Stories from 1960s New Worlds by Thomas Disch, Langdon Jones, Brian Aldiss and three other "top" authors

It feels like it was just last month that I was reading and passing a merciless judgement on stories selected by Judith Merril from New Worlds, the flagship periodical of the New Wave, brought to you by the British taxpayer. Let's do it again, this time with stories chosen by New World's famed editor and creator of Elric of Melnibone and sundry other doomed heroes, Michael Moorcock, as representative of the best work published in that magazine.

I read all of the tales described below in my 1971 copy of Berkley Medallion's Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  The anthology first appeared in 1969 in the UK, published by Panther.

"Linda and Daniel and Spike" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

The US edition of the anthology declares this story "a disturbing fable" and when it appeared in New Worlds the title was written on a woman's bare back!  I actually bought this whole book for two smackers at Half-Price Books because I didn't already own this story and I am a Disch fan.  That's a lot of hype and hope to live up to!  Can Disch do it?

This is a sad story!  Disch, you are going to break people's hearts with this thing!

Linda is an unattractive secretary living in New York City who thinks of herself as an intellectual type but never went to college and is in fact a little dim.  (Disch, a smart guy who was very well-read, likes to laugh at dolts; remember "Problems of Creativeness"?)  She is so lonely that she has an imaginary boyfriend, Daniel.  Linda develops uterine cancer, but, in her delusions, thinks she is pregnant with Daniel's child. She gets a dog (that's Spike) and pretends/believes it is her child.  (Spike bites people, including Linda.)  When she dies of her cancer, the hospital puts Linda's tumors on display--they are of record-breaking size.  As all parents hope, Linda's memory will live on thanks to her offspring!

Sad, but with some laugh-out-loud moments of black humor, Disch scores a hit with this brief (seven pages) story and justifies my purchase and all the hype.

"Transient" by Langdon Jones  (1965)

This was a New Worlds cover story.  (Look how classy and serious this '65 cover is compared to the '67 collage cover by Charles Platt and Christopher Finch.  One looks like the bulletin put out by a staid art museum and the other looks like a zine handed out on a street corner by stoners.) Moorcock in his intro to the six-page piece says it is "transitional," a break from Jones' earlier work that shows some similarities to his later work, like the triptych "Eye of the Lens," which I (and Joachim Boaz before me) wrote about recently.

Our narrator wakes up in a hospital bed.  Jones has cleverly primed us to think that the narrator has been revived from death, but this is only metaphorically true--halfway through the story we learn that the narrator is a chimpanzee who has been operated on so as to have human-level intelligence and has had implanted into his brain facility with spoken English.  The story is a tragedy, because the treatment only has effect for two hours, and our narrator spends those two hours in misery, knowing he will soon lose his miraculous intelligence and return to his natural "state of mindless half-life."

(Compare with Daniel Keyes' famous Flowers for Algernon, which I had to read in school.)

Like the Disch story, "Transient" is a short and touching story about the mind and psychological anguish.  So far this collection is living up to its back cover promise to "blow the mind."

"The Source" by Brian Aldiss (1965)

In the far future mankind has colonized the universe and founded innumerable complex and sophisticated cultures.  People live so long that their brains fill up with trivia and periodically "the Machines" have to "expunge the dross" from your brain or you will start going a little bonkers.  In this story Kervis XI leads an expedition of "Seekers" to Earth, cradle of humanity, in quest of "the peak of man's greatness."  The Seekers are disappointed to find Earth's cities in ruins, and Earthlings living like primitives.  But Kervis XI, who has been skipping his brain-cleaning treatments, isn't ready to give up on Earth yet.

In a series of increasingly surreal scenes (it is often not clear if he is seeing reality, having spiritual visions, or just going cukoo) Kervis XI crosses a forest, enters a walled city, navigates a maze, and meets a woman who (I think) warns him that technology and sophistication are yokes that limit you even if you don't realize it.  In the end of the story Kervis XI decides to stay on Earth with the primitives and live the simple life of subsistence agriculture, playing pipes and dancing around a fire.

This story is just OK.  The start is good, but I find long dreamy sequences boring and I feel like I've been exposed to this "back to nature" message way too many times, and it is a message that is not that convincing.  Sure, I like to go to the woods and see birds and turtles and all that for a few hours, but then I like to go home to the air-conditioning, running water and my books.

"Dr. Gelabius" by Hilary Bailey (1968)

Way back in 2014 I declared Hilary Bailey's "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" to be the best story in the wacky experimental anthology Quark/3.  Bailey was married to Moorcock from 1969 to 1978, and seems to be into that thing where you write a sequel to a famous literary work; she has produced sequels to Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, and Goodbye to Berlin, as well as a book about Sherlock Holmes' smarter sister Charlotte and her colleague, Mary Watson.

In this three-page tale we meet the title doctor, in his lab, surrounded by scores of live human fetuses in jars full of amniotic fluid.  Dr. Gelabius is part of a decades-old joint American-European project to improve the human race!  The babies in the transparent artificial wombs are the product of sperm and ova from the finest human specimens, carefully selected.  After birth they will be placed with equally carefully selected couples.  As adults, they will enrich the world with their good works and by spreading their superior genes.    

Well, not all of them.  The doctor examines each jar in turn, notes ten defective specimens, disposes of them.  Then a woman bursts into the room and, crying out "You killed my baby," blasts him with a pistol.  It seems not everybody is onboard with this whole race-improving program!

Bailey's images and style are good, but there's no real story here, just an idea.  This thing is almost like a prose poem.  Of course, if it been presented to me by one of the poets I know as a prose poem, I would have said, "This is a great poem, it's almost like a SF story!"

"The Valve Transcript" by Joel Zoss

Here we have another of the unspecified "six top authors" mentioned on the cover of the US edition of Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  In his intro to the story Moorcock warns us that this comic piece might take two readings to figure out.  It appears that Zoss achieved greater success as a musician and songwriter than as a science fiction author; he only has four entries on isfdb.

