Barry N. Malzberg's Down Here in the Dream Quarter: Part Three

Almost all of my books are in cardboard boxes back in Ohio while I am in Maryland preparing our foul-smelling apartment for occupancy.  Luckily, I had the foresight to bring with me to this border region between America's Crime Capital and The Belly of the Beast both my DAW paperback of Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar and my hardcover copy of Barry Malzberg's Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  We discussed the Lee novel in our last episode; today let's continue our look into the 1976 Doubleday collection by the man who brought tears to my eyes with the hilarious "Vidi Vici Veni" and the moving "Conversations at Lothar's."

"After the Great Space War" (1976)

This story has a separate entry at isfdb, but it appears to be simply a retitled version of "Before the Great Space War," which appeared in Alternities and which we read in late 2016 when we read that original anthology.  It is possible that it is a revision of that story, but with my copy of Alternities 400 miles away, I am in no position to check.

In the afterword to "After the Great Space War" Malzberg talks about how hard it was to place the story, and speculates on why Analog, Galaxy, and Ed Ferman all rejected it before it was accepted by David Gerrold for Alternities.  Malzberg also reminds us (as if we, his fans, needed reminding!) that he doesn't think the human race will ever reach "far space."  "After the Great Space War" would in 1980 appear in Space Mail, an anthology with Isaac Asimov's name on it, one which has been reprinted numerous times over the years, including in German; do the authors of the stories get a payment every time one of these anthologies gets reprinted?  For Malzberg's sake, I hope so!

"Trashing" (1973)

"Trashing" first appeared in Infinity Five, edited by Robert Hoskins.  It is a three-page story, the reminisces of an insane man who stalks and murders the President of the United States.  Our narrator, a madman and an assassin, in the way of a mentally ill person, calls the President "the madman" and his bodyguards "his assassins" and after shooting down the President expects the crowds assembled to hear the chief executive speak to thank him as a liberator.

This is a decent story, and, with its insane narrator and topic of political murder, very representative of Malzberg's body of work.  The afterword is also very Malzbergian.  Barry relates that, at the invitation of a female friend who teaches creative writing, he read the story to about one hundred of her community college students, and only one of them (1 percent!) understood the story.  Malzberg worries that his career is a waste of time because, if ordinary people can't understand this brief and straightforward story, either Malzberg himself is a poor writer, or, ordinary people are almost all dim-witted (or, as Malzberg diplomatically puts it, "incomprehension is almost absolute out there.")  Barry addresses us readers directly, expecting us to share his pain: "either way, this afterword must depress you."

Malzberg's friend, the "lovely lady" college instructor, tried to salve his feelings by telling him that the community college students were members of the "underclasses" who would "never be heard of again," which is pretty funny and of course a fair sample of how academics, even those relegated to teaching at community colleges, think of the hoi polloi.  Malzberg, ever cagey, always teasing and laying puzzles and traps for us, his loving fans, doesn't tell us his friend's name, but gives us a clue: "she is a marvelous writer who wrote a splendid novel, Living and Learning," which, he tells us, was a paperback original which received little attention.  A few minutes on WorldCat.org and then ye olde search engine leads me to believe the lady in question is Karen Jackel.  The cover of Living and Learning describes the novel as "an extraordinary and disturbing portrait of a young woman in love," and its sole reviewer on Amazon gives it five of five stars.  This book is available for ten dollars as of this writing at Amazon and 12 bucks at abebooks --I suggest you order a copy if only to prove to yourself you are not a mere member of the underclasses but can appreciate real literature.

"Vox Populi" (1973)

This one was first published in Edge, a magazine edited by Bruce McAllister that apparently only had one issue.  "Vox Populi" appeared alongside stories by Malzberg's peers in SF's literary smart set like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and every college professor's favorite SF writers, Stanislaw Lem and Ursula LeGuin, a bunch of other famous SF figures, and a horde of people I've never heard of.

"Vox Populi" is two pages long, a lame bit of 1970s angst based on Malzberg's encounter on the street with congressman Leonard Farbstein, who was running for reelection, challenged by Bella Abzug.  (Malzberg tells us all this in the afterword; though I am flattered that you thought I figured it out by myself!)  On the first page of the story the narrator, a political and demographics junkie, is among a crowd of people shaking his congressman's hand, and then a few blocks away sees students rioting against American participation in the Vietnam War.  On the second page the narrator has a dream (ugh) about "members of the underclass" rioting and murdering people, including the congressman, at a campaign event.  The point of the story is that politicians just promise whatever constituents want--the congressman in the story blindly follows public opinion, for example supporting or opposing U. S. intervention in foreign wars not based on strategic or moral principles, but based on what will help win election.

