1967 stories by Samuel R. Delany, Thomas M. Disch and R. A. Lafferty

From the anthology shelf of the MPorcius Library comes a paperback in a pleasant green, World's Best Science Fiction Fourth Series, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr, printed by Ace.  This is a retitled 1970 edition of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, a collection of SF stories Wollheim and Carr thought the best of 1967.  The wraparound cover is by Jack Gaughan, who also provides fun interior illos.

My copy, which is in really good shape--I think I am first to read from it

World's Best Science Fiction: 1968 includes sixteen stories, among them Harlan Ellison's famous "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" (promoted specifically on the back cover of my copy) and Robert Silverberg's well known "Hawksbill Station."  I read both over ten years ago, in my New York days, and think both are good and you should read them, but I don't feel like reading them again right now.  Joachim Boaz in 2011 read the expanded novel version of "Hawksbill Station," which he gave five out of five stars on his blog, and in the comments there several SF fans discuss the novella.  (Joachim makes the novel version sound pretty interesting, I have to say.)

In their introduction to World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, Wollheim and Carr talk a little about the New Wave and the controversy surrounding it, suggesting that the changes in SF everybody was talking about represent more of an evolution than a revolution.  I'll be reading one story each from my copy of World's Best Science Fiction Fourth Series by two authors often associated with the New Wave, Samuel R. Delany and Thomas Disch, and two by R. A. Lafferty, who, while not really a member of the New Wave, wrote in his own idiosyncratic style that defied or ignored convention and whose work certainly qualified as something new on the SF scene which was embraced by critics.

"Driftglass" by Samuel R. Delany

It is the (nearish) future!  Mankind is colonizing the Moon and Mars!  And the ocean depths, where men work submarine mines and tend herds of whales and sea weed farms.  Who performs this dangerous subaquatic labor?  Men and women who, as children, received operations that gave them gills and webs between their fingers and toes, turning them into mermen and mermaids, or as they call them in the story, "amphimen."  (One female amphiman is named Ariel, presumably Delany deliberately reminding us of mermaids.)

"Driftglass" is a first-person narrative; our narrator is Cal Svenson, a retired amphiman who was born in Denmark but now lives in a Brazilian fishing village where he did his undersea work before that work crippled him.  Twenty years ago he was working a job in a nearby deep sea canyon, laying a power cable, when that project suffered a disaster, an avalanche that ended the operation and left Svenson with a long list of disabilities and scars that is the first thing we learn about him.  Retired and living on his pension, he has become fully integrated into the local community, and much of the story is about his relationship with a local fisherman, Juao; Svenson is godfather and a sort of mentor to Juao's kids, who will soon become amphimen themselves.

The plot of "Driftglass" concerns the fact that the Aquatic Corp is going to try to lay a cable in that canyon again; the young man who is going to lay the cable seeks advice from Svenson, and Svenson attends a big beach party the night before the risky operation.

The driftglass of the title is a reference to pieces of broken bottles that the sea erodes down into smooth glass pebbles; Svenson explicitly explains the metaphor--those who make their living on and in the ocean are eroded and smoothed by the sea much like the glass is.

The tone of this story is sad, even tragic, but at the same time sort of mellow and at peace with the vagaries of fate--the characters accept that dangerous jobs must be done, and that no life is without risk.  The disasters that befall some amphimen do not discourage Svenson or Juao from sending Juao's kids off to be turned into amphimen.  The plot of the story reminds us of the kind of stuff Barry Malzberg says (technology and "progress" are chewing people up, forcing them to radically alter their very bodies and go on dangerous missions) but I think Delany is portraying future social and technological developments more ambiguously, suggesting they present opportunities as well as risks, just like social and technological changes always have, and that being an amphiman is a tough job but also a rewarding one, like tough jobs throughout human history.  "Fishermen from this village have drowned," says Juao.  "Still it is a village of fishermen."

A good story.  "Driftglass" first appeared in If, and would go on to be widely anthologized and to serve as the title story of an oft-reprinted Delany collection.

   
"The Number You Have Reached" by Thomas M. Disch

We just read Ray Bradbury's story about a guy who is the last man on Mars following a war on Earth and who torments himself over the phone, and here we have Thomas Disch's story about the last man on Earth who torments himself over the phone--he alone has survived because he was on a trip to Mars when a war broke out on Earth and neutron bombs destroyed (almost) all life on our big blue marble.  The astronaut starts getting phone calls from a woman, but of course these must be hallucinations, the product of his guilty conscience and horrible horrible loneliness.

Why a guilty conscience?  One of Disch's themes in the story is automation.  The future depicted in the story is largely automated; for example, machines automatically clean the streets, so, when the astronaut returns to an Earth where everybody was suddenly killed, he sees very few dead bodies or car wrecks, as machines have cleaned most everything up.  As a military man, and as a man who loves math and obsessively counts things, Disch likens the astronaut to an automatic machine; it is also suggested that he is cold (the story takes place in winter and the astronaut doesn't mind the cold and finds the snow-blanketed city beautiful) and emotionless, that he had a single-minded obsession--to see Mars--and married his wife not out of love but because her father was a big wig in the space program or the military or something and could help him get assigned to the Mars project.  Anyway, as an automatic man, the astronaut is perhaps somehow part of the system that led to the catastrophe.

Another significant element of the story is that the astronaut contemplates and eventually commits suicide--a recurring theme in Disch's work and his life.

Not bad.  Disch's style is smooth and straightforward, but full of clever little notes (like examples of what the astronaut finds so fascinating about numbers) and succinctly-described but still powerful images.  Disch's work has economy, which I find admirable (and doubly so after all the Weird Tales stuff I have been reading, stuff which can be very wordy and repetitive.)  Disch's stories are often biting and potentially offensive, and this is of course true of "The Number You Have Reached," with its suggestion that military men, math nerds, and ambitious people in general are amoral robots.  "The Number You Have Reached," like so many of Disch's stories, makes you sit up and take notice, can stir you up. 

