1970 stories by Clifford Simak, Ed Bryant, and George Zebrowski & Jack Dann

While working on my blog posts about Bob Shaw's 1973 collection of short stories Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, I flipped through the March 1970 issue of If and became intrigued by a story by Clifford Simak, "The Thing in the Stone," because it was accompanied by a moody illustration of a bipedal dinosaur.  Like everybody, I love dinosaurs.  So today we are looking at this story and two others in that issue of If, which also features debate about race and IQ in the letters column and an ad in which Tony Curtis offers you a button reading "IQ" (which stands for "I Quit") if you quit smoking cigarettes.

"The Thing in the Stone" by Clifford Simak

"The Thing in the Stone" was apparently a hit with readers, coming in second to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story "Ill Met in Lankhmar" in the voting for the 1971 Hugo for Best Novella.  It was included in Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1971 and has appeared in many anthologies and collections and been translated into six foreign languages.

This is one of those pastoral stories about country folk in the Wisconsin hulls who sit on porches and look at the hills and gossip about foxes and chickens and moonshining.  Wallace Daniels has lived in the area only three years as the story begins.  We learn that he likes climbing the hills and looking for fossils, but he sees more than fossils on these daily outings--he sees prehistoric plants and animals in the flesh!  In a flashback we learn that he developed the ability to see the past after a car accident (which wiped out his family) injured his head and "rearranged" something in his brain.  As he hikes, this ability will kick in and shut down at random intervals, enabling him to walk the countryside some apparently randomly determined time in the distant past, but not really interact with it; photographs taken in the past do not develop, he can't bring samples back to the 20th-century, and the dinosaurs and other prehistoric fauna can't see or smell him.

That car accident gave Daniels still more powers--he can listen in on the telepathic communications of aliens!  In a cave in a cliff face, accessible by climbing a tree, Daniels senses an alien intelligence embedded deep inside the rock which he suspects to be the crew of a space ship which crashed tens or hundreds of millions of years ago and was buried in the mud that this stone then was.  When an envious neighbor traps Daniels in the cave our hero tries to communicate with the alien and succeeds in holding a conversation with making a friend of not the actual space traveller trapped in the stone but a lesser creature loyal to it, a creature of pure energy that plays a role in alien society similar to that of a dog in human society.  This space hound has an intelligence similar to that of a human, but is a "lowly" creature in the  hierarchy of super smart alien society--it has been waiting here for the alien to somehow achieve freedom for millions of years.

Daniels escapes the cave when his power kicks in and he finds himself at a time before the cliff and cave had formed (luckily, his power always materializes him at ground level, not up in the air even if the ancient landscape was at a lower elevation than it will be in the 1900s.)  He is on the shore of an ancient ocean, at the time of the dawn of land-based life, there are no trees or grass, just slime and little amphibious creatures Simak doesn't describe.  An alien space ship appears, and drops a sphere into the shallows of the prehistoric sea; Daniels can "hear" the alien authorities bidding a farewell to an alien criminal who is being left imprisoned on the primitive Earth ("beyond the farthest track of galactic intercourse") for unspeakably horrible crimes--this is the alien entombed alive in the Wisconsin stone, beloved of the space hound despite its evil.

I guess the fact that the trapped alien is some kind of interstellar Mengele is our twist ending.  Our happy ending is provided by the fact that the space hound is going to be Daniels's bosom buddy--both lost their loved ones to some kind of tragedy but neither need ever be lonely again.

The big theme of this story seems to be the unity of all life, and the responsibility of living things for each other, even across borders of species and regardless of considerations of justice and worthiness.  Daniels feels a sense of duty regarding his cows and hogs, who rely on him for food and shelter, and when he is in the cave, in danger of dying of cold or thirst, he is thinking about the poor trapped alien and his own poor unfed livestock as much as he is about his own skin.  (The space hound notes the similarity of this devotion to his own devotion to the trapped alien.)  Daniels, who has no interest in hunting and doesn't own a gun, refuses to try to kill the fox who steals his chickens, and doesn't report to the cops the life-threatening trick his jerk of a neighbor played on him.  Like the aliens who don't execute a perpetrator of unfathomable atrocities and the space dog who loves his master despite his crimes, Daniels forgives those who trespass against him.

This story is not bad, though the conversations and descriptions feel a little long-winded at times and of course the powers Daniels has are pretty nonsensical.  "The Thing in the Stone" is a good example of the "pastoralism" for which Simak is famous, and it lacks the sort of bitter complaints we sometimes get from Simak about city life and human shortcomings that can get on my nerves.

"In the Silent World" by Ed Bryant

"In the Silent World" doesn't appear to have been a hit; besides If, it has only ever appeared as a bonus story in an Italian collection of Sterling Lanier stories.

Julie is a nineteen-year old college girl from a small town in Georgia and a telepath who can read minds.  She is lonely because she has never met another telepath.  One day during a lecture on Baudelaire she receives a mental message--another telepath, a young man named Ted, has found her!  After class she walks across campus to meet him, already thinking of what their married life will be like--who else could she fall in love with and marry besides the only other telepath in the world?  Especially since with her mind reading power she knows how selfish and horny all other men are!  But when she meets Ted she sees an obstacle to her new found happiness--Ted is black!