The war business takes up more words, but the most interesting part of the story is the Jewish angle.  The congressional district in the story is largely Jewish, and the congressman (in the dream) while on a campaign stop trumpets his support of Israel and even plays the Israeli national anthem as a way to woo local voters.  (This wooing doesn't work on the "members of the underclass," who presumably are gentiles.)  I feel like nowadays only people on the very fringes of acceptable political opinion broach the topic of U.S. Congress members' support for Israel, so this element of the story struck me.  Presumably Malzberg is suggesting that the congressman's talk about Israel is insincere opportunism, but those passages in the story sound a lot like the kind of satire you might expect from anti-Semites or supporters of the Palestinians who think Israel has too much influence on Washington's foreign policy. 

In the afterward Malzberg reiterates his complaint about "liberal Democrats" (the scare quotes are used by Malzberg himself) who just cowardly chase votes and also complains that the country is "going down," saying "our life is being sucked away from us."  I hate vague political rhetoric like "going down" and "our life is being sucked away from us"--it is essentially meaningless, the kind of complaint any person who pays any attention to politics or culture at all and has any kind of ideology or attitude could voice:

Free market type:  "There are so many regulations and so many taxes there is no point in expanding my business and hiring more workers--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Government employee:  "They are cutting taxes and easing regulations, I'll be out of my cushy job and lose my monumental pension and the soft drink companies will sell arsenic soda--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Welfare recipient:  "They are cutting my food and housing benefits so I will starve in the gutter--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Union member (and factory owner):  "They are allowing too many foreign imports so nobody is buying our crummy overpriced MADE IN THE USA products--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Religious person:  "Thanks to the attacks on religion and traditional values from academia and Hollyweird nobody goes to church anymore and our social fabric is collapsing--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Luddite:  "All these computers and machines are taking our jobs and diminishing social interactions-- our life is being sucked away from us!"
Identity politics activist:  "The words people use and the way they look or don't look at my identity group are hurting our feelings--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Free speech advocate: "People can't speak their minds or even attend talks at college campuses without being shouted down or physically assaulted by these entitled snowflakes--our life is being sucked away from us!"

I think you get the picture.  Either Malzberg's amorphous complaint is evidence that he is driven not by serious reflection on political and social issues but an unspecific and visceral sense of unease about change, or, he is just too scared of diminishing his audience by specifying his gripes about the political and social issues of the day.  Either way, it results in vapid and irritating writing--it is much better when Malzberg makes clear his complaints, that the space program is a distracting waste of money or that machines are stealing our humanity or whatever.  Gotta give "Vox Populi" and its afterword a thumbs down.

"Fireday and Firenight" (1974)
 

"Fireday and Firenight" appeared first in one of Roger Elwood's anthologies, The Far Side of Time: Thirteen Original Stories.  As I have noted on this blog before, Elwood gets a lot of flak from some people who hate his anthologies or think they ruined the SF economy or something, but The Far Side of Time includes new stories from pillars of the SF community like Fritz Leiber, Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova, and a story from genius Gene Wolfe, so it is hard to take such criticisms of Elwood very seriously--don't SF readers want more stories from Leiber, Silverberg, Bova and Wolfe?

We've seen a number of Malzberg stories in which the government takes control of family structure and sexual life, such as "Culture Lock" and "Getting Around," and "Fireday and Firenight" is another.  In the future the story depicts, the family has been replaced by "the unit;" the narrator's unit consists of seven people who "go together everywhere under statute."  The units are set up by "the Protectors," and each member has an assigned role; for example, each unit includes a learned individual, "the pedagogue," who explains everything to the rest of the unit.  The narrator would like to have some alone time with the female member of the unit with whom he has been "sex-paired," but this is impossible.  (Since there are seven people in a unit, one of them is doomed to celibacy; this person's role is that of "the antagonist," and he is very unhappy and caustic, always casting doubt on everything.  Each unit is supposed to be a microcosm of the old society, which of course included skeptics, rebels, conservatives, etc., who challenged beliefs, institutions, and new ideas, creating friction, and the role of the antagonist is to remind everyone of the problems of the past called by such dissension.)

The plot of the story concerns the annual Day of Burning, when the units all go to the Arena to watch actors and robots reenact such historical phenomena as 18th-century pistol duels and World War II terror bombings--the point of the Day of Burning is to remind the people of how horrible life was before the unit system was imposed.  The end of the story hints that the unit society is just as horrible as the societies that went before it.

In his afterword Malzberg describes his abortive attempt to expand "Fireday and Firenight" into a novel, which he says would have been a useless, even disastrous, rehash of the innumerable SF novels already published about rebels overthrowing an oppressive robotic government.  He also tells us that the story is a "satirical rejoinder" to Theodore Sturgeon's many sentimental stories romanticizing or advocating collective consciousness and corporate identity, showing such collectivism's "dark side."  Malzberg doesn't use simple words like collective" and "corporate," though, but instead challenges our little minds with "syzygy" and "the gestalt effect in human relationships."  Oy!  Now whose acting the pedagogue?

