Cirque by Terry Carr

"Everybody in Cirque believes....Whether or not they come to services here or somewhere else, they all believe.  They all tune in to the broadcasts; they're all part of Cirque.  We're really all one people, aren't we?  Because of the monitors."

My copy of the 1978 paperback

Joachim Boaz, via twitter, recently noted Terry Carr's birthday.  In September of last year, in the Lone Star State, I purchased a copy of Terry Carr's 1977 novel Cirque along with some other off-the-beaten-path SF books, and Joachim's tweet inspired me to read it this week. Joachim blogged about Cirque back in 2016; check out his assessment before or after reading mine, as while we basically agree on how good the book is, we discuss different aspects of it and come at it from different angles (his blog post is also far less spoily than mine.)

It is the far future, and the Earth is almost unrecognizable to us 20th-century types; Earth's mineral wealth has long been exhausted, for example.  The most prominent river on Earth, the River Fundament, empties into a chasm almost ten kilometers wide, the Abyss.  The Abyss has been there so long that nobody really knows how it came to be.  Built around the Abyss is Earth's most prominent city, Cirque.  The people of Cirque benefit from all kinds of super advanced technology, but their culture is religious and spiritual, their city home to innumerable different sects and site of a profusion of churches and temples, most of which have the Abyss at the center of their theology.   

Carr's novel chronicles a pivotal day in the history of Cirque, a day on which its citizens must confront two outsiders and the revelations about Cirque they present.  One of these outsiders is a visitor from outer space, a three-meter-long millipede from the Aldebaran system; Earth may be a backwater at the time depicted in the novel, but in the past Earth was the center of a galactic civilization built with human technology, humans being the most entrepreneurial and technologically innovative race in the galaxy, and a half dozen or so aliens still come to visit Earth each year.  The other outsider is the colony of tentacled creatures that is discovered living among fungus and vines at the bottom of the Abyss--to the astonishment of everybody, the Abyss is not, as has been assumed for centuries, a barren shaft that extends to the molten planet core.  The hideous creatures have been living on the garbage the citizens have been throwing down into the Abyss for as long as anyone can remember, and, some religious leaders immediately conclude, on the sins thrown down the Abyss by the faithful at confession.  One of the novel's many characters, the head priestess at The Cathedral of the Five Elements, a woman named Salamander, believes this creature is "the Beast" of her religion's lore.

Another of Carr's many characters is a powerful psyker known as the monitor, who fills the role in Cirque played in our own times by the mass media.  The monitor simultaneously reads the minds of every person in the city and sifts through these people's experiences to select the most compelling for transmission to every other person in Cirque; citizens can generally choose to receive or ignore ("tune in" or "tune out") these transmissions.  The initial arrival of the benign Aldebarranean millipede, and the first sighting of the terrifying Beast, are thus experienced by thousands of people, who share not only the sights and sounds experienced by those who first encounter these outsiders, but their very thoughts and feelings.  (Carr mostly ignores the privacy implications of living in such a surveillance society, though it is clear that Cirque suffers almost no crime and the police have little to do.)

1977 Hardcover first edition

Full of the personalities of others, a monitor has almost no personality or life of his or her own, and lives like an idiot or even a vegetable, fed and bathed by servants.  The current monitor is a fifteen-year-old girl, Annalie, and the senior of her assistants and next in line to become monitor, Lily, another female psychic, only ten, doesn't even remember Annalie's name.  Monitors never live out their teenage years, and so Lily has reason to believe she will soon be graduating into Annalie's place.  The shock of the Beast's arrival jars Annalie back into an individual, and she loses all her psychic powers--Lily is expected to take over Annalie's role, but Annalie's first spoken words as an individual are to warn Lily to flee this grim destiny and preserve her freedom. 

The monitor and her role in binding together Cirque with a common culture and shared experiences is one iteration of a major theme of Cirque, how individuals can contain multiple identities, and how multiple individuals can form a single, collective identity.  "The Beast" is seen by religious people as a single entity born of the sins of the people of Cirque, while the secular-minded believe it to be an ecosystem that has battened on Cirque's cast off garbage.  Of course, any city is a sort of collective identity, a sum composed of diverse individuals who pursue their individual, often conflicting, interests, and Carr presents us with many characters, painting a portrait of Cirque made up of views from a number of angles.

Another of Carr's characters, Nikki, takes drugs every day to induce what we might call multiple personality disorder but which the people of Cirque would more charitably call a liberation of the various facets of her personality.  She awakes as Nikki One, her "normal" personality--shy and depressed, suffering low self-esteem from being short and fat--but lives part of the day as uninhibited pleasure-seeking Nikki Two, and another as aggressive (she might insist "assertive,") bitter, manipulative and cynical Nikki Three.  Nikki Three meets the millipede, and insinuates herself into its company and acts as its self-appointed tour guide.  The alien, however, turns out to be as much a guide for Nikki as she is for it, as Aldebarraneans can see the future, and the visitor already knows all about the rise of The Beast and has in fact come to witness this event.  During this adventure, Nikki's personality shifts into that of the rarely seen Nikki Four, who is generous and joyful, loving all and beloved by all.  Nikki Four does not see the giant tentacled creatures that climb out of the Abyss as evil monsters that must be destroyed, as the religious and temporal authorities initially do, but as beautiful, graceful beings.

For their 1979 edition, our friends in
the Netherlands reused Paul Lehr's
cover for Jack Williamson's
The Power of Blackness

There are a lot of women in authority in Cirque; the head of the police force is a woman, Gloriana, and she directs the investigation of the Abyss's unexpected inhabitants and the efforts to destroy them with poison sprayed from an aircraft brought in from the provinces, where it is usually used to dust crops.  But don't expect Cirque to be championed by the feminist community--all the women in the novel seem to find authority unfulfilling, and/or to have taken up power to compensate for their failures to build a good relationship with a man.

The big day, and the 223-page novel, end in Salamander's Cathedral of the Five Elements, where congregate at a major ritual all the characters, including one of the elephant-sized tentacle monsters which has escaped Gloriana's poison sprays; the monster is attracted to the building's warmth as the cold of night approaches.  The blind monster makes its way through the cathedral towards the ceremonial Fire, in the process killing several people (all you Bernie bros out there will be relieved to hear that it is rich people who get killed, and most of them are actually killed by the inaccurate proton fire of Gloriana's keystone kops, who are trying to stop the monster.)  Annalie's psychic powers return, but now she can control them ("Her talent had come back, but now it was her tool instead of her master") and she sees the monster through Nikki's eyes; Nikki finds the monster beautiful, and Annalie transmits Nikki's vision to everybody in the city, and in response, the monster transforms into a lump of clover covered in flowers--the Beast really is a projection of people's thoughts, and if everybody sees it as nice, it will be nice.  Oy, welcome to hippyville.

