Early '70s tales from Eddy C. Bertin, Arthur C. Clarke & Harlan Ellison

It's the fourth and final installment of our look at Donald Wollheim's The 1972 Annual World's Best SF!

"Timestorm" by Eddy C. Bertin (1971)

Bertin is a Belgian, and "Timestorm" first appeared in Flemish in De Achtjaarlijkse God, a collection of Bertin's stories.  Wollheim tells us it won the "'Sfan Award' as the best original story in the Lowlands language sector."  Bertin translated it himself into bland and unidiomatic English--witches are "hung" instead of "hanged," things appear "on intervals" instead of "at intervals."  Why didn't some native English-speaker copy edit this stuff?

In the year 2213 two wandering stars collide and cause a "timestorm."  Somehow this transports an Earthman, Harvey Lonestall, into a vast library of baton-sized cylinders, billions of them.  This "time tower" exists beyond space and time; here Harvey need not eat or sleep.  When inserted into a projector machine the cylinders each can transport Harvey's consciousness into the body of an historical figure; when he tests some they are all people involved in acts of violence; Lee Harvey Oswald murdering JFK, or a crewmember on the Enola Gay as it bombs Hiroshima, for example. Sneaking around the sprawling corridors of the time tower Harvey spies on aliens; these jokers are, apparently, manipulating Earth history!  (Somehow our hero can understand their speech as they talk about Nero, Waterloo, World War II, and other atrocious historical people and events.)  Harvey theorizes that the human race is naturally peaceful and these aliens are to blame for our history of crime and war. (Remember detective writer John D. MacDonald's Wine of the Dreamers?)

Harvey kills the aliens and then uses the machines to manipulate history in a peaceful direction, preventing the rise of Hitler and Napoleon, the outbreak of the First World War, the birth of the Marquis de Sade and the murders of Jack the Ripper.  He even goes back to caveman times to prevent humans from eating meat!  (In this world, Summer Kreigshauser, you would be Chopped Champion!)

Harvey returns to 2113 Earth where he happily joins the peaceful vegetarian society of primitive hut-dwellers who have not even invented the wheel.  Then we get our Twilight-Zone-style twist ending.  Evil space aliens arrive and the human race is too weak to resist them!  You see, the aliens in the time tower were beneficent, and were tailoring a human race strong enough to liberate the universe from these evil aliens! Oops!

The style of this story is poor, as I have already noted, and it is too long and feels tedious.  The plot is just silly, and Bertin fails to give it credibility or emotional power. (Invoking tragedies like famous murders and major wars is a cheap method of playing on the reader's feelings that has little efficacy here because we've heard about JFK, WWII and Jack the Ripper a million times already and because Bertin doesn't do any work to move us, he just throws the names out there.)  I have to give "Timestorm" a thumbs down.  I think Wollheim included this story not because it is one of the "best" from 1971, but because he thought a Continental story had novelty value.  (Science fiction from beyond the Anglophonic world seems to have been an interest of Wollheim's.  We await Joachim Boaz's assessment of Wollheim's 1976 anthology The Best from the Rest of the World.)  

"Transit of Earth" by Arthur C. Clarke (1971)

Here we have some of the hardest of hard SF, a realistic first-person account of an expedition to Mars in 1984 to observe the passage of the Earth across the face of the sun.  Drama is provided by the fact that our narrator is marooned on Mars after an accident, and will run out of oxygen soon after the transit ends.  Besides his description of the transit he provides memories of his life and charts his psychological state as death approaches at the very moment of his, and mankind's, triumph.  The astronaut (and Clarke) show off their taste and erudition with references to Samuel Johnson, James Cook (who observed the transit of Venus from Tahiti in the 18th century), Robert Falcon Scott (who, like our narrator, died after achieving the goal of his mission and left behind a record discovered by later adventurers) and to lots of classical music.  (Don't worry SF fans, Wells, Burroughs, and Bradbury also merit mentions!)

I don't generally seek out these super realistic SF stories, but this one is quite good. "Transit of Earth" first appeared in Playboy.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison (1970)

I actually read this story in my teens, maybe 30 years ago, and then forgot the name of it and over the years started mixing up the details of this story with Ellison's famous "Jeffty is Five," which shares with "One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" a child protagonist and a nostalgic tone.  I was glad to read this story and batten down one of those untethered thoughts that had been fluttering in the back of my mind for decades.

Ellison stand-in Gus Rosenthal, a forty-two year old who brags about his success as a writer and how he was the only one to escape his Ohio town, leaving the rivals of his youth behind to work low-class jobs and marry fat women, travels back in time to meet his childhood self. Protecting little Gus from bullies and sharing with him a love of comic books and genre literature brings big Gus a happiness he hasn't felt in a long time, but he can't stay in the past; not only is he suffering time travel-related medical problems, but little Gus is becoming anti-social, stealing and so forth.  So, big Gus has to leave, which breaks little Gus's heart--big Gus realizes that it was himself, not bullies and poverty, that drove him to fight his way out of Ohio and to fame and success.

I find Ellison's braggadocio and self-congratulation a little hard to take ("One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" is squarely aimed at the stereotypical science-fiction fan demographic, the unpopular kid who thinks he is smarter than everybody else), and this story is a little too sappy and sentimental for my tastes.  However, it is well-written--the structure, pacing, and length are all just right, and there are plenty of interesting images--and I appreciated Ellison's little asides praising Jack Williamson and Harold W. McCauley.  So, thumbs up for this one.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" first appeared in Orbit 8--if you haven't already, check out Joachim Boaz's review of that anthology--and was made into an episode of the 1980s Twilight Zone which I have not seen.

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The 1972 Annual World's Best SF is a good collection of stories; the Niven, Russ, Anderson, Lafferty, Clarke and Ellison stories all feel characteristic of what those authors typically do, but seem more fun, more streamlined, and more accessible than their average work.  Definitely worth a look.

Three stories from Astounding by Eric Frank Russell: "Mana," "Jay Score," & "Homo Saps"

I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read Eric Frank Russell stories because when I read his famous and widely anthologized "...And Then There Were None" I thought it was a long and tedious exercise in smart alecky utopianism.  But when I saw the 1978 collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell I decided to give Russell another shot.

Alan Dean Foster (of movie tie-in fame), in his introduction to this volume, tells us that Russell is his favorite SF author, and, more surprisingly, that Russell was John W. Campbell's favorite SF author!  Campbell, the editor of Astounding who worked closely with those titans Heinlein and Asimov, said Russell was his favorite SF writer? I suppose that is reason enough for someone interested in classic SF to read Russell. Let's start with the first three tales in the book, all of which appeared in Campbell's Astounding.

"Mana" (1937)

Omega is the last man on Earth.  It is the far future, when men have evolved into immortal beings who can use their mental powers to effortlessly fly.  People only die when they have achieved all their goals, achieved satiety, and Omega, six thousand years old, is the only man who has not yet achieved satisfaction.

Omega's quest is to inspire intelligence ("mana") in ants!  He finally accomplishes this by shooting a ray through his own brain at a terrarium full of ants.  When he has done this enough, the ants figure out how to start fires and shoot a bow and arrow!  No doubt, Omega reasons, a million or whatever years ago space aliens gave the human race intelligence in a similar way (isn't this the premise behind 2001: A Space Odyssey?) His work done, Omega releases the ants and then flies up into space, to commit suicide.  The ant civilization that is to come (barring some kind of catastrophic anteater attack, I suppose) will be Omega's monument, and the monument to the achievements of the human race.