"Making the Connections" (1975)

Here is another piece first published in a Roger Elwood anthology, Continuum 4.  isfdb indicates that this story was the fourth and final installment in a collaborative cycle whose earlier parts were produced by Dean Koontz, Gail Kimberly, and Pamela Sargent with George Zebrowski.  (The idea behind the Continuum series was that it presented serial fiction.)

Malzberg often presents us with first-person narrators who are insane and suffer from hallucinations, but he mixes things up this time by giving us an insane narrator who is a robot!  It is the post-cataclysm future, and the world is run by a powerful computer named Central.  Central is trying to exterminate the human race, and to that end has an army of robots patrolling the world, one of which is our narrator.  Our narrator has been killing lots of humans lately, many more than were expected, and he suspects that his old and worn out sensors are providing false data, that he is not crushing and lasering real people, but hallucinations.  Central has problems of its own, and must deny our narrator's many requests for repair.

Our narrator hits on the idea that he could build a comparatively simple robot to do his work of hunting down the remnants of humanity for him.  (It is a little hard to believe that building another robot is easier than just repairing yourself or shooting defenseless people yourself, but we'll have to overlook this.  Anyway, this robot is insane and who knows what is really going on?)  In the final scene the narrator totally breaks down and has a comforting dream (!) that his creation comes to put him out of his misery and then continues his mission of wiping out the human race.  Presumably the narrator's career as creator of a simulacra is supposed to parallel humanity's own history of making machines to do our work for us and finding they have the power to murder and replace us.

Zoinks!  This thing goes
 for 21 bucks online!

In his afterword Malzberg tells us baldly that he thinks that the human race is now the creature of technology instead of vice versa, and that it was doomed to be thus, that nothing could or can be done to halt this process.  (I personally find this attitude totally ridiculous.  Would Malzberg really be happier in a world with no typewriter, no telephone, no recorded music, no printing press, no automobile, no skyscraper, etc?  The guy has chosen to spend his whole life in New York City and Northern New Jersey as a writer!)  Then he praises David R. Bunch's Moderan stories, and laments that they have been "almost completely ignored."  (Well, Joachim Boaz has not ignored them!)   

**********

"Vox Populi" is self-indulgent and anemic, but "Making the Connections" and "Fireday and Firenight" are the real Malzberg stuff, worth the time of us Malzberg fans and people interested in the New Wave and the odder precincts of the SF world.  And Malzberg's afterwords discussing the commercial writer's life and indulging in literary criticism are always interesting.  I'm glad I kept my copy of Down Here in the Dream Quarter close to my heart and didn't trust it to those movers!

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

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

"Up Schist Crick" by Piers Anthony

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

"Up Schist Crick" would later appear
in Anthonology

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

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

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

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

Acceptable.

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

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

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

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

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

"Beside Still Waters" by Ed Bryant and James Sutherland

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

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

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

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

This story is OK.      

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

"Nova Morning" by Ed Bryant and Jody Harper

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

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

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

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

This story is alright.

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

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

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

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

This is essentially the whole story.  Merely acceptable.

**********

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

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

**********

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

1974 stories by Barry Malzberg, David Bunch, Ed Bryant and James Sallis

The back cover text of Alternities ("DAZZLING VISIONS...unfettered by strictures and taboos..probe the forbidden...."), and the titles of the included stories (e. g., "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb with a View") made me think the anthology, published in 1974 and edited by David Gerrold (associate editor, Stephen Goldin), was part and parcel of the New Wave.  But Gerrold's intro makes me wonder if it is a blow struck against the New Wave:

Science fiction has been standing neck-deep in bullshit for so long....Science fiction used to be fun.  Now it's become "important," with all the resultant literary in-breeding and incestuos navel-studying that implies.  Too many writers have forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money....I want science fiction to be fun again....The goal of this editor is to provide a place for stories that I believe are worth reading because they're "fun" in one way or another.

In this intro Gerrold seems to be calling out (though not by name) Golden Age writers L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein for acting and/or being treated like gurus:

Being able to tell a story--no matter how well--doesn't automatically qualify a man as a magician.  (Oh hell, we really are the special dreamers, but "special dreamers" shouldn't be capitalized and turned into a religion.  That way leads only to Scientology and Terminal Grokking.)

More subtly, I think Gerrold criticizes Harlan Ellison, who likes to write long intros to stories in anthologies he edits:

The stories [in this book] speak for themselves, which is why I have specifically avoided introductions at the beginning of each one.  That's one of the places where the bullshit quotient is highest.

Zing!

It makes sense for Gerrold and Goldin to be the editors of such a volume, as, while they both have agendas that are evident in their fiction (advocacy for social acceptance of homosexuality in Gerrold's fiction and hostility to religion in Goldin's), both are strongly influenced by Golden Age SF (Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr books reminded me alot of Heinlein's juveniles and Starship Troopers, and his Yesterday's Children was reminiscent of van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle; Goldin has worked with and in the style of E. E. "Doc" Smith) and their novels (that I have read, at least) are primarily entertaining adventure stories.

