Galaxy, Feb '68: P Anderson, T Carr & A Panshin, and F Leiber

Back in December we read Robert Bloch's contribution to the February 1968 issue of Galaxy, "Sales of a Deathman," and called it a waste of time.  We also noted that this issue is full of stories by people we like here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  So let's read some of those stories!  This time we read those by Poul Anderson, Terry Carr in collaboration with Alexei Panshin, and Fritz Leiber.  Next time we'll read the stories by Brian Aldiss, R. A Lafferty and Keith Laumer. 

"A Tragedy of Errors" by Poul Anderson

isfdb lists this one as being part of the Technic Civilization series, and it has been reprinted in the collections The Long Night (in the 1980s) and Flandry's Legacy (in our own crazy 21st century) among a few other places.  I'm reading the magazine version of "A Tragedy of Errors," which is graced with four illustrations of space craft and people in space suits by Gray Morrow, though I am consulting a scan of the Sphere edition of The Long Night when I come upon a confusing typo, like a "have" on page 14 of the magazine where I would expect to see a "haven't."  (The book version has "haven't.")

"A Tragedy of Errors" takes place in "The Long Night," the time period after the collapse of the Terran space empire when the human race, now inhabiting thousands of star systems, becomes fragmented, people having lost the ability to build space ships and repair many of their electronic systems, though surviving space ships can still be operated on manual, though at additional risk and lesser efficiency.  Our hero is Roan Tom of planet Kraken, who, I guess Viking-like, travels hither and thither in a space ship, raiding and trading as he sees fit.  He has multiple wives and lots of tattoos.  Anderson spends perhaps too much time describing what he and the two of his wives that appear in the story look like--Anderson loves to describe stuff, sunsets and the wind in the trees and that sort of thing.

The plot of "A Tragedy of Errors," which is like 56 pages or so here in Galaxy, concerns Tom and the two wives he has with him, one the chief wife he's been with for quite a while, a seasoned spacer with whom he has grandchildren, and the other a new acquisition, young and inexperienced, having to land on a planet hoping it has the industrial capacity to repair their damaged ship.  They find the natives are very wary of strangers, having been raided in the recent past; the central gimmick of the story is that the English language has evolved differently in different spots since human civilization fell into isolated pockets with the collapse of the Empire, and this makes negotiations between Tom and the locals difficult and leads to bloodshed.

Our heroes get split up, the women fleeing the crash-landing site of Tom's ship into the wilderness while Tom tries to negotiate with a member of xenophobic local aristocracy.  The older wife, many adventures behind her, teaches the younger city-bred wife how to survive, and the younger grows as a person in response to the challenges she faces.  Tom uses logic and his practical knowledge of science and technology to reunite with his wives, and then the younger wife uses her book-learned science knowledge and facility with math to figure out the mystery of this star system's age and this planet's erratic weather, information Tom sells to the local potentate as part of his negotiations to make peace and lay the foundations of a mutually beneficial commercial relationship.  In the denouement we find the younger wife becomes a successful diplomat.   

I still enjoy reading about and thinking about aircraft, spacecraft, spacesuits with anti-grav so you can fly around in the atmosphere like a bird and that sort of thing, and Anderson delivers on that fun stuff.  He also includes lots of astronomy, sociology and ecology stuff, always telling you that this or that geographic or meteorological feature is the result of the proximity of this moon or elevated solar radiation or whatever, and always offering speculations on how people who live in the ruins of the superior civilization of their ancestors might think and behave.  "A Tragedy of Errors" is adventure fiction about people fighting and trying to evade capture or escape captivity, but it is also serious science fiction informed by Anderson's knowledge of science and history and full of little lectures.  And there is a plus for our feminist friends--Tom's wives are instrumental in resolving both the action and the number-crunching obstacles presented by the plot. 

I can mildly recommend "A Tragedy of Errors."  You might justly call it an unspectacular standard-issue Anderson space story, but it is competently told and I appreciate its pro-science and pro-trade values, and I enjoyed it. 