"The Number You Have Reached" first appeared in British magazine SF Impulse, and went on to be included in the collections Under Compulsion and Fun with Your New Head.   

    
"The Man Who Never Was" by R. A. Lafferty

I'm counting "The Man Who Never Was" as a rare Lafferty story, because, according to isfdb, after it was first published in Robert A. W. Lowndes' Magazine of Horror, it has only ever reappeared in English here in Wollheim and Carr's anthology of 1967 stories.  (The story did appear in a few European anthologies in translation, however.)

There is a long tradition of SF stories about homo superior, and homo superior's fraught relationship with us poor homo sapiens, and in "The Man Who Never Was" Lafferty takes a whack at this traditional subject.  The story's first paragraph reads:

"I'm a future kind of man," Lado said one day.  "And I believe there are other men appearing with new powers.  The world will have to accept us for what we are." 

The story's second para reads:

"Bet it don't" said Runkis.

Mihai Lado is famed as the best liar in his small rural town, the luckiest gambler and the savviest businessman (his business is selling cattle.)  One day a neighbor, Raymond Runkis, is denouncing his lies, among them such claims as owning a horse that can recite Homer and a cow that gives four different types of booze from its teats instead of milk.  Lado declares that, as "a future kind of man" with "new powers," he can prove that his outrageous lies are not lies at all.  Runkis takes him up on this challenge, daring him to prove his claim that he can make a man disappear.  Thinking such a feat impossible, so many townspeople place bets with Lado that if Lado should succeed in making a man disappear he will own half the town!

And Lado does succeed--a quiet, simple-minded man, Jessie Pidd, over the course of a few days, gradually vanishes, first becoming transparent and then gradually fading until he is literally gone. 

Many Lafferty stories contain chilling violence which is played, in part at least, for comic effect, and we also get some of that in this tale.

Lado is too clever for his own good; the townspeople consider his making Jessie Pidd disappear to be murder.  Lado insists that he hasn't murdered anybody--Pidd never existed, Lado created him, even implanting into the townspeople's minds a belief in Pidd; Pidd was an illusion all the time, and making an illusion disappear is no murder!  Lado is dragged into court, but he cannot be convicted of murder as there is no physical evidence of the alleged homicide.  Perhaps because they fear the great power of homo superior, perhaps because they don't want to pay up, the townspeople get together and lynch Lado, and then hide the body and go through their records, erasing all evidence that Lado ever existed.  Mihai Lado has been disappeared as thoroughly as was Jessie Pidd.

I like it.

"Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" by R. A. Lafferty

Here we have a famous Lafferty story which has appeared in several Lafferty collections and a bunch of anthologies since its debut in Galaxy.

"Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" takes on the traditional SF concepts of time travel, alternate history and "time streams."  A bunch of scientists and their super computer (the computer actually seems like the leader of the group) decide to send back in time an Avatar, which we are told is "partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction," to kill a person and thus change history.  The cabal sits high in a building, and will judge whether history has been changed by looking out the window to see if their city has changed, and by looking at a history book that lies open before them--surely if history changes, the text of the book will change.

The somewhat obvious central joke of the story is that the experiment is a success, but the eggheads and their machine don't realize it: history changes and the city and books in turn change, but the computer and scientists are themselves, of course, different, and thus don't notice the changes that to we readers are very pronounced.

Many SF alternate history stories are meant to be taken as serious speculation on what life might be like if the Confederacy achieved independence from Washington or if Nazi Germany had conquered the United Kingdom or whatever, but Lafferty here seems to just be kidding around, or even making fun of the whole project of alternate history, maybe arguing that we can't even really understand what happened in the past and its effect on us, so still grander speculations are futile or even ludicrous.  A clue to Lafferty's attitude is in the name of the historian whose book the scientists watch for changes: Hilarius.   

In case the medievalists in the audience (I know you are out there) are curious, Lafferty's story suggests that Charlemagne might have a maintained a good relationship with the Islamic world were it not for a traitor who caused the Battle of Roncevaux Pass; the Avatar kills this traitor, and the resulting encouragement of intellectual intercourse between the Christian and Muslim civilizations leads to an earlier Renaissance and superior technology and more vibrant art in the present.  The scientists, thinking their experiment has failed, send back in time a second Avatar; this one is to act in such a manner that the philosopher William of Ockham--he of the famous razor in our universe (a fact which gives Lafferty an opportunity to make some jokes about cutting throats)--will have greater influence.  In the universe in which Charlemagne has good relations with the Islamic world, Ockham seems to have unsuccessfully played the sort of role played with success by Martin Luther in our own universe; Ockham seems to have argued for pure materialist intellectualism and against spirituality, but to have lost the argument with other philosophers and failed to spark the sort of major reform movement Luther sparked in real life.

I think we can see "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" as a criticism of science, or at least a suggestion that many people hold science and/or scientists in too high a regard, see science and scientists the way people once saw magic and wizards, pagan religion and pagan priests.  The triumph of Ockhamite thought severely retards or even reverses technological and cultural development--after the second Avatar succeeds in its mission in the past, the world changes in such a way that the scientists are reduced to stone-age primitivism.  From the beginning of the story, when we are told the supercomputer chooses to represent itself as a dragon and that the Avatar is half-robot, half-ghost, Lafferty equates science and magic, and the scientists in the world that resulted from Ockhamism look for wisdom not to a supercomputer, but a fetish mask they all pretend can talk.  Is the computer the 20th-century equivalent of a pagan oracle, manipulated by the 20th-century version of a witch doctor?

Another brisk, fun, and provocative piece from Lafferty that serves up lots of silly names and odd jokes alongside its thought-provoking ideas.

I wrote about the Kuttner story in Transformations: Understanding 
World History Through Science Fiction, "Absalom," a homo superior story, back in 2014

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All four of these stories are good--each addresses some typical SF trope and is well-written and entertaining, and in each one the author makes an artistic decision or makes some sort of claim about the world that gives the reader pause and makes him think.  Commendable selections by Wollheim and Carr.