This story, four pages, is the transcript of an interview of a guy who works on big underground pipes that carry natural gas. The interviewer's questions are brief and straightforward, while the worker's answers are long and digressive.  It appears that the worker was sent into a pipe to repair a valve, and instead of returning to the surface via the hatch at which he was awaited, he walked further along the pipe, to egress at a hatch closer to his favorite diner.  (There are hints that the worker prefers to walk in the pipe rather than on the surface because it is cooler and the sun hurts his eyes outside.) Because his supervisors could not find him, they assumed he was still in the pipe, and so couldn't restart the flow of gas, with the result that the company lost vast sums of money.

This story is OK, I guess.  I didn't laugh, but I wasn't irritated, either.

"In Seclusion" by Harvey Jacobs (1966)

Moorcock in his introduction tells us that Jacobs works in American television, and this story is a sort of satire of Hollywood.  An actor and an actress fall in love while on the set of their big film, Beowulf, and break up with their spouses to pursue their relationship.  As a publicity stunt, or something, their studio sends them to a secluded building (an abandoned abbey) on the coast for a sort of retreat.  There they bicker and their relationship approaches collapse.  There are lots of jokes about how the main characters are sexually unfaithful to each other, narcissistic, and poor actors who get by on their looks, jokes which are not funny.

A kaiju-sized sea monster attacks.  The monster, an absurdist joke, is like an amoeba with many different pseudopod-like tentacles; some have fins, some have eyes, some have claws, etc, but also has memories and a personality and a sex drive.  The monster envelops the abbey, and reaches inside with its tentacles to try to devour the actor and rape the actress. For reasons that are supposed to be amusing but which are not, the movie stars survive the attack and one of their enemies, a gossip columnist, is killed instead.  (A bigtime Hollywood story has to have a sinister gossip columnist or theatre critic in it, right?)

Weak.  (Maybe people steeped in Hollywood lore will like it?)  

***********

The Disch and Jones are quite good, actually moving, and the Bailey is good; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4 was a worthwhile purchase.  The Aldiss and Zoss are not offensively bad, but the Jacobs is the kind of absurdist nonsense that I don't care for, and furthermore is based on a topic (studio-system-era Hollywood) that holds limited interest for me.  (The Leiber, Sladek and B. J. Bayley stories I am passing by for now with tentative plans to read them for single-author blog posts in the unspecified future.)

That's enough highbrow avant garde stuff for a little while; in our next installment I think we'll be seeing some "swashbuckling sword-and-planet adventure."

Important New Wave Stories by Thomas Disch, J. G. Ballard and Langdon Jones

When people talk about the New Wave, one of the things they often mention is Judith Merrill's anthology England Swings SF, first published in 1968.  Now, I don't actually own a copy of England Swings SF, but I do own anthologies by two of the most famous and prolific New Wave writers, Thomas M. Disch and J. G. Ballard, which include some of their stories from England Swings SF. Additionally, Joachim Boaz, indefatigable SF blogger and promoter of SF which has faded from memory and perhaps deserves to be more widely read, has generously provided me access to the story by Langdon Jones which was printed in England Swings SF. So, let's check them out and try to gain some kind of insight into the New Wave phenomenon!

"The Squirrel Cage" by Thomas Disch (1967)

I've already praised Tom Disch on this blog numerous times, but Disch has done work I'm not crazy about (when I read them in the aughts, I thought Genocides overwrought and mediocre and Echo Round His Bones and Mankind Under the Leash left me cold) so there's no guarantee I'm going to love this one. "The Squirrel Cage" first appeared in the issue of New Worlds with Charles Platt's The Garbage World.  I read Disch's tale in my 1980 Bantam edition of Fundamental Disch.

Don't tell my wife, but I have had a
crush on this garbage girl for quite a while

"The Squirrel Cage" is one of those stories in which a guy is trapped in a mysterious high tech prison and has no idea how he got there or who put him there.  For some psychological reason I am afraid to carefully dig into, I love stories in which a guy is in a prison and his cell constitutes his entire universe (Araminta Station by Jack Vance and Cage A Man by F. M. Busby come to mind at once as particularly effective SF examples), so "The Squirrel Cage" was right up my alley.  Disch uses the story as an allegory of life (of course), how we all are truly alone and can't know why we are here and have no real understanding of the universe because we cannot trust our senses.  It is also, more specifically, about the psychological reality of being a writer--the prisoner has access to a typewriter, and the text we are reading is things he has typed on his machine.  However, the narrator's typewriter neither admits nor produces paper--the narrator has no reason to believe anybody is even reading what he is writing! (He hopefully fantasizes that his words are being reproduced electronically somewhere and read by someone, maybe lots of people.)  On the last page of the story, when we learn the name of the narrator ("Disch"), he admits that even more terrifying than this lonely meaningless life in the antiseptic prison is the thought of being forced to leave it; a comment on our fear of death or perhaps Disch's own horror at the thought of having to make a living doing work more onerous than writing?

I think "The Squirrel Cage" also serves as a sort of satire of people who learn everything about the world via the New York Times--every day a new copy of the Times appears in the cell and the previous day's copy vanishes.  The newspaper is the only contact the prisoner has, apparently, ever had with any other living entity, and it is his only source of information.  One passage (in which the narrator wishes he could keep the papers and pile them up into walls and corridors) reminded me of the famous Collyer brothers, and perhaps the whole story is a sort of subtle reference or homage to them.

Both bleak and amusing, "The Squirrel Cage" is well-written (Disch has a smooth and engaging style) and compelling.  I liked the "New Yorkiness" of it, and there's also the sad frisson I get whenever I read references to suicide in a Disch story.  Worth a look!                

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

As with Disch, I have really liked some Ballard, but also been disappointed by him (I know Joachim loves it, but I found Drowned World tedious and silly.)