This is more of an idea than a story--it doesn't have anything to say about racism or interracial relationships or the black experience in America or anything like that, it just points out that people are racist as a twist ending--but it is acceptable filler, I guess.

"Traps" by George Zebrowski and Jack Dann

The galactic government is almost ready to OK colonization of an as yet unnamed planet, but they need a specimen of all the planet's land animals first, and one beast has so far eluded captured--the greycat!  Rysling is hired to capture one of these elusive beasts, and after landing on the planet sends out his remote controlled robot cage to snag the feline.  (Remember when J. Jonah Jameson remotly guided a robot designed to catch Spider-Man?  That was really something, wasn't it?)

The cat, it turns out, has psychic powers and somehow part of its soul enters Rysling's body and part of Rysling's soul enters the cat's body.  Not realizing the limitations of a human body, the cat psyche in Rysling's body tries to jump off a cliff, breaking the human's neck.  Meanwhile, the surviving portion of Rysling's psyche enjoys being in a cat body and quickly forgets its former human life altogether.

(Science fiction people love cats!)

OK, I guess.

"Traps" would later be translated into Italian and French (it appeared in the French edition of Galaxy) and was included in a 21st-century collection of Zebrowski and Dann collaborations titled Decimated. 

**********

These stories are a little underwhelming, but not actually bad.  (I'd have read the Poul Anderson story in this issue of If but the Poul Anderson estate requested that it be excluded from the file at the internet archive.) 

In our next episode, stories from SF magazines published in 1971.

Four more 1970s stories by Barry Malzberg

It's time to explore the Dream Quarter (or Dream Quarters, you know, whatever) with our Virgil, Barry Malzberg (or Malzverg--you know who I mean!)

"State of the Art" (1974)

The fourth story in the 1976 collection Down Here in the Dream Quarter is "State of the Art," which originally appeared in New Dimensions IV and would later be included in the 2013 collection The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  In the Afterward, Malzberg tells us this exercise is a deliberate pastiche of Robert Silverberg's famous "Good News From the Vatican."

Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, William Shakespeare, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the narrator, or simulacra or representations thereof, regularly meet at 1:00 at a Paris sidewalk cafe in the future or a simulation thereof.  Hemingway gets run over by a street car, Shakespeare is poisoned by a vengeful waiter (or maybe just gets sick) and dies, and then the authorities cart the writers all off to prison.

"State of the Art" strikes me as show-offy and self-indulgent and ultimately sterile. Maybe we are supposed to hunt the text for quotes from the luminaries who inhabit the story (Pound's only line is "like petals on a wet. black bough"), but in the Afterword Malzberg assures us the story is serious and not a frivolous light piece, so I guess it is supposed to be a warning that technology is bad for culture and a lament that society does not appreciate writers. Unconvincing and boring.  Have to give a thumbs down to this thing, which reminded me a little of a horrible off-off Broadway play I once endured in which Mae West and Billy the Kid (in the afterlife, mind you) debated the meaning of existence.

"Isaiah" (1973)

In the first installment of our look at Down Here in the Dream Quarter we learned that Malzberg was angry about the way that editors Jack Dann and George Zebrowski had rejected "A Galaxy Called Rome."  Well, in the Afterword to "Isaiah," we learn of another instance in which Jack Dann (allegedly) screwed over Barry!  As Barry tells it, Dann commissioned a 2,000 word piece from our hero for Wandering Stars: An Anthology of Jewish Fantasy and Science Fiction, he delivered "Isaiah,"and Dann rejected it, complaining that he wished it was longer!  In 1981 Dann made it up to Malzberg by including "Isaiah," eight years after it had been printed in Fantastic, in the sequel to Wandering Stars, More Wandering Stars, along with a second Malzberg story.

Top Billing!  Take that, Jack Dann!

Reading "Isaiah," I got a strong sense of deja vu--had I read this before? After all, I do own a copy of that issue of Fantastic with the sexy comic book witch (hubba hubba) on it.  But, no, what "Isaiah" reminded me of was "Bearing Witness."  Both stories include detailed descriptions of religious authorities smoking cigarettes, both stories mention "the Great Snake," and in both stories a guy goes to visit clergymen to ask them questions about their faith, only to find them distracted by more secular, political matters.  In "Bearing Witness" the narrator goes to a Catholic Church and talks to the chain-smoking Monsignor about the Apocalypse, then, after being sent away brusquely, he has the hallucination that he is the Second Coming of Christ.  In "Isaiah" the narrator goes to visit various people learned in Jewish religious traditions (first a Chasid, then a student rabbi at a Reform congregation in Teaneck, and finally a secularized and alienated Jew at what Malzberg calls "the Ethical Culture Society"), and after they have dismissed his questions about the Messiah out of hand, he returns to report to a man on a throne, I guess God himself, to report his findings.  God (?) climbs off his throne, stubs out his cigarette, and ventures forth.