For some reason one British edition of World's Best Science Fiction 1968 was
entitled World's Best S.F.1 

Night Chills from Robert Bloch, Thomas Disch and Carl Jacobi

While taking a breather between volumes of Edmond Hamilton's Starwolf trilogy, in which a space pirate joins a team of space mercenaries and travels through space dealing with ancient artifacts, let's read three more tales of suspense and/or horror chosen by Kirby McCauley for his 1975 anthology Night Chills.

"The Funny Farm" by Robert Bloch (1971)

McCauley tells us he chose the stories for Night Chills based largely on the fact that they were not yet published in widely available books.  Bloch's "The Funny Farm" was first printed in August Derleth's anthology Dark Things (I denounced Derleth's own story from Dark Things just a few blog posts ago) and I think qualifies as a rare Bloch story; to this day it has only been printed four times, according to isfdb, and two of those times have been in French language collections.  I guess Robert Bloch completists need a copy of Dark Things or Night Chills in their collections.

Joe Satterlee has been collecting newspaper comics since he was seven years old, back in the Twenties.  Today, in the early Seventies, he is retired, the hermitish owner of a huge collection of comic strips.

We've remarked on Bloch's cultural conservatism before; for example, there's his denunciation of youth rebellion in 1958's "A Lesson for the Teacher," and his portrayals of Tinseltown as an immoral cesspool in 1957's "Terror Over Hollywood" and 1971's "The Animal Fair."  Here in "The Funny Farm," setting the stage and building up the character of Satterlee, Bloch serves out a hearty helping of nostalgia, opining that "The funny pages were actually funny in those days," and then layering on many long sentences that consist of extensive lists of comic strips of the 1920s, '30s and '40s and allusions and references to their characters.  I know a little bit about Superman, Flash Gordon, Dick Tracy and Krazy Kat, but a lot of these comics meant zilch to me.

Once Bloch has set the stage for us, he introduces the plot--a professional thief learns of Satterlee's collection, then (as we say) cases the joint, and then, late at night, breaks in, hoping to steal a fortune in comic books.  Of course Satterlee doesn't have any comic books--he just collects the newspaper funny pages.  Enraged, the burglar murders Satterlee, but then we get the predictable and totally lame gimmick I was hoping Bloch would refrain from indulging in--comic strip characters come to life and mete out vigilante justice; the goofy specifics are that Little Orphan Annie commands her dog Sandy to tear out the thief's throat.

Not good; the plot is mediocre and the story seems to be merely a vehicle for Bloch to talk about the old comic strips, but it is not clear if he is praising or satirizing the strips and the attachment of readers to them--he just sort of lists them, without saying anything interesting about them.  Maybe I can recommend "The Funny Farm" to people who already know who Dixie Dugan, Moon Mullins and Major Hoople are--perhaps they will be able to appreciate nuances in the tale that went over my head.  (For example, is the fact that Little Orphan Annie leads the attack on the thief supposed to be a surprise or a joke to readers, because Annie is a little girl, or is it a knowing acknowledgement that the Annie strip actually was full of crime, war and sharp commentary on current events including sympathetic portrayals of vigilante violence?)

"Minnesota Gothic" by Thomas Disch (1964)

"Minnesota Gothic" first appeared under a pseudonym in the same issue of Fantastic that carried another Disch story, "A Thesis on Social Norms and Social Controls in the U.S.A.," and the first part of the serialized Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story "Lords of Quarmall."  (Fritz Leiber co-wrote "Lords of Quarmall" with his friend Harry Fischer and there is reason to consider it the first Fafhrd and Grey Mouser story, but when I read "Lords of Quarmall" back in the Eighties in my Jeff Jones-adorned copy of Swords Against Wizardry I thought it had a different tone than most of the other Fafhrd and Mouser stories and did not care for it.  Probably I should read it again.) 

Seven-year-old Gretel is living in Onamia, Minnesota, a world of gravel roads and clapboard farmhouses, though it seems her parents are more in tune with city life.  "Minnesota Gothic" is the story of Gretel's relationship with her neighbor, 100-year-old Minnie Haeckel, reputed to be a witch.  When Gretel was younger her mother would threaten to give her to Minnie Haeckel if she refused to eat her vegetables, and when Gretel's grandfather out in California dies and her parents have to fly out to the left coast they leave their young daughter with the strange Haeckel woman, in whose house Gretel has weird and life-altering experiences.   

Disch is one of the best prose writers in SF, and this story is a pleasure to read; Disch manages to achieve not only a real sense of menace, but a level of childish whimsy and even what you might call psychological insight or wisdom about human nature.  The plot contains many references and allusions to the famous story of Hansel and Gretel, and I have to admit I found elements of the plot a little confusing, maybe because I'm not intimately familiar with a legit 18th- or 19th-century version of Hansel and Gretel.

Minnie Haeckel has a familiar that looks like her dead brother Lew, who died in 1923 in a car wreck in far off New York.  I'm not sure if the creature is 1) the brother brought back to ghoulish life, 2) Lew's reanimated corpse inhabited by a spirit or demon or whatever, or 3) a spirit or whatevs that has been made to look like Lew.  The familiar connives with Gretel to destroy Minnie, and at some points talks like he is Lew ("She hexed me.  I was a thousand miles away, I was in New York....She made my leg go bum,") but other times talks like maybe he is a different being made to look like Lew or inhabit Lew's cadaver ("...Minnie had to have something that looked like her brother--so she dug him up.  I had to do all the work....")  The familiar seems to be sexually attracted to seven-year-old Gretel, and suggests that Gretel, now a witch in her own right--and he now her familiar-- transform him into a likeness of Fabian or Bobby Kennedy; Gretel instead opts to turn him into a cocker spaniel.  If Gretel really could make the familiar look like the crooner who gave the world "Tiger" or the third or fourth most famous of Marilyn Monroe's sex partners, this implies that there was no reason for Minnie to dig up Lew's corpse to make the creature look like Lew.  Another data point: Minnie spends her last moments, just before Gretel breaks the spell that has been keeping her alive past her natural term, digging around Lew's grave.  I just can't make all these clues add up.