"The Planet Slummers" by Terry Carr and Alexei Panshin

In the course of this blog's apocalyptic life we've read Terry Carr's stories "Castles in the Stars,"  "The Dance of the Changer and the Three," and "In His Image," as well as Carr's novel Cirque.  As for Alexei Panshin, we've read "The Destiny of Milton Gomrath" and "Now I'm Watching Roger."  (I'll also note that, before starting this blog, I read Panshin's famous Rite of Passage and really liked it.)  "The Planet Slummers" is four and a half pages long and seems to never have been reprinted.  We're all about the deep cuts here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

"The Planet Slummers" is an absurdist joke story perhaps set in another universe--in the first column we learn that our protagonists, Dave and Annie, have purchased an Edsel with a "Dewey for President" sticker on it and driven it to England.  The core joke of the story is that Dave and Annie and their circle of friends are hipsters who buy things "ironically"--D & A have a picture of Mussolini in their house with a joke word balloon affixed to it, for example, while a friend who bought a pet bandicoot did so because he thought "bandicoot" sounded funny.  After we see these two jokers in action at a rummage sale, a UFO lands near them and they are accosted by a pair of space aliens who are just like they are--these E.T.s are frivolous people who collect stuff not because they admire it or can make use of it but because they think it is funny.  The aliens seize Annie because they think she is amusing and fly off with her, leaving Dave on Earth to worry that, like that bandicoot, she is doomed to some black fate when the aliens find something funnier.

For what it is, "The Planet Slummers" actually works--Dave and Annie, and the two aliens, actually sound and act like the sort of people Carr and Panshin are spoofing--I know these sorts of people, and my wife and I, who, as my twitter followers may have noticed, spend a lot of time at antique stores and flea markets, might even be considered akin to these sorts of people.  So even though this is a trifling joke story I'll give it a grade of "acceptable."

"Crazy Annaoj" by Fritz Leiber

Many a time at this blog I have noted the somewhat unusual sex content in Fritz Leiber stories, and today I get to do so again.  Sadly, I also have to tell you that "Crazy Annaoj" is a rather weak story in which little takes place and which lacks any compensatory charms, the style and images and relationships and jokes being quite bland.  I guess we can call it acceptable.

It is the far future when mankind has explored multiple galaxies and colonized untold numbers of worlds.  The richest man in the human race, Piliph Foelitsack, is like 400 years old, but looks and even mostly acts like he is in his early 20s because he's had so many treatments and his body is full of gadgets which a team of doctors aboard his space ship Eros monitor and control remotely 24/7.  He has just married his seventeenth wife, Annaoj, a woman 17 years old who managed to catch his attention when she was a 16-year-old beauty-contest-winner and actress in a virtual reality porno film.  Piliph is the richest man in human civilization, having risen out of a ghetto to become owner of multiple planets and a fleet of hyperspace freighters.  Wife #17 Annaoj was born in a slum herself and her drive, intelligence and ambition are comparable to his.

On their honeymoon the couple visit a gypsy fortuneteller.  One of the themes of this little story is that no matter how scientific, no matter how high-tech, a civilization may be, many of its members will be fascinated by the supernatural and the occult, and will act irrationally when it comes to love and sex.

The gypsy tells the bazillionaire that he is young and his longest journeys lie ahead of him.  Piliph and Annaoj don't believe her--Piliph has travelled widely across the universe but just recently decided to stick to the Milky Way galaxy from now on in order to remain close to the best health professionals and facilities.  Just after leaving the gypsy, Piliph's body gives out and he collapses--the doctors freeze him in hopes that new technologies will be developed that can revive him.

Annaoj takes over Piliph's business empire and runs it as well--maybe better!--than did he, its founder.  She also spends a lot of time travelling all over the universe, trying to find somebody with the ability to revive her husband, visiting not only the foremost scientific medical men but also witch doctors, mystics and sorcerers.  Annaoj has sex with lots of men, but her heart remains with her husband, and oft are the times she will lay down to sleep next to his frozen body.  The Eros carries her and her frozen husband to so many extragalactic locations over so many centuries that the gypsy's prediction comes true.  After searching the universe for a way to revive her beloved for over 1,000 years, the Eros fails to return from one of its jumps into hyperspace, the ship and Annaoj vanishing.

This is one of those stories that I like more thinking back on it than I did while reading it.  While I was reading "Crazy Annaoj" it felt slight and bland, but looking back the plot seems good--maybe I should say I feel the story is underdeveloped, that it is like a plot outline or summary that would benefit from fleshing out.

"Crazy Annaoj" has been reprinted in the Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh and Jenny-Lynn Waugh anthology that has appeared under the titles 101 Science Fiction Stories and The Giant Book of Science Fiction Stories as well as Leiber collections.  The covers of the collections suggest this story is both rare and one of Leiber's own favorites.  Hmm.   