In this sexiest of blog posts there is even something for the ladies: it's every woman's dreamPTboat, JFK!

"The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race" first appeared in the magazine Ambit, and in New Worlds the next year.  This is a two-page gimmick story, an imitation or pastiche of a similarly brief gimmick story by Alfred Jarry ("The Passion Considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race"), larded with dumb jokes and lame puns.  I guess the story is supposed to say something about our society's obsession with celebrity and political violence, and also to suggest LBJ and/or the citizens of Dallas or the American people as a whole are somehow complicit in or responsible for the JFK murder. There are lots of people who like this sort of flashy cleverness and irreverence, but to me this kind of thing is hollow and a waste of my time--as I suppose I have said before online, I'm sick of absurdist humor in which any random shit can happen and of humor based on references to other works of fiction or to celebrities or historical events.

You gotta read this thing because it is "important," but I think it is a facile scam.

"Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" by J. G. Ballard (1966)

Woah, maybe this post needs a
NSFW tag or a trigger warning!

Here we have a story in the same vein, a gimmicky JFK murder-related story about how people are sexually aroused by violence and by automobiles.  This one is in the form of a dry scientific report about therapy involving catering to the desires of mental patients to assassinate celebrities. Jokes include a clinical reference to a man inserting his penis into a car's exhaust. Presumably this was shocking in 1966, but we are now living in a permissive society in which some of us, me included, are almost entirely shocked out.

Like "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race," "Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy" first appeared in Ambit.  I read both of these stories in my copy of the 2001 edition of The Best Short Stories of J. G. Ballard.

While the Disch story deals with timeless issues, these Ballard stories are very time sensitive, very topical, very much focused on celebrities and events current in 1966.  I sometimes think including references to some "iconic" contemporary celebrity or event is an act of laziness on the part of the writer--instead of doing the work of inspiring the reader to feel by creating a character or a mood, the writer takes the shortcut of just invoking our ready-made feelings about, in this case, the bogus "Camelot" of the early '60s.  This maybe works on people who were old enough to pay attention to the news in 1963, but I was born in 1971, so the murder of JFK has no more emotional resonance with me than the murder of Julius Caesar or Cicero.

(If I am comparing them, Disch's story also has good writing, while these Ballard stories seem like loud jokes meant to dazzle you with their irreverence.)

"The Hall of Machines" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Hall of Machines" first appeared in New Worlds along with its two companion pieces, "The Coming of the Sun" and "The Eye of the Lens;" together, there three pieces form a triptych known as "The Eye of the Lens."  Joachim has shared with me all three of the components of "The Eye of the Lens," and I will discuss them all here, even though only the first appeared in England Swings SF.

(Check out Joachim's review of this triptych, and Langdon's entire collection of the same name; we actually cover different ground and have somewhat contesting and complementary views of the work.)

I guess Jones is one of the "etceteras."

"The Hall of Machines" consists of the notes of a scholar from some alternate universe (though see below) about an indescribably vast building which houses massive automatic machines of numerous types.  Most of the text is detailed description of various of the machines; one that consists of shiny blades making elaborate cuts (a "Death Machine"), one which extrudes tiny machines from a tube ("The Mother"), a colossal "Clock" made up of a huge spring and innumerable precise gears whose face is turned away from any possible viewer, and more.

I'm going to have to guess that the mysterious Hall of Machines represents the universe, and that the story is about how the laws that govern our lives seem mechanistic, predictable, and open to close inspection, but are so complex as to be practically indecipherable, and are bereft of any values or spiritual meaning.  Jones provides a clue, however, that this story does take place in our universe, and that he is making, or the reader is expected to make, some kind of ethical judgement: the word "Auschwitz" is inscribed on one of the three Death Machines.

"The Hall of Machines" reminded me of Herman Melville's 1855 "The Tartarus of Maids," which also includes detailed descriptions of allegorical machines.  It also reminded me of Thomas Ligotti's 1996 "The Red Tower," which, as I remember it, is just a description by an investigator of an old sinister factory, presumably in some alternate universe.

Jones presents vivid and exciting images, sets a powerful mood and gets the reader thinking.  Quite good.

"The Coming of the Sun" by Langdon Jones (1968)

"The Coming of the Sun" is a series of connected vignettes, spread over 22 pages, dealing with recurring themes that include insanity, fire, sex, religion, and the sun. The first of these 16 vignettes, a compelling character study of a pyromaniac imbecile, is very good, but after this very entertaining beginning the vignettes become increasingly tedious.  One, involving a grocer kicking a pair of mating dogs, is a shocking and memorable piece of "body horror," but some of the other little tableaus, like a one-and-a-half-page-long description of an elaborate clock burning, and a dream sequence about a guy on a motorcycle driving in circles around and then inside a cathedral, were so repetitive and boring I had trouble keeping my eyes open while I read them.  The last five pages of  "The Coming of the Sun" include poetry that is alternately mind-numbing ("Give me the red and the green of your love--my man, my woman, my child, my God") and groan-inducing ("...an old man masturbates his death-tool and spits white glory at the sun....")  Ugh.  The last page has a drawing of the sun, its flares like tentacles or petals, the words of the last poem jumbled all around it..

When tarbandu talks about the self-indulgence of the New Wave I guess this is the sort of thing he means.  I couldn't sincerely recommend "The Coming of the Sun" to anybody, though it is of academic interest and some might find it "so bad it's good" with its poetry about bloody semen and the cleansing venom of the "sun sun sun."

"The Eye of the Lens" by Langdon Jones (1966)

This one is a description of a film.  (I seem to recall Barry Malzberg resorting to this gag a few times; right now only The Men Inside is coming to mind.)  Jones starts by relating the type of film stock and filters used, and then describes the movie's two actors; all you feminists out there will be thrilled to learn Jones describes the female lead in precise detail over 27 lines, lingering on her breasts and body hair, while dispensing with the labor of describing the male lead in an efficient three lines, even though the man plays two parts.