Except for those dead rich people, everybody gets a happy ending and nobody has to make any sacrifices to get that happy ending.  Gloriana and Salamander and Nikki all get good boyfriends, and Salamander's and Gloriana's careers become more fulfilling (though there is a case to be made that they didn't really do a very good job during the crisis and perhaps should be sacked.)  Annalie quits her job as monitor, and in true have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too style she still has her psychic powers.  Lily takes Annalie's place, but it is implied that monitors will no longer be worked to death as they have for centuries, but instead learn what Annalie has learned and transition back to an ordinary life after serving the community for a few years.  The Aldebarranean is revealed to be the prophet of the religion of the miracle of the monster that turned into flowers; because he could see into the future he has already written his holy book of verses, and now that the events it describes have occurred it can be published and his gospel spread.  Cirque will soon become rich from the tourist trade as the destination of pilgrims from throughout the galaxy.

I like the look of this 1979
British edition, but it is hard
to find a decent image of it online

Cirque's flower power happy ending is a little hard to take, and, befitting a novel in which one of the characters can see the inevitable future, the plot happens to the characters rather than the characters driving the plot with their decisions, but it is not a bad novel.  Carr is a competent writer, and the book has numerous good SF devices and ideas, and only a few pages (of religious ritual) are actually boring; for the most part I was curious to see what was going to happen next.  The novel's use of religion is a little ambiguous and equivocal, which is probably more interesting than a blanket denunciation of religion or a passionate endorsement of religion.  The environmentalist angle is similarly grey rather than black and white: the Aldebarranean says that the intelligent races of the galaxy are grateful for all the brilliant technological advances humans have shared with them, but that since humans can't see into the future, some of their technology threatens the environment.

I think Cirque deserves a mild recommendation.

1970 stories by Liz Hufford, Robert F. Young, Robert Margoff & Andrew Offutt and Carol Carr

Let's continue our exploration of Orbit 8, the 1970 anthology of all new stories edited by Damon Knight.  I have a quite worn copy of the 1971 paperback edition published by Berkley, for which I paid 50 cents at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.

"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" by Gene Wolfe

I read this in 2015 in the Wolfe collection Storeys from the Old Hotel and really liked it.  Joachim Boaz also read it in 2015, when he read Orbit 8, and he liked it.  I read it again today (it is only six pages) and I have to say it is a great science fiction story (it speculates on how the technology and politics of the future will affect human lives) and a great horror story (it is sad and disturbing.)  It is unanimous--you should read this story.

"Tablets of Stone" by Liz Hufford

Hufford has only three credits at isfdb; this is the first.

A spaceship has to land for emergency repairs on a planet with an overpopulation problem.  Because of the overpopulation problem, sex and pregnancy on this planet are taboo.  But one of the lonely space crew members manages to win the heart of the pretty girl who is the ship's liaison at the spaceport--they fall in love and she stows away on the ship so they can be be married and live happily ever after.

In its last paragraphs this five-page tale is revealed to be a gimmicky horror story.  The woman, who looks human, never told the spaceman that the females of her planet give birth to dozens of children at once, and that they mature at a very rapid rate.  When she produces a brood of approximately fifty infants the ship's captain realizes that this additional population will overtax the life support systems of the ship and kill everybody on board.  The young lovers commit suicide and the space crew have to hunt down the fifty babies and exterminate them.

Acceptable.  It looks like "Tablets of Stone" was never reprinted anywhere.

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" by Robert F. Young

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" is a New Wavey title, and the story is written in the present tense and includes lots of odd symbols, but Young offers a strong plot and writes in an economical style and addresses themes that are more or less traditional--weird aliens, travel through space and time, and the way so many men must choose between family life and freedom.  Here Knight offers us another quite good story; like Dozois's "Horse of Air" and Wolfe's "Sonya, Crane Wesselman, and Kittee" it is readable but has an edge, offering controversial content and surprises.

Some centuries in the future mankind has colonized the galaxy and encountered huge creatures who live in space, the asteroid-like spacewhales.  These creatures can travel not only through space but through time.  Their strong exoskeletons make perfect hulls for space craft, and so hunters called Jonahs invade the whales and blow up their brains so that their internal organs can be removed and replaced with cargo holds, crew quarters, electronic equipment, etc.

The conversion of dead spacewhale corpses into space ships takes place in orbit over Altair IV.  Over the centuries the human colonists of Altair IV have evolved in such a way that the planet is now some kind of matriarchy, as the women are much longer lived and substantially more intelligent than the men.  Women on Altair IV are also very beautiful and subject to voracious sexual appetites--they take many lovers or administer drugs to a single husband so he can perform sexually again and again in a single day. 

The protagonist of the story is John Starfinder, a former Jonah who now works on converting the dead whales.  He is also one of the few men on the planet who has one of the gorgeous Altair IV women all to himself, which can be looked upon as a blessing or as a burden.  When Starfinder starts receiving psychic messages from the whale he is helping to convert into a spaceship--it is still alive because it has a second brain which was only damaged, not destroyed, its captor failed to discover it--our hero (?) has a big decision to make.  He can kill the whale and stay on Altair IV, where for the rest of his life he will be dominated by a woman who will long outlive him, or he can make a deal with the whale, healing its brain, liberating it and partnering with it in an exploration of the universe and history.  Starfinder is a history and literature buff (his interest in the liberal arts is appropriately/ironically the result of a disastrous run-in with a spacewhale early in his career) and he relishes the idea of travelling back in time to witness first hand the glory that was Rome.

I found the climax and resolution of the story surprising, even shocking, in a way that was satisfying--Young does not pull his punches, but follows his themes to their utmost conclusions.  Joachim didn't care for "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams;" maybe because its treatment of male-female relations, and its shocking climax, offended his feminist sensibilities?  Personally, I found "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" to be compelling.  Not only does Young fill it with good SF ideas, surprises, and the kind of difficult sexual relationships I always find fascinating, but includes many direct and indirect allusions to the Bible and to Moby Dick.  Thumbs up!

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," I see, is one in a series of stories about John Starfinder and his relationship with spacewhales; it would later appear under the title "The Spacewhale Graveyard" in a 1980 collection of the Starfinder stories called, appropriately enough, Starfinder.