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A decent batch of stories--any group of stories that doesn't include any bad ones is to be commended.  But I'm not actually in love with any of them.  Maybe love awaits us when we read the stories from this issue of Galaxy by Aldiss, Lafferty and Laumer.  Fingers crossed!

Alpha 4: T Disch, E Pangborn, and T Carr

In Omaha in 2015 I purchased, along with a stack of other paperbacks, Alpha 4, a 1973 anthology of "superb" stories that are "important to the genre."  The potential problem with reprinting old stories widely considered "excellent" and "important" is that serious SF fans will have already read them in other venues, so the back cover of Alpha 4 tries to appeal to new fans of SF, people who may be familiar with the Big Three of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and with mainstream breakout success Ray Bradbury, but not yet with people like Thomas M. Disch, Damon Knight, Philip Jose Farmer and Brian W. Aldiss.  There were nine Alpha volumes in total, so maybe the pitch worked.

At this here blog we have already addressed a few of the stories that make an appearance in Alpha 4: "Dio," AKA "The Dying Man," by Damon Knight, "Judas Danced" by Brian Aldiss, and "All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty.  Today we'll assail three more of these allegedly excellent and important works, one each by Thomas Disch, Edgar Pangborn, and Terry Carr.

"Casablanca" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

This is one of those stories I own in multiple books, it appearing in the 1971 hardcover Disch collection Fun with Your New Head--I own a 1972 paperback printing of that-- and the 1980 paperback Disch collection Fundamental Disch, a copy of which sits right there on the shelves of the MPorcius Library.  It kind of looks like "Casablanca" first saw print in the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories that Scared Even Me, which seems a little odd, all the other stories in that book being reprints.  In 1968 "Casablanca" would appear in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, the famously influential and famously unprofitable flagship of the New Wave--the magazine's survival was only possible through subsidies from the British taxpayer and Moorcock himself, who sank into it cash he raised through the rapid composition and sale of paperback fantasy novels.

Thomas Disch is a smart guy and a good writer but also a bitter and snobbish sort of character and "Casablanca" is a derisive and even vindicative attack on the American people, in particular the Midwesterners among whom Disch was born.  The title is presumably an ironic reference to the famous film, which, like The Godfather, is one of those cultural icons I have never actually watched but which I feel like I know because people never stop talking about it.  Anyway, in the Bogart-Bergman movie, Americans in North Africa during a world war act admirably and achieve some kind of nobility, while in Disch's story Americans in North Africa during a world war act crassly and get totally humiliated.

An older married couple are on vacation in Morocco and Disch pokes fun at them for being unable to speak French, for trying to save money, for enjoying sugary treats, for being patriotic about the US of A and for being hostile to communism, exactly the kind of criticisms of provincial Yanks we'd expect from a New Yorker who spent a lot of time in England hobnobbing with other sophisticated smarty smarts.  While they are there in North Africa, the United States is destroyed by a nuclear attack and the couple is repeatedly humiliated by the locals because their travelers' checks and American money are no longer worth much of anything.  Eventually the wife disappears and the husband is robbed of his only means of getting out of Morocco; his incompetent efforts to find his wife prove fruitless and he is beaten up by a mob and robbed again following a tussle with a young thief.

(I don't know if people are still talking about "punching down," but "Casablanca" could be the subject of an entire discourse on the concept.  Is smart and educated Disch punching down at the ignorant tourists, or is he a homosexual punching up at breeders?  Are the Arab mobs punching down at a lone woman and a lone old man, or punching up at the white imperialist bourgeoisie?) 

Obviously you are going to enjoy this story if you hate America and relish the spectacle of seeing Americans humiliated by third worlders.  Silverberg in his little intro to "Casablanca" here in Alpha 4 bills the story as "comic and terrifying both at once, like most true nightmares," I guess trying to sell it not as a leftist wish fulfillment fantasy but as a horror story.  In some horror stories, horrible things happen to sympathetic people and you feel bad for them; in others, horrible things happen to people who have misbehaved and you feel justice has been served.  Disch in his story here seems to be conducting a sort of literary exercise in which directs the reader to feel the United States deserves to be annihilated and its expatriates laid low for their sins but leaves enough room for readers who don't share his snobbish anti-American opinions to be tricked into sympathizing with the tourists.  I can't say I am on the same page as Disch is here, but the story is thought-provoking and cleverly put together so I guess I have to admit it is good.