As when I read Gene Wolfe, often when I read Tom Disch I feel like I am reading the work of a genius, work that, while satisfying, has facets I am not quite able to grasp.

"Minnesota Gothic" was reprinted in Fundamental Disch, the 1980 anthology edited by Samuel R. Delany; I actually own a copy and have blogged about some of its contents. 

"The Face in the Wind" by Carl Jacobi (1936)

You know I love Weird Tales.  H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, Edmond Hamilton, C. L. Moore, Henry Kuttner, Ray Bradbury, and on and on.  Well, one member of the Weird Tales gang whose work I have never read is Carl Jacobi.  Today I cross a new frontier and explore another tract of weird country in hopes that it will be to my taste and present me another rich vein of weird goodness to mine.

Minnesotan Jacobi sets "The Face in the Wind" on a crumbling English country estate named Royalton; the tale is narrated by a Hampstead, the 20th-century inheritor of the decayed estate.  Hampstead decides to get a wall on the estate repaired; he calls this wall the "frog wall" because it was originally built (he has been led to believe) to keep frogs from the nearby marsh out of the estate because their croaking would make it hard for the Hampsteads to sleep.  A young painter Hampstead has befriended, Peter Woodley, begs the narrator to cancel the repairs because he believes the wall is a mystical barrier against an unspecified entity and any change will weaken the barrier.  Hampstead gets the gaps in the 18th-century wall patched up anyway, and, sure enough, that very night, minutes after midnight, a giant bird attacks the estate and Hampstead shoots an antique percussion cap pistol at it from a window, driving it off.  Bizarrely, the bird had the face of a beautiful woman!

Only one other person lives on the decrepit estate, Classilda Haven, a hideous septuagenarian woman who has rented the gardener's cottage for the last four months.  She had urged Hampstead to tear the frog wall down entirely, saying that she loves frogs.  The day after the giant bird attack Hampstead notices that the old crone looks kind of like a bird, and Woodley shows him a canvas he painted the night before, while in a sort of daze, a landscape showing the frog wall and the half ruined manor house where our narrator resides.  Hampstead keeps the painting, and, by looking at it in a mirror, suddenly sees the lovely feminine face of that monster bird, cunningly hidden in the brushstrokes!

That night, at the frog wall gate, hidden in the shadows, Hampstead watches Haven conduct a sort of ritual that apparently summons a sleepwalking Woodley, but the painter wakes up and flees before the woman can be whatever she had planned to him.  The next day Hamptead finds that Woodley's painting has been stolen from a locked cabinet in the manor house, and when Woodley shows up his arm, where Haven touched him, is a blackened gangrenous mess.  Woodley shows Hampstead an 18th-century book about magic that Hampstead hadn't realized was in his own library, and convinces the narrator that Classilda Haven is a harpy who has been terrorizing Hampstead's family throughout history.  Woodley has a bottle of holy water and a bow and two silver arrows and that night they fight Haven and her two harpy sisters; Haven and Woodley are both killed (Haven evaporates, leaving no corpse), Hampstead is permanently scarred (his hair turns white) and the other two harpies just leave after being sprinkled with holy water.

This story stinks.  The plot is just a bunch of silly events jumbled together haphazardly without any kind of connective tissue, no foreshadowing or building of suspense or anything like that.  The supernatural elements make little sense, Jacobi witholds and reveals information in a way that seems arbitrary rather than guided by some kind of narrative strategy, and none of the characters or images are the least bit interesting.  It feels like the author was just making it all up as he went along and never bothered to do any revisions.  Long and tedious, "The Face in the Wind" is incompetent and McCauley's inclusion of it in his anthology is inexcusable.

Or is it?  In the program to the 1983 World Fantasy Convention is an article by SF historian Sam Moskowitz in which Moskowitz, based upon the extensive records kept by Weird Tales editor Farnsworth Wright, lists the most popular stories in Weird Tales from 1924 to 1940.  (I wrote about this fascinating article in connection with Edmond Hamilton back in 2017.)  Moskowitz indicates that readers' favorite story in the April 1936 issue of Weird Tales was the final installment of the serialized version of Robert Howard's Conan novel The Hour of the Dragon (The Hour of the Dragon is actually probably my own favorite Conan story.)  But in second place, with 14 people writing in to Weird Tales to praise it, is Jacobi's "The Face in the Wind."  I may think it sucks, but it seems like Weird Tales readers appreciated it, so maybe by making it available almost 40 years after its first publication McCauley was doing the weird community a service.

"The Face in the Wind" would be reprinted twice more in the 1970s, in a British volume featuring the severed head of a woman hanging from a nail on its cover and an American volume whose cover bears a characteristically over-the-top Stephen King blurb and a stupid gimmicky illustration that is reminding me of the work of Giuseppe Arcimboldo.

A better image of Les Edwards's painting for The Tomb from Beyond is available here

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I can heartily endorse four stories from Night Chills--the Disch, the Howard, the Wagner and the Etchison, but there seem to be quite a few clunkers in there (at least in my opinion!)

It's back to space opera in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log--see you then!

Starburst by Frederick Pohl

"My God," he said, shaking his head, "it's politicians who are supposed to be the manipulators, not scientists.  You're acting like a tinpot Jehovah!  You use human beings like laboratory rats, tricking them and in the end killing them."

Most of the SF I have read since this blog arose from the slime to sow terror and confusion about the countryside has been in old paperbacks or old magazines (often via the medium of the internet archive or the SFFAudio PDF page.)  But in my youth most of the SF I read was in hardcover, because I was at the mercy of libraries in the suburban New Jersey towns where I and my grandparents lived, libraries which didn't really stock paperbacks.  One of the authors the librarians seemed to favor was Frederick Pohl, and I read lots of hardcover Pohl novels published in the '70s and '80s when they were relatively new.