A tight five pages, with an interesting idea, numerous memorable images, and a good writing style; this one gets the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

"Jay Score" (1941)

In the 23rd century a space ship gets hit by a small asteroid, and the multiracial crew finds they are hurtling towards the sun!  While the rest of the crew takes cover in the most heavily shielded part of the vessel, expert pilot Jay Score stays in the searing hot cockpit, steering the ship on a one in ten thousand chance course past old Sol.  The ship makes it, but poor Jay is burnt within an inch of his life!  Thankfully, back on Earth he becomes the first ever man to have his brain put in a robot body!

The thing about this competent but basically routine story that will stick out to 21st-century readers is how it addresses the issue of race. Russell uses the story to promote racial harmony and the idea that different people's different abilities can complement each other (he is "celebrating diversity" in today's argot) but the way he does it, focusing on fanciful biological differences between ethnic groups instead of on human equality, would at best be considered "problematic" by today's cultural arbiters, and at worst it would be career suicide.

On the first page of the story we are told that, since white people invented space drives, only white people are ever hired as engineers on space ships--whites "know most about them [rockets] and can nurse them like nobody else."  This doesn't really make much sense; maybe it is an appeal to the idea of "racial memory?"  The special ability Russell assigns to black people is approximately as silly: "All ship's surgeons are black Terrestrials because for some reason none can explain no Negro gets gravity-bends or space nausea."

Anyway, the white engineers, the black doctor, and the crew's tentacled Martians (who need less oxygen than humans and can better stand extremes of heat) all contribute to the ship's and the crew's survival.  Presumably it is significant that hero Jay is "neither black nor white;" whether this means he is biracial or an Asian or Native American is unclear.

Russell's pacing and style are good, and he makes the Martians interesting (they love chess, for one thing--the cover of this collection illustrates "Jay Score") and I have a weakness for stories about space travel, so I'm giving this one a thumbs up.

"Homo Saps" (1941)

This is a nonsensical joke story whose payoff doesn't justify the long set-up.

Fifteen or more years ago a cure for cancer was discovered on Mars!  So human businesspeople flock to native Martian settlements to buy it.  Instead of using spacecraft or aircraft to go to the Martian towns, Earth merchants ride Earth camels across the spider-infested deserts between the spaceport and the native settlements. (Russell repeatedly tells us that this is because there is no gasoline on Mars.)  Our story follows one such camelback journey.

The native Martians can't talk, so trade is conducted via hand signals and pictures (the natives build up credit and point to what they want in illustrated Earth catalogs.)  One of the Martians invites one of the human merchants to his home--the human is amazed to find that the Martian has used Earth parts to build a device which allows him to talk!  It has taken over fifteen years of contact for the first Earthling-Martian conversation to take place, and we are there to witness it!

The native Marsplains that his race lost the ability to talk because they developed telepathy.  He opines that only primitive types speak; advanced species like Martians and camels communicate via telepathy.  When the human scoffs at the idea that camels are superior to humans, the Martian tells him that camels don't wear clothes or pay taxes--obviously their lives are better than those of a human.  The denouement of the story involves the human experimenting and confirming that the camels can indeed read his mind.

Thumbs down!

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These stories, taken as a group, are good enough that we'll be seeing three or four more selections from 1978's The Best of Eric Frank Russell in our next episode.

Four stories by Mack Reynolds from the early 1960s

When I read Mack Reynolds' Commune: 2000 A.D. in 2011 I thought it was kind of lame.  In the same year Joachim Boaz reviewed Reynolds' Rolltown and thought it deserved 2 of 5 stars and "isn't worth the effort of procuring" due to an "average plot," a "silly final twist" and "endless info-dump lectures...."  But you hear good things about Reynolds now and again (famous SF historian and critic Barry Malzberg praises him, and Reynolds at one point won a readers' poll and was thus proclaimed SF's most popular writer), so when I saw the thick (370 pages!) 1976 collection The Best of Mack Reynolds for sale for one dollar at Half Price Books, I bought it.  Maybe, I reasoned, Reynolds shines in the short form. Besides, Reynolds's own introduction to the book, about his life as a professional writer and his travels around the world, was charming.

What kind of exotic system of voting did they use that allowed Reynolds to beat Asimov and Heinlein?
  Ranked Choice?  Instant Runoff?  Range Voting?  Limiting the franchise to the Reynolds family?    

Last week I read four stories from the collection, which I chose based on their provocative one-word titles.  By chance, all turned out to have been published first in the early 1960s.

"Revolution" (1960)

A lot of SF stories ask you to accept things which don't make much logical sense and for which there really isn't much evidence, like hyperspace, psychic powers, and time travel.  Mack Reynolds' "Revolution" asks you to accept that the central planning and dictatorial rule of the kind of psychos who ran the Soviet Union could produce an economy that by 1985 was surpassing the economy of the United States.  Our hero in this story is Russian-born American agent Paul Koslov, who is sneaked into Communist Russia in hopes he will be able to spark a revolution, in the same way Lenin was sent to Czarist Russia back in 1917.

In the introduction to the volume (remember a minute ago when I told you it was charming?) Reynolds compares himself to Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke, major science fiction writers whose work focuses on the hard sciences.  Reynolds tells us he knows little of "the physical sciences," but has a background in "the social sciences...especially socioeconomics...." The impression I get from "Revolution" is that, in the same way Asimov or Clarke might use a SF story to talk about robotics or astronomy or oceanography (remember Imperial Earth?), Reynolds uses SF to talk about forms of government and different models of society, based on his readings in theory and history and his own travels around the world (in the intro he says he spent ten years travelling among over 75 countries.)    

So, "Revolution" starts out with discussions of MPorcius fave Somerset Maugham and anti-Soviet leftist intellectual Milovan Djilas, author of The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System with Koslov's boss in Washington.  Later, in Russia, we get a lecture from one anti-Soviet activist on the "three bases of government evolved by man": the family (example: Native Americans); property (example, European slave, feudal, and capitalist societies); and "your method of making your livelihood," (the activist hopes to replace Communist Party rule with just such a system, one in which each sector of the economy would elect representatives.)  Another Russian rebel gives Koslov (and us readers) a lecture on revolutions--we are told revolutions come from the people when they need them, not from leaders--great leaders are created by the desperate times they live in, and often struggle to stay ahead of the popular tide.
    
The story ends with the anti-communist revolutionaries, thanks to Western aid, in position to overthrow the Soviet Union.  But since these revolutionaries have chosen to maintain the USSR's nuclear arsenal and have not embraced British- or American-style democracy and capitalism, Koslov wonders if the new Russia he is playing midwife to might be an even greater threat to the West than the Soviet Union--maybe he should report his friends to the KGB and put the kibosh on the whole thing!