"The Book" by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt

Offutt is a famously odd character, the subject of a great New York Times article by his son Chris; Chris Offutt has also written an entire book on his father which I have not yet read.  I have read several things by Andrew Offutt and opined about them here at the blog; in general I have found them full of problems but somehow have enjoyed them anyway.  I am not very familiar with Margroff, though I know I read one of his collaborations with Piers Anthony, The Ring, back in the 1980s.

"The Book"'s protagonist is a cave man living in a milieu that is characterized by loneliness, abuse, murder, cannibalism, and, I fear, incest--men live alone and the strong steal weaker men's wives and children and sometimes eat their own children and (it is hinted) have sex with their own children.  Men who are old or ill kill their own wives so that the wife will keep them company in the afterlife.

Our hero (?) is different than other men.  When young, he was the strongest of men and dominated all the other men in the vicinity.  More importantly, he has in his cave an artifact of ancient or alien origin in the form of a book.  The book projects ideas and even desires into his mind, guiding his actions, often in ways that contravene his inclinations.  The book seems to be trying to civilize the cave man and his race, for example, informing him of more efficient hunting methods, nudging him to get other cave people to look at the book, and convincing him to put an end to that whole "kill your wife to bring her to the next world" business.

One odd element in the story is that the high tech book seems to want people to eat each other's brains.  Probably this is Margroff and Offutt invoking those famous planarian maze experiments that seemed to suggest (erroneously, it has turned out) that some creatures can gain the memories of those animals that they eat.

I kind of like this one, because it is so crazy and you have to try to figure it out (and it is not too hard to figure out.)  As with "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," Joachim and I disagree over this one and I again wonder if maybe it is because of the story's depiction of male-female relationships--in this story women are stuck in subordinate roles and defined by their relationships with men and with children.

It looks like "The Book" has only ever appeared in Orbit 8.  Offut produced quite a few short stories, but it doesn't seem that any collections of his short fiction have ever been published.         

"Inside" by Carol Carr

Carol Carr is the wife of Terry Carr, the famous editor.  She has six fiction credits at isfdb.  "Inside" would reappear in an anthology edited by Terry Carr, as well as one edited by Robert Silverberg.

This is one of those stories that has a vague, dreamlike, hallucinatory feel, a story full of mysteries that are perhaps impossible to figure out.

A girl wakes up in a bedroom--out the windows can be seen mist, and when she opens the door she is confronted with empty blackness.  She sleeps, and wakes up to find a corridor leading from her door has been added to the house.  Every morning, for a month or so, new rooms and furniture, and eventually inhabitants--servants and people who eat in the dining room and act like they are at a restaurant--are added to the house.  The servants badger the girl but ignore her responses; the girl assiduously avoids the diners, but their conversations provide us readers clues that suggest that our nameless protagonist was an insane and/or depressed married woman who committed suicide.  Maybe she is now a ghost or in the afterlife or something like that, or maybe this is all just the fantasy or delusion of an unhappy and/or mentally ill individual, a reflection of her hopes for solitude and fears of and disappointments with her family and friends.  On the last page of the five-page tale the servants and diners disappear, and the story ends on a faint note of triumph--the girl/woman has successfully closed herself off from the world and from other people.

At first I was going to judge this one "acceptable," but while copyediting this blogpost I found myself again trying to figure "Inside" out; this is one of those stories that, the more you think about it, the better it seems, so I guess I'll call it marginally or moderately good.  Maybe it is just a psychological story of a troubled individual who rejects the world, or maybe it (also) is a feminist thing, an allegory of the lives of women who inhabit a world they didn't create and to whom nobody listens when decisions are to be made.  This allegory seems a little shaky, as in my own life experience it is wives and mothers who control how a house is furnished and decorated, but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

**********

Taken as a group, these four stories are pretty good; I certainly liked most of them more than did Joachim.  (Am I becoming a softie?)  Orbit 8 is looking like a strong anthology, and we still have six stories to go, including pieces by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty.  Fifty cents well spent!

By Furies Possessed by Ted White

"You're a fool," Bjonn said.  His face was flushed, and he looked more angry than I'd ever seen him.  "You've lived from infancy on a diet of tasteless, tube-fed pap.  You've never left the teat.  You connect yourself to an 'evacuation unit' and your entire alimentary tract is plugged in, part of the circuit of an obscenely sterile machine.  You're a product of conditioned reflexes, of compulsive habit patterns.  No wonder you're so deeply neurotic!"  

Three dollars!  That's why they call me
"The Big Spender"

In the July 1973 issue of Fantastic, SF critics Alexei and Cory Panshin conclude that SF is in a period of stagnation, but on the brink of achieving "maturity" and producing "a great literature."  They list a bunch of recent "introspective" SF novels which show hints of this coming maturity, and one of them is Fantastic editor Ted White's 1970 novel By Furies Possessed.  By Furies Possessed was first serialized over two issues of Amazing, which White was also editing at the time; I own the Signet paperback edition.  Flipping through my water-stained copy, the print looks quite small and I see that the last page is numbered "192."  This thing is long... it had better be good.

From its first page, By Furies Possessed lays on the traditional technological and sociological SF speculations: what will it be like to travel between the moon and the Earth, to travel in zero gee, to live on the moon?  If the Earth becomes overcrowded, how will government and culture change?  The novel is also full of psychology: in the first of 23 chapters we learn that our first-person narrator, Tad Dameron is claustrophobic, his fellow passengers on the Earth to Luna shuttle envy him because he gets waved through customs without having to deal with any paperwork, he envies his Luna-based colleague who has had more time in space than he has, and witness this colleague play mind games on Tad, criticizing him and trying to exploit his claustrophobia.  When something unfortunate befalls this guy, Tad is torn between sympathy and schadenfreude.

The Earth has built seven interstellar ships in the last forty years, and one has just docked on Luna, bringing with it a passenger from Earth's first extrasolar colony, Farhome.  This emissary, "Bjonn" (he has only the one name) is the first extrasolar colonial to ever visit Earth.  (Farhome is like 15 years travel away, though for passengers it feels like only a few months.)  It's Tad's job as a "Level Seven Investigator" from "the Bureau of Non-Terran affairs" to show Bjonn around the Earth, and, in the process, learn all about him and Farhome.  But already on Luna and on the shuttle back to Earth Tad has begun to dislike this visitor, who is so tall and agile and self-assured.  Envy again! 