As an adult I reread and loved Gateway, but on a reread I found Beyond the Blue Event Horizon to be mediocre and I was irritated by Drunkard's Walk, which I viewed as too much (for my tastes, at least) a product of Pohl's political ideas, ideas which I do not find congenial, so I avoided Pohl for some years.  Recently, however, I really enjoyed Pohl's short story "The Fiend," which sparked a curiosity about all those old hardcovers like Jem and Black Star Rising that I recall so little about but which I presume I liked.  I began looking into used bookstores specifically for these 1970s and '80s works, and my first hit came in late May at the Old Book Shop in Morristown, New Jersey, a place I frequented while still living in the greatest state in the union and which I try to visit on my rare trips back.  For $1.50 I got a paperback copy of 1982's Starburst, adorned with a rainbow-like cover and high praise from the Minneapolis Tribune, which ceased publishing under that name soon after printing that laudatory review (the Tribune survives as the Star Tribune, in 1982 having been consolidated with the Minneapolis Star.)  Was the Tribune full of crap when it said Starburst was "one of the best sf novels of the past three or four years?"  Or will Starbust be so good that I will be jumping in my Toyota Corolla to scour the Eastern seaboard's used bookstores for copies of the aforementioned Jem and Black Star Rising so I can indulge in what the TV-watching public might call "a Frederick Pohl binge?"  Let's read Starburst and find out.

Dr. Dieter von Knefhausen, alumnus of the Hitler Youth and veteran of the Eastern Front, is a genius!  You might even say an evil genius!  He has worked his way to the top of the U.S. space program, and convinced the American people and government to finance the construction of an interstellar space ship even though the country is wracked by unemployment and civil unrest and faces the prospect of Africa being taken over by violent Muslim radicals; he even personally hand-picked eight people of the highest abilities to crew the ship on its voyage to Alpha Centauri.  Von Knefhausen got the people of the land of the free and the home of the brave to sign on to this expensive project by telling them that there was a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri for the eight heroes to explore, but the Bolshies over in Moscow are not so gullible as us Yankees!  Soon after liftoff, the commies announce to the world that their instruments indicate that there is, in fact, no planet orbiting Alpha Centauri!  It's not long before the President of the United States has called von Knefhausen on to the Oval Office carpet and is demanding he explain why the German egghead tricked him into lying to the whole world and sending eight of America's best and brightest on a one-way trip to their deaths a bazillion miles away!

Von Knefhuasen explains that the free world, to outlast the communist East, needs scientific breakthroughs, and isolating the eight astronauts from the distractions of the Earth, putting them in a situation where they have nothing to do but think, will probably result in them coming up with some awesome new ideas!  (This scheme reminded me of Theodore Sturgeon's classic story from 1941, "Microcosmic God," and Thomas Disch's fine 1967 novel, Camp Concentration--in both, ruthless authorities impose deadly conditions on people that foster innovative thinking.)

Pohl's narrative switches back and forth between Washington, D.C. and the starship and employs a number of narrative strategies.  Many chapters are in the third person omniscient, though the ones on Earth include lots of internal monologue stuff from von Knefhausen; some early chapters consist of transmissions from the astronauts back to von Knefhausen, and some later ones are first person narratives composed by the most sympathetic of the astronauts, Eve Barstow and Willis Becklund, the spacefarers least altered by their revolutionary adventure.

Squint or click to marvel at the love showered on Starburst by the critics

Von Knefhuasen's scheme almost immediately bears fruit--with nothing better to do, one of the spacers proves Goldbach's Conjecture.  Within a year the astronauts have invented a more efficient, more expressive, language that leaves them bored with the clumsiness and annoyed by the sluggishness of English.  They become very interested in random numbers and their use in divination, and acquire knucklebone dice by chopping off their little toes--no real sacrifice, as they have developed means of controlling their bodies to the point that they can ignore pain and even regenerate lost digits.  They also realize, via I Ching hexagrams and a "personality analysis" of Knefhausen, that there is no planet at Alpha Centauri and that they have been sent on a fraudulent suicide mission; this inspires a consuming wrath towards the German scientist and a determination to build a planet around Alpha Centauri for them to reside on.

While the astronauts develop increasingly unbelievable powers, back in Washington things rapidly deteriorate, with political violence escalating and the federal government's power diminishing until a confused civil war, with military units switching sides and untrained youths taking the place of disciplined soldiers as the professionals are steadily killed off, ensues.  Things on Earth go from terrible to still more terrible when one of the astronauts, full of rage, uses his psychic powers to direct a stream of kaons at Earth; kaons cause radioactive materials to lose their radioactivity and instead shed tremendous heat.  This sneak attack renders useless nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors all over this big blue marble, crippling energy production, and also causes global warming that raises the sea level.

Starburst feels very long.  The tone is detached and uniformly flat, and the plot is episodic and has a feeling of bland inevitability; Pohl's novel lacks emotional high points and offers no suspense or tension or catharsis.  The characters are not very engaging, and those we follow most closely are, during the period the novel directly covers, spectators rather than drivers of events.  Mad scientist von Knefhausen is probably the most interesting character, though Pohl tries to make Eve Barstow, the least intelligent of the astronauts, sympathetic by describing her loneliness and ennui--she cannot learn the new-fangled super-efficient language of her comrades and is thus left out of much of what they do.  Eve is also the only astronaut who maintains her humanity; for example, she embraces the traditional female role of raising the astronauts' army of genetically engineered kids when most of the spacefarers have progressed so far intellectually and even physically that they see their own offspring as laborers, as the machinery they have built to do the tasks necessary to construct their artificial planet.

Pohl's writing is deliberately oblique and parcels out information in a fragmentary fashion, leaving the reader to figure out some things or just wait until they are explained.  Early in the story Willis Becklund is killed, but his personality somehow survives and continues to interact with the other explorers as a "ghost;" the nature of his living death is explained (in a vague and impressionistic fashion in keeping with the novel's interest in Eastern mysticism) many chapters later.  Similarly, we are presented with the astronauts' passel of children long before it is explained how these strange beings, genetically engineered to achieve English literacy at age two and sexual maturity at age six, were actually produced.  The reader's experience thus mirrors that of the characters--when von Knefhuasen was in the driver's seat he kept all the other characters in the dark as to his true designs, and when he is out of favor he has to contend with the astronauts' confusing messages and endure years in prison, where he receives only scattered clues about what is going on in the calamity-wracked outside world.