Reynolds tries to create an interesting character in Koslov, who, over the course of the story, realizes, despite his Russian blood and 15 years of single-minded dedication to liberating Russia from communism, that his upbringing in the USA has made a true American out of him.  Reynolds also tries to create an interesting relationship--Koslov and one of the Russian anti-communist rebels fall in love, but their love founders on their different loyalties (hers to Russia, his to the West) and political attitudes.  But these facets of the story are not very effective; most of the story is all those lectures and historical references.

Acceptable, but I wouldn't urge anybody to rush out and find it.  "Revolution" first appeared in Astounding-- the Galactic Journey blog earlier this year analyzed that entire issue.  Worth checking out.

"Freedom" (1961)

Each of the 22 tales in The Best of Mack Reynolds has a little introduction by the author himself.  In the intro to "Freedom," which was first published in Analog, Reynolds tells us that he has spent considerable time in Moscow and Prague, and that he has not heard from Czech friends since the 1968 invasion by a Soviet army which crushed Czech efforts to secure liberal reforms.

"Freedom," like "Revolution," is set in a hypothetical future in which socialist economics has worked and the Soviet Union and its satellites have achieved the world's highest GDP and standard of living.  Our main character, Ilya Simonov, is a security officer whose job is to kill and imprison Soviet citizens (without a trial, of course!) who oppose the rule of the Communist Party.  His superiors want to know why there are so many such people--aren't they grateful for the economic health created by the Communist Party and its policies?  The Kremlin assumes malign Western influence is the cause of their problems, and sends Simonov to Czechoslovakia to ferret out any possible Western sources of this inexplicable hostility to the Soviet regime.

In Prague, Simonov finds that government controls over speech and the press have loosened--people openly criticize the Communist Party, read Western books, even meet American journalists.  At first he is outraged, but over a period of months he not only realizes that the people he is investigating are not dupes of the West, but spontaneous seekers of personal liberty--he even comes to share their dreams of a free Eastern Europe.  Simonov returns to Moscow and shoots his boss and burns the official records of his mission (in order to protect his new friends back in Prague) but is then killed himself while trying to escape.

Obviously, I'm behind this story's ideological content--even if, in some fanciful way, the Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and the countries it had conquered had produced economic plenty, their murderous, arbitrary and unaccountable rule could in no way be morally justified.  But does this make "Freedom" a good story?  No.  The story is full of political lectures, even a page-long extract from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World Revisited, and the plot and characters fail to generate any real feeling.

Reynolds addresses interesting and important ideas here, which is presumably why John Campbell published it in his famous and important magazine Analog and Judith Merril included it in one of her famous and important The Year's Best S-F anthologies, but as a story I'll have to judge it as merely acceptable; it does the job you'd expect of an article in an opinion magazine, not what you hope a piece of fiction does.  

"Subversive" (1962)

This one, which also first saw light of day in Analog, is even more lecture-heavy than "Revolution" and "Freedom."  The foundation of those stories was the dubious assertion that the command economy of the Soviet Union could outproduce the market economy of the United States.  In "Subversive" Reynolds presents what he perhaps considers one of the advantages of the command economy over the free economy--the money and manpower devoted to such things as advertising and TV shows in a market economy.  We get long lectures on how one bar (or "cake," as I guess people said in 1962) of soap is much like another, and is manufactured very cheaply.  Likewise for electric razors and loaves of bread (!).  These products sell dearly to the consumer because of all the advertising costs and middlemen.  (This reminds me of Bernie Sanders' apparent belief that it is immoral for there to be several brands and types of deodorant on the market.)

A company is formed that can sell soap and razors and bread cheaper than the other middlemen because it eschews advertising.  Such competition will make the American economy more efficient, so Soviet agents attack the new company, killing everybody involved.

This story is like 19 pages of lectures with 2 pages of plot.  There is no effort at presenting a human story, and Reynolds even dispenses with the historical anecdotes and quotes from intellectuals with which he peppered "Revolution" and "Freedom." I'm going to have to give this one a thumbs down.

"Pacifist" (1964)

"Pacifist" was a cover story for The Magazine of Fantasy of Science Fiction, even though the cover illustration apparently depicts a scene from the magazine version of Damon Knight's Beyond the Barrier, the paperback edition of which I read, more or less on a dare from Joachim Boaz, back in the summer of 2014.  "Pacifist" takes place in an alternate universe much like our own but in which the Cold War is between the Northern and Southern hemispheres.  The brainiacs of this world have determined, Hari Seldon-style, that, unless government policies change, nuclear war will break out in three years.  Instead of working through the media and the democratic process, presenting their ideas and hoping the voters and their representatives are swayed by them, these elitists form a secret society called The Pacifists and engage in terrorism designed to change government policies.  They eschew no tactic in their quest for peace, no matter how outrageous: they kidnap a Senator's son and threaten to murder his friends and family if he refuses to resign, they strafe a military academy graduation ceremony with a hijacked jet fighter, and more.

The point of the story, I guess, is to examine this paradoxical strategy for achieving peace; does the noble end justify the murderous means?  Would such a campaign hope to succeed?  Reynolds may also have hoped to shock the reader with characters who suggest that strategic bombing (like the British and Americans inflicted on the Axis countries less than 20 years before the story was published) is no different than the cold-blooded murder of children and that in modern war conscientious objectors are more brave than volunteer soldiers.

The plot follows the lead "hatchetman" of the Pacifists, Warren Casey, the guy who actually gets his hands dirty threatening, beating, kidnapping, and killing people whom I (and who could be more reasonable than me?) would consider innocent.  Casey joined the Pacifists after his experience as a bomber pilot in this universe's equivalent of World War II, which led him to the conviction that war should be outlawed at any cost.  Over the course of the story he becomes skeptical of the Pacifists' strategy of using violence to end violence.  Casey is killed while trying to escape from police officers because he didn't take an opportunity to shoot the police in the back, an ambiguous ending.

The audacity of this story, and the effort put into the psychology of its main character, makes it probably the best Reynolds story I am discussing today.  Mild recommendation.

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These stories are not appallingly bad, but they lack literary value; their value is in the ideas they present.  (I'll leave aside the fact that the more you think about their ideas, the goofier the ideas appear.)  Reading four of them over the space of three days in the 21st century probably doesn't present them in the best light; for one thing, you easily notice a sameness about them (e.g., all four stories are about agents and include meetings between the agent and his boss; Koslov and Simonov are almost the same character: both had little time for women before the story begins because they were busy fighting for or against communism, and during the story they fall in love with a woman with a different political point of view; Simonov and Casey have almost the same fates and their stories the same ending: both are shot dead while trying to escape government forces and then subjected to musings on their psychologies by their killers.)  SF fans who read only one of them a month or so, during the height of the Cold War, decades before we knew how the Soviet empire would collapse, perhaps found them very thought-provoking.

In our next episode more science fiction short stories, but I hope and expect these stories will have (what I consider) literary value: a distinctive style, human feeling, vivid images.  I highly doubt they will have much to say about the Soviet Union or economics, but you never know!

Fire Pattern by Bob Shaw

"Secrecy has always been a big thing with you people," Jerome said, voicing a minor criticism as a camouflage for the deep revulsion the Dorrinian's words had inspired in him.