(I wrote about Gerrold's celebration of dinosaurs, laser guns and gore, Deathbeast, in 2013.  This year I wrote about Goldin's Assault on the Gods.  Joachim Boaz reviewed Yesterday's Children in 2014; in the comments to his review we discuss the radical differences between the original edition of the novel and the revised one.)

Gerrold's intriguing introduction to the volume has me wondering what Alternities has in store for us.  Let's check out some of the stories; in this post we'll look at contributions by people we've read before: Barry Malzberg, David R. Bunch, Edward Bryant and James Sallis.

"Before the Great Space-War" by Barry N. Malzberg

ATTENTION!  Calling all Barry Malzberg completists!  If isfdb is to be believed, "Before the Great Space-War" has appeared in one and only one publication, right here in Alternities.  Order your copy today!

"Before the Great Space-War"'s six-pages consist of messages sent back and forth between an invasion force and HQ.  First we have messages from Interstellar Scout Wilson, who is making friends with primitive natives on some planet, learning about them in preparation for the invasion.  The natives have invited Wilson to a mysterious ceremony, and HQ insists that he accept the invitation, but Wilson is reluctant.  Perhaps fearing that he will be relegated to the "basket of deplorables," Wilson assures HQ that "it is not, not xenophobia which makes me reluctant to participate in the Ceremony of Hinges but merely a certain shy reluctance...."  Later messages indicate Wilson has gone native--he vows to join the locals in resisting the invasion force.  The final communications, to and from the commander of the invasion force, suggest that the entire fleet has been suborned and seduced by the natives, who are cannibals and hope to entice down colonists to serve as the meal at the next ceremony.  Presumably the space war of the title is between the now-cannibalistic spacemen and a fleet sent to rescue or destroy them.

Trifling perhaps, but the style is the classic Malzberg we fans are used to and so "Before the Great Space-War" is an acceptable entertainment.

"How Xmas Ghosts are Made" by David R. Bunch

This story is four pages long and is perhaps the kind of thing that "breaks taboos" in its irreverent attack on America's bourgeois society and its rituals and mores.

A married couple with two young children (three and four) is out Christmas shopping.  Bunch stresses that the mother wears expensive clothes, perhaps trying to excite the reader's supposed envy of the rich, or just lampoon the pretensions of American consumers.  In an ironic deadpan Bunch describes how Mom slips in the snow and is run over by public busses trying desperately to keep to their schedules.  Mama is torn in half by the machines as husband and children watch; the pieces are then carried away by the wheels of the vehicles so that the woman has simply vanished without trace.  Right before she is killed Mom is thinking of suing somebody for causing her fall, a means of defraying the cost of all those Christmas presents.  (Bunch never spells out "Christmas," it is always "Xmas," like ten times.)  A drunken Irish cop is no help and Papa can find no witnesses; in the coming years Papa and kids embrace the fiction that Mom abandoned them.

If you haven't heard enough that Christmas is too commercialized and people these days are in too much of a hurry and Americans are too selfish and materialistic and litigious and religion has become a pro forma scam and the government is a callous and incompetent racket, well, here is your chance to hear it again. The style is alright and at only four pages this thing doesn't overstay its welcome, so I guess I can award "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" the coveted grade of "acceptable."

Like Malzberg's "Before the Great Space-War," Bunch's "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" seems to have appeared only in this volume; Alternities is shaping up to be a must-buy for all you fans of short wacky misanthropic trifles.

(Back in 2014 I read other Bunch stories about how crummy American society is and about people getting run over.  Apparently in 1974 Bunch really had hit and run accidents on his mind.)

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

This is the third story from Alternities that has never appeared anywhere else, but the first which I can't dismiss as a trifle; Bryant really tries to construct a provocative and believable alternate reality here.  "Cowboys, Indians" depicts a United States onto which a sort of Vietnam War template has been placed--the country bubbles with revolutionary fervor, while Canada (!) and Communist Vietnam send agents and commandos to infiltrate the USA as part of their covert war on America.

Our narrator is a young rancher from Wyoming.  At college he got radicalized by smoking weed and reading Marxist texts; this story includes flashbacks to his youth (episodes illustrating how violent and racist people in general or maybe just Americans in particular are) but primarily describes a raid on a government facility in which he participated.  The raid team includes a Vietnamese agent (his eyes altered so he can pass for a Mexican laborer), a female Canadian "exfiltration expert" equipped with electronic jamming devices, and another American radical.  Their mission is to sneak into a fortified lab in the countryside (where an addictive birth-control drug is being developed for use in the effort to limit the fecundity of urban blacks) and rescue a scientist (an expert on steroids) being held there against her will.  The scientist will be extracted via a Harrier jet that revolutionaries have stolen from the USMC!