Banned in Britain?

Then we get what amounts to a script, a description of the shots ("She passes out of the frame, kicking the statuettes idly as she walks") and of the soundtrack.  All you masochists out there will be thrilled to learn that the soundtrack includes just the kind of poetry about love that had us scrambling for cover like an 8.8 cm Flak had zeroed in on us back when we read "The Coming of the Sun"--"love me red with bloody arrows...love me brown, brown as leather..." etc.

The girl walks through a desert, encounters a statue that is crying, then men with flamethrowers who immolate any plants that appear on the desert surface.  (When I was in Denmark, the environmentalist capitol of the world, I saw how they killed weeds with a sort of scaled down flamethrower.  In Iowa I found that they spray Roundup on everything.) She visits a cathedral where a "psychedelic freak out" is taking place, and then comes upon Jesus on the cross. She gets into an argument with Christ, accusing him of being rude, stupid and shallow. In the final scene of the film the girl sits in a field of flowers.

I can't tell if this story is a sincere criticism of Christianity and our society or a parody of an art movie full of banal allegories. Either way it is a bore.

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

Do these stories tell us anything about the New Wave?  (Let's pretend these stories are our first exposure to this New Wave we've been hearing people argue about.)  Well, they certainly lack many of the very things people tend to look for in conventional science fiction: there is no adventure plot (hell, there is no plot at all), there isn't really much science, and there isn't much speculation on what future societies or stuff in outer space might be like.  It is easy to see why casual SF readers looking for entertainment might be uninterested in the New Wave, and why committed members of the SF community who are into science and interested in what the future will bring might be exasperated by such work.

On the other hand, you can see how these stories would appeal to people who are interested in "serious mainstream literature" and think of themselves as free-thinking individuals or educated radicals.  The stories have the trappings of sophistication: they employ experimental literary techniques and/or abandon traditional literary elements like plot and character; they are pessimistic; they are irreverent or rebellious, implicitly or explicitly criticizing our society and traditional attitudes and beliefs; they include frank sexual content.  The Disch story and parts of the Jones stories are also well-written, and all the stories hope to say something about life or society.  The stories are also connected to long literary, artistic or philosophical traditions.  (And there's the fact that parts of the Jones pieces are difficult to read, and, as we see in academia, sometimes obscurity and tedium can pass for profundity.)

Disch, Ballard and Jones are all obviously thoughtful, well-educated, and capable of good writing--if anything good can come of the New Wave, these are guys who can make that happen--and in this selection I think we can see the golden opportunities presented by the New Wave to able writers, as well as the pitfalls for readers in the New Wave's excesses.  In the same way a quest story or a detective story or an alien invasion story, the kind of thing that has been done a billion times, can be emotionally and intellectually thrilling when it comes from the pen of a talented and dedicated writer, but predictable, shoddy and boring in the hands of the lazy or incompetent, we have to expect that there will be some fine New Wave stories, and some New Wave stories which are a waste of our time.  I think we have seen both kinds here today.

Four stories by Thomas Disch from 1966

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

"5 Eggs" (1966)

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

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

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

"Three Points on the Demographic Curve" (1966)

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

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

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

Prosper Ashfield was not a happy man.

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

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

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

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

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

"Invaded by Love" (1966)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not bad.

"Bone of Contention" (1966)

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

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

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

*********

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Four more 1960s Thomas Disch stories

Let's read four more Thomas Disch stories from the 1960s!  These appeared in Fantastic Stories of Imagination and Worlds of Tomorrow; I read them in my copy of the 1971 edition of the collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.

"Genetic Coda" (1964)

This is one of those Oedipal time travel stories in which a guy goes back in time and has sex with his mother.  (Heinlein famously explored similar themes in 1958's "'—All You Zombies—'" and the Lazarus Long stories.)  It is written in a jocular style, and is perhaps a parody of such stories as Heinlein's; I suspect, in writing "Genetic Coda," that Disch wasn't taking the possibility of time travel and its ramifications very seriously.

Our story takes place in a future in which the world government maintains rigid control over everybody's genetic purity, and its protagonist, Sextus, is a hunchbacked freak. We first meet our hero as a clever six-year old, living in seclusion on his rich father's estate, being educated by robot tutors.  The eugenicist government, under ordinary circumstances, would castrate or execute little Sextus (and his hunchbacked father Quintus) but Quintus has bribed them and promised that no freak will ever cross the bounds of the estate.  Sextus is very lonely, only rarely seeing his freakish father, his obese, abusive, and alcoholic mother, and the lawyer who manages the estate and helps keep the World Genetic Council off the family's back.  As a young man, Sextus becomes obsessed with sex, but of course can meet no girls.  He tries to change social attitudes by self-publishing a polemic novel urging tolerance of freaks and by using his family's vast wealth to manipulate the economy; when those methods fail he spends two trying to create an artificial woman in the lab, with no success.  Finally, in his early thirties, he hits upon the idea of building a Time Machine and travelling back in time, to a period before the estate was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and armed guards.  He has sex with the first woman he encounters beyond the confines of the estate, a drunk lying in the gutter.

I am often confused by time travel stories and their paradoxes, and I was definitely confused by the twist ending of "Genetic Coda."  Sextus has sex with his mother, sure enough, but I had expected the child produced from this union to be Sextus himself. Instead, he and Mom have a daughter, whom he names Septima.  The explanation for this is, I guess, that by travelling through time, Sextus has created, or shifted to, a different "continuum"--there is a scene right before Sextus picks up his lush of a mother in which Sextus sees himself (as Quintus) and Quintus "pops out of existence."

Quintus had been; he was no more.  Not in this continuum.

Sextus brings Septima to back the future with him, and they produce twins, Octavia and Octavius, who are not hunchbacks.  So, a happy ending.