I guess like a lot of people my age, when I was in my teens in the 1980s my family had a copy of Reader's Digest's Mysteries of the Unexplained, a book about paranormal phenomenon.  One of the things which really got to me in the book was the section on spontaneous human combustion.  I wasn't a sailor, I didn't believe in God, and I lived in the suburbs, so sea serpents, demonic possession, and sasquatch didn't scare me, but spontaneous human combustion seemed like something that might be real and could happen to anybody, anywhere.  Around the same time this phenomenon was scaring a young MPorcius, Bob Shaw wrote and published a science fiction novel based on spontaneous human combustion, Fire Pattern.

Published in 1984 and set in 1996, Fire Pattern has the words "science fiction" on the back cover but starts out much like a conventional thriller, one of those books about an ordinary middle-class person facing quotidian life challenges who starts a new love relationship while doing detective stuff and uncovering a conspiracy. Fifty-year-old Ray Jerome is still recovering from the death of his wife and the loss of his job as an engineer.  His current job is as a reporter at a small New England newspaper (British subject Shaw set this novel in the United States, apparently an alternate universe USA in which Americans measure distances in "kilometres" instead of "miles" and call their summer homes "chalets.")  Jerome, who is older than everybody in the office and worked at a trade journal, is always correcting everybody's grammar and writing style and ridiculing people's beliefs in goofy nonsense like spontaneous human combustion.  Circumstances force him to change his tune about fortean phenomena when a case of "SHC" occurs in his little New England town, and the editor of the paper (a forty-year-old woman our hero has a crush on) assigns Jerome to investigate.

Like in any detective story, Jerome talks to the witness, reads background material, visits the morgue, looks for clues in photos, blah blah blah.  You can bet I was relieved when, 75 or 80 pages into the 208-page paperback, we plunge into Van Vogt territory!  Cases of SHC are revealed to Jerome to be botched mind transfer operations originating from Mercury!  For centuries the telepathic Mercurians (who call themselves "Dorrinians"), by the hundreds, have been colonizing Earth by switching bodies with Earth people (and in the process building up a colony on Mercury of Earthlings in Mercurian bodies!)  Jerome finds himself in the middle of a secret war between factions of telepathic Mercurians on Earth, and then, in classic wish-fulfillment fiction style, is transferred to a young healthy body on Mercury!  In the first part of the book Shaw kept reminding us of Jerome's arthritis and poor eyesight, making the move to the Mercury body cathartic.  Even better, the Terran colony on Mercury has a culture of sexual promiscuity--I mean free love!

Despite his improved physical health and active sex life, life on Mercury is no picnic for our hero!  He misses Earth and finds that he doesn't really get along with the natives, who can be arrogant, dismissive, and selfish.  But the wish-fulfillment fantasy continues when it is Jerome (earning the title "Dances with Dorrinians") who saves the Mercurian civilization and then helps the Mercurians secretly conquer the Earth with their telepathic powers! Like in so many anti-human/anti-Western science fiction stories (The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Killer Thing, Hero's Walk, Childhood's End, The Forever War, The Cosmic Rape, etc) we are expected to cheer on the aliens as human free will is extinguished and the Earth becomes some kind of utopia under the imperialism of the extraterrestrials.  If these Mercurian psykers hadn't hypnotized all of us, we'd all have died in a nuclear war caused by humanity's failings!  (Like my college professors, these SF stories never want to blame the Soviet Union for the Cold War, but instead blame the West or some abstraction like "tribalism" that places equal blame on the corrupt and racist bourgeois democracies and poor Uncle Joe's misunderstood, well-intentioned and hard-pressed worker's paradise.)  Jerome's reward for putting the Mercurians in charge of his fellow Earthlings is getting his memory of all he has learned about SHC and Mercury erased, getting his mind put back in (a healthier version of) his old body, and getting married to that sexy newspaper editor.          

Even if the ending disappointed me, there is a lot to like about Fire Pattern; it is a very entertaining read.  Shaw is a skilled writer, and the plot is good.  Because the cover illo and blurbs make no reference to outer space, I was truly surprised when the whole Mercurian telepath angle was sprung on me, and surprised again when Jerome ended up on Mercury in an alien body.  I had expected Shaw to explain spontaneous human combustion to be the work of callous big business or wealthy predatory physicians or something like that (sort of like what Pohl did in Drunkard's Walk.)  And because Shaw shows how self-important the Mercurians are, and has them keep bragging about how ethical they are (the Mercurian doth protest too much, I thunk), in the last few pages, when Jerome has to make his big decision, I thought there was a real chance he would side with the people of Earth over the invaders.

A curious element of the novel was its anti-computer, anti-technology attitude.  Computers put Jerome out of work, a computer that checks grammar is to blame for Jerome's fellow journalists' poor grasp of the English language, and Jerome thinks recording interviews via shorthand is more effective than using a tape recorder.  Mercurian engineering is inferior to that of the Earth, but the Dorrinians' superior mental abilities mean it is they who conquer us, without us even knowing what is happening!

Maybe I've got Van Vogt on the brain, but another thing about Fire Pattern I found interesting was possible links or similarities to that wild Canadian's work.  Besides all the telepathy stuff, the hidden secret aliens, and the secret conspiracies, I found Fire Pattern's explanation for spontaneous human combustion to be very similar to a striking scene in one of Van Vogt's better stories, "Secret Unattainable."  I also wondered if the ways Jerome was always criticizing other journalists' grammar and word usage was some kind of oblique reference to how Van Vogt's writing is famously confusing and clumsy.

Do I wish Fire Pattern was a ringing endorsement of human independence and loyalty to the Earth? Of course I do.  But since it is a well-written, well-constructed, and surprising novel, I still enjoyed it and am looking forward to reading the other Shaw books I own.

Orbit 4 stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and Vernor Vinge

On Labor Day I stopped in at Half Price Books to take advantage of the 20% off sale, and one of my finds was a copy of 1968's Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight.  I like the cool green cover, with its resonant hints of alien planets, electricity, electronics, and the ocean deep.

There's no actual intro to the book as a whole, though on the first page there is a blurb from Publishers' Weekly that, without saying "new wave," comes across as celebrating that vaguely-defined phenomenon and Orbit's role in it: "Most of the stories typify the emerging new domain of science fiction, with its emphasis less on the 'out-there' than on the 'right-here, right-now.''  In the next sentence they give their prime example, the included Harlan Ellison story.

"Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" by Harlan Ellison

My man tarbandu has made mention of this story a few times at The PorPor Books Blog, and I was glad to have a chance to read it myself.  "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" has appeared in numerous other venues, including The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, where William Stout (I love Stout's dinosaur illustrations!) gave it the comic book treatment.

Rudy, a recently discharged soldier, comes to a decrepit gothic house looking for his former fiance, Kris, whom he still loves and wants to marry, even though he hasn't seen her in eight months.  The house is full of hippies, and Kris, like the rest of them, spends most of her time out of her mind on drugs.  Rudy moves in, and helps to support the hippies by running errands, bringing in money, and serving as a presentable public face for the hippie colony, things which none of these perennially stoned goofballs can really do.  Significantly, because "love" is so much a part of the hippy "brand," Ellison shows that the druggies have lost the ability to love or care for each other--their sexual needs are like those of animals,

Ellison describes the house the way you would describe a haunted house, all weird noises and shadows, and goes beyond showing that drug use has turned the hippies into useless, filthy decadents: in an oft-foreshadowed final dream sequence/metaphor, the hippies appear as vampires, werewolves and other monsters.  Drug addiction has turned them into parasites, cannibals, who infect others with their evil: Rudy eventually succumbs and starts taking drugs himself, leaving behind his productive life (before his time in the service he had a job as a mechanic) and his sincere and human love for Kris.