The raid is a disaster; not only do some of the team members get killed, but the steroid scientist has been used as a guinea pig by the government researchers: "She was no longer a woman, and I didn't know what she was."  The narrator escapes with his life and abandons the cause of revolution.

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

I've read two stories by James Sallis before, "The Field" from Quark/3, which I gave a thumbs down to, and "Tissue" from Dangerous Visions, which I thought was more worthwhile.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" is a sort of four-page literary experiment in which the narrator describes his wife walking down a street barefoot, watched by five men, as she collects mail and steps on an earthworm which has died on the pavement.  We hear about the wife's thoughts (she is an artist) and get to read a piece of her mail and hear a pitch for her husband's idea for a stage play based on this walk.

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

Sallis's second story in the anthology is just two pages.  It describes a dream or maybe just a load of nonsense in the first-person.  The narrator takes a flight to the city where a friend lives, and along the way there are visions of warfare, cannibalism, and crime.  The narrator gets on the plane never having considered writing a novel before, but during the flight he becomes a best-selling novelist.

I can't recommend this, either.

Both "The First Few Kinds of Truth" and "Delta Flight 281" would show up in the 1995 collection of Sallis's work entitled Limits of the Sensible World.

***********

Despite Gerrold's complaint that SF writers have "forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money," this anthology appears to be full of stories with thin or nonexistent plots and little or no characterization, stories which would only appeal to a very small market.  The Malzberg, Bunch and Sallis stories are what I would expect from them, but they seem to go against the sensibilities Gerrold propounds in his intro.  Very strange.

(Bryant's work seems to actually try to fulfill Gerrold's mission, and it is the most successful of the stories we read today.)

There are 16 stories in Alternities, which leaves 11 to go.  We'll look at about half of those in our next episode.

Three stories by David R. Bunch from Fantastic

Not long ago I read a very short story by David Bunch that appeared in the January 1974 issue of Fantastic and pronounced it horrible.  But Joachim Boaz of the SF Ruminations blog has endorsed some of Bunch's other work, so this holiday week I read three Bunch stories I found in recent additions to my SF collection.

UK edition of the anthology

"Training Talk" (1964)

Published by Dell in 1966, Judith Merrill's 10th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F is full of stories by authors I've never heard of, and by authors I don't typically think of as SF writers, like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Russell Baker, and John D. MacDonald.  (Though I have already reviewed some of MacDonald's SF right here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  In an effort to allay the fears of the SF book buyer, on the back cover of my edition of the volume the publishers printed an assurance from The Chicago Tribune that the book is a "Jim Dandy" and "Fantasy land really comes through in this one...."

David R. Bunch's contribution to 10th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, "Training Talk," is five pages long and originally appeared in Fantastic's March 1964 issue.  I guess it is some kind of allegory or something.  A single father living in the country tries to teach his four-year-old daughter and five-year-old son something (about death?) by carving up hunks of baloney into likenesses of a deceased aunt and burying them in cigar boxes along with the little girl's paper cutouts of angels.  When they dig up one of the boxes six months later they find a snake has been making the box its home.  The end.

Maybe I'm missing some kind of deep symbolism here.  Maybe "Training Talk" is a satire of the scientific method?  (A theme of the anthology as a whole, judging by Merrill's introductions and summations, seems to be skepticism of science and technology.)

Maybe I'm supposed to enjoy the folksy style, with all its similes and metaphors ("It was one of those days when cheer came out of a rubbery sky in great splotches and globs of half-snow and eased down the windowpanes like breakups of little glaciers.")?  The story is a little like an R. A. Lafferty story, but one shorn of any laughs.

Maybe I'm supposed to look for clues as to what really happened to the aunt and the kids' mother?  What city the mother may currently be residing in is a topic of conversation among the characters.

This is a thought-provoking story, but my thoughts don't seem to get me anywhere; is the story a puzzle for which I lack a key, or just absurd nonsense without any real meaning?

"Short Time at the Pearly Gates" (1974)

This three page tale appears in my copy of Fantastic's March 1974 issue.  In his intro, editor Ted White admits that "for some Bunch is an acquired taste."  The isfdb suggests that this was "Short Time at the Pearly Gates"'s only appearance anywhere. 

A man is hit by a truck while crossing the street and awakens at the entrance to Heaven.  One of Saint Peter's subordinates plops him in a tub and scrubs away his sins with abrasive soaps and wire brushes. But just before he passes through the Pearly Gates the narrator wakes up to find himself still alive, in a hospital, confronted with his wife and children.

I guess the tension of the story is in wondering whether the man really went to Heaven or was simply dreaming, and whether we should suspect that his life on Earth, working to pay his doctor bill and feed his family, is literally or metaphorically Hell.  There are also some lame jokes (e. g., the attendant at the Pearly Gates keeps track of the oddballs who come up to Heaven, and our narrator is approximately the 485759th most absurd.)  This is some pretty thin gruel. 