Back in New York (or "Megayork," as they are calling it in Tad's day), Tad introduces Bjonn to one of his colleagues, Dian Knight, an attractive woman who has always spurned Tad's advances.  Bjonn and Dian disappear together, and the novel shifts into detective mode as Tad travels around the world, sifting through clues and interrogating people in an effort to find them.

As the story progresses we learn all about this future Earth and how radically different it is from our own.  The world population stands at 37 billion, and is presided over by a socialistic world government which White metaphorically likens to a mother.  There is almost no private sector, with most everybody working for the government or (Tad suggests this group is the "vast majority") living off "Public Care" and spending their time watching the "lulling opiates of public 3-D."  (Professionals like Tad almost never watch 3-D, and if they do it is more serious private broadcasts that are only quasilegal.)

Most strange, and most indicative of the mother-baby relationship people have with the state, is people's attitude towards eating.  People never eat together; in fact, the idea of seeing another eat or being seen eating disgusts them, and when Bjonn first invites Tad and Dian to share a meal with him they become physically ill.  The citizens of the future take their meals in private little "eating cubicles," the same rooms they urinate and evacuate in, seated on a toilet, sucking algae from a tube that projects from the wall.

As we learn about this overcrowded future society, we also learn about Tad's own psychology, and I think to an extent Tad is meant to represent his society--his misfortunes and psychological problems are the result or a small scale version of Earth society's sociological issues.  Family and community ties in this world are weak--Tad was separated from his parents at age six, people walking the crowded streets and riding mass transit never make eye contact (Tad dubs his age "The Age of Anonymity"), marriages are generally short term contracts, and when someone is nice to Tad, he tells us it is a surprise.  Tad is not only claustrophobic, but also alienated from the natural world, finding the feel of sunlight or cool air on his skin uncomfortable and spending as much time as possible inside.  As Tad conducts his investigation he is given the opportunity to see different sectors of society--he visits an artist living on the dole, a busy professional of the private sector who left her child to an orphanage so she'd have time to pursue her career, and attends a wild party of the decadent rich, an orgy where he becomes intimate with a porno actress, and performs in a porno with her!-- and we observe how classbound and divided Earth society is and how dysfunctional people's relationships are.

When Tad finally catches up with Bjonn and Dian they have started a church and their congregation is growing.  Tad realizes that the church members are all carrying an alien parasite from Farhome, and when he discovers that his bosses at the Bureau have also been infected with these parasites the hunter becomes the hunted, and he desperately tries to avoid capture.  But, in the end, he is persuaded that the alien parasite is not a parasite at all, but a symbiote that enhances its human host's perceptions and general health, including his psychological health.  Tad joins Bjonn's group, accepting one of these "parasites" into his own body, and Dian becomes his lover.  As the novel ends we know that Tad's many psychological problems are solved, and that soon, when everybody has taken aboard one of these alien symbiotes, the class conflict and alienation and other problems of Earth society will be solved.

An interesting way to look at By Furies Possessed is as a novel about science fiction, or perhaps as a novel in dialogue with other science fiction works.  White includes quite a few references which feel like little SF community in-jokes.  Early in the book there is a sort of satirical reference to L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics and Richard Sharpe Shaver's claims about a malevolent subterranean civilization of "deros."  A little later we meet a minor female character named Terri Carr--celebrated (male) SF editor Terry Carr co-wrote the novel Invasion from 2500 with White in 1964.   

Most importantly, By Furies Possessed feels like a response to or mutation of one of the most famous SF novels by one of the most important SF writers, Robert Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land.  Bjonn does almost the same stuff that the hero of Stranger does--he is a human born on another planet and matured under the beneficent influence of aliens, and he comes alone to an Earth that has a sort of crummy society and sets up a church that has the potential to solve all Mother Terra's problems.  One glaring "tell" is that the important alien ritual in Stranger is "the sharing of water," while the "sacrament" of Bjonn's church is the "sharing of food."

In the introduction of the 1978 edition of his 1967 novel Secret of the Marauder Satellite, White tells us that he first fell in love with SF when he read Heinlein's juvenile novels as a child, and that he took Heinlein's juveniles as a model when he wrote Secret.  So it would be "in character" for White to have based By Furies Possessed in part on Stranger in a Strange Land.  In many ways, of course, By Furies Possessed is very different than Stranger; Stranger is full of philosophical conversations and expressions of love, and it is clear from the start that the Martian is the good guy.  White's novel is like a hard-boiled detective novel full of femmes fatale in which people are all jerks to each other, and White tries to keep us guessing about whether we should welcome Bjonn and his church or fear it.  In fact, while Bjonn's character arc is somewhat like that of Smith from Stranger, it is also quite like that of Dracula in Bram Stoker's classic novel--Bjonn is an alien weirdo who comes to the Earth via a ship, hides out and begins converting people to his alien ways via an invasion of their bodies. 

(There are quite a few SF books that feel like responses to Heinlein's work, like Alexei Panshin's Rite of Passage and David Gerrold's A Matter for Men.  Joe Haldeman's The Forever War was widely seen as a response to Heinlein's Starship Troopers, though Haldeman denies any such intent.)

Ugh, I never would have bought the
book if the copy I found had this
cover--it makes the novel
look like it must be a bad comedy

I also thought White might be using By Furies Possessed to strike a subtle blow for the New Wave, or just reflect New Wave influence.  One of Tad's many psychological issues is an obsession with space travel.  As a child he collected model space ships and studied starship blueprints and covered his walls with pictures of astronauts, and as an adult he tries, without success, to get assigned to space missions.  But at the end of the novel it is made explicitly clear that Tad's path to happiness is the exploration and mastery not of outer space, but of inner space, of his own mind.  Tad's interest in outer space is, in fact, an illness!  One of the tenets of the New Wave was that SF should focus less on traditional topics like space travel and more on things like human psychology, and White's book, though it does have space travel and aliens as important components, is primarily concerned with Tad's thoughts, feelings and memories, and the novel's story follows Tad's psychological journey--the uncovering of the reasons why he is so envious and so obsessed with space and his growth from mental illness to mental health--not a physical voyage to another star system.

(With its optimistic paradigm shift ending and straightforward detective-style plot structure and tone, By Furies Possessed is probably more traditional a piece of SF than either Stranger in a Strange Land or your stereotypical depressing and abstruse New Wave piece.)

White's style is good, brisk and clear, so (despite my initial worries) the story never drags or confuses.  All the surprises, changes of scene (which I have not discussed here at all), symbols and SF in-jokes keep the reader interested.  By Furies Possessed is a solid, readable, entertaining, piece of work.