(A double-plus-super-anti-subversive subversive hot take on "Casablanca" might be that Disch is laying a trap for his fellow alienated sophisticates, seeing if he can get them to side with mass-murdering communists and Arab thieves against innocuous and ineffectual ordinary Americans.)

"Angel's Egg" by Edgar Pangborn (1951)

Here we have an at times tedious story that feels long and reminds me of the work of Theodore Sturgeon: the themes of love and of collective consciousness; the alien utopia that serves as a foil for our crummy human society; the argument that the cognitive elite should mold society for its own good regardless of the will of the plebians.    

"Angel's Egg" is almost 40 pages long here in Alpha 4 and comes to us as a series of documents in a file in the near future of a one-world government.  The wife of Cleveland McCarran, the "martyred first president" of that world government, donated these documents to some institution in 1994, and one component of the file is a letter sent to McCarran in 1951 when he was working at the FBI by a state police captain regarding an investigation of a Dr. David Bannerman, a biologist and school teacher.  ("Angel's Egg" is one of those stories that romanticizes teachers.)  The lion's share of the file consists of annotated excerpts from Bannerman's journal; these were attached to the 1951 letter and describe in sleep-inducing detail Bannerman's relationship with an alien who looks like a six-inch-tall woman covered in down and is equipped with dragonfly wings; Bannerman calls this doll-sized creature an "angel."

The angels hail from a planet ten light years away and their society is wise because it is 70 million years old.  In this oh-so-wise civilization the most honored of all professions is teacher (of course!) and these long-lived aliens spend many years being educated.  When the aliens sent an expedition to Earth it was only natural that one of their number hook up with a kindly Terran schoolteacher--Bannerman--whose goodness was confirmed by reading his brain--like so many aliens in SF stories of all types, from space opera to this kind of sappy utopianism, the angels are telepathic.  

Besides descriptions of how the little angel makes a little bed in a shoe box and having her around makes him the happiest man in the world, Bannerman fills his journal with summaries of his telepathic conversations with the alien, much of them about how her people's utopian society operates.  They no longer experience fear.  They no longer experience hate.  They have beautiful and intelligent cats who have outgrown the desire to torture their prey.  They have the capability to travel to every planet in the galaxy but are humble and have thus far kept themselves aloof and a secret from other life forms.  

The angel aliens have finally decided to help other intelligent species, and we humans are to be the beneficiaries of their wisdom--it is implied they will secretly program the minds of influential people so they will behave along the lines the angels think best.  (There is a scene in which Bannerman plays chess and the angel programs his mind to play a better game and Bannerman thinks he is coming up with these genius moves himself.)  But to provide us Earthers this help they must know as much about us as possible.  They can erase your brain and absorb the info themselves, but this process, which takes some considerable time, ends in death of the mind donor.  Bannerman, reflecting that the human race of 1951 appears to be on the brink of destroying the world, agrees to donate his mind to the angels for the good of his people.  Bannerman starts reliving his life, remembering every moment in detail, and then forgetting it; the process takes like a month, and then he dies.  

The file contains, and our story concludes with, a brief statement from the self-sacrificing Bannerman's  chess partner, a doctor, that provides clues that make it clear that Bannerman's journal tells the absolute truth, and that Bannerman's dead body shows no signs of distress, only contentment--it is the most well-ordered dead body the doc has ever seen.  ("Angel's Egg" is a story bubbling over with superlatives--doc also says Bannerman was the most stable human being he ever met.)  It is not quite as clear, but I guess we are supposed to think that McCarann's presidency and the world government are signs the angels are manipulating us to have a better society.  "Angel's Egg" is one of those SF stories like Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing and the overrated film The Day the Earth Stood Still that expects us to welcome alien imperialism.  

(I often talk about how genre fiction is wish fulfillment fantasy, and maybe we should also consider this story as the wish fulfillment fantasy of a childless man who likes the idea of having a smart beautiful daughter.  Did Pangborn have children?  A skim of Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction hasn't yielded any info on his family life.)

I found the first half or two-thirds of "Angel's Egg" pretty boring and annoying but by the final third or so, after the sappy preliminaries are done with and the chess partner is introduced into the story, I guess I fell into its groove and it got a little more interesting.  I guess we'll call it acceptable.

"Angel's Egg" debuted in Galaxy and appears to be Pangborn's first published SF tale.  Many of the prominent SF editors--Damon Knight, Groff Conklin, Martin H. Greenberg, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, and Edmund Crispin--have seen fit to serve up this slab of sentimentality to their readers.