Some twenty years after leaving the Earth the astronauts and their fifty or so offspring have made great progress in building a Centauran planet out of asteroids and comets, but they want more raw materials and more genetic material and so they debate how to acquire these resources from Earth--via threats or via trade?  To assess the lay of the land back on the mother planet Eve and Willis return to the post-apocalyptic Earth with six children; Eve's twelve-year-old son, himself a father, is in command of the vessel.  They are greeted by the current President of the United States, whose domain consists of merely a portion of a largely submerged midAtlantic region--the rest of the former USA is split into little competing fiefdoms.  Von Knefhuasen died in prison a few months ago.

While Americans are reduced to riding around on horses and their President speaks with some kind of hillbilly accent, civilization has been reborn in Western Canada.  The leader of this oasis of order and technology in British Columbia, a beautiful woman, is on hand in Washington to make sure the President, whom Pohl portrays as a buffoon, doesn't have a chance to seize the Centaurans' technology and use it to reunite the United States.  She guides the visitors to her Kanuck utopia where everybody lives in an efficient little apartment and population levels are carefully controlled, and she has sex with Eve's son, who is sixteen after the four-year trip from Alpha Centauri.

Eve also starts a relationship with a handsome Canadian, a police officer (even though the sight of his gun makes her queasy.)  Willis the Ghost raises a ghost of von Knefhuasen in order to berate and humiliate him--he gives the German scientist a big nose and makes him say things like "oy vey" and "bubbeleh."  The astronauts offer the Canadians their supertechnology, but the Canadians reject the offer, preferring to keep their utopia the way it is.  I guess that is the (underwhelming, after 216 pages) climax of Starburst; the sensawunda denouement is that the principal Alpha Centaurans split up to colonize different areas of the galaxy (accompanied by some volunteer Earthlings), while Willis, the ghost, explores time and the universe and nervously contemplates the end of time.

Long, tedious and a bit dull, Starburst is disappointing, no matter what various newspapers claimed back in 1982.  Pohl presents situations that should provoke an emotional response in us readers--von Knefhuasen, Eve Barstow, and Willis Burkland are all people of ability and ambition who are suddenly thrust into catastrophes and find themselves essentially helpless and totally isolated from the rest of humanity--but somehow Pohl failed to generate any feeling in this reader.  The book is cold and distant--perhaps Pohl's failure to convey human feeling or depict human drama is a function of the novel's alleged satiric intent?

Publishers Weekly, in the blurb reproduced above, tells us Starburst is, in part, a satire.  If a satire is supposed to be funny, Pohl again fails, because there are no laughs in this book.  The effect of the jokes, if they have any effect at all, is to defuse any drama, or leave the reader scratching his head.  The way von Knefhuasen is turned into a caricature of a Jew, for example--Pohl didn't bother to paint von Knefhuasen as an anti-Semite, and in fact pointed out early on that he was not a committed Nazi but simply an opportunist, so the gag at the end of the book comes out of nowhere.

More interesting than whether or not Pohl's humor succeeds is the question of what Pohl is satirizing here.  A ruthlessly manipulative German scientist, stupid Americans, clever communists and wise Canadians, and a USA crippled by illegal immigrant demonstrators, stone-throwing college activists and heavily armed African-American terrorists, and then finished off by the temper tantrum of an intellectual, are certainly the kinds of elements you might expect to see in some left-winger's satire of a post-World War II United States.  Pohl, like grad students I have had the misfortune to have to work with, also pushes the idea that technology and trade are detrimental rather than beneficial to human life--the Canadian woman suggests that the kaon strike that has denied the Earth any nuclear power wrought an improvement over the Cold War conditions that prevailed before, and we get an abbreviated lecture on how international trade is characterized by imperialism, cartels, dumping, and trusts.

More effective than this bog standard lefty boilerplate stuff is what I take to be Pohl's examination of the science fiction trope of the superman and his rehearsal of the timeless insight that power corrupts.  The smartest and most powerful individuals in the book are the least decent and least kind, the astronauts (besides Eve and Willis) growing more and more selfish and less and less connected to their comrades and their families as they grow more intelligent and acquire more abilities.  Power corrupts, whether it is the genius of a von Knefhuasen, the supergenius of the astronauts, or the political power of a head of state (though not if she is Canadian, I guess.)

Starburst is not actually bad; I am not quite prepared to declare it a waste of the reader's time.  There are interesting ideas, and tons of science stuff--I don't think I've encountered kaons anywhere else, nor the idea of a Gödel code.  Pohl also tries to explain solitons and instantons, one of those concepts I am never going to understand.  Contra Washington Post Book World, what the novel lacks is any sense of fun (though I suppose Democrats and foreigners may read about the destruction of the United States with glee) and any sort of feeling--there is no adventure, no excitement, no human drama, and I didn't care about the characters and I wasn't eagerly turning the pages to see what happened next.  I have to judge this one barely acceptable, and admit that any plans of seeking out Jem or Black Star Rising have been put on the back burner.

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!

Messenger of Zhuvastou by Andrew J. Offutt

All he had was a better-than-average set of reflexes and a fair ability at fencing, and what that Earthside shrink had called a born leadership ability.  And a tremendous knowledge of history--mostly wrong, since it came from movies.

Alright, here's one with a title I can't even pronounce. I'm sure the boys down in marketing loved this one. "Andy, would it kill you to call this one Messenger to Planet Z or Messenger from the Galactic Empire?" At least it has a terrific Jeff Jones cover, an heroic celebration of the human body and man's unquenchable desire to climb up the most dangerous precipice he can find while wearing as little clothing as possible.  A brassiere?  That shit would cramp our style!  A rope?  You have got to be kidding!  You can wear a metal circlet thing in your hair so you are looking your best when those creeptastic birds attack us, but that is where I draw the line!