This story is pretty good; it is certainly vividly and economically written, with each sentence serving the story's purpose and being worth reading with care.  As an attack on the drug culture and a warning to stay off drugs, I suppose many people would dismiss it as a sort of SF version of Reefer Madness.  Though I am sympathetic to Ellison's message here (I'm as square as they come and never drink or use drugs), and Ellison's writing is far better, "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" did remind me a little of that over-the-top anti-gun story by Davis Grubb, "The Baby-Sitter." Both stories employ horror fiction conventions to issue a heavy-handed condemnation of what their authors consider a social evil, in the process exaggerating the seductive power of the vice that has inspired their ire, and diminishing the agency of individuals.

Mild to moderate recommendation.

"One At a Time" by R. A. Lafferty

It has been a while since I read any R. A. Lafferty, so I eagerly took this chance to do so.  Lafferty is sui generis.  When you read a SF story in which a guy is swinging a sword at some other guys, it is easy to say "this story is an attempt to emulate Burroughs" or Howard, or Tolkein, and to assess the story's success by comparing it to those beloved classics.  But what can you compare a Lafferty story to?  Damon Knight, in his intro to the story, suggests "One At a Time" is like an "ethnic" tale, Irish most probably, but also argues that Lafferty's stories are probably best described as "tales unlike other tales."

Sour John, a rowdy hard-drinking type who hangs around in bars in port cities, "collects odd ones."  So when he hears an "odd one" is hanging around Barnaby's Barn, he hurries over to the tavern to meet him.  The odd one is McSkee, who eats tremendous quantities of food and drinks vast volumes of booze--he's breaking all the local records!  Sour John spends the evening with McSkee, wandering the city, fighting and whoring, living it up--for Sour John and McSkee it is such hearty, simple pleasures that make life worth living, and McSkee can handle more of such pleasures than any man alive.  Sour John tries to figure out McSkee's secret, and McSkee is quite open about it: he has learned how to put himself into a kind of hibernation, to slow down his body and literally die, and then wake up again, years or decades later. McSkee has lived for ages, but only one day at a time, each day separated by many years.

This is a fun story, and you have to suspect Lafferty is somehow referring to such central elements of Christian thought as Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, as well as exhorting all of us to live every day to its fullest.  The story perhaps contains hidden depths.

"One At a Time" would later appear in the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I own, but which is currently in storage along with most of my books.

"Grimm's Story" by Vernor Vinge

In a time that feels long ago, I guess early 2003, when I either had money or was behaving as if I had money, the wife (then my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Western Europe, staying in a hotel in London, with a friend of hers in Denmark, and with a friend of mine in Portugal.  On planes and trains I read Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky.  It was the first science fiction novel I had read in a long time, and I rather liked it.  With its interest in human freedom and technological and social change, it reminded me of SF I had read in my youth.  Some time later I read The Peace War, but thought it was just OK; I remember thinking it addressed the same issues and had the same tone as a bunch of other SF work, including Deepness in the Sky, and being disappointed because I had been hoping for something new.

It had been approximately a decade since I'd read any Vinge when I bought Orbit 4, so I decided to check out the longish (over 50 pages) Vinge contribution, "Grimm's Story."  Isfdb told me that "Grimm's Story" is a component of a fix up novel called Grimm's World, which was later retitled Tatja Grimm's World.  If the cover illustrations of this novel were any guide, the story was about a sexy girl who has a battleship--that part of MPorcius's mind which is still 13 years old thought that sounded pretty good.

"Grimm's Story" is a traditional type of hard SF story.  In this category of story, which presumably has a name that I don't know, the author imagines a planet or planet-like environment which has some physical difference(s) from the Earth--the gravity or temperature or chemical composition or whatever are significantly different.  The author speculates on how civilization and/or the ecosystem would evolve and adapt in such an environment.  This alien world is then used as a setting for an adventure story in which the protagonists must journey from point A to point B and accomplish some mission; this journey provides the author opportunity to describe different facets of the world he has designed.  Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is sort of the archetype for this type of story, but I think Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer and Larry Niven's Ringworld and Integral Trees books, and even Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, John Varley's Titan and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville qualify.

The planet in this story is a vast ocean with lots of little islands, inhabited by humans who are descended from Earth colonists who lost their high technology ages ago.  The planet is severely lacking in metal deposits; iron and aluminum are very rare, and as a result technological development has been slow.

Hard science fiction stories often glamorize scientists, engineers and merchants, and show contempt for religion and government, and Vinge delivers on these expectations.  Our heroes are an astronomer and the crew of a publishing enterprise that makes money by putting out girlie magazines and a journal of science articles and science fiction stories.  (Remember how, in his alternate world in Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov called science fiction "physics fiction?"  In "Grimm's Story" the people call science fiction "contrivance fiction" or "c.f.")  These businesspeople make their own paper and print the magazines on a huge ship that travels around the planet, delivering the periodicals.  Vinge describes the chemical and mechanical processes by which this is done, which will no doubt thrill some readers and bore others.

The astronomer, Svir Hedrigs (I just realized that when you say it out loud in the German or Scandinavian accent it seems to demand it sounds like "severe headaches") is sitting in a bar with his little pet monster that has psychic powers (hard SF is ostensibly based on real science, and yet somehow often includes characters with psychic powers, just like extravagant action-based space fantasies like Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000) when the tall and beautiful woman who runs the publishing ship, Tatja Grimm, appears and seduces him.  Grimm uses her womanly charms to persuade Hedrigs to join the publishing company on a perilous secret mission.  This mission is to infiltrate the impenetrable fortress in the capitol of the most powerful nation in the world, which is ruled by a murderous tyrant.  This dictator has the world's only complete collection of the aforementioned science fiction magazine, and he is planning to sacrifice this literary treasure to the gods!  This crime against humanity must be stopped!  The only way to rescue the magazines from the fortress is to use Hedrigs's little psionic monster to fool the guards.

In fact, the ruthless and manipulative Tatja Grimm has even bigger fish to fry than preserving old issues of her world's analogue of Analog.  She ends up using Hedrigs and his little hypnotic pet to overthrow the tyrant and make herself Queen of that powerful country.  As it turns out, Grimm isn't just the sexiest woman on the planet, but the smartest human being.  She thinks that, at the head of the world's strongest economy, she can advance technology to the point that people can fly to a neighboring planet!  And why does she want to fly to that planet?  Because she is lonely and hopes that on that other planet is a man smart enough for her to love!  On the last page of the story Grimm says:

"...I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had.  For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most...a man."    

Was that sound I heard feminists' heads exploding?

I thought this story was pretty good.  I love the idea of a huge centuries-old ship, and thought the idea that they were on a quest to save old SF magazines pretty adorable. And I thought Vinge did a decent job with Tatja Grimm, a sort of anti-hero with mysterious motivations about whom we learn more and more as the story progresses. Now I want to find that fix-up novel and see what happens to Grimm and her quest for love!