"In His Image" by Terry Carr (1971)

Here is another of those stories in which robots who admire humans inherit the Earth and we readers are offered reason to believe humans are not in fact admirable.  There are a lot of these stories out there; I associate this theme with Clifford Simak, but we recently read just such a story by beloved bad boy Harlan Ellison.  Fortunately, Terry Carr here in "In His Image" takes a nuanced view on the matter of whether human beings are worthy of admiration.

It is like three centuries in the future.  In the period between the Nixon Administration and the time in which this story is set the human race developed human-like robots, built abstract sculptures the size of mountains, polluted the air severely, and then retreated into domed cities to escape the pollution that corroded the mountain sculptures and made the air almost unbreathable.  This story relates the search conducted by our narrator, a human-like robot, of the tallest building in a domed city for the last surviving human being!  Our narrator makes clear he admires humans because they are always striving to climb higher, both literally and metaphorically.  When he finds the last human being the man turns out to be a drunk who hates robots--when he isn't vomiting he is calling the robots mere machines no better than staplers or typewriters.  The faith of our narrator is not shaken--in fact, after the medical robots take off the last living human our narrator decides to emulate the human race, to embody our ambition, by figuring out how to climb one of the mountain sculptures.  His computer brain doesn't have enough data to mathematically calculate the probability of success in scaling the sculpture without falling, and this is one way in which he is able to emulate his creators, going on a dangerous adventure without any certainty of how it will turn out!

Of today's three stories this is the most conventional and comfortable, the easiest to read and the one with the least irritating (to me) message or theme.  I like it.

"In His Image" was the cover story of an issue of Amazing published in the year of my birth; the story is titled "In Man's Image" on the magazine's interior pages.  "In His Image" hasn't been reprinted nearly as often as "Casablanca" and "Angel's Egg," but, speak of the devil, it did appear in the third volume in the Harlan Ellison Discovery Series, the Carr collection The Light at the End of the Universe.  As I was copyediting this blog post I learned that the internet archive, world's greatest website, was back in action, and I was able to read Carr's intro to "In His Image" in The Light at the End of the Universe; Carr relates how Amazing editor Ted White acquired the Mike Hinge painting and asked Carr to write a story based around it and the result is this story

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If you were inclined to think SF fans were misanthropic and pessimistic self-important snobs who hold normies in contempt and expect them to destroy themselves and maybe the world unless some elite group were to seize the reins from them, these stories would not disabuse you of this notion.  I'm not on board with a lot of what these stories have to say, but none of them are actually bad, though at times Pangborn's "Angel's Egg" comes close.  I am, however, skeptical that "In His Image," while a good story worthy of inclusion in an anthology, is "important."

Stay tuned for more short stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

1968 SF stories by Fred Saberhagen, Fritz Leiber, H. H. Hollis and Terry Carr

I have already written three blog posts about Donald Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1969 and its terrific John Schoenherr cover, covering a dozen of the stories it offers.  But I think there may still be some goodness to be wrung out of this fruit!  Today we'll read four stories from its pages, tales by Fred Saberhagen, Fritz Leiber, H. H. Hollis and Terry Carr, as we continue the exploration of the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library that has taken up my last five blog posts.

"Starsong"  by Fred Saberhagen 

This story, one of Saberhagen's many Berserker stories, first appeared in Fred Pohl's If.  Saberhagen often bases his stories on famous works of literature or myth or events in history, and this story is a beat for beat retelling of the tragic tale of Orpheus and Eurydice.  

Ordell Callison is the greatest musician in the human space empire.  He marries the beautiful Eury.  As you well know, artistic types tend to be decadent libertines, and Ordell and Eury fit the mold.  One of the little games they and their hangers-on play is tag, each of them flying around in a little one-man space ship; when a man catches a woman's space ship he boards her ship and has sex with her.  Ordell and Eury are participating in one of these space sex games, as they did all the time before they were married, but now they want to play the tag part but not the sex part.  For some reason they didn't tell this to their fellow debauchees, so when Eury is caught by some guy he expects to be able to fuck her and doesn't believe her when she refuses and he gets a little rough.  Eury manages to escape his clutches and, back in her ship, in a panic, flies into a nebula.