I laughed out loud when I realized how Malzberg had reworked this material to produce another salable story.  Oh, Barry, you scamp, what are we going to do with you?  (Don't worry, we still love you--we still love The Kinks even though "All Day and All of the Night" and "You Really Got Me" are almost the same song, after all.)

I actually think this story is a little more interesting than "Bearing Witness," being longer, more audacious, having more characters and being about real specific places like Teaneck, New Jersey and The New York Society for Ethical Culture, whose massive building on Eighth Avenue I used to walk past regularly, back in my late and lamented New York days, when I would spend hour after hour in Central Park looking at girls and birds instead of hour after hour behind the wheel of a car looking at the trash and wrecked vehicles on the side of Route 71 (or as people here insist on calling it, "I-71.")  It looks like I graded "Bearing Witness" "acceptable," but "Isaiah" earns a "marginally good" score.

Afterword to "On the Campaign Trail"

We read "On the Campaign Trail" when we immersed ourselves in futuristic evil, evilometer in hand, by reading Future Corruption, a volume compiled by controversial anthologist Roger Elwood.  In the Afterword to the story here Malzberg claims that "On the Campaign Trail" was prophetic and moans that his prophecy was unrecognized: "The writer in America functions in obscurity; how much more obscure the domain and audience of the science fiction writer, who, the more serious he becomes, the more resistant he finds the audience."  I wonder if Malzberg is singing the same tune now that every "with it" person is expected to know who is having sex with who in the latest episode of the zombie show and the dragon show and in the killer clown movie.

Malzberg likes to pose puzzles, and he gives us one in the second para of this Afterword: "...the only two worthwhile national figures in American political life in my time have, I feel, totally betrayed me and all of us."  Who can he mean?  Get out the Venn diagrams!

It's not hard to come up with two national level politicians who were left-wing college professor types (the kind of pols I'm guessing a person like Malzberg might identify with), guys like George McGovern and Hubert Humphrey, but does Malzberg have a reason to feel betrayed by McGovern and Humphrey?  It seems impossible that Malzberg could have ever admired vulgar and brutish Texan LBJ, and as for America's photogenic royal family, the Kennedys, I don't know why Malzberg would feel betrayed by Robert, doubt Malzberg cares about Chappaquiddick, and I don't think many Democrats hold their matinee idol JFK responsible for the Bay of Pigs fiasco or the Vietnam War.  A mystery!

"Report to Headquarters" (1975)

Like "State of the Art," this one first appeared in one of Silverberg's New Dimensions anthologies and then was included in 2013's The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg.

"Report to Headquarters" is in the form of a glossary of terms used by the X'Thi, natives of a gaseous alien planet, sent by explorer Leonard Coul from that planet, upon which he is stuck because of a crash and perhaps an attack from the panicked (but now friendly) X'Thi.  Through the glossary entries Coul describes the native's cosmology and metaphysics, engages in a little self-aggrandizement, and begs for help.  Time is running out, soon the X'Thi's major religious festival (a sort of sex orgy followed by a mass pilgrimage) will take place and then they won't be able to help Coul.  How they are helping Coul now is not clear--Coul has to stay in the disabled ship because he can't breathe planet's atmosphere, and he communicates with the natives, whom he can barely see in the swirling gasses, which they in fact resemble, via viewscreens.  We readers have to assume there is a chance there are no X'Thi and Coul is another of Malzberg's many insane astronauts.

Not a bad story--I laughed at one of the jokes, and a digressive glossary is a good idea for an experimental literary story.  In his Afterword, Malzberg tells us "Report to Headquarters" is a sort of pastiche or homage to Nabokov's Pale Fire, which he says he "reveres."  I haven't read Pale Fire myself, though I am a Nabokov fan; maybe this is a signal it is time to tackle it?  Malzberg tells us he thinks nobody has ever discerned the point of "Report to Headquarters," and I would not venture to claim I grokked it, either.

Afterword to "Streaking"

The next story in Down in the Dream Quarter is "Streaking," which I read in 2015 in the aforementioned Future Corruption and didn't really get.  This afterword isn't helping me much.  Malzberg explains what streaking is (mansplains?) because, he says, today's technology causes fads to arise and be forgotten very quickly, and we readers probably don't recall the phenomenon.  He makes some weak jokes about Watergate (Nixon should have streaked, he says) and that's it.  I don't usually grade the ancillary material, but I think I'm giving a thumbs down to this Afterword.

"Making It to Gaxton Falls on the Red Planet in the Year of Our Lord" (1974)

This story made its debut in Nova 4, and then in the 1990s Ursula K. LeGuin included it in The Norton Book of Science Fiction: North American Science Fiction, 1960-1990, a book of SF inflicted upon college students. As Thomas Disch relates in The Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, LeGuin employed a number of editorial strategies to create in The Norton Book of Science Fiction a volume that would promote and cement in the minds of college students a vision of science fiction as a body of work with a feminist and leftist character.  One such strategy was to cherry pick stories by men which reflected LeGuin's own agendas, even if they were neither very representative of the author's work as a whole or examples of his better work.  Disch relates how LeGuin wanted a story of his which Disch was not very proud of, and would accept no substitute, and he also dismisses the Malzberg story we talk about today as weak, not "mordant and funny" like better specimens of Barry's oeuvre.  Let's see if "Making It to Gaxton Falls on the Red Planet in the Year of Our Lord" delivers the pinko goods.  

