1970 stories by Gardner Dozois, Avram Davidson and Thom Lee Wharton from Orbit 8

When I find myself near Dupont Circle in this nation's capital on a rainless day, I generally spend time looking at the clearance carts on the sidewalk in front of Second Story Books.  It is always fun to flip through the art books and military history books that are going for four bucks, and I have purchased quite a few SF paperbacks there for one dollar or even a mere 50 cents.  On my most recent visit I found two volumes in the Orbit series of original anthologies edited by Damon Knight, numbers 8 and 10.  A look at isfdb indicated that these books included stories by Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty that I did not already own and had not already read, so I parted with a dollar to take them home.  I'll read my perforated copy of Orbit 8 first--looking over the table of contents I have decided to read every story in this volume (excepting any I have already blogged about.)

Joachim Boaz, SF blogger extraordinaire and generous supporter of this here blog, read Orbit 8 and wrote about each story back in 2015.  Enough time has passed that my memories of his opinions are a little hazy, and I think I can read and assess these stories without being unduly influenced.  After I read each story and draft my own opinion I will check out Joachim's blog post and see if we are at loggerheads or seeing oculum ad oculum.

"Horse of Air" by Gardner R. Dozois

This is a well-written and compelling piece, a strong start to the book; Knight must have been excited to get it.  At least he included it in the 1975 Best from Orbit anthology.

Dozois employs an interesting narrative strategy: we get an unreliable first-person narrative, interspersed with a more honest stream-of-consciousness (or unvoiced inner monologue) narrative and a third-person omniscient narrative; these latter two texts emphasize or undermine the claims in the main text.  This is quite effective at presenting and distinguishing between different facets of the character, those he wants to display and those he'd rather not.

Our narrator is one of the few people left in a big city (I guess New York), trapped in a high rise apartment far above the street with a fenced in balcony like those one sees in public housing projects.  The start of the story consists of the narrator looking out over the city, of descriptions of his view and his intellectual and emotional responses to what he sees.  As I have told readers of this blog before, I love the kinds of descriptions of rooms and views we find in literary fiction like Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Marcel's room in Balbec, for example, and his view of the church steeples from a moving carriage) and Wyndham Lewis's Self Condemned (Rene Harding's Canadian hotel room) and Dozois really succeeds in painting an absorbing picture in the reader's mind here.   

Then the back story is filled in.  Our narrator, who studied at Annapolis, is a member of what he calls "the upper class" and even "the aristocracy."  (This isn't really the way educated Americans talk, especially self-described "liberals" as this guy is--perhaps a hint this is all a dream or fantasy?)  His class of people, in response to black crime, secluded themselves in these high-rises, and (shortsightedly) handed over political power to the managers of the high-rises.  Eventually the management company sealed the high-rises' inhabitants in, "for their own good." (The plumbing is maintained and twice a week food and supplies arrive via a dumbwaiter.) 

The narrator hates blacks because they "are responsible for the destruction, for the present degeneration of the world," but the third-person omniscient narration indicates that his hatred largely stems from envy--reminding me of the scene in Henry Miller's Plexus (Chapter 15) in which the narrator goes to hear W. E. B. Du Bois speak, Dozois enumerates the many ways (in the eyes of the narrator, at least) black people are better than white people; their easy sexuality, their depth of feeling, their exuberant and happy culture, their rebellion, all a contrast to the square and bland and boring and obedient ways of whites. 

In the final third of the story we are given an increasing number of clues that suggest that some, maybe all, of this SF stuff is the delusion or dream or fantasy of an ordinary man, maybe a businessman, who is stressed out by the pressures of city life in the late '60s/early '70s and a failed relationship with a woman.

"Horse of Air" is quite good, like a Malzberg story that has been carefully polished over a number of drafts instead of being slapped together at high speed as Malzberg's work so often appears to have been.  Joachim also liked it, saying it is the best story in the book.  Whoa, does this mean I should quit now?  "Horse of Air" would reappear not only in The Best of Orbit but the Dozois collection The Visible Man and the seventh Nebula anthology, it having been nominated.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison

I tackled this one, the second story in Orbit 8, back in 2016 when I read Donald A. Wollheim's 1972 edition of World's Best SF.