In this nebula is a Berserker space station; the Berserkers, as you probably know, are machines programmed to exterminate all life.  This Berserker base is a laboratory that conducts experiments on captured humans, its main line of research is integrating human brains into Berserker computer systems.  So the base is mostly "crewed" not by purely mechanical robots, but by cyborgs, human brains stuffed into robot bodies; these brains are imperfect clones or natural brains in various states of insanity and are thus very suggestible.

Ordell goes to the lab and uses his top tier musical abilities to befuddle the foggy human brains of the cyborgs so they will facilitate his rescue of Eury.  All goes according to plan for a while, but, just like in the traditional Orpheus story, the rescue attempt miscarries on the very cusp of success.

Saberhagen's space warfare retelling of the tale of Orpheus is imbedded in a horror-story-style frame story involving a brain surgeon who assesses the human brains liberated from the lab when the Berseker base is captured by human space navy boarding parties.

I am prejudiced against parodies and spoofs and retellings and reimaginings, and was not impressed with this story, much of which comes across as contrived and silly.  Barely acceptable. 

"Starsong" would go on to be included in quite a few Berserker collections.

   

"The Square Root of Brain" by Fritz Leiber 

In the same way the narrow corridors of a traditional Dungeons & Dragons dungeon are riddled with spiked pits, spring-loaded crossbow bolts and green slime that falls on you from the ceiling, these SF anthologies are laced with joke stories that can unexpectedly spring on the intrepid explorer and make a mess of his expedition.  Wollheim and Carr warn us that "The Square Root of Brain" is a "sharply satiric look at human achievements," and I'm inclined to skip it, but will press on, buoyed by the knowledge that Leiber's "Lean Times in Lankhmar" is one of the very funniest of SF stories.  

At a Hollywood party, in a series of rooms decorated with psychedelic drapes, modernist furniture, and teen-aged starlets in tight dresses, a bunch of people swap incredible anecdotes (a guy claims to have been abducted by aliens, a woman says she remembers her past lives, etc.) and share conspiracy theories.  The text of the story is broken up by block-quoted entries from an encyclopedia--these entries are nonsensical or clearly fictitious.  I guess these encyclopedia entries, and the fact that in the last paragraphs the modernist chairs turn out to be spacecraft, is our clue that this is an alternate universe and the crazy anecdotes and conspiracy theories, in the depicted universe, are likely true.

Despite the warning, I fell in the trap.  The jokes in this story are not funny, it offers no human feeling and no arresting images, the anecdotes and theories are not original, and there is no suspense or tension or even interest.  Gotta condemn this one.  Bad.

"The Square Root of Brain" debuted in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and Moorcock even included it in Best SF Stories from New World 4, another anthology I own.  Do Moorcock, Wollheim and Carr really think this lame story is good?  Maybe they promoted it because it is (sort of...I guess) an attack on American imperialism and racism?  Or maybe they wanted to do their friend a solid and knew Leiber's name on a book would help it sell because Leiber truly has done very good and quite popular work?  Well, who knows?  One thing I do know is that isfdb does not list "The Square Root of Brain" as having appeared in any English Leiber collections, though it has been reprinted in a French collection.

"Sword Game" by H. H. Hollis

We really are exploring today, oh my brothers--here's a story from some guy I never read before.  H. H. Hollis was a Texas lawyer (real name: Ben Neal Ramey) who wrote SF on the side for fun; he has 16 fiction entries at isfdb.  "Sword Game" is probably his most successful story, appearing in several anthologies after its debut in Galaxy and garnering a Nebula nomination. 

"Sword Game" is another unfunny joke story.  A math professor is able to create tesseracts, which in this story at least are cubes inside which time passes very slowly because they exist in the fourth dimension as well as the three ordinary dimensions, or something like that.

Anyway, the prof starts having sex with one of his students.  He hasn't been enjoying being a professor anyway, so he and the girl join a circus and take to the road--the girl, before attending college, worked in a carnival as the woman who scrunches up into a basket and dodges swords that pierce the basket.  On stage the girl climbs into one of the prof's tesseracts, which appears as a translucent cube, and he thrusts a sword through the cube and through his girlfriend--spectators can see that the point of the sword sticking out the other side of the cube has her blood on it.  In a way I don't quite understand the girl doesn't die even though the blade of a sword has passed right through her torso because she is entirely within the tesseract so time passes very slowly for her while the weapon, its hilt being outside the cube, experiences time at the normal rate.  When the prof withdraws the bloody sword the girl heals instantly and climbs out of the cube in perfect health. 