Our narrator and a young woman, Betsy, inhabitants of the year 2115, on Bastille Day, visit a recreation of a 1974 American town built as a tourist attraction on Mars.  Our narrator moans that Mars has become a tourist trap!  He also lets us know that Venus is suffering terrible unemployment!

The fake 20th-century town is like a carnival, with barkers enticing people into tents. (Dare I point out the contrast between Ray Bradbury, optimistic Christian from a small Middle Western town, who loved loved loved carnivals, and Malzberg, urban Jewish pessimist, who seems to think carnivals are disgusting?)  Betsy and the narrator visit an attraction billed as "the iconoclast."  Inside the tent a person (human or robot? the narrator wonders), representing a contrarian of 1974, argues that the space program must be abandoned, explaining that it wastes money that should be spent on "our cities" and "the underprivileged" and distracts people from their real problems on Earth and in their own souls.  "We won't be ready for space until we've cleaned up our own planet, understood our own problem."

Betsy and the narrator argue with the iconoclast, and then, on the hallucinatory final page of the four-page story, the narrator and the iconoclast describe radically divergent histories of the post 1970s space program, the iconoclast one in which Man never colonized space because of 1980s civil unrest and the narrator the one in which the story is (apparently) set, in which Mars, Venus and the moons of Jupiter were colonized in the late 20th and the 21st centuries.  Then the narrator is hypnotized or has his consciousness sucked out of his body and placed in the iconoclast's shell or something--he comes to believe the iconoclast's pessimistic vision and finds himself in the iconoclast's place, arguing to people that the space program must be abandoned.

While I agree with Disch that this story is earnest instead of funny, says boring goop that lefties say all the time, and does not represent Malzberg at the top of his game, I still think it is a pretty good story, whether or not you share Malzberg's pessimism about the space program (Betsy makes the standard pro-space exploration arguments about as effectively as the iconoclast makes the standard anti- ones.)  In the Afterword, Malzberg tells us writing the story was "profoundly satisfying" because for the first time in print he was "speaking in his own voice."  He compares himself to Harlan Ellison, John Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis and Norman Mailer, suggesting he now knows the attractions of writing in the confessional mode and addressing issues and the audience directly.  One wonders if Malzberg is happy that our society (as reflected in political priorities and public discourse, at least) has abandoned the romance of space exploration and instead focuses on diversity matters, redistribution schemes, and environmental issues.  (As for myself, I'm with Betsy--"But don't you think that exploration is an important human need?  We'll never solve our problems on Earth after all so we might as well voyage outward where the solutions might be.")

**********

These stories, and even more so Malzberg's Afterwords, serve as a window onto Malzberg's recurring themes and interests and the 1970s milieu in which he wrote them.  Definitely recommended for the Malzberg aficionado--if there's a Malzberg otaku in your life, keep Down in the Dream Quarter in mind this holiday season!

Three mid-70s stories by Barry N. Malzberg

Via Ebay, I recently acquired the Lake Blackshear Regional Library of Americus, Georgia's withdrawn copy of Barry N. Malzberg's 1976 hardcover collection Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  On the jacket are quotes from Harlan Ellison ("Barry Malzberg is...a better writer than I am") and Brian Aldiss (who sees Malzberg as "a master of sex and depression") which would be reason enough to crack yet again the severely cracked spine of this harried and tattered volume, even if I hadn't, somehow or other, slowly been evolving into some kind of Malzberg obsessive. Today, four pieces from this collection!

"Introduction: A Short One for the Boys in the Back Room" (1976)

Malzberg starts the six-and-a-half page intro, dated "New Jersey: January 1976," to Down Here in the Dream Quarter by describing how he temporarily left off using 1950s issues of Astounding as bedtime reading and absorbed nine ("or perhaps ten") biographies of literary icons ("Ross and Tom and John and Ernest and James and John again and Sinclair"--he just gives the first names, mystifying you or flattering your erudition, though in the next paragraph there are more clues--for example, the James is apparently not Joyce or Boswell but Thurber,) only to find them depressingly similar tales of unhappiness--lives of rejection, failed marriages, and alcohol abuse.

Barry then moves on to describing the start of his own career as a writer and how he got into science fiction (at the same time telling us that his SF career is over--don't believe him!)  This account is both entertaining and interesting and contains numerous memorable tidbits, e.g., "the single happiest moment" of his life was when he learned he had made his first real SF sale, "We're Coming Through the Window" to Frederick Pohl at Galaxy, and that when he wrote his breakthrough story "Final War" (original title, when he was shopping it to literary magazines and slicks like The Atlantic Monthly, Kenyon Review, Playboy and Esquire, "Shoe a Troop of Horse") he "did not have Vietnam at all in mind."  In our last episode of this here blog we saw that Malzberg identified with A. E. van Vogt as a fellow sui generis writer--in this book Malzberg identifies with J. G. Ballard because both are (he says) symbols of a certain type of writing:

I never expected to be a major science fiction writer let alone the figure I have become.  (Which if not "major" is certainly that in terms of visibility as best symbol of a certain kind of writing in my field in my country just as J. G. Ballard occupies the same role in England.)      