**********

Across from the title page of By Furies Possessed is an ad for other Signet SF we are assured we will enjoy.  Top of the list is Mordecai Roshwold's Level 7, a book much beloved by Joachim Boaz and 2theD.  Heinlein's famous The Door into Summer is represented, as well as a novel by SF giant Poul Anderson which I haven't heard of, A Circus of Hells.  Another thing I've never heard of is Moon Zero Two; the book advertised here is a novelization by a John Burke of a Hammer film.  Burke also did the novelization of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and a bunch of short stories based on such Hammer Films classics as The Reptile and The Gorgon.  Also promoted here in By Furies Possessed is Robert Hoskins's anthology The Stars Around Us.  I own The Stars Around Us, but I don't think I've read anything from it yet.

Tomorrow Part Deux: John Keith Mason, Brian Aldiss, Sonya Dorman & Terry Carr

In our last episode we read three stories from Roger Elwood's 1975 anthology of original stories, Tomorrow. Those three tales took up like 100 pages; today we've got four stories which are quite short.

"Arctic Rescue" by John Keith Mason

One of the complaints about Roger Elwood's anthologies is that they were (this is a quote from Elwood critic Theresa Nielsen Hayden that appears at Wikipedia) "peculiarly long on authors who had slight or nonexistent publishing credentials."  This is obviously not the case with Tomorrow--in this blog post alone we have towering icon Brian Aldiss, the well-known editor Terry Carr, and Sonya Dorman, whose fiction I am not familiar with both whose name I have seen on the cover of F&SF and Galaxy.  (Even if Elwood really did publish lots of stories by relative unknowns, if you spin that as "provides opportunities for new voices to be heard" it doesn't sound like some crime, but a service to the SF community!)  But John Keith Mason perhaps does qualify as a "slight" author--according to isfdb, he published only eight stories; five in the 1940s under the name John Hollis Mason, and then three in the '70s.  "Arctic Rescue" would be his last published story.

A space boat crashes in the Arctic, and an Inuit rescues the alien who is thrown clear and nearly dies of frostbite. The Earthling takes the extraterrestrial back to his igloo where his wife nurses him back to health.  Recovered, the alien, whose species is part of an interstellar union which has abolished war, contacts the space ship which is orbiting Earth studying our civilization, and then talks to the Inuit couple via telepathy.  The alien's family comes down to collect him, and everybody expresses gratitude and brotherliness and all that.

Acceptable, but totally pedestrian.  Maybe it would be interesting to students of portrayals of non-whites and race relations in SF (the Inuit talks about white people and how they differ from Inuits a bit)?

"Always Somebody There" by Brian Aldiss

My feelings about Brian Aldiss's individual productions run the gamut.  I loved Malacia Tapestry, liked Starship (AKA Non-Stop), thought the Helliconia books full of good ideas but nonetheless kind of boring, and was dismissive of his pretentious experimental triptychs.  So I never know how a piece of Aldiss's fiction which is new to me is going to impress me.  But, in general, I find Aldiss an interesting person with interesting views (he is an important SF critic and historian) whose fiction is always worth checking out.

(A few years ago tarbandu had a good blog post about the Helliconia books in which he sets them in the context of their time of publication.)

I think we are going to have to call "Always Somebody There" a New Wave story.  A spaceship left Earth long ago to search for "the Creator," its crew consisting of a man and a computer.  The man has been in deep freeze for what has seemed to the computer almost 60 million years, but due to relativistic effects, the time passed in the outside universe has been much longer.  So long that the universe has collapsed and a new universe sprung up.

(This is one of those stories in which the human is not really like the humans we know, the computer not like the computers we know, and they weren't really searching for God, but an "objective" that could "be expressed only in mathematical symbols," but words like "Creator" have to be used because they are the only crude intellectual tools at our disposal.)

The human is defrosted and the explorers open the viewports to look at the new universe.  All the laws of physics out there are different.  They land on an "octahedral" planet the size of a soccer field inhabited by creatures like blue-feathered kangaroos with heads on their feet.  The human leaves the ship, but the ship shrinks because "in this universe, time was as much a regular dimension as height or length...." so he cannot get back in it.  He realizes that he will have to stand still on this little planet forever--oddly enough, just this misfortune befell him in the dream he had while in deep freeze for 60 million years.

This story is only five pages long, so it is not a big waste of your time, but I can't say it is rewarding.  Barely acceptable?

"Death or Consequences" by Sonya Dorman

As I noted above, I recognize Dorman's name but am little acquainted with her work, which appears to consist of two dozen stories and a fix-up novel, some poems (I actually read one way back when which appeared in the experimental Quark series) and the book reviews in the June 1977 "Special Women's Issue" of Analog.  I mention the book reviews because one of the books reviewed is Barry Malzberg's Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  What might she have said about the collection of mid-1970s Malzberg stories?  I am succumbing to an ineluctable desire to order this magazine from ebay! While I'm at it I guess I should order a copy of Down Here in the Dream Quarter as well, which I do not own (though I have read stories from it, like the amusing "Ballad of Slick Sid" and two pieces that appeared in Elwood's Future Corruption, "On the Campaign Trail" and "Streaking."

Ebay, here I come!

Alright, back to "Death or Consequences." Like "Arctic Rescue," this story consists of pretty ordinary SF stuff, but I think Dorman's technique elevates it a bit.  Seventeen-year old Sandra, our first-person narrator, wakes up in a space station in 2108--back in the 1970s she was put in deep freeze by her wealthy parents because she had cancer. She has been thawed and cured because of her musical talent--because Earth is overcrowded, lots of frozen people have never been revived, and priority is given to people with special abilities.

Dorman focuses largely on Sandra's emotional reactions, but perhaps more interesting is how she (Dorman) develops a pervasive theme of disappointment in the future--not only does Sandra learn that the Earth is overcrowded and efforts to colonize other planets have come to nothing, but Dorman gives us the idea that everything in the future is fake, phony, fraudulent.  One of the many elements contributing to this theme is when Sandra, who is some kind of prodigy with the flute, classical guitar and piano, hears 22nd-century music for the first time--a recording of an "impertinent, repetitive" "electronic tune" that she immediately recognizes as a mere "popular song."  I always find it interesting when older SF writers like Poul Anderson (Dorman was born in 1924, making her two years older than Anderson), writing in a time when rock and roll and other types of pop music had triumphed, champion classical music.  This is in contrast with such writers as Michael Moorcock (born 1939) who lauds the Beatles in the Jerry Cornelius stories and gently pokes fun at their popularity in the Hawkmoon stories, and Harlan Ellison (born 1934) who publicly welcomed the death of an (unnamed) woman who had the temerity to criticize Jimi Hendrix.