"At Bugs Complete" (1974)

Like "Short Time at the Pearly Gates," "At Bugs Complete" appeared in Fantastic (the July 1974 issue in this case) and was never printed again.  Poor Bunch isn't even listed on the cover.

Bugs Complete is a large business firm in a dystopic world in which the government is spying on everybody all the time, and this story is mostly a conversation between an executive (our narrator) and his direct subordinate, a scientific type.  Bugs Complete sells surveillance devices to the government, and the scientist is presenting a new idea to the narrator, a system of bugs that will catalog a person's every experience from birth, thus allowing the government to extrapolate what he or she will do in the future.  Knowing what people will do before they do it, the scientist claims, will be the ultimate power!

This is easily the best of the three stories I'm discussing in this blog post.  Unlike in "Short Time at the Pearly Gates," in "At Bugs Complete" something actually happens, and there are actual relationships between the characters (we learn how the narrator manipulates the scientist to further his own career, for example.)  Now, in "Training Talk" there was also a plot and characters, but in that story everything was inexplicable and absurd; in "At Bugs Complete" you can actually understand the plot and characters--call me old-fashioned, but for me that is a plus.  "At Bugs Complete" also addresses philosophical debates I find interesting--nature vs nurture and determinism vs free will--and includes actual science-fiction elements, the proposed methods of government surveillance.  This is a story I can recommend.

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

So, we've got a bewildering but acceptable story, a story I thought a total waste of time, and a story that actually worked.  It's a mixed bag, to be sure, but good enough that I will read more Bunch in the future, if and when the opportunity presents itself.

January 1974 stories by Ted White, Janet Fox, J. J. Russ, and "Susan Doenim"

Let's tackle the rest of the fiction from my copy of January 1974's Fantastic.

"...And Another World Above" by Ted White

White, editor of the magazine, includes a longish story by himself; on the Table of Contents it is called a "novelete."  In its introduction White tells us it is the first in a series of stories about his character, "Long Hand," but I'm not finding any evidence online of further stories about the character.

Which is too bad, because "...And Another World Above" is a pretty good piece of work, a good start for a novel or a series of closely connected stories.  It doesn't really work as a stand alone tale, as it spends all its pages setting the scene and introducing the characters, so there is no conflict or climax or resolution.

Long Hand (is this name some kind of writerly in-joke?), a teenage boy, is a member of a nomadic tribe of only 22 people.  They can only barely eke out an existence in the barren desert they inhabit, and have virtually no technology--Long Hand has never even seen a wheel!  One day the band is visited by wise men who have magical (or high tech) healing abilities.  These wise men do some good deeds for the tribe, and then leave.  Long Hand, curious, follows them, and witnesses them teleporting away. Imitating their actions, the boy himself is teleported.

He reappears in a much more fertile land, one of towns, farms and rivers, and a population that wears clothes and uses wagons.  The sky is also different; White seems to be hinting that this world is on the interior of a globe or cylinder with a sun in its center, like in the generation ship in Gene Wolfe's 1990s Book of the Long Sun or Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1914-1963 Pellucidar books.  Long Hand meets an older woman who is a mind reader, and becomes her assistant.  He also meets a friendly teenage girl in a town, and loses his virginity with her.  Then the story is over.

I liked White's writing style, and the way he handled the characters was pleasant.  I think I would have enjoyed following Long Hand as he explored his new world and did whatever the plot would end up consisting of, going on a quest or fighting in a war or whatever.  Is there any chance one of White's novels is a continuation of this story?

NOTE:  There's a fun story autobiographical story by White about his relationship with Harlan Ellison available online here; check it out, it is like something Harvey Pekar would write, and even includes charming cartoons!

Mike Kaluta's illo for "She-Bear"; I
don't get the Asian style; this is a Northern
European story (Arcana invokes Odin)

"She-Bear" by Janet Fox

I'd never even heard of Janet Fox before reading this story; apparently she is most well-known for a series of novels about an alien called Scorpio who travels through time.  Those novels appeared under the pseudonym Alex McDonough.

"She-Bear" is a competent, if ordinary, sword and sorcery adventure.  Maybe I'm supposed to praise it because it's about a woman who kills people with a magic sword instead of about a man who kills people with a magic sword?  Be that as it may, I liked "She-Bear,"--the plot is solid, and Fox's style and pacing are good.

Arcana is a "tall, sturdily-built girl" climbing snow-covered mountains on a quest to find a magic sword and kill a troll.  The sword is imbued with the bloodthirsty soul of the great king of a forgotten people, and when Arcana has to fight rapists, the sword basically fights for her, guiding her hand in intricate fencing moves.  Besides her magic sword, Arcana (who is a witch) is accompanied by a daemon trapped in the body of a blind horse, and a handsome man who is in her thrall, she having used the magic sword to outfight him and win his obedience.  A romance seems to be brewing between the two, but is not consummated within the period of the story.