We'll let you decide if both these self-identifications, written within six months of each other, can be reconciled.

A valuable document for all of you (us?) students of the sage of Teaneck!

"A Galaxy Called Rome" (1975)

This famous story, the foundation of Malzberg's novel Galaxies, which I read back in 2011 in a 1998 anthology of classic novels of space travel and was my first exposure to Malzberg's work, begins by invoking seminal SF editor John W. Campbell, Jr, dead four years when "A Galaxy Called Rome" was published.  (Campbell died on July 11, 1971, within a week of your humble blogger's birth.)

The first line of "A Galaxy Called Rome" is "This is not a novelette but a series of notes," and Malzberg explains that the novelette will "lean heavily upon" two posthumously published editorials by Campbell, in which Campbell posits the existence of a "black galaxy," the product of a neutron star's collapse, a thing with such gravitational power that it is invisible and can constrain not only "light itself but space and time." The novelette Malzberg proposes writing would be about a space ship trapped in this black galaxy, named after Rome by Campbell because all roads lead to it (though none lead away.)

In note form, interspersed with draft fragments of important scenes, we get the outline of the story of ship captain and pilot Lena Thomas, who is the sole waking person on a ship that ends up in the black galaxy, and who thus lives for thousands of years, going insane.  Malzberg's "notes" are full of specific criticism of hard SF ("At this point in the story great gobs of physics, astronomical and mathematical data would have to be incorporated") as well as criticism of fiction in general ("It is to be noted that putting this conventional viewpoint in the character of a woman will give another of those necessary levels of irony with which the story must abound if it is to be anything other than a freak show...irony will give it legitimacy.")

"A Galaxy Called Rome" seems, to me, to be about the impossibility of real knowledge, as well as a reflection on the uselessness of science fiction and perhaps literature in general.  No information can leave the black galaxy, a reminder of the inability of one human being to know another, to transmit information, or to truly know anything with confidence.  Lena Thomas talks to the rest of the crew and passengers, all of whom are in suspended animation and cannot hear her--she is talking for herself, for own psychological benefit, and isn't this like the writer, who writes not knowing if his work will even be published, much less if others will read and understand it? Malzberg muses that SF's pretensions makes little sense--what is the point of speculating about what happens on other planets or in different times when what goes on in one's own town, much less the town one over, is just as unknowable?  ("...it occurred to me that Ridgefield Park would forever be as mysterious as the stars...." Why consider the "sound of pulsars" when "the music of the paddock area at Aqueduct racetrack" is just as, or even more, strange and exciting?  Isn't writing or reading about riding in a star ship just as interesting as writing or reading about riding in a New York City subway car?

Image from Amazon.co.uk--Malzberg's career is plagued with typos!

"A Galaxy Called Rome" is characteristic of Malzberg--it's about being a writer, it shows respect for SF at the same time it calls SF's traditional attitudes into question, it suggests that man's problems will go with him to the stars because those problems are spiritual and psychological, it mentions Freud and the Aqueduct and frustrating sex--but it is better than average for Malzberg because it has more clever turns of phrase and more interesting images per page than most of Malzberg's work, and at about 20 pages it is a good length, neither overstaying its welcome and feeling like it is bloated with filler nor coming off like a half-baked trifle dashed off for a check.  I really recommend this one, not just to Malzberg fans (who of course need to read it) but to people curious about Malzberg who haven't tried him yet, or those who have read one or a few other Malzberg stories and been irritated or unimpressed; this is top shelf Malzberg.

In his Afterword Malzberg tells us he wrote the story for an anthology called Faster Than Light and that it was rejected by the editors, whom he does not name (they are George Zebrowski and Jack Dann.)  Malzberg, who usually says sympathetic things about editors and often expresses his gratitude to them (in fact, Down Here in the Dream Quarter is dedicated to a list of eleven editors) tells us that he is still angry about this rejection; I think Malzberg realizes this is some of his best work.  "A Galaxy Called Rome" first appeared, then, in F&SF, and it has been reprinted many many times, often in books with titles that include the word "Best" or "Top" or "Favorite" or "Great."  (Zebrowski and Dann blew it on this one, but I suppose they made amends in 1998--they were editors, along with Pamela Sargent, of that three book anthology that contains Galaxies!)

"Thirty-Seven Northwest" (1976)

This story, if isfdb is to be believed, has only ever appeared in this book, so you are just going to have to go buy a copy, aren't you?

Our narrator, who is also named Thomas, is an explorer walking around on the surface of Jupiter, in a massively heavy suit which allows him to survive and move in the tremendous gravity of that planet.  He does whatever the people back at base tell him to do, setting up cameras, looking this way and that, etc.  This is all pretty well written in hard SF style, interspersed with Malzbergian descriptions of the narrator's fears about the deadly planet and his worries that stem from the fact that he was supposed to be merely one component of a three-member team, and his comrades, for some reason, have not accompanied him.