Not bad.

"Castle in the Stars" by Terry Carr

Carr is more famous for his work as an editor, but isfdb lists three novels by him (Joachim Boaz read his third and apparently most ambitious novel, Cirque, last year) and three dozen stories by him.  I don't think I have ever read any of his fiction--Tomorrow is providing me several opportunities to sample authors for the first time.

This is another traditional piece, one about space explorers with a clearly foreshadowed twist ending.  For decades mankind has searched the galaxy, fruitlessly, for signs of intelligent life.  This story is narrated by a member of a three-man team who finally discovers an alien building on a planet where everything is large, because of the low gravity, I guess.  Sand dunes are five hundred feet high, for example.  The three spacemen explore the building, but it seems to lack any real entrance or contents. Suddenly, they realize that it must be a toy or work of art--not a functional building at all, but the alien equivalent of a sand castle, indicating that the aliens must have been hundreds of feet tall.

"Castle in the Stars" is not bad, but it is no more than a trifle.

**********

Four OK stories, though the Aldiss is on the verge of being bad and the Dorman on the edge of "good" territory.  I'm kind of thinking of these as "filler" stories.

We finish up with Tomorrow in our next episode.

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.

**********

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.

1977 stories from Fritz Leiber, Brian Aldiss, Julian Reid and Robert Chilson

Inside jacket flap of my copy

We all love these anthologies of original SF stories, don't we?  So let's read my copy of the hardcover book club edition of 1977's Universe 7, edited by Terry Carr.  We are told it is "acclaimed" and "an eagerly awaited event in science fiction."  Let's see if the acclaimers and eager waiters of that world of long ago in which I was a mere six years old were well-served by Carr and the "famous authors" and "stars of tomorrow" who appeared between Universe 7's covers. Today we've got two titans of speculative fiction, Fritz Leiber and Brian Aldiss, and two people whose work I have never before read, Julian Reid and Robert Chilson.

"A Rite of Spring" by Fritz Leiber

Like a lot of us who played 1st edition AD&D in the 1980s, I have a special place in my heart for Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and Grey Mouser.  (Fave F&GM stories: "Seven Black Priests," "Lean Times in Lankhmar," "Bazaar of the Bizarre" and "Stardock.")  I also really liked Leiber's hard sf Hugo-winner "Ship of Shadows."  Hopefully "A Rite of Spring," which Terry Carr also included in Best Science Fiction of the Year 7, will join this list of solidly entertaining stories.

At the very start of the novelette (40 pages) Fritz hints that "A Rite of Spring" might be some kind of feminist switcheroo piece; the very first line is "This is the story of the knight in shining armor and the princess in a high tower, only with the roles reversed." I guess that is a fair description, but, equally justly, we can see the tale as a male wish-fulfillment fantasy in which some egghead who is ineffectual with women suddenly has his dream girl tossed in his lap.  It is also akin to those stories like Tom Jones and Citizen of the Galaxy in which a young person with an unhappy life suddenly learns he is the heir to a fortune or the son of a nobleman or whatever and is whisked away to a finer existence.

Matthew Fortree is a mathematical genius, a resident at a luxurious secret U. S. government campus where the finest of pure scientists are collected to pursue their research in hopes that they will produce breakthroughs which will aid our nation militarily or economically.  Matthew is eccentric and antisocial, a friendless virgin. During an electrical storm he (though an arrogant atheist) prays to the "Great Mathematician" and at his door appears a beautiful seventeen-year-old girl.  The girl, Severeign Saxon, is ostensibly at the secret installation to look for her brother.  She and Matthew play an intellectual party game, each in turn naming a famous thing associated with the number seven (e. g., Seven Sisters, Seven Against Thebes, Seven Samurai, etc.)  This game goes on for pages and pages, Leiber unleashing on the reader much erudite trivia from history, literature and religion, including references to Poul Anderson and to his own Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories.  The game also has integrated into it a somewhat elaborate sex scene between Matthew and Severeign.

At the end of the story it becomes evident that Severeign is from another dimension, one Matthew glimpsed in trances as a child, "a realm where he was in direct contact with the stuff of mathematics" and where the mathematical genius can live a happier, more fulfilling life.  The authorities suspect Severeign is some kind of foreign spy, and when Matthew carelessly reveals classified information to her they come gunning for the pair of them.  Luckily Severeign has a magical artifact that allows them to escape to her better world.

The story may be a bit too long, and some sections exhibit a sort of folksy colloquial style that is (I guess) supposed to remind you of fairy tales or sitting by the campfire hearing some oldster spin a yarn ("For it was a Gothic night, too, you see") which might be a little hard to take.  Some might find some elements of the story a little pervy; not only is Severeign 17 years old, but she says that in the "other realm" that she and Matthew are siblings--he is the brother she is looking for!  But "A Rite of Spring" is cleverly constructed and for the most part smoothly executed.  If you can take the barrage of trivia, it is worth your time.

 
"My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows" by Brian Aldiss

This is an effective sketch of a setting and characters; there isn't much plot here.

A decade or so (?) ago an energy-starved Earth sent aloft satellites (they call them "planetoids") that collected solar energy and beamed it down to the surface.  These satellites were like flying cities, full of fashionable stores and comfortable hotels and so forth for the benefit of crew and visitors.  But then six years ago some capital-C "Catastrophe" struck (a plague is mentioned) and the satellites drifted off into the sun or deep space or crashed on the Earth's surface.

Our characters are the Goddard family.  When the Earth was reduced to a medieval level of existence, Goddard, a designer of sportswear, and his father embraced the change and totally got into growing their own crops by hand and spending half the year leading a nomadic life, following a herd of reindeer.  Goddard's wife acted much more like I would--she was psychologically crushed by the collapse of our wealthy technological and capitalist society and became a hermit, moving into a crashed planetoid to take up residence in the ruined hotel therein and read books.  Periodically the four male Goddards--her husband, father-in-law, and her two young boys--go visit her.  On the visit covered in this story, Goddard tries to convince his wife to abandon her books ("Books are where you get your sick notions from") and join the family.  She dismisses them, saying they are living like mere peasants!  "I resent being kicked back to the Dark Ages, if you don't."  Amen, lady!

The story's title suggests, I guess, that we are to see these visits as similar to pilgrimages to a sacred site of a Marian apparition, like Lourdes or Guadaloupe.  Or maybe we are to consider that the fallen planetoid will be an incomprehensible artifact to future generations of Stone Age-level people, a place surrounded by outlandish legends vaguely based on the reality of our own high-tech society, the Catastrophe, and Mrs. Goddard's (tragic and heroic!) refusal to abandon the cultural heritage of our sophisticated modern society.

