarke (1950)

Cronklin tells us that this story, published under a pseudonym in the British magazine Science Fantasy, was later reworked to be the opening story of Clarke's 1957 collection Tales from the White Hart.

This story is OK.  It is about scientists and businessmen in a late 20th century England with aircars and that sort of thing and centers on the rivalry of two firms that make money by developing and/or manufacturing electronic inventions.  The antagonist firm, Sir Roderick Fenton's Fenton Enterprises, gets a hold of a valuable patent for a calculator that the protagonist firm, Electron Products, wants.  To get the calculator patent back and achieve revenge, first, the lead scientist at Electron Products (he is known as "The Professor") develops a device that cancels out soundwaves and thus causes silence in a certain radius.  (The radius depends on the size and power of the device, and in theory is very extensive.)  Without letting Fenton know who invented it, the Professor makes sure Fenton buys the silencer device's patent, and then Electron uses that money to buy the calculator patent from Fenton.        

Then comes the revenge part of the plan.  By consulting a social psychologist who, suspiciously like Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon, can use math (he's got a "square matrix with about one hundred columns" that "express the properties of any society") to predict societal developments, the Professor knows that the silencer will be used for anti-social purposes and become a PR nightmare for its manufacturers.  Fenton mass produces the silencer, its prestige and stock valuations plummet, and eventually Electron Products buys the patent for the silencer for cheap; the Professor knows he can manufacture it in such a way that criminals and malcontents won't be able to abuse it.

Not bad.  This is one of those SF stories which is really about science and technology, glorifies science and scientists.  Clarke tries to make it funny (I wonder if the competitor is called "Sir Roderick" as an homage to the Rodericks who serve as foils for Bertie Wooster), and while I didn't actually laugh, the jokes were understated and were not annoying.  

Cover illustrates some other story

"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (1956)

Ted is the kind of guy that writes utopias that denounce our society for being too individualistic or having too many taboos.  "The Skills of Xanadu," which first appeared in Galaxy, is just such a story.  It is the far future, Sol has gone nova and the human race is spread all over the galaxy, developing into different cultures.

A man (from planet Kit Carson) loaded down with armor and concealed weapons lands on a planet (Xanadu) inhabited by people who run around practically naked, and Sturgeon uses this scenario to tediously contrast the two different societies.  The bad imperial society has skyscrapers and walls, locks and doors; in the good native society people live in transparent forest huts with no interior walls.  On Kit Carson people don't just have sex and take a dump in private, they actually eat alone; on Xanadu the people urinate and evacuate in full view of everybody.  The Xanadu people are in constant telepathic contact with each other, they all have the same skills and social position, and they have practically no government.  There is no scarcity on Xandau; the people just effortlessly produce whatever they want whenever they want it; they build the Kit Carson guy a house to his specifications in minutes.  

Eventually the man from Kit Carson learns that the miraculous abilities of the natives come from their belts.  He obtains a belt and returns to Kit Carson, where the belts are duplicated and mass produced; the Kit Carson government hopes to use the powers of the belts to conquer the galaxy.  But when the people of Kit Carson put on the belts and gain all the skills of the people of Xanadu their whole social structure peacefully collapses to be replaced by a Xanadu-style culture of anarchistic collectivist egalitarianism.

This story is lame; there is little plot or character, no tension or surprise, it's like a three page essay on what Ted thinks the perfect society would be stretched out to 26 pages, or like a Dr. Suess book with no whimsical rhymes or drawings.  I recently praised Vonda McIntyre's story "Only at Night," which I think could be read as an attack on, or at least a lament about, aspects of our society, for showing instead of telling.  "The Skills of Xanadu," which is like seven times as long as "Only at Night," feels like telling, telling again, telling some more, then telling you one last time just in case.

I might also note that, if my memory is not failing me, the structure of this story is almost the same as Sturgeon's novel Venus Plus X and his story in Dangerous Visions, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

I generally find these kind of hortatory and tendentious stories irritating, but people must like them; Sturgeon got top billing in Galaxy for this tale and his name is top of the list on this edition of 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction.  (British editions have Wyndham and Clarke at the head of the list.)

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Well, I wouldn't call any of these stories "great," but two of them were pleasant.

In our next episode, I'll take a look at fiction in 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction by authors who are more obscure than the Hugo and Nebula winners and nominees who wrote today's tales.