At the end of the seven-page story the people at base order him to remove his helmet; when he protests that he will die they threaten to leave him on Jupiter forever.  Then we learn the shocking truth: everybody on this mission is a child!  Why or how this happened is not explored.

A decent piece of work.

In his Afterword to this tale Malzberg compares it to Golding's Lord of the Flies.  He also says that "What all post-technological cultures share is the absolute brutality with which they treat their children, all their children.  (I don't think most other cultures were or are any better but it is this one I know well enough to generalize.)"  This is puzzling. First of all, do people normally think of 1976 USA as "post-technological?"  Does Malzberg mean "post-industrial?"  Secondly, it seems obvious that, compared to most other places and times, that post-World War II America, and the West broadly, coddles and pampers kids.  What "absolute brutality" is he talking about?

Malzberg also uses the afterword to promote Kris Neville, whom he considers "underrated," and to list stories of Neville's which he believes "articulate" the alleged brutality of which Malzberg speaks "with visionary skill."  The Neville stories he lists are "Betty-ann," "From the Government Printing Office," and "Overture;" I have read some Neville but none of these.  Joachim Boaz read the fix-up novel of which "Betty-ann" and "Overture" are a part, and wrote about it in 2015--check his thoughts out at the link.

"Sedan Deville" (1974)

Here's something you maybe didn't know about our pal Barry--he loves cars!  Cadillacs, in fact!  I'm always a little surprised to learn that a smart and/or educated person loves cars or sports, but I hear it all the time, so maybe I should stop being surprised by it.

"Sedan Deville," which first saw light of day in F&SF, consists of letters written to a literary agent by Karl Delvecchio, New Jersey auto mechanic!  Delvecchio writes ungrammatically and refers to himself in the third person with regularity, but he is a published writer, having sold stories to a failing SF magazine, Terrific Science Fiction.  I know you are disappointed about this grease monkey's name, but dry your eyes--the editor of Terrific Science Fiction is named Mr. Walter Thomas!

Anyway, the letters reveal that Delvecchio's stories are all about Cadillacs; in fact, he claims that he is simply the messenger of the Cadillacs, who tell him their stories as he works on them.  He is contacting the agent because Terrific has folded and he desires help finding new markets, but the agent's demands for reading fees and criticism of his stories (the agent suggests he show range by writing about some other make of car) anger him.  The letters conclude with Delvecchio's assertion that the energy crisis is a plot to murder the Cadillacs!

I laughed at some of the jokes in this story, so it gets a thumbs up.  Maybe nowadays the story would be pilloried because it could be interpreted as making fun of a choleric working-class ethnic who may be an immigrant.  It would have been safer to name the mechanic "Thomas," Barry, and reserve "Delvecchio" for the kind but doomed editor of Terrific!

In the Afterword Malzberg talks about the Cadillacs he has owned and describes how each died on him in dramatic circumstances.  (Every day brings new reasons to be glad I drive a Toyota.)  He also points out that when some unnamed "commentator" learned he drove a Cadillac this "enraged" individual listed Malzberg "near the top of the Exploiting Class"--a foreshadowing of the feminist attack on Malzberg in 2013?  No matter how leftist you may be, there's always another leftist ready to slide the knife into you for the least infraction of their ever-shifting creed.

**********

Worthwhile stuff!

When Brian Doherty of Reason magazine reviewed the 2013 Malzberg collection The Very Best of Barry N. Malzberg he noted that it had typos on every page.  Down Here in the Dream Quarter is not nearly as bad as that, but poor Barry was not well-served by the editors at Doubleday back in the '70s.  When he cites the Neville stories, "From the Government Printing Office" is listed as "In the Government Printing Office" and even though the book's title is printed correctly on the title page, the header on every page that has one reads, nonsensically, "DOWN HERE IN THE DREAM QUARTERS." Sad!

1981 stories by Vonda N. McIntyre, Gordon Eklund, and Jack Dann & Barry Malzberg

On November 2nd the wife and I went to a flea market held in the 4-H building at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.  Many vendors had box after box of romance novels, and box after box of Westerns, but one vendor had about a dozen boxes of SF paperbacks.  My poor wife waited patiently while I went through each box; unfortunately, almost all the books were recent, less than 25 years old.  I purchased only a single book, 1981's New Dimensions 12, edited by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg.  (Randall's introduction seems to suggest that she did all the editing, and Silverberg's name is on the cover to help sell copies.)  I bought it because Barry Malzberg and Vonda McIntyre's names appeared on the contents page, and today I read their contributions, as well as a story by Gordon Eklund.

"Elfleda" by Vonda N. McIntyre

I was impressed by McIntyre's early '70s story "Only at Night," a primary reason why I purchased New Dimensions 12.

Through elaborate surgical techniques unscrupulous scientists have recreated mythical creatures like centaurs, unicorns, and mer-people, apparently by grafting the torsos of human accident victims to the bodies of animals.  These half-human, half-animal creatures are kept in a park, and are periodically visited by normal humans who use them as sex slaves.