(As we saw with The Yngling, Jones' evocative cover has nothing to do with the actual characters, setting or story of the book which it adorns.)

The people at Berkley presented Andrew J. Offutt's Messenger of Zhuvastou to the sword and planet community in 1973.  This one is long, 286 pages, and the print seems small--two randomly selected pages each have 45 lines on them, while similarly chosen pages in The Shores of Kansas have only 35 lines, and pages of The Yngling weigh in at 35 and 37.  The contents page lists 40 chapters, and they all have titles that refer, perhaps jocularly, to classic literature, history, or conventional phrases. I have a feeling this is going to be a long and crazy ride.  (This feeling was reinforced when I found that the very first word of the text included a typo!  In fact, this book is full of typos.  Shame on you, Berkley!)

Moris Keniston, a minor celebrity as not only the wealthy son of a Senator of the Galactic Empire centered on Earth but also a talented athlete, wants to prove to himself that he has what it takes to succeed on his own without Daddy's money and connections. He finds just the place to prove his prowess: Hellene, a planet whose more or less human natives, a violent, hedonistic and even sadistic lot, live a sort of ancient/medieval lifestyle, with fortified towns, mail armor, crossbows, etc.  Ostensibly, Keniston is going to Hellene in pursuit of his fiancee, Elaine Dixon, who has flown the coop. (I followed the love of my life from New York City to Iowa, so maybe following a chick from Earth to a death world isn't all that unbelievable.)

Years ago I read a bunch of L. Sprague de Camp's tepid sword and planet tales set in his Viagens Interplanetarias universe.  (I thought de Camp's efforts to make a John Carter story more "realistic" drained much of the fun out of the whole business.)  The title and opening scenes of Messenger of Zhuvastou lead me to believe that Offutt was writing this novel as a sort of homage to de Camp--like de Camp's Viagens tales, Hellene is characterized by the pervasive use of "Z" proper nouns, and, just like the protagonists of de Camp's books, Keniston has to have an interview with an official of the Earth imperial administration before setting foot on Hellene.  The authorities confiscate all Keniston's high tech equipment (lest it fall into the hands of the bellicose natives) and provide him an elaborate disguise so he can pass for a native.  This disguise involves invasive cosmetic surgery--the Hellenes have blue hair, manila folder-colored skin, and very wide mouths, and our hero has to go under the needle and the knife in order to get the look that won't get too many looks.  (People get similarly extensive disguises in the Viagens books.) Keniston's cover is as a royal messenger in the employ of the emperor of Zhuvastou; a role which will render Keniston's wealth and extensive travels less suspicious.

Offutt seems to have also taken up de Camp's mission of making the planetary romance more realistic.  Keniston doesn't fight off dozens of foes single-handed like Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert Howard heroes sometimes do, and Offutt reminds us again and again how unlike a fictional hero Keniston is, how scared he is during fights, for example.  When Keniston kills a man for the first time, he vomits, a reaction the sadomasochistic natives find surprising. (The novel's most memorable scene is when a Hellene woman is sexually aroused by this victory of Keniston's and begs the fatigued Earthman to take her violently, to hurt her, her "dirty talk" consisting of a wound by wound recounting of the gory fight.)

Offutt doesn't just nod to de Camp in the book; Messenger of Zhuvastou comes off as a celebration of dozens of his other favorite books and movies--hardly a page goes by that doesn't refer directly or subtly to somebody like Ian Fleming, L. Frank Baum, Mark Twain, Cecil B. DeMille, Charlton Heston, W. C. Fields, or Alexandre Dumas, and the list goes on and on. 

Messenger of Zhuvastou's plot is episodic and picaresque--Keniston travels from walled town to walled town, spending lots of time in inns, making friends and tarrying with women, learning about Hellene society and getting mixed up in capers.  He befriends a member of an ethnic minority (these people have grey skin) and preaches against racism.  He uses his wits or his fencing skills to survive drunken brawls, confrontations with the police, and assassination attempts.  He helps a woman escape servitude in one town to join her lover in another.  He crosses a swamp full of monsters and an arid desert haunted by bandits, nearly dying of thirst in the process. He falls in love with a woman (she turns out to be a princess in disguise) and has to rescue her from a dungeon torture chamber before they can get married.

There's a lot of sex in this book, though not any really explicit sex scenes.  There are prostitutes and harem girls everywhere, and Offutt obsessively describes women's secondary sexual characteristics and skimpy attire.  Offutt, who is pretty hard on Christianity (he follows the line that Christianity caused the "Dark Ages" and retarded European development for centuries), reminds us repeatedly that the Hellenes don't have an "antisex" religion that stifles their urges, so everybody on the planet is promiscuous and nobody associates marriage or deep meaningful love relationships with monogamy; men share their girlfriends with each other, for example.  

Gender roles, and relations between the sexes, are a big theme of the book, and Offutt comes down firmly on the side of traditional gender roles.  In the last third or so of the book Keniston arrives at Zhavalanko, a fortified city which has undergone a feminist revolution.  A cunning woman, using high tech devices like radios and firearms smuggled onto Hellene despite the precautions of the Galactic authorities, has murdered the king and taken over, ruling as a dictator at the head of an all-female army and an all-female priesthood.  This tyrant is Elaine Dixon of Earth, whom we learn was not Keniston's fiance after all, but his brother's: Dixon murdered Keniston's brother and escaped from a prison planet, and Keniston's true mission to Hellene is one of revenge.

Even though Offutt (and Keniston) admit women on Hellene are second class citizens, they have no sympathy with Dixon's revolution, calling it "unnatural" and comparing her ruling party to the Nazis and the Communists.  Offutt makes clear his belief that men and women have natural roles and it is folly to tamper with this natural order, he even describes the sight of a city street full of women who have taken up bourgeois professions like banker and merchant as a "nightmare."  Psychologically healthy women, he believes, naturally desire a man to be in charge of them and take care of them, and members of Elaine Dixon's all female army prove eager to desert and join the counter revolution once they find it is lead by strong competent men like Keniston and his friends.  Keniston's counterrevolutionary army overthrows Dixon and returns men and women to their rightful places in society, and in the end of the book Keniston decides to stay on Hellene as the ruler of Zhavalanko.  