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

I'm quite happy with this edition of Orbit--all three of these stories are entertaining and interesting.  (I read the included Silverberg story, "Passengers," some years ago and liked it, as well.)  I'll be reading more of the anthology in the future to see what else Knight served up the SF readers of 1968.

Four stories by Thomas Disch from 1966

It's time to finish up with my 1971 US edition of the Thomas Disch collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.  (I read and blogged about the title story back in early 2014.)  All four remaining stories first appeared in 1966.

"5 Eggs" (1966)

This one first appeared in the anthology Orbit 1, edited by Damon Knight.  It's a good one, and is a good example of what I think of when I think of a characteristic Disch story; it is full of references to Shakespeare, Ovid, and Botticelli, it includes a sentence in Latin, a broken heart and a pathetic tragedy, as well as a central ironic joke.  It is only eight pages long, but Disch constructs the story as largely a bunch of flashbacks and documents, instead of a straightforward narrative.

The plot, in linear fashion: A wealthy ornithologist meets a beautiful alien woman and they have an affair, she living with him for two months.  She is a cruel lover who deliberately hurts him psychologically and physically, but he finds her irresistible and they become engaged. She leaves him just before the start of the party he is throwing to celebrate their engagement.  He takes some consolation in the fact that she has left behind five eggs, and instructions on how to hatch them.  Presumably, these are the product of their relationship.  The cruel alien has played a trick on the ornithologist, however, contrived a way to fool the housekeeper into including the eggs in a salad which he and his friends ate at the sad party meant to celebrate his engagement to the only woman he has ever loved.

A superior piece of work, the plot, structure, style, emotional impact and economy all remarkably good.  Five stars for "Five Eggs"!

"Three Points on the Demographic Curve" (1966)

This one first saw light of day in SF Impulse, a short-lived British magazine, edited by Harry Harrison for most of its existence.

It is the year 2240!  Government and Science! have been grappling with the problem of overpopulation for ages.  People live in tiny cubicles, children are raised in government barracks manned by robots, and, like in that Genesis song, the authorities have reduced human height!  But the Earth is still running out of room.

So, the authorities don't really mind when a Dickensianly-named guy from the future appears in a time machine and starts kidnapping children by the thousands, to repopulate a future Earth depopulated by war:

Prosper Ashfield was not a happy man.

As a youth, he had dreamed, as almost every young man dreams, of being the Last Man on Earth. Unlike other young men, Prosper had the good fortune to realize this ambition.

(Again we see the understated humor I enjoyed in "Genetic Coda.")

Prosper's plans fail, because the 23rd century kids have been ill-equipped by their education to rebuild society... these kids can barely walk, much less construct a new civilization.  Having been raised by robots, they love machines, so Prosper goes back to 1790 and sells them to a Scottish businessman, who puts them to work in a factory. Disch explains that Prosper is to be credited with the sharp increase in population at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution.

With 1790 and 2240 as Disch's first two points, the third is in the far future, when Prosper, the last man, goes into suspended animation, instructing his robots to try to "reverse entropy" and wake him up if they succeed.  His robots managed to make a time machine, so given enough time, maybe they can accomplish this similarly audacious task.

"Three Points on the Demographic Curve" is not bad, but I felt like the plot fizzled instead of delivering any kind of emotional payoff, surprise, or funny punchline.

"Invaded by Love" (1966)

This story was first published in New Worlds, edited by Michael Moorcock, which is considered a sort of flagship of the New Wave.  It takes place in New York City, which of course pulls at my heartstrings!  To think that I used to live among all the places mentioned, the UN, Rockefeller Center, Tudor City, Sutton Place, St. Patrick's Cathedral. How many hours did I spend, sitting on a park bench or standing on a street corner, eating a slice of pizza or a bagel, admiring just these very buildings, watching the world go by.  That was the Technicolor period of my life, sandwiched between black and white stretches like Dorothy Gale's dream of a life of adventure in another world over the rainbow.

Enough about the Rise and Fall of MPorcius--back to "Invaded by Love."  It is the late 1970s!  An alien preacher has come to Earth, and used high tech hypnotism, the distribution of drugs (little yellow pills), and appeals to traditional Earth religious sentiments to get most of humanity to join his "Universal Brotherhood of Love."  War and violent crime essentially cease, but people also stop slaughtering cattle, fishing, and exterminating insects, leading to widespread hunger and economic crises.

Our main character is the head of the UN, who, like in so many SF stories, is some kind of world chief executive, the commander in chief of a hegemonic military (in this story the UN has a moonbase with an arsenal of nuclear missiles.)  I feel like during my entire life (I was born in 1971) that Americans have considered the UN a sort of debating society attached to a charity, an institution we take about as seriously as the Red Cross or the YMCA, but in these SF stories Americans are always willingly relinquishing their independence and power to some foreigner (in this story an Australian) because he's UN Secretary General.

The Australian UN guy, Seneca Traquair, is one of the few people to refuse to take the little yellow pill, and he resists the alien's demand that Earth immediately disarm.  The alien tries to hypnotize him, then kidnaps his son, but Traquair continues to resist, to the point of gunning down the alien in his office and nuking his orbiting space ship. But resistance is futile; the single alien missionary with one ship is replaced by an army of aliens with an armada of ships, and humanity is overwhelmed by their hypnotic power:

From the moment the invaders landed, the converts ceased to have wills of their own, lives of their own.  They were absorbed in the Ground of All Being and obeyed the Universal Will.     

Even Traquair succumbs, and rushes to embrace and obey Earth's new arachnid ruler.

I feel like I've read or seen a million of these SF stories in which "peace-loving" aliens put the screws to the Earth and make us violent humans behave; the film The Day the Earth Stood Still and the novels Hero's Walk (by Robert Crane) and The Killer Thing (by Kate Wilhelm) come to mind, as do Cosmic Rape / To Marry Medusa by Theodore Sturgeon and Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke, which actually have the same "collective consciousness" angle that Disch hints at here in "Invaded by Love." Those five works all seem to be cheerleading for the human race to be dominated by an alien empire, but Disch, by likening the aliens to missionaries (like most SF writers, Disch is hostile to religion) and drug pushers, stressing the Big Brother aspects ("He [Traquair in the final pages of the story] loved his Father and did what he was told") and the starvation caused by the alien's love cult, appears to be more skeptical of alien imperialism.  While Clarke and the rest denounce Western imperialism by engaging in a somewhat hypocritical wish fulfillment fantasy in which extraterrestrial imperialism of the Earth is good, Disch (similar to how I think Wells does in War of the Worlds) denounces Western imperialism by having Earth stand in for the colonized and aliens stand in for the colonizer.  Going further than all these writers, the pessimistic Disch has the Earth be conquered and human freedom eliminated without whitewashing (or celebrating) this tragedy.

Not bad.

"Bone of Contention" (1966)

This story first was published in Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine.

In the future, apparently related to a revival of interest in the culture of Ancient Egypt, many Americans cease interring their dead relatives and instead have them preserved in lifelike poses and leave them sitting around the house.  An older couple has over half a dozen such preserved corpses in the house, and the husband is getting sick of it; he'd like to sit in the rocking chair in the den currently occupied by Uncle Maurice, who died twenty years ago!  The wife loves her (currently bloodless) blood relatives more than she loves her husband, it turns out, and murders him when he tries to have Maurice carted off to a (in this future society, gauche and declasse) Christian cemetery.  A forgiving soul, she does have her husband preserved and sat in a new armchair right next to Maurice.