Even though I didn't really get the rules of time travel Disch is using in this story, I enjoyed it; after all it was only the last two of the tale's ten pages that had me scratching my head.  The style is light and gently amusing, and carries you pleasantly along, and some of the droll jokes are decent:

Sextus ran downstairs to the laundry room, entered the secret chamber, and found his birthday president: several bales of hundred and thousand dollar bills.  It was just what he wanted.

******

"Why do you go to so much trouble for me, Mr. Sterling?" Sextus asked [the lawyer] one day.

"Because you're worth millions, Sexy."  Mr. Sterling loved money more than he hated freaks.  He was a liberal in the old style.

Thumbs up!

"Dangerous Flags" (1964)

In the introduction to the collection Harry Harrison tells us that Disch informed him that "'Dangerous Flags' was written with pure delight," and Harrison recommends that readers begin with it.

Well, Disch may have enjoyed writing it, but I was groaning while I read it.  "Dangerous Flags" is one of those absurdist fables full of archetypal figures, dumb jokes, and nonsensical events; perhaps it is trying to reproduce the feeling of a whimsical children's story or an insane dream.  I don't like these kinds of stories; they are too unmoored from reality to inspire any interest or emotion, and the points they try to make always feel facile.

The plot: An evil English teacher and her stupid rich nephew are trying to destroy a Pennsylvania mining town with poisonous coal gas and a waterspout.  The Green Magician leaps to the defense of the town.  Their struggle includes riddles ("What is the sound of one hand clapping?") and magic spells activated by the recitation of poems by Longfellow and Tennyson.  Finally, the Green Magician triumphs by summoning the Snow Fairy.  

"Dangerous Flags" reminded me of Harlan Ellison's "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman" and Joanna Russ's "The Zanzibar Cat," neither of which I'm crazy about.  Even worse, while those stories seem to be trying to get across some kind of point (in Ellison's case, with a heavy hand), "Dangerous Flags" seems almost like pure surrealism.  Could Disch be pursuing revenge on an English teacher he hated in his youth?  (And who had a rich nephew?)  Is "Dangerous Flags" a hamfisted and oblique environmentalist story?  Maybe it's a derisive attack on American civic culture: there is a farcical town hall meeting; the townspeople elect the Green Magician king; and in the final lines of the story the Green Magician sings his favorite song, "America the Beautiful."  Could Disch be lampooning specific events in the early 1960s that I am ignorant of (there is a mention of the Republican Party, which Disch likens to the Ku Klux Klan, and a "Eurasian spy")?

Well, whatever is going on in "Dangerous Flags," I don't care for it.  Thumbs down!

"The Sightseers" (1965)

This is one of those stories in which the world is not what it seems, and the characters (and readers, it is hoped) are surprised to discover the true nature of things.  It is the future, and rich people, known as Sightseers, pay to have access to the "Deep Freeze."  Every evening, after a day of leisure or tourism, they are frozen, and sleep for a century.  Then they are defrosted, and emerge to see how the world has changed in their absence.  The world, however, never seems to be any different.

We follow two couples, a wheelchair bound man (appropriately named Nestor) and his sprightly female companion (Ramona), and an older woman (Myrna Balch of the Little Rock Balches) and her young virile gigolo (Jimmy).  These four white people, like all Sightseers, are served by attentive black people known as Nubians.  Jimmy wonders why centuries of time passing never seem to change anything, why the only people he ever meets are Sightseers and Nubians, and why the sterile cities they visit contain no stores or offices.  He discovers that the Nubians are robots or cyborgs, and realizes that the only human beings left in the world are the decadent Sightseers, who pursue empty, unproductive lives.  Jimmy and Ramona run off to found a colony of humans who will live real, full, lives, away from the Deep Freeze, growing their own food and starting families.  In the last scene we learn that the joke is on them: Jimmy and Ramona are not human, either, but cyborgs purchased by Nestor and Myrna, little more than advanced sex toys.

Disch adds on an extra layer of pessimism by making it clear that Myrna Balch is vapid and ignorant;  on the third page of the thirteen-page story we learn she has never even heard of Dante or Goethe.  The Earth has been inherited by a tiny elite, and not even the kind of elite that will keep alive the beauties of Western civilization.  

This story is just OK; I feel like I've encountered all its elements before, and Disch doesn't do much that is new with them.

"The Vamp" (1965)

I watched way too much TV as a kid, and all kinds of weird sounds, images and ideas are always rattling around inside my head.  Ever since I first looked at the contents page of One Hundred and Two H-Bombs I have been hearing the phrase "The Vamp" in my mind, spoken in the same emphatic yet restrained tones used by the narrators of one of my favorite Woody Woodpecker cartoons, "Under the Counter Spy," when saying "The Bat."

Anyway, this is a pedestrian humor story about a vampire that consists primarily of feeble jokes.  A guy meets his ex-wife on the street.  She's just back from Transylvania and wants to kiss him on the neck!  When he takes her home she asks him to cover the mirrors!  When he offers to make her a steak she says she would prefer to eat it raw!  When she finds he has seasoned the steak with garlic she flees from the house!

This material feels old and tired.  Disch tries to liven it up by setting it in Hollywood and having the man and his ex-wife be washed up silent film stars, and filling the story with (authentic-sounding but I believe bogus) references to Old Hollywood, but it doesn't help very much.

Not good.

*********

I gotta say, this batch of stories was kind of disappointing.  There was certainly nothing as fine as "The Return of the Medusae" or "The Demi-Urge," though I liked "Genetic Coda."  Well, there are fourteen stories in the US edition of One Hundred and Two H-Bombs, I guess you have to expect a few clunkers and failed experiments.

Five 1963 stories by Thomas M. Disch

Long-time readers of this here blog will perhaps recall my praise of Thomas Disch's novel On Wings of Song, his fix-up novel 334, and some of his short stories.  Followers of my twitter feed may remember that earlier this month, in South Carolina, a thousand miles away by Toyota Corolla from my Midwestern HQ, I purchased a 1971 copy of Disch's 1967 collection One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.