This girl is vapid and they have nothing to talk about and the prof soon tires of her.  So he murders her in a way he thinks will be undetectable.  Telling her he needs to practice, he has her get into a tesseract in private, then he stabs her with a short Roman gladius--the point does not stick out the other side of the cube.  He breaks off the hilt of the sword so the blade is entirely inside the cube--presumably she has been slain.  Then he shrinks the cube down to a convenient size, and uses it as a paperweight on his desk when he resumes his career as an academic.

Many years pass.  The prof develops a friendly relationship with a promising student who looks much like him when he was young.  The student is fascinated by the tesseract and figures out how to open it.  Before the prof can stop him, the student opens the tesseract and the girl jumps out--for her only a few seconds have passed.  She is alive because when she didn't recognize the sword entering the cube she squirmed to dodge it.  She thinks the student is the prof and embraces him, and the lovers imprison the old geezer of a prof in the tesseract, where he will live until the collapse of the universe.

A plot along these lines--evil mad scientist takes advantage of a daffy female and then gets his comeuppance--could definitely work, but, instead of writing it like something you'd find in Weird Tales, Hollis presents it as a joke; there is lots of feeble topical humor about the mores of kids in the late Sixties, for example.  We're calling this one barely acceptable.          

"The Dance of the Changer and the Three" by Terry Carr

The point of this story, which first appeared in the anthology The Farthest Reaches, is to present some truly alien aliens and to demonstrate that different cultures cannot really understand each other.  Our narrator is one of the few survivors of a mining expedition of like fifty people sent to inhospitable planet Loarr, where the natives are beings made up mostly of energy that look like nebulas or snowflakes and communicate by changing their patterns and colors.  Their traditional art form is the "wave dance."  The narrator was the diplomat on the mission, and had time to get to know the Loarra people and their art pretty well, and to give us some insight into Loarra culture, provides us his translation of the most prominent Loarra wave dance, something like a folk tale or heroic myth, maybe akin to our Iliad or the tales of King Arthur or something.  The narrator stresses repeatedly how his translation is imperfect and he has to resort to words like "water" and "sky" even though on Loarr, a gas giant, there really is no water or sky.

The wave dance epic concerns three heroes who go on a quest to "avenge" the "suicide" of another character.  Our human narrator has to use the words "avenge" and "suicide," words which do not make much sense in the context of the aliens' story, because we Earthers have no words that correspond to the concepts that the Loarra story is really about.  In my opinion "commemorate" and "metamorphosis into the next stage of life" would be better translations.  Anyway, the three heroes meet a very old Loarra, one who is so old he is mostly matter now instead of mostly energy.  The old timer tells them a secret that is incomprehensible to human minds, and using that secret the three heroes enter the vortex from which life first emerged on Loarr and create a new life which they promptly devour.  This meal, we are told, is the most significant part of the Loarra epic.

At the end of Carr's story, after we have read this fragmented translation of the Loarra national epic, we learn the story of the mining expedition.  The humans met the Loarra, learned to communicate with them, made friends with them, got permission to mine, and then mined for over three years.  Everything seemed to be going just fine.  Then one day the Loarra, indestructible energy beings, suddenly attacked the helpless and unarmed miners and killed all but six of them.  When the narrator, who had been friendly with the natives for four years, asked them why they had murdered his colleagues, the aliens assert that they are not angry and don't mind if the humans take the ores off planet and don't want the humans to leave; they killed most of the humans "just because" and cannot predict whether they will or won't launch such an attack again.

"The Dance of the Changer and the Three" succeeds in making its point that the universe is inexplicable and life is meaningless and so forth, but it is not very engaging--it is kind of boring, to be honest.  It tells a story you can't understand, and keeps telling you that you won't be able to understand it, so all the descriptions of conversations between flickering beings feel pointless.  Maybe on a technical level the story is "good" because it inspires the reader to share the diplomat's frustration at being unable to make sense of the universe and hopelessness at realizing we have no control over our own fates, but I have to give it a thumbs down because reading it is not an entertaining or enlightening experience.

Editors evidently love this story--it has been reprinted many times in anthologies like Robert Silverberg's Deep Space and magazines like Vertex.    

*********

Oy, I feel like this has been a tough expedition.  I may have to reread some SF stories I already know I like in order to renew my faith in the utility of carrying on with the performance art project we call MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Well, see you next time, space fans...if there is a next time.

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.