Not bad.  Terry Carr would also include "My Lady of the Psychiatric Sorrows" in his 1980 anthology Dream's Edge, published by the Sierra Club.  Reduce, reuse, recycle!

"Probability Storm" by Julian Reid

This is Reid's only published story, if isfdb is to be believed.  Carr tells us Reid attended the first Clarion West workshop, where Harlan Ellison was very critical of one of Reid's stories; the enfant terrible of speculative fiction is said to have "literally" torn it to pieces.

"Probability Storm" is a tedious 35-page sleeping draught about an alternate dimension New York City where ordinary people coexist with dryads and gremlins and ghosts and mad scientists.  Most of the story takes place in a bar called Rafferty's (could this be a reference to R. A. Lafferty?)  Our narrator is a ghost who can enter people's minds as well as visit some parallel plane to observe probability storms, which he can warn the regulars at the bar about.  A villainous businessman called "The Fat Man" comes into the bar, hoping to buy the place (or something), but the ghost narrator and the gremlins, empowered by one of those probability storms, invade his psyche and turn him into a thin man who doesn't want to make business deals, I guess.  The whole thing is very very verbose but at the same time very very vague; Reid willfully provides a very very low signal to noise ratio, even admitting to the reader that he is doing it (the narrator says things like, "as you may already have gathered, my attention has a tendency to wander at times.")  "Probability Storm" is supposed to be funny, but the jokes consist of comparing the fat guy to a pig again and again and again and describing how the gremlins spill drinks on him.

Very, very bad.  As far as I am concerned, Ellison could have ripped this one up as well; by excoriating his work Ellison was doing Reid a better service than Carr did him by encouraging him.  I really don't know what Carr was thinking when he elected to inflict this mess on readers of Universe 7.

"People Reviews" by Robert Chilson

I recently bought Chilson's novel Shores of Kansas for three whole bucks because it has a cool dinosaur cover.  Hopefully "People Reviews" won't make me regret the investment!  (Yes, "Probability Storm" has turned me cynical!)

My mind is grasping for a quote by, I think, editor John W. Campbell, in which he exhorted Astounding's writers to give him stories that felt like "newspaper articles of the future."  Chilson does just that in "People Reviews."  In the future, people will be able to wear headsets which record their thoughts; these recordings can be "listened" to by others, and a whole commercial industry, like the book publishing and record industries, has sprung up that produces and sells these thought recordings.  Chilson's nine-page story is a critical review like you'd find in a highbrow magazine like The New York Review of Books, a discussion of recent thought recordings and a series of musings on this art form's potential and current state.

Engaging and original, highly recommended to all you New Wave kids!  Cynicism storm abated!

**********

The Reid was astonishingly bad, but the Leiber, Aldiss and Chilson are all good; each is idiosyncratic and fresh, is well-executed when it comes to style and structure, and rests on a foundation of one or two interesting ideas.  Let's hope the second half of Universe 7 is as enjoyable.

1968 science fiction stories by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty & Samuel R. Delany

Last week I went to one of the many Half Price Books here in central Ohio (land of the mind-blowingly difficult driving test) to sell a stack of 2nd and 3rd edition AD&D rule books I had never used, and while there I took a look at the science fiction and "nostalgia" shelves.  When I saw Ace 91352, World's Best Science Fiction 1969 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, I was in love.  The cover by John Schoenherr and the interior illustrations by Jack Gaughan were great, and the anthology included many stories by writers I care about.  Here was one I had to have!

The introduction by the editors is fun, with Wollheim and Carr subtly criticizing the other yearly "best of" SF anthologies and pointing out what makes their own series distinctive.  Wollheim and Carr tell us they don't include fantasy stories in World's Best Science Fiction, and they don't include old stories like some of the other anthologists do ("we don't ring in stories by, say, Alfred Jarry or James Thurber that were originally published in 1930 or 1940.")  My research at isfdb indicates that editors Harrison and Aldiss included James Thurber's 1941 story "Interview with a Lemming" in Best SF: 1967, while it was Judith Merrill who included an Alfred Jarry story in 1966's 11th Annual Edition: The Year's Best S-F, almost 60 years after Jarry's death in 1907.  Wollheim and Carr also claim to try to read every SF story published in the world.  Ambitious!

While I lack the ambition and work ethic of Wollheim and Carr, this weekend I did read three stories from World's Best Science Fiction 1969, the contributions by Damon Knight, R. A. Lafferty, and Samuel R. Delany.

"Masks" by Damon Knight

"Masks" first appeared in Playboy, and has been widely anthologized, and was nominated for a Nebula and a Hugo.  Will I like this popular favorite?

"Masks" is about the psychological issues of the first man to have his brain transplanted from a ruined human body into a robot body.  As I have said before, I love stories about immortality and minds and brains being transplanted; this is perhaps a product of my fear of death.  So I was on this story's side from the get go.

The guy in the robot body, Air Force veteran Jim, isn't too happy.  The scientists and engineers who are running the experimental robot body program think he's unhappy because he doesn't properly dream, or because his robot body doesn't look human enough.  These eggheads strive to help him have dreams that will stabilize his psychology and to construct him a body, a face in particular, that looks as human as possible.

It seems to me that Jim's "problem" is, in fact, that he is now disgusted by, perhaps even feels contempt for, humanity and all other living things, thinking himself beyond them because he is essentially immortal.  Knight drives home Jim's hatred for life by pointing out how he has had his quarters in the lab protected from germs with special ultraviolet lights and air conditioning systems, and by including an episode in which he murders a canine.  There is a also a cool scene in which Jim broods over people's pimples and saliva and the oil of their skin.  And there is the fact that he habitually wears a blank metal mask over his artificial human-like face, and makes visitors wear surgical masks.

Jim doesn't want to fit into human society by wearing an artificial body that looks just like a normal human body--since he doesn't have adrenal glands and all those sorts of organs he no longer experiences human emotions like fear and love, and so he doesn't have any interest in friends or sex partners.  Instead, he wants to be alone, and sketches designs of four-legged exploration and mining vehicles that he hopes his brain will be installed in so he can live in sterile extraterrestrial environments, far from all life.