Besides the fine cover painting (presumably by Paul Lehr) this edition has an intro by Harry Harrison of Stainless Steel Rat and Eden fame.  Harrison describes Disch's physical appearance in the early '60s, and gives a little capsule history of the "New Wave," which he says is a poor label for the phenomenon.  As Harrison tells it, the science fiction field was in a "grey period" in the early '60s, but then a bunch of new writers, writers who had read widely of mainstream literature and travelled around the world (Disch and Harrison both spent time in London, Harrison reminds us) appeared on the scene.  These new writers were a breath of fresh air that shook the old dinosaurs of SF, whom Harrison declines to name.  According to Harrison, Disch is "about the best of this pack," a man who writes in the tradition of Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Burgess, producing works that are "comic," but don't try to make you laugh out loud.

I think Disch is an exciting, challenging writer (I like his irreverent criticism as well as his fiction) and so I have really been looking forward to tackling some stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs.  This week I read five stories from the collection, all of which appeared in 1963, in either Amazing Stories or Fantastic Stories of Imagination. 

"Final Audit"

"Final Audit" appeared first in the July issue of Fantastic.

This is an ingenious and absurd fantasy story, set in the late nineteenth century, starring a bank auditor who has access to very specific but trivial occult information; inexplicably, he can see the figures he will write in one of his ledgers (the one covering the bank's postal expenses) 30 days before he writes them.  He tries to use this very minor predictive ability to his advantage, but with no luck.  In fact, focusing so much on this ledger stultifies his career and social life. When the ledger actually does provide valuable information (that the bank will burn down) the auditor is too obtuse to benefit by it, and, in a somewhat predictable twist ending, he causes the conflagration himself.

"False Audit" is well-written and well-constructed, and an effective spoof of or homage to stories about the ability to predict the future.  Because the story is set in a bank Disch is able to include numerous attacks on the bourgeoisie of the kind that we find so often in fiction: the stockmarket is no better than gambling, businesspeople are all callous, corrupt, and greedy, etc.

I liked it.  

"The Return of the Medusae"

"The Return of the Medusae" appeared with "The Princess's Carillon" and a third story by Disch in the August issue of Fantastic; isfdb lists all three together as components of the "Fables of the Past and Future series."

This is a clever story, less than two pages in length, that speculates on how the survivors would react if suddenly and unexpectedly everyone awake was turned to stone.  Which statues would be left intact, even decorated with flowers by grieving relatives?  Which would be smashed because they were ugly or simply in the way (think of people turned to stone while in the middle of a bowel movement)?  Would artists chisel away at the doomed, trying to improve their looks, change their expressions?  The story is convincingly written in the voice of an historian or art critic, living long after the event.

Good.

"The Princess' Carillon"

This is a farcical satire of welfare state liberalism, or of fears of welfare state liberalism, or both.  A nine-year old white princess, an orphan, is physically and psychologically abused by the regent, her uncle, but the legislature supports the regent because of his well-administered welfare program.  The little princess is sent to an integrated school, where she fears the black kids will kill her ("or worse.")  A black boy tells her he is really a prince, and will return to his "proper form and color" if the princess kisses him.  She kisses him, and he becomes a frog, whom she marries.

I tend to not like absurd satires, and I'm not getting much out of this one; there is no character or plot, no human feeling, and no point that I can really discern.  It is only two and a half pages, so I can't really argue it is a waste of time, but I'm not willing to tell you that time reading it was well spent, either.

"The Demi-Urge"

There are words that I learned at one point, but, because they don't come up very often, whose meaning I tend to forget, so that every few years, when they do come up, I have to look up.  "Defenestration" is one, and "demiurge" is another.  Maybe this story will permanently imbed "demiurge" in my porous brain.

This story, three pages long, consists of two messages, each sent by a member of a survey team from a Galactic Empire back to HQ; this team is examining our solar system, during a time when Earthlings have colonized the entire system and are preparing to travel to the stars.  One of the messages laments that the Terrans have become slaves to their Machines, and requests permission to liberate the Earth people by destroying all the Machines.  The second message is from a dissenting member of the survey team.  He asserts that those his comrades believe to be Machines are in fact the native Terrans, and those they wish to liberate the true Machines.  This mistake has been made because the Galactic Empire itself is populated by Machines, created by a race long extinct, a fact forgotten for millennia and only now evident because the Empire has stumbled upon true living beings for the first time in recorded history.  The revelation that the citizens of the Empire are not natural entities, but artificial constructions of an earlier natural race, will cause an inferiority complex that will shake the Empire's foundations.

Pretty good.  "The Demi-Urge" first appeared in the June issue of Amazing and is now available at Gutenberg.org.

"Utopia? Never!"

Utopias and utopianism are common topics in science fiction--during the life of this blog I have read stories by Theodore Sturgeon and Edgar Pangborn which present utopias, as well as stories by Clare Winger Harris, R. A. Lafferty, and Tanith Lee that express skepticism of utopianism.  I was intrigued by the title of this three-page story, curious to see how Disch would engage with the idea of Utopia in this short format.

I was a little disappointed; this is an entertaining story, but little more than a twist-ending thriller kind of thing.  The planet of New Katanga (the name is a clue to what is going on), called "Utopia" by its inhabitants, has great wealth, because it exports the finest fleece in the galaxy.  Due to a secret process, the "gobblers" raised on New Katanga have much better fleece than gobblers raised on other planets.  This monopoly produces enough money for the Utopians to live lives of ease, dining on the finest cuisine in the galaxy, surrounded by beautiful architecture.