This story is OK.  I guess it suits the tone of macabre jocularity cultivated by Hitchcock in his TV appearances.

*********

British 1967 edition of the collection,
which does not include "5 Eggs" or
"Three Points on the Demographic Curve"

So, I've read every story from the 1971 edition of One Hundred and One H-Bombs.  It is a worthwhile collection, and the Harry Harrison introduction is also of interest.  But this exploration of SF history was not without its costs.  In the course of reading my copy, the dried glue of the spine gave up the ghost and my 160 page book now consists of a cover and 80 loose sheets, which I will have to entomb in one of those clear plastic baggies.  Rest In Peace, One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.    

Classic SF Mysteries: Harry Harrison's 1971 introduction to Thomas Disch's One Hundred and Two H-Bombs

In his intro to the 1971 Berkley edition (S2044) of Thomas Disch's collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs, Harry Harrison makes a number of provocative claims.  For one thing he says that the New Wave writers "brought a breath of fresh air into the dusty SF establishment at that time [the early 1960s] that still has the fossil saurians shivering."  Who are these dusty dinosaurs? Arthur C. Clarke?  Robert Heinlein?  Poul Anderson?  Isaac Asimov?  I wish Harrison would name names instead of just making these vague allegations.  I suppose Harrison had his career to worry about, but now I am going to be wondering who exactly Harrison is contemptuously condemning here in the same way I am still wondering who Jack Vance denounced to that New York Times reporter and who Harlan Ellison was sneering at in the intro to The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World.

In praising Disch and the New Wave writers Harrison also asserts that they enjoy writing, that readers can sense the pleasure experienced by New Wave writers as they compose their work.  This sounds like boilerplate ad copy that the reader is free to accept or reject as he sees fit, but Harrison goes a step further, claiming that lots of SF stories are hack work produced by people who don't even like what they are doing:

There is also more than a touch of authorial pleasure in their [the New Wave writers'] writing, an ingredient that is missing from all too much of science fiction.  If a writer is not writing for his own pleasure or interest the fact is immediately obvious to all except the most cynical of editors and dimmest of readers.  The vacant interstellar spaces of SF contain far too much of this; less than an atom of interest per cubic meter.    

Who is Harrison talking about here?  What SF writers (and he seems to think there are many of them) were active in the '60s and early '70s who could be credibly accused of not enjoying their work?  Is Harrison talking about big name writers whose politics he didn't like, like (I'm guessing) Heinlein, Anderson, and E. E. Smith, who glorified businesspeople and fighting men?  Or prolific writers of straightforward adventure stories like Edmond Hamilton, E. C. Tubb, Ken Bulmer and Lin Carter?  I've read all those writers, and even when I didn't like something they did, I felt they were doing it with enthusiasm.  (Maybe I am one of the "dimmest of readers.")  If Harrison is talking about minor figures, people almost forgotten today, like John Glasby and Lionel Fanthorpe, then I think he may have been overstating his case.

Readers are invited to nominate candidates for Harrison's rogues gallery of dusty dinosaurs and uninterested hacks in the comments, based on knowledge of Harrison's other criticism or pure conjecture, in the comments.

The Crack in the Sky by Richard A. Lupoff

Only the windborne sand and aerial particles hurled into the sky by a century of industrial felons moved, and overhead no bird glided in search of hunter's prey or carrion.

Back at Christmas time I read Richard Lupoff's Sandworld.  My blog post about Sandworld hardly qualifies as a rave, but the novel wasn't so foul that it kept me from purchasing a copy of 1976's The Crack in the Sky when I spotted it on the shelves at the Omaha Half-Price Books.  The weak cover illustration apparently depicts a (symbolic?) giant bird piercing a sphere used for storing red paint.  I have to admit that for a few hours I thought the cover showed some kind of evil faucet, perhaps a representation of the easy access to narcotics hinted at in the advertising text.  When our friends in Britain and Italy printed The Crack in the Sky under variant titles they saw fit to provide it more literal cover illos.  

The Crack in the Sky is kind of like a poorly written response or pastiche of Thomas Disch's very fine 334, a fix-up from 1972: we follow several characters over interweaving plot threads and learn about a dystopian future world which is largely an extrapolation of trends that worried people during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

It is the year 2000, and the environment has been destroyed; almost all the vegetation in the world is gone, the air is full of poison and grit, the oceans are black, and all animals bigger than an insect are extinct.  The surviving human population lives under huge domes--the dome in Northern California, where most of the novel takes place, houses thirty million people and stretches for over a hundred miles, covering Bodega Bay, Mount Oso and Santa Rosa.  (This is one of those books which rewards a familiarity with California geography.  Whenever I read one of these I wish it was set in New York, where I know where everything is without resorting to a map.  334 is set in New York, of course.)

There is very little work, and the government, which controls just about everything, provides food (algae) and housing, so people have sex and use drugs and watch prolefeed TV all day.

While Lupoff addresses many issues in The Crack in the Sky, from racism and politics to religion and literature, and the novel's main bugaboo is pollution, overpopulation comes a close second. The domes are crowded.  When the domes were first built one-family homes were seized by the government and split up into tiny apartments and public schools and similar large buildings were turned into dormitories.  Twenty years later masses of people are still living on the streets.  To control the population level, the water is laced with contraceptives and very few people (one hundred people a year in the U.S., chosen specially by the master computer) are permitted to have children. When the characters aren't having banal political discussions (e. g., one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter) or engaging in tired cultural criticism (e.g., discussion of gender stereotypes and "the old, old story of gaining personal esteem by contrast with the degraded") they are imparting history lectures about how the British are to blame for overpopulation because they brought modern medicine and sanitation to places like India, or how only crazy religious fanatics and people obsessed with individual freedom could oppose mandatory birth control.  I found it hard to tell how much of this stuff Lupoff endorses, and how much was him satirizing such views.

Lupoff pads out the novel (to 200 pages!) with multitudinous references to his literary interests.  He manages to shoehorn lots of material about Edgar Rice Burroughs into the book, as well as references to George Orwell's 1984 and talk about underground comics like Yellow Dog and comics creators like R. Crumb, Greg Irons, S. Clay Wilson, and George Metzger.

The plots and characters of The Crack in the Sky are not very interesting:

• Marco Hyndal, a Chicano, after robbing a taco stand (the vendor is dismissed as a pimply-faced "petit bourgeois") is invited into the high ranks of a rising religious order that hopes to take control of the dome and repair society.  

• Jomo Silver, a black comic-book fan, leaves his group marriage (to Gonzalez, Min-yi and Jacobson) over an argument about racism and hooks up with other African-American comix aficionados and helps them put out samizdat documents for Marco's religious order.

• Oliver Gonzalez, a Chicano police lieutenant, pulls strings and saves Silver from being sent outside the dome (a death sentence) when Silver gets attacked by crooks--just like when I was attacked by bullies in junior high, the authorities make it their practice to punish all participants in a fight, including the victim!  