A good story with some clues to puzzle over.  What does Jim mean when he compares the eggheads maintaining him to cancer patients?  What emotion is Knight referring to when he writes "there was still one emotion he could feel."?  I like it!  If you were in some college literature class you could compare it to Poul Anderson's classic 1957 story "Call Me Joe," in which a crippled guy wants his consciousness installed in a monster body that is used to explore the surface of some inhospitable moon.              

"This Grand Carcass" by R. A. Lafferty

This one was first published in Amazing Stories; at the time our buddy Barry Malzberg was editing that venerable magazine.  "This Grand Carcass" feels more accessible than most of Lafferty's work that I am familiar with, and even has a sort of traditional horror story structure.

In some interstellar civilization of the future one of the galaxy's most successful businessmen, Juniper Tell, is approached by a similarly successful magnate, Mord. Saying he is all "sucked out" and will soon die, Mord sells Juniper Tell a super robot, the first of the level ten robots, a machine vastly superior to the many robots already in Tell's employ.  In a matter of days this superior machine crushes almost all of Tell's business rivals and vastly enriches Tell, utilizing strategies that are so sophisticated that no human could have thought of them, but which are also amazingly efficient, so efficient that after having been developed, these methods seem like the only way the deed could have been accomplished.

Despite the spectacular successes of his partnership with the super machine, Tell finds himself feeling weak.  Investigation of the new robot reveals that it is not powered by batteries or outlets, like conventional robots, but is living off of Tell's life force, sucking him dry.  Like Mord before him, on the brink of death, Tell sells the vampire machine to another robber baron type.

The style of the story is brisk and silly fun, the little jokes and suggestive names of the various human and robot characters amusing.  Should we furrow our brows and seek a deeper meaning to "This Grand Carcass?"  I think we can see a skepticism of mechanization; Tell derives little satisfaction from business successes derived wholly from letting the machine make all the decisions for him.  In fact, the machine "sucks the spirit and juice" out of the businessmen who employ it.  Perhaps this is Lafferty's commentary on our modern world in which few of us raise our own food, do math without a calculator, or walk when we can ride motor cars everywhere, a world in which we are so reliant on machines it seems ridiculous to try to get things done without using them (how would your friends react if you told them you walked to the grocery store three miles away or calculated your taxes longhand?)  Maybe the story is a warning that if we contract out our very thinking to machines, we will lose our souls.

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" by Samuel R. Delany

This is a revised version of the story originally published in New Worlds, the famous British flagship of the New Wave. "Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" won a Hugo and a Nebula, is specially highlighted on the back of this anthology, and has been reprinted a zillion times, so provides another chance for me to see if I am on the same wavelength as the SF community.  

"Time Considered as a Helix of Semi-Precious Stones" quickly strikes one as a New Wave-ish story, a first person narrative that is full of "word play" ("I hear the breast has been scene [as opposed to obscene] on and off since the seventeenth century"), expresses contempt for "the establishment" (police and businesspeople, for example) and has somewhat absurdist images, like a vast mechanized dairy farm and a gangster who owns and operates an ice cream shop.  In the first few pages the narrative even slips into the present tense, but mostly sticks to past tense.

Our narrator is a young thief and master of disguise who shifts easily from one identity to another, living in a future in which much of the solar system has been colonized and people have constant access to the media via little ear pieces.  In New York City (the Pan Am Building and Grand Central Terminal, buildings I saw every day for years, figure prominently) shortly after getting out of prison on Mars, our hero is approached by a representative of an elite branch of the police force and learns that, through the collection of what we might now call "metadata," the government's computers can predict people's future moves with considerable accuracy.

The narrator is friendly with some of the famous pseudo-bohemian artists known as Singers, and accompanies one to a party in a luxury apartment in upper Manhattan. The Singers and their popularity, we are told, are a response to the alienation from real experience caused by the pervasiveness of mass media; like Homeric bards the Singers are poet-actors whose powerful art can only be experienced at close hand, it being illegal to record their performances.

I guess, with the Singers, Delany is romanticizing the role of the creative performer in pre-mass media days, when art was an intimate personal expression and not (as Delany perhaps sees it) the commodity churned out by organizations as it is today. (Delany wants us to compare the mass-produced milk at the dairy farm where the narrator briefly worked with mass-produced media.)  I don't really take that line myself, and I'm not sure the Singers really work at promoting this sort of democratic, populist idea.  The Singers are like rock stars, adored by the public and catered to wherever they go, but how do they get so popular if it is impossible for ordinary people to access their work via broadcast or recordings?  Delany suggests they are bohemian individualists, but they are in reality creatures of the elite: they benefit from what amounts to a government monopoly or a powerful and exclusive guild system: not only will the government crack down on you if you try to record their performances, but each political division is allowed only a small number of Singers (four for all of New York City) and when a Singer dies a new Singer is selected by the surviving Singers.  (Maybe Delany means to paint the Singers as hypocrites or a sham?)

At the party our narrator sells some stolen goods to a famous gangster known as "The Hawk," the police raid the party, and our narrator escapes because one of his Singer buddies, a disheveled man known as "Hawk" (there's that clever wordplay again, two characters with almost the same name), creates a distraction by giving an impromptu performance that starts a dangerous conflagration and draws a crowd.  The narrator ends up on Triton, where he starts an ice cream shop and pursues illegal activities, becoming a rival to The Hawk.

This story is just OK.  I guess I'm too old or too conservative to find smart alecky thieves and neurotic self-important artists who are members of a tiny elite but pretend to be poor down-and-outers (Hawk wears ratty clothes and walks around barefoot and has some kind of masochistic streak and so is covered in scars and has memorized how he got each scar) inherently interesting or sympathetic, and Delany doesn't do much to make the characters special (are they meant to be archetypes of The Artist, The Cop, etc?)  I couldn't get myself to care whether the cops caught our narrator or that Hawk had sacrificed himself for the narrator.  The story's ideas (mass media is alienating; with statistics you can predict and control society; and politicians, police, gangsters and artists are all part of the establishment and fabric of society and all are equally corrupt and menacing) are OK, I suppose, but not surprising or moving.

***********

None of these stories is bad, and all three say something about man's (potentially dangerous) relationship with high technology.  What do radically improved convenience and efficiency do to the human psyche and human spirit?  But while the Knight has emotional drama and the Lafferty is fun, the Delany reads like a cynical hipster's exercise in style; Delany denounces bourgeois society and romanticizes criminals and creative types, but not in a way that is very entertaining for somebody who doesn't already share the author's sentiments.

In this episode we looked at stories by authors I have had some experience with; next time we'll look at stories in World's Best Science Fiction 1969 by authors with whom I am totally unfamiliar.