These Edgar Rice Burroughs/Robert Howard style stories often ask the question, "Is it better to live as a civilized man or a barbarian?" To me this seems like what the kids call "a no-brainer"; of course it is better to sit in an air conditioned art museum across the street from a skyscraper and read a novel than it is to sit in a tree in a steaming jungle gnawing on a raw baby allosaurus leg while bugs gnaw on you and Momma Allosaurus waits at the bottom of the tree, ready to serve up some harsh justice. Somehow, John Carter, Tarzan, Conan, and the guy from Almuric have trouble with this easy question and have to do lots of field research, living in both the civilized town and the hellish wilderness gathering evidence, and somehow they always come to the wrong conclusion, that a life of danger and savagery is to be preferred to a life of leisure and sophistication.

Offutt and his hero Keniston follow in the august footsteps of their predecessors; despite all the fear and danger, Keniston comes to prefer life on Hellene where people are constantly trying to beat him up, stab him or shoot him.  Halfway through the book we are told that he

liked the weight of the sword at his side, the long cloak flapping at his heels, the short unencumbering kilt.  This, he had begun to believe, was the way life should be lived, not existing on Clement Keniston's bequest and trying to run his business empire...

By the end of the book Hellene's bloodthirsty mores have begun to rub off on him, and he is declaring that Moris Keniston is dead and that his cover name is his true name, his true identity.  Hellene, for all its dangers, gives him the opportunity to be who he really is, a natural leader and man of action; life in cushy Galactic society wouldn't bring out his true potential.

But just as John Carter, who abandoned Earth to go native on Barsoom, worked to reform Martian culture and religion, Keniston, uncomfortable with the racism and the power of the priests on Hellene, works to diminish these characteristics of Hellene culture.  And he doesn't fully embrace Hellene's sadomasochism or the way women are relegated to second class status.  The woman Keniston falls in love with and marries is well-educated, a brave fighter, and a skilled rider, and Offutt presents multiple incidents in which her resourcefulness saves Keniston's life.  Keniston also refuses to beat her, even as she enviously admires the bruises proudly borne by other wives.  (Like so many exploitation writers, and the producers of such ubiquitous TV programs as Law and Order: Perverts Division, Offutt has his cake and eats it, too, titillating the audience with talk of denigrating sex and wife beating but maintaining membership in decent society by denouncing such unsavoury practices.)

So, is this long novel which baldly presents Christians and feminists with innumerable reasons to find it enraging any good?  The plot is not bad; fighting monsters and bandits, climbing mountains and crossing deserts and swamps, falling in love and rescuing gorgeous women, and overthrowing tyrants is what we more or less expect from these books.  And the plot is well structured, Offutt offering the reader mysteries to unravel, foreshadowing later developments, and showing how Keniston's actions early in the book make possible his triumph at its end.  But there are lots of problems. The tone and the characters are very bland, and the style is flat; I didn't care who got killed or who had sex with who.  Offutt includes many jokes, and they are all mild, neither funny nor offensively bad, but they help to defuse any sense of drama or terror; we are told Keniston suffers terrible hardships and fears, but the reader never suffers along with him, just watches, detached, knowing another joke is coming along in the next paragraph.          

The biggest problem is perhaps the length and pacing of the novel.  We often praise economy here at MPorcius Fiction Log, and this is a quality Offutt's novel severely lacks; considering how much actually happens in the novel, it is very very long, and the pace is quite slow. The text is repetitive, with Offutt providing a superfluity of incidents that demonstrate each character's personality traits. Offutt also spends a lot of time describing clothes and people's physical appearances, but in a way that fails to add to their characterization.  Offutt's verbosity does not really add to the atmosphere of the book or make its world more vivid or memorable; it just makes the book longer. Typographical errors, the use of esoteric words (maybe if I had gotten my degree at Princeton instead of Rutgers I'd have recognized words like "vermiform," "muliebrity" and "cruor") and of words Offutt has simply made up (the names of Hellene animals, for example) also serve to slow down the reader.  (It is hard to explain exactly why, but when Tom Disch in Camp Concentration or Gene Wolfe in Book of the New Sun hurls some word nobody knows at you it deepens the book's atmosphere, tells you something about the character and his environment, but in Messenger of Zhuvastou the hard words are just obstacles that make the story more vague or opaque.)

Because I am interested in the whole sword fighting on an alien planet genre, and I find Offutt's odd career interesting, I found Messenger of Zhuvastou worthwhile, but only just barely.  I can only recommend the novel to the sword and planet completist or the Offutt collector, and even then, it suffers in comparison to the classics of the genre or Offutt's own better work. Even for its target audience, Messenger of Zhuvastou is merely acceptable.

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The marketing boys at Berkley got their way when it came to advertising.  Bound into the spine of the book was a color ad; the ad in mine was torn out by a previous owner, so I don't know what it was shilling; often such ads are for booze or tobacco products. There are also two pages of ads at the very end of the novel, promoting Berkeley SF titles by authors more famous and critically renowned than Offutt hmself:

The boys down in marketing get their final revenge on the back cover, with a mysterious ad for Dream Power which lists no author or description for the volume, just the promise that "IT CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE."  Both Offutt and I may have our gripes with the 21st century, but at least nowadays we have google to solve these mysteries in a matter of seconds.  Dream Power, it turns out, was a top-selling self help (or shall we say, "self-awareness?") book by Dr. Ann Farady, who advises us that our dreams contain vital messages.  If Dr. Farady is to be believed (and hey, when was the last time a doctor made a mistake?) my recent dreams are telling me to move back to New York because Jerry Seinfeld is eager to be my friend and to stop driving because I will soon be in a terrible automobile accident.  Hopefully my next dream will explain an easy way to finance these oh so welcome life changes.

Six more from The Best of Barry N. Malzberg

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

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I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.