• Min-yi, an Asian woman, is a former social worker who is skilled at meditation, massage and lesbian sex.

• Janet Jacobson, a beautiful Jewish genius, works as an actress on the Edgar Rice Burroughs Adventure Hour and as a computer programmer. She is on the team that decodes messages from space aliens.

That's right, space aliens!  Transmissions from space that were received decades ago are finally deciphered during the period of the novel.  Perhaps having read Arthur C. Clarke, Kate Wilhelm, or maybe one of a hundred other SF writers who assure us we'd be better off if aliens were telling us what to do, the U.S. government organizes a major operation ("Project Help") to transmit a message to the aliens begging them to fix our environment.  They call in some communist scientists from the USSR and the People's Republic of Japan (!) to help; this gives Lupoff a chance to put into the mouths of the Marxist scientists the contempt for the common people and electoral government we find so often in SF, and for the US eggheads to agree:

[Communist scientist:]"Your mayor appears to be nothing but a buffoon.  But in your system, even a buffoon is allowed to stand for public office.  Tell me, do they ever win?"

[American scientist:]"Do they ever lose?"

Before Project Help can really get underway Marco, Jomo and their religious order buddies attack the science facility and murder most of the scientists; Janet survives and goes abroad to help the commies with the Project.  America becomes divided into two hostile camps, the pro-Project establishment and a powerful insurgent faction that says the Project is a waste of resources that won't work anyway.  When it looks like the anti-Project voters are going to win the presidential election the pro-Project incumbent prez cancels the election and civil war erupts.  The novel ends with a fire destroying the Northern California dome and killing everybody in it.

The Crack in the Sky is not very good. We've all seen domed cities, pollution, overpopulation, group marriages, planned economies, etc. before, and Lupoff doesn't add anything new that I can see to these well-worn widgets and doodads from the SF toolbox.  He doesn't have the kind of engaging and distinctive writing style that a Wolfe or a Lee or a Disch or a Vance has that lets him get away with working with elements we've seen a hundred times already, and he doesn't give us characters or a plot worth following.

The best part of The Crack in the Sky is how it opened my eyes to some underground comics I had never heard of before.  I know Lupoff's fiction has enthusiastic supporters (mostly for two books I haven't read, Space War Blues and Sword of the Demon, apparently) but so far I have found his work as a critic much more valuable than his work as a novelist.

Unless you are some kind of pollution and overpopulation obsessive, I'd suggest avoiding The Crack in the Sky.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entertaining.

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

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

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

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

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

Cover illustrates some other story

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last of the Novelets: Blish and Clarke

At this here blog we've been reading Novelets of Science Fiction, a paperback anthology of early 1950s stories published first in 1963 (I have the 1967 printing.)  In a spirit of friendly competition we will be crowning the writer of the best novelet, and so far Poul Anderson is in the lead.  But we have high hopes for today's contenders, James Blish, my fellow Jersey boy and Rutgers alum, and Arthur C. Clarke, writer, explorer, and TV and film icon.

"Testament of Andros" by James Blish (1953)

If you've been following my investigation of Novelets of Science Fiction you won't be surprised to learn, despite claims on the front and back cover of the book, that "Testament of Andros" appeared in a paperback collection of Blish stories in 1961 entitled So Close to Home.

"Testament of Andros" is the craziest and most experimental of the stories in Novelets of Science Fiction.  It consists of five first-person narratives, each told by a male with a name that is a variant of "Andrew," and each in part about the narrator's relationship with a female whose name is a variant of "Margaret."  These narratives all take place on an alternate Earth (among other things, it has 12 continents and its version of Wagner wrote an opera titled Tristan and Messalina) which is devastated by a solar flare that kills the majority of life on the planet.

Each of the stories details human unhappiness, and most of them feature some kind of injustice or depravity.  A scientist believes a grad student is taking credit for his research and having an affair with his wife, so he murders the student.  A working class orphan grows up to be a rapist and murderer and dies in prison when the solar flare hits.  An eight-year-old child who fantasizes about being a space hero tries to come to terms with his unhappy family and school life as well as the solar flare.  Some of the narratives take a dim view of religion, suggesting that organized religion has failed to comfort and guide people, while one of them is written by an insane person who claims to have seen God and has started his own religion.

This is a good "literary" story that reminded me of the kind of experimental work we associate with the New Wave of ten or more years later.  It tackles religion, psychology, gender relations, the family, economics, all that heavy stuff.

"The Possessed" by Arthur C. Clarke (1953)

This six page story in which Clarke ponders why lemmings sometimes jump to their deaths en masse is gimmicky and forgettable.   It was included in a 1956 paperback, Reach for Tomorrow.

A non-corporeal life form, parasitic in nature, is floating through space, looking for an intelligent species to serve as its host.  After millions of fruitless years of searching it lands on Earth during the Age of Reptiles.  With no intelligent hosts available, the creature opts for a desperate expedient: it will split in two parts, one portion remaining on Earth, the other half continuing the search.  Should the space-going half find an attractive host species somewhere else in the universe, it will return with the good news.  The two halves agree on a meeting place, which the Earthbound portion of the creature will return to periodically.

The Earthbound portion of the alien colonizes the minds of small mammals in hopes they will evolve intelligence.  Instead, they evolve into lemmings.   Millions of years in non-intelligent hosts takes a toll, and the parasite creature grows weaker and weaker until it is essentially dead.  The lemmings, however, retain an instinctive need to periodically return to the meeting place, an instinct which overrides any thought of safety, and the fact that the meeting place is now underwater.

This story is inoffensive, so I would grade it "OK" or "acceptable," but it has zero feeling and no characters or plot--it is just an odd speculation.

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It's time to rate the eight "superlative" stories found in Novelets of Science Fiction and crown a King of the Novelets!

James Blish put in a good showing, but I have to judge him our rummer up--which means Poul Anderson, with his story, "The Chapter Ends," is King of the Novelets!  "The Chapter Ends" has multiple interesting SF ideas, emotional content, characters who make big decisions, and memorable images, and actually made me consider what I would do and how I would feel in the situations he describes.  So, congrats to Poul.

Simak and Clarke's stories are sort of one note idea tales, lacking in plot or feeling, and so they bring up the rear.  Frank Belknap Long's "Night Fear" is also vulnerable to the charge that it is just an idea and not really a story, but I found the idea interesting and I think Long's piece had some added human drama.

Our three violent adventure stories, by Del Rey, Lesser and de Camp, make up the middle of the pack.  Each has its own charm; Del Rey has his ponderings about politics and free will, Lesser his hard-boiled stylings, and De Camp has his mediocre jokes.

Here are our rankings:

Winner                        Poul Anderson              "The Chapter Ends"
Runner Up                  James Blish                   "The Testament of Andros"
3rd place                     Frank Belknap Long     "Night Fear"
4th place                     Lester Del Rey              "I Am Tomorrow"
5th place                     Milton Lesser                "'A' as in Android"
6th place                     L. Sprague de Camp     "Ultrasonic God"
7th place                     Clifford Simak              "...And the Truth Shall Make You Free"
8th place                     Arthur C. Clarke           "The Possessed"  

Novelets of Science Fiction is a good collection; none of the stories were bad.  A worthwhile purchase for those, like me, interested in 1950s SF!