The sixteen page story is a first person narrative by a centaur, Achilleus, and its theme (beyond callousness and cruel exploitation) is disappointment and unrealized desire. Achilleus is in love with a unicorn, Elfleda, a human woman whose torso is attached to a quadruped body and has a horn implanted in her skull.  Elfleda has always rejected Achilleus's advances; his love is unrequited.  Most of the creatures in the park are obedient to their human masters (due to some kind of brain implants or something) but Elfleda is allowed her freedom, and doesn't have to participate in the orgies organized by the normal humans.

One day the "creators" trick Elfleda, using an unwitting boy as bait, and try to capture her with nets and ropes.  Achilleus tries to rescue her, and breaks his leg in the process. As per time honored equestrian tradition, Achilleus is euthenized as Elfleda is led away.

"Only at Night" was also about the callousness of people towards their unfortunate fellows, but while I found that story powerful, "Elfleda" is just OK.  Despite the strange sexual content of the story (for example, Achilleus and Elfleda have two sets of genitals each, their human ones and the set from their animal bodies, which permits some outre erotic gymnastics) there is nothing about the story that makes it stand out to me. "Elfleda" gets a passing grade, but I didn't find it special.

"Elfleda" is afforded an unmemorable illustration by Wendy Rose.

Gene Wolfe wrote two stories on a similar theme and topic, 1979's "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholos" and 1981's "The Woman the Unicorn Loved," which I read over seven years ago, according to my notes, and do not remember very well.  My notes suggest I wasn't thrilled with them, either.

"Pain and Glory" by Gordon Eklund

I gave Gordon Eklund's novel A Trace of Dreams a marginally negative review, and I described his story "Home Again, Home Again," as "lame" and "poor."  But as people who watch sports might say, let's give him another swing at the plate, or chance at bat, or something.

In "Elfleda" we had a woman writing a first person narrative in the voice of a man, and here we have a male writer writing a first person narrative in the voice of a 16-year old girl.

Kelly Cohen of San Francisco is the youngest of the seven children of Isaac Cohen.  The Cohens have the power to relieve the pain and anxiety of people they touch.  Kelly regularly visits the poor neighborhoods and eases the pain of a catalog of unfortunates: the 12-year old black girl with a birth defect who is molested by a 14-year-old boy, the gullible hippies who are trying to live off the grid and are adherents of the guru Matthew Samson (does that rhyme with "Charles Manson?"), the old woman who is so poor she eats dog food, a blind man, a deaf girl, a drug addict.

Isaac Cohen is dying, and his kids, among them a high-powered lawyer, a sociology professor, and a Berkeley student, gather round.  (The Berkeley student, an aspiring poetess, is always urging Kelly to lose her virginity.)  Isaac tells Kelly the story of how his Ukrainian village of psychic Jews was massacred by the SS.  Kelly learns that many of her siblings have lost their power to relieve pain, perhaps because they have lost the ability to love, or because they got sick of the responsibility their talent brought and were tired of being different.

This is a pedestrian story, I guess an allegory for the burnout experienced by social workers and doctors and for the idea that Jews are an "other" wherever they go and/or a "chosen people" with special abilities and responsibilities.  There is nothing particularly noteworthy about it.  I'll judge this one barely acceptable.

"Parables of Art" by Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg  

Attention Malzberg completists: according to isfdb, "Parables of Art" has only ever appeared in this volume.

I enjoyed "Down Among the Dead Men," a Dann collaboration with Gardner Dozois, and I generally like Barry Malzberg, so after reading the mediocre McIntyre and Eklund selections, I expected this to be my favorite of the three.  My expectations were realized.

Fans of Malzberg will not be surprised to hear that this story is four pages long but is divided into three chapters.  Nor that it begins, "Walter Taplin was forty-five and a failed artist."  Taplin is "enormously fat," as is his wife.  We are told that the couple has lots of sex.

Taplin discovers a secret room at the back of his house; within this room he has the ability to create exciting paintings that are sought after by gallery owners and collectors!  (The authors tell us Taplin's early work was like that of Rosa Bonheur, while his work in the secret room is reminiscent of Bosch.)  Taplin enjoys critical and financial success, and loses weight! But he has less time for sex!

Taplin's wife is envious of her husband's success, and jealous that he spends less time with her, so she seals the secret room with concrete.  Life returns to normal (meaning: lots of sex!)

This story is crazy, feels new, and made me laugh.  Winner!

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

For me, Dann and Malzberg deliver, but the McIntyre and Eklund just sit there inoffensively.  Still, I can see people embracing the McIntyre and Eklund for their conventional earnest liberalism, and finding "Parables of Art" offensive for its selfish and obese female villainess.  (But is she really a villainess?  If we view a happy love relationship as more important than fame and fortune, maybe we should see her as a heroine!)

***********

The final page of New Dimensions 12 is an advertisement for "science fantasy" novels.  Of the seven books listed, I have only read the two Jack Vance books, The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld.  I think The Dying Earth is overrated, but I love The Eyes of the Overworld to death, and consider it one of the most fun books I have ever read.  I'd probably give the Poul Anderson and Theodore Sturgeon selections a try, but I'm weary and leery of L. Sprague de Camp.  William Barnwell I've never heard of.  Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds is widely discussed and apparently sui generis, so I am intrigued, but I've heard it is over 600 pages, which is an investment I am reluctant to make.                  