The overt theme of the story is voiced by a tourist visiting the planet, who declares that a utopia is impossible: "'There's always a fly in the ointment...Injustice is a part of human nature.  A society can't do without it.'"  This is the kind of pessimism we have every right to expect from the author of 334!   Despite his skepticism, the tourist is enjoying his visit, and jumps at the chance to become a citizen of New Katanga.  Then it is revealed how the Utopians produce such fine gobbler fleece--immigrants are fed alive to the gobblers!  It is a diet of human flesh which makes the gobbler fleece of New Katanga so fine.  The evil behind New Katanga is made explicit when we (and the tourist) discover that the gobblers are fed in a Roman-style arena, before rapt crowds of spectators.

Presumably this is yet another literary attack on successful businesspeople; the Katangans make their profits and finance their high lifestyle through monopoly and murder.  It also reminded me of the dream sequence in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, in which scenes of a utopia are followed by a vision of human sacrifice.
   
An acceptable entertainment.  "Utopia? Never!" first appeared in Amazing's August issue.

***********

A pretty good selection; 1963 was evidently a good year for Disch and his fans.  "The Return of the Medusae" and "The Demi-Urge," in particular, are models of good "short-shorts;" they offer striking ideas and are imbued with emotional content and psychological insight.  "Final Audit" and "Utopia? Never!" are well-put-together and entertaining.  As for "The Princess' Carillon," well, you can't win them all.

More stories from One Hundred and Two H-Bombs in our next episode!

Four stories by Henry Kuttner & C. L. Moore

As I crisscross America's Middle West, I scour the shelves of used book stores, thrift shops, and library sales, in search of classic SF bargains.  Recent purchases of anthologies brought the number of as-yet-unread Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories in my possession to a critical mass, and this weekend I read four Kuttner and Moore stories, first published in the 1940s and '50s, that draw heavily on psychological theories, classical mythology, and Lewis Carroll.

"Piggy Bank" (1942)

"Piggy Bank" first appeared in the same issue of Astounding as A. E. Van Vogt's famous "The Weapon Shop," under the Lewis Padgett pseudonym.  I read it in Volume 2 of Anthony Boucher's 1959 A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, where it is credited to Henry Kuttner.  The isfdb has Moore as a second author.

Fellow SF fan R. R. Nurmi,
we salute you!

My copy of the two-volume A Treasury of Great Science Fiction was once owned by an R. R. Nurmi of Des Moines, Iowa. Mr. or Ms. Nurmi had a cool ink stamp with which to mark his or her books; it depicts a chess piece (a knight) in the center of a spider's web.  Pretty neat!

"Piggy Bank" takes us to New York City at the turn of the 21st century, when corrupt and ruthless robber barons and organized crime dominate society, the perpetual struggles between rival conglomerates throwing the world into economic chaos.  "Science and government were handicapped by the Powers," Kuttner tells us, "which were really industrial empires, completely self-contained if not self-supporting units.  Their semanticists and propagandists worked on the people, ladling out soothing sirup."  We've seen Kuttner's hostility to private enterprise and advertising before, in the 1953 story "Year Day."

Our main characters in this proto-cyberpunk drama include robber baron Ballard and scientist Gunther.  Gunther has figured out a way to manufacture diamonds that are indistinguishable from natural stones, and Ballard sells them.  Or he would sell them, if they didn't always get stolen.  Ballard gets Gunther to build him an invulnerable robot; with its super senses and super speed it can detect and avoid any trap, any attack.  Ballard has the robot ostentatiously plated in gold and studded with all his diamonds.  Ballard, doing a neat bit of self-analysis, admits that he has designed the robot to show off his wealth in order to compensate for a childhood inferiority complex.  (Kuttner aspired to be a clinical psychologist, and both he and his wife had undergraduate degrees in psychology.)

In a sequence like one in a detective thriller, Ballard's thugs pursue and murder Gunther.  Gunther was on Ballard's hit list because the scientist was the only other guy who knew the diamonds were fake, and how to deactivate the robot.  But when Ballard has money troubles and needs some of those diamonds he realizes he made a boo boo in liquidating Gunther--Gunther changed the robot's password.  There follows a long sequence in which Ballard and his boffins try to figure out a way to catch the robot.  In the end, the only way to stop the robot also renders the diamonds worthless by revealing to the world the formula for how they were created; Ballard's business empire collapses and Ballard goes insane.

This story is OK; I liked how Gunther set things up so if he died Ballard would be financially ruined, but nothing in the story engaged me emotionally or intellectually--I didn't care how or if Ballard caught the robot or salvaged his finances.

"The Children's Hour" (1944)

This story also appears in A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, in Volume 1. Originally it was published in Astounding, under the Lawrence O'Donnell pseudonym.  A Treasury of Great Science Fiction credits Moore as second author, but elsewhere Kuttner has received sole credit.

It is World War Two, and Sergeant Lessing is part of an experimental U. S. Army hypnosis program; the brass want to be able to hypnotize the dogfaces so they will be impervious to any hunger or pain they may experience while they are liberating Europe and Asia from the fascists (or preserving markets for American industry, as your college professor may have put it.)  While he is trying to turn Lessing into the latest Captain America, psychiatrist Lieutenant Dyke discovers that many of Lessing's memories of a three month period two years ago have been suppressed.  Dykes and Lessing struggle to uncover these memories, and a story comes to light that could shatter our view of life and the universe!

Back before he started his military service, in beautiful New York City, Lessing met and fell in love with a beautiful black-eyed girl, Clarissa.  Clarissa is a special woman; whenever Lessing is with her, the world seems brighter, clearer, more beautiful. Bizarre events (e.g., it rains, and as Lessing and Clarissa are running for shelter the shelter suddenly vanishes) lead Lessing to believe that Clarissa is being guided (or manipulated) through life by a superior being of infinite power.  Lessing, jealous, conceives of Clarissa being like Danae of the brazen tower, the love interest of a divinity.  (Kuttner and/or Moore must have really been into classical mythology; Danae also got a mention in "Piggy Bank.")  Lessing tries to get Clarissa away from New York and out of this mysterious being's influence, but to no avail--the being can twist reality to make sure that Clarissa is right where it wants her!