While a complete story, "She-Bear" feels like an episode in a series, and I'd certainly be interested to read more about Arcana, the captive daemon, and the thrall and their Conan/Elric/Grey Mouser-style adventures.  Fox published something like 50 stories in anthologies and periodicals, so with luck I will encounter some more of her work in my usual course of scrutinizing tables of contents in libraries and used book stores. 

An entertaining fantasy caper with some effective horror elements; thumbs up. 

"The Interview" by J. J. Russ

J. J. Russ only has six entries, all short stories, on the isfdb.  White tells us this is a Kafkaesque story, and that Russ is a published poet.

This is a first person narrative in which the protagonist endures a job interview in a dystopian world in which there is only one company to work for and the unemployed are "disappeared" soon after losing their positions.  Our narrator is presented with impossible challenges at the interview, like being asked to recall something from the day of his birth, or define words that the interviewer has just made up.  The story is mildly amusing, though it feels a little long and I spotted the twist ending early.

Acceptable.

"Heartburn in Heaven" by Susan Doenim

When I looked up Doenim at the isfdb I was surprised to find that this was a pseudonym used by George Alec Effinger.  In his intro to the story Ted White reports that "Miss Doenim" recently graduated high school--in 1974 Effinger, born in 1947, was 27 years old!  Was White in on the joke, or was he the victim of an elaborate charade on Effinger's part?  Is the "affectionate dedication" to Harlan Ellison sincere, or some kind of dig?

I liked Effinger's 1973 story, "City in the Sand," but was not impressed by several of his earlier stories. "Heartburn in Heaven" isn't terrible, but I can't quite say I enjoyed it; it is a sterile literary exercise.

A man awakes naked in a long steel corridor.  He can only vaguely remember his earlier life; he doesn't even recall his own name.  On the floor are a scrubber and a can of polish.  He eventually learns that if he polishes the walls of his prison, food will appear.  Exploring, he meets other prisoners; none know any more about how they got here than he does.  The inmates cannot live communally, because their food only appears in the place where they awoke.   The female prisoners have a little more mobility, because they will have sex with men who trade them half a ration of food for the privilege. 

And that's all folks, we never learn anything about how or why he is in this environment, or who put him there.  I guess this is just a (tepid) allegory of life.

Barely acceptable.

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

All in all, this issue of Fantastic is pretty good.  White, Malzberg and Fox provide stories I can confidently recommend.  The Meyers, Russ and Effinger stories, all of them odd in one way or another, get (perhaps grudgingly) passing grades.  That leaves us only one truly bad story, the anemic Bunch piece.  And the ancillary matter--editorial, letters, the whole business of Effinger impersonating a young woman--are fun.  So, reading this magazine has been a positive experience, and opened my eyes to two authors, White and Fox, worth a further look.

January 1974 stories from Fantastic: Myers, Bunch & Malzberg

Let's take a look at one of the magazines I got at the Des Moines Flea Market!

The January 1974 issue of Fantastic has a weak cover painting; the dripping knife in the brutish woman's hand actually reminded me of the knife StrongBad likes to include in his own art work.  And is that water coming out of her sleeve?

Editor Ted White's editorial is full of minutia that might interest the SF fan obsessed with 1970s inside baseball stuff, like how the number of stories in a SF magazine compares to that of a mystery mag, and whether SF and the mystery are genres better suited to the novel or the short story.  White tells us that a traditional (puzzle whodunit) mystery story drawn out to novel length is a drag, while the "most memorable and outstanding" SF stories are long stories or novels.  He and other SF editors find that there have been quite few really good SF short stories lately.

At the back of the magazine we have eleven pages of letters.  Alexei Panshin praises Ted White to the skies, and White returns the favor.  Other correspondents call Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca "brilliantly creative" and "sheer greatness."  My man tarbandu read the paperback edition of this novel (retitled Earth Magic for book publication) and called it "one of the worst fantasy novels I've ever read."  There is also a lot of discussion of Gene Rodenberry's failed TV pilot Genesis II and a rumor of a Star Trek movie!

I read three pieces of fiction from the issue early this week: a short novel by Howard L. Meyers, a very short story by David R. Bunch, and a story by Barry N. Malzberg.

"The Earth of Nenkunal" by Howard L. Myers

I'm not familiar with Howard L. Myers, who wrote few novels but a substantial number of short stories.  Baen has published two collections of Myers' stories recently, and "The Earth of Nenkunal," as I write this, can be read for free as part of the free e-book, the Creatures of Man.  "The Earth of Nenkunal" is the first story in what the people at isfdb call the "Econo-War" series, which the people at Baen tell us is part of the "Chalice Cycle."  The version of the story in Fantastic is graced with an evocative illustration by Jeff Jones.