Return of Gallery of Horror: Bloch, Campbell, and Dozois & Dann

The original hardcover edition

In honor of William L. Trotter and in hopes of finding some good early 1980s horror fiction, let’s give Gallery of Horror another stab.

“Rubber Room” by Robert Bloch

I’m often disappointed by Robert Bloch. But I keep giving him a chance.

“Rubber Room” is about Emery, a bookish paranoid anti-Semitic murderer. Like Norman Bates, his insanity is linked to an overbearing mother. Because his mother hated Jews and he reads lots of books about World War II, Emery becomes a neo-Nazi hermit, collecting Nazi paraphernalia from antique stores. He goes totally insane, thinking that everything that happens to him is because of Jewish terrorists, and then when a little lost girl he meets on the street turns out to be Jewish, he kills her. The police put him in a padded cell, where, it appears, he is killed by the ghost of a terrorist who died in the same padded room earlier in the month.

This story, first published in 1980, is just OK.  Based on the title, I was hoping for it to be more about claustrophobia and the anxiety resulting from being all alone in a tiny room.  For some reason I always find the scenes in novels in which a guy is in a prison cell and counts all the bricks and becomes familiar with every crack in the wall and taps out messages to the other prisoners and loses track of the days and all that very engaging.

"Rubber Room" doesn't have anything new or compelling to say about anti-Semites or child killers, so one wonders if those elements were just introduced in hopes of easily manipulating the reader.  Maybe when "Rubber Room" came out neo-Nazis and child molesters didn't feel tired yet, the way Norman Bates must have felt fresh before we'd all seen three thousand episodes of "Law & Order: Perverts Division."

When the ghost appears to kill Emery I thought it might be the ghost of the little girl or of her grandfather, who was murdered by Nazis in World War II, making the book a Jewish revenge story.  But the ghost turns out to be that of an insane terrorist, presumably not Jewish, making the story a piece of irony with a twist ending: the crazy dude who stupidly fears the ski-mask wearing terrorists he thinks are financed by Jews is actually killed by a crazy ski-mask wearing terrorist who is not financed by Jews.

"Rubber Room" may be interesting as a period piece, with its numerous references to ski-mask-wearing terrorists ("In today's world, terror wears a ski-mask"); do we still think of terrorists as wearing ski masks? Comparing popular depictions of terrorists during the Cold War to those of the post-Soviet or post-September 11 period would be an interesting dissertation.  Likely been done already.

“The Sunshine Club” by Ramsey Campbell

This is a silly story about a vampire psychiatrist who tricks vampires into thinking they are not vampires at all, that their fear of sun, garlic and crosses is just the result of a difficult relationship with their parents. Oh brother.

This is one of those stories in which two guys are in a room, sitting with a desk between them, and the guy behind the desk gets up, and so I’m visualizing that he is away from the desk. Then suddenly he is writing on his blotter, like he’s back at the desk again, so I go back through the text to see if the writer told us he had returned to the desk, and I find we were not notified of the guy’s return to his desk. I find this sort of thing distracting. When I say a writer has a smooth style, which I feel like I often do, part of it is that he or she makes sure stuff like this doesn’t happen.

I’ve read several Ramsey Campbell stories, and I think the only ones I really liked were a brief mad scientist one, “Heading Home,” and “Out of Copyright,” a clever piece of work about a corrupt anthologist accidentally casting a spell that causes disaster.  Mad scientists and scholarly wizard guys appeal to me; vampire psychiatrists and werewolf psychiatrists don't appeal to me.

“Down Among the Dead Men” by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann

More Nazis and more vampires! But this story is definitely better than the Bloch and Campbell stories.

Bruckman and Wernecke are Jews in a Nazi death camp, where the prisoners are being worked to death excavating a quarry. One day Bruckman realizes that Wernecke is a vampire! Wernecke surreptitiously drinks the blood of the other prisoners, just a little from the healthier Jews, but actually murdering and draining those known as Muselmänner, prisoners so weak that they have given up any hope of surviving. Bruckman is shocked; Wernecke has been the kindest of the prisoners, a sort of leader, always helping by sharing food or encouraging the dejected. Wernecke, when confronted, admits that he did this the way a farmer maintains his livestock – he thinks of the other Jews as his cattle to be nurtured and fed upon! How is Bruckman to react to this nightmarish situation?  Will the Red Army liberate the camp before Wernecke makes a meal of him?  Or does he have to fight Wernecke?  Does he have a moral obligation to protect his fellow prisoners from Wernecke?

This story is well plotted and well paced, and the audacity and originality of setting a Jewish vampire story in the middle of the Holocaust makes it memorable, striking. I wonder if anybody found it offensive when it was first published in 1982 in Oui, a pornographic magazine, or when it first appeared in this anthology in 1983.  Offensive or not, Dozois and Dann are giving Tanith Lee a run for her money when it comes to the competition for best story in this book.


********

So, out of five stories, we have two I like, two I don't like, and one mediocrity.  Not so bad I guess.