Dyke, thinking of the example of his own high I.Q. child, debunks the Danae theory and figures out what is really going on.  Like some other Kuttner and Moore stories ("Absalom" springs immediately to mind), "The Children's Hour" is about child psychology.  Clarissa is an infant member of our successor species, homo superior, and to this race of supermen, who live on alien planets in a universe where "a cube may have many more than six sides," our little old Earth is like a playground or boarding school.  Dyke has a whole speech about how kids can't quite understand adults, and need to spend time with other kids in order to mature in a healthy way, and tells Lessing he had to make his own genius son go out and play with the normal kids so he would be socialized.  The superhumans sent Clarissa to our Earth, with its meagre number of dimensions, to play with us dummies for a while before taking up the mantle of adulthood.

(It is actually more complicated than that, with dozens of Clarissas, each a single facet of the super-Clarissa that will be formed when they have all matured and will be combined.)

"The Children's Hour" is full of connections to other SF literature.  Charles Fort and James Branch Cabell are mentioned, and a scene in Alice in Wonderland  is referred to (Kuttner and Moore's most famous story, "Mimsy were the Borogoves," prominently features Lewis Carroll).  I wondered if the talk of cubes and tesseracts in "The Children's Hour" was influenced by Heinlein's "--And He Built a Crooked House--," which had appeared in Astounding three years earlier, or if Heinlein and Kuttner and Moore were just drawing on the same source material.

Looking back on the story it is easy to like it, but while I was reading it it felt long (it's like 33 pages) and kind of confusing.  There are some scenes in which Lessing is transported to some of the other planets which are hosting facets of Clarissa that I think are not very interesting and could have been left out.  The fact that the protagonists aren't doing very much, but instead are victims of manipulation instead of agents who drive the plot, and that there is no real villain, also makes the story seem long.        

"The Cure" (1946)  

Another Lewis Padgett story from Astounding.  This one I read in my copy of A Science Fiction Argosy, edited by Damon Knight in 1972, where it is credited to Kuttner and Moore.  Like my volumes of A Treasury of Great Science Fiction, it was originally owned by R. R. Nurmi.

A middle-aged lawyer whose office is in a New York skyscraper is suffering brief, repetitive hallucinations.  A few visits to a psychiatrist help the lawyer realize the meaning of the vivid, specific hallucinations: he is from the far future, when humans have evolved into a vastly superior race, one with ESP and eight fingers on a hand!

But this sixteen-fingered future is no utopia!  In fact, the human race is going extinct due to a plague of insanity, the result of "the herd instinct" apparently resulting from an over reliance on machines.  Only four thousand people remain sane, but they have hit upon a method of therapy to keep themselves from going bonkers: time travel! They send your psyche back to a body in the rough and tumble individualistic 19th or 20th centuries for a few decades--only six months pass for your "real" future body, and when you return to it you are rejuvenated.

(Thomas Disch had a kind of time-travel-as-therapy thing going in "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire," didn't he?)

The lawyer's hallucinations are, in fact, clues about how to get back to the future.  But when he goes back he finds that society has collapsed, his 3999 colleagues have all succumbed to the disease, and are scampering around like monkeys.  All he can do is live out a five-fingered existence in the primitive, but relatively sane, 20th century.

There are obvious similarities to "The Children's Hour," though the optimistic sense-of-wonder ending of that story is replaced by a pessimistic conclusion in "The Cure." While there is no Greek mythology this time, "The Cure" does refer to Tweedledum and the Red King from Through the Looking Glass.

I liked "The Cure" quite a bit; it has the virtue of packing as much punch as "The Children's Hour" into a package a quarter the size, and includes several striking, memorable images.      

"Two-Handed Engine" (1955)

This novelette has been widely anthologized, and is actually the title story of a 2005 collection of Kuttner and Moore tales published by Centipede Press.  In some places, like where I read it, a 1976 anthology edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison called Decade: The 1950s, Kuttner receives full credit for the story.  But in some places Moore is listed as a second author, and in still others Moore is listed as the primary author with Kuttner as second author.

In the future, computers and robots will become so powerful and efficient that human beings need do no work, and all people have equal access to sumptuous luxuries.  Everybody spends his or her time playing what we would call virtual reality video games (Kuttner and Moore call them "Escape Machines that fed them joyous, impossible adventure and made the waking world seem too dull to bother with.")  People stop talking to each other, stop living as families and even stop having sex, leading to a collapse of all social institutions and a precipitous population decline.

Before mankind goes extinct some far-sighted individual reprograms the computers that are running the world.  The Escape Machines are shut down and all those free handouts come to an end, forcing people to work again.  The period of anarchic individualism, however, has left humanity with no sense of morality, no conscience.  To enforce the law against murder and spur a regrowth of the human sense of guilt and sin, the machines have their Furies (Orestes is mentioned in the first line of the story.)  The Furies, invincible robots, follow murderers around for days or months, haunting them until finally, unexpectedly, they execute the malefactor.

The plot of the story follows some murderers who thought they had figured out a way to escape the Furies.  Kuttner and Moore do a great job of "getting into the murderers' heads;" there are lots of tense psychological scenes that build character and drama--I prefer this kind of psychology in my stories to scenes in which a character throws around words from a college textbook or expatiates on child-rearing theories.  Of the four stories discussed in this blog post, "Two-Handed Engine" is my favorite.  

Aldiss and Harrison tell us in an introduction that their Decades series reprints the most entertaining and most important SF stories, and I think "Two-Handed Engine" fits the bill.

**********

All four of these stories are worth reading, but "The Cure" and "Two-Handed Engine" in particular have the kind of economy, emotional impact, and powerful images that I hope to find in a story.

So far all these anthologies I have been buying have proven to be a good investment. I think next I'll sample some stories by writers with whom I am unfamiliar.

The Crack in the Sky by Richard A. Lupoff

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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