The world is changing!  The Age of Magic is giving way to a period of religion.  This revolution is the doing of spirit creatures called "necromancers" from outer space; they are coming down to the Earth and taking over people's bodies and stealing people's souls and that kind of thing.  The necromancers have the ability to lay a geas on people that causes them to worship the necromancers as gods.  Among the worshipers, sex is considered dirty, which is a big change from the Age of Magic.  Among those still devoted to magic, it is normal for people to have group sex in the middle of a tavern while the other patrons watch and cheer.

Basdon is a swordsman newly arrived in Nenkunal, where magic is still holding on. Basdon is a recovering worshiper, and so he is a little reluctant to climb onto the tavern table and bang a chick while all the farmers watch and wait their own turns with the young lady.  But he manages to get into the swing of things.

After pulling up his trousers Basdon is pulled aside by a magician, Jonker.  The magic-user tells Basdon that the coming era of religion will only last twenty thousand years, so no biggie, but when the next magical era begins it may be stunted.  The magicians of the future will have an easier time of it if Jonker can find a particular magical talisman and preserve it for them in a place safe from the religious.  Jonker asks Basdon to accompany him on this quest; the talisman is currently in territory ruled by religious people, and Jonker could really use the help of a fighting man with knowledge of the ways of the religious.

In Nenkunal the croplands are lush and the people friendly; in the lands of god-worshipers there is famine and everybody is a jerk who loves money.  Basdon and Jonker have to fight in hand to hand combat with "weredogs" and their master, an evil wizard, and in the ruin where the talisman lies buried kill the musclebound body occupied by one of the necromancer "gods."  Basdon also rapes a six-year-old girl.  Hey, don't worry!  You see, she has a curse on her, and for the last two weeks her body has been growing at the rate of a year a day, so she's legal!  And, after Jonker applies a little more magic, the girl isn't calling up Rolling Stone for an interview, she's asking Basdon for more! 

"The Earth of Nenkunal" is an ordinary quest adventure with a few crazy pro-sex and anti-religion elements stapled on.  Barely acceptable.

"Alien" by David R. Bunch

This story was translated into French and included in Univers 10.  Univers 10 has one of those covers that makes us Anglo-Saxons say "Sacre bleu!" or "ooh la la."  Bunch is another author I have never read before; I guess it's education time for your humble blogger!

"Alien" is one of those stories that makes us 21st century people say "WTF?"  Two pages long, it stars a "little man-not-around" with a "pumpkin-yellow-face" who wants to love everybody and serve as people's "umbrella." But everybody, particularly a millionaire and a woman in high heels with lots of cosmetics on her face, is in too much of a hurry and they push the guy out of the way.  So pumpkin-face decides to become a man in a hurry also, and becomes the fastest and hurryingest of all.  The moral of the story: we are all trying to get away from something, and we don't spare enough time for love.

Awwwwwwww......

In his intro to the story Ted White tells us "Alien" is "a parable" and "a unique offering," but I suspect White included it to serve as evidence of what he says in his editorial: "I have talked with several of these editors and I've noted a common complaint: all are very discouraged by the general state of the sf short story."  Editor dudes, I feel your pain!

"Network" by Barry N. Malzberg

This story appears in the 1976 collection The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and it is pretty good. It includes images, characters, an adventure plot, and traditional SF ideas, things our man Barry doesn't always feel the need to include in his work.  Somehow, of the three stories we are talking about today, Malzberg's is the least crazy!

In the future a crumbling big city, I'm guessing New York, has been closed off by the authorities, so the inhabitants can't get out and only tourists and students of the Institute can get in.  (Yes, this sounds kinda like Ben Bova's 1976 novel City of Darkness and his 1973 short story, "The Sightseers.")  Our story follows two students from the Institute who drive into the city, which is called "Network," to collect information.  They act foolishly, get in trouble, and have to fight for their lives.

A decent story, I suppose about urban decay and the callousness of the authorities and intellectual elites in their dealings with the common people.  The tense action and danger stuff actually works, so, kudos to Malzberg.

***********

When the wife and I are on some road trip in the Toyota Corolla, and I inevitably get us lost with my incompetent driving or incompetent map-reading, I say things like "hey, this is an adventure!" and "we're explorers!" and "it's always worthwhile to see things you've never seen before!"  The January '74 issue of Fantastic is a little like that.  Am I going to be seeking out more stories by Myers and Bunch?  No, not really. Am I glad I got to experience their 1974 wackiness?  That's what I'm telling myself!

(Luckily the Jeff Jones illustration makes the issue worth far more to me than what I paid, and I liked the Malzberg.)

In our next episode I'll explore more fiction from this issue, including Ted White's own story about "a new kind of sword and sorcery hero," Janet Fox's story about a "witch-girl," and the mysterious Susan Doenim's story, which she dedicates to Harlan Ellison!