"Rite of Spring" by Avram Davidson

Here's another story that Knight included in The Best from Orbit.  "Rite of Spring" doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of traction otherwise, however--I think it only ever appeared in books with "Orbit" on the cover.

This is a trifling little vignette (less than seven pages of text) from some weird (post-apocalyptic?) future or alternate world.  I am guessing it is an acknowledgement and demonstration of the fact that customs and social arrangements are arbitrary and silly.  Davidson's story is full of hard-to-decipher allusions and hints about the alien milieu it vaguely depicts; maybe it is supposed to recreate in the reader the feeling of spending the briefest moment in a foreign culture or being exposed to only a few snatches of information about a foreign civilization, to give us the sense that all the apparently bizarre things these people are doing have deep roots and layers of meaning it would take a lifetime to fully understand.  Maybe Davidson is trying to put us in the shoes of an explorer or traveler confronted by alienness, like an 18th-century European who found himself briefly among  people in China or Persia or sub-Saharan Africa, or an Eskimo or Yanomamo who suddenly found himself in Victorian London or the Paris of the Second Empire.

"Rite of Spring" takes place on a farm, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.  Living there as well are a young man, Roger, a young woman, Betty, and a spectacularly obese woman, Mrs. Machick.  The action described in this deliberately opaque story suggests that the Robinsons are responsible for feeding the (apparently idle) Machick, and training young people like Roger and Betty in "the old ways."  It is suggested that both Betty and Roger are only the latest in a series of young people who are employed and tutored by the Robinsons; Betty does domestic chores and Roger does farm work, chopping wood and the like. Betty is from the city, where, the characters say, it is difficult to teach young people the old customs.  (These 1970s stories are down on city life; I guess I am lucky I moved to the Big Apple after it had been tamed in the mid-1990s.)  Roger wants to have sex with Betty, but he is told to wait until the time is right.  The arrival of the first robin of spring is the signal that the right time has arrived; Roger catches the bird, it is decapitated and its blood drunk, and then Roger roughly takes Betty, who initially puts up some resistance.

Gimmicky, a story that is technically competent but has no human feeling or real intellectual content.  Joachim liked it even less than I do, giving it only one out of five possible stars.  I am willing to say it is an acceptable experiment.

"The Bystander" by Thom Lee Wharton

Who is Thom Lee Wharton?  Well, this is his only story listed at isfdb, and that is all I know.

"The Bystander" feels like what I guess the mainstream detective novels I never read are like, if that makes any sense.  A retired dentist, in his forties, is now owner/manager of a bar in New Jersey (or as I call it, the greatest state in the union.)  An FBI investigator comes by to talk to him about his relationship with his business partner, "Joe the Nuts."  The dentist drives the flatfoot to the shore in his antique car (a 1934 Packard) where they talk in an old Coast Guard bunker from World War Two.  The bar owner describes how, like the guy in that Kinks song, he was a success as a bourgeois professional but was not satisfied and became a drunk.  After hitting bottom he lucked into owning a bar; the FBI man and we readers hear all about his struggles to make the bar a success.  And the bar is a success, because the Mafia supplies the food and entertainment.

In the story's last pages we learn that this interview was the first move in a war between the federal government and the Mafia in which many are killed.  The dentist is not killed however, and it is implied that he is somehow pulling the strings behind the scenes, that he caused this war because he is bitter that his wife and child died of a disease or something and he sees the Mafia and the government as equally bad.  Or something.  I don't get it.

This story has no SF content and as a mainstream crime story is a total waste of time.  Wharton makes no discernible effort to back up his apparent argument that the government is a racket just like the mob and is equally delinquent in any effort to portray the psychological pressures of a man broken by the loss of his family or dissatisfied with middle class suburban life.  I am very open to the argument that the government sucks and that middle class life is a tragedy, but the author offers only the tiniest of crumbs to dramatize these themes.  Instead we get twenty pages of pointless details, the literary equivalent of white noise.  Bad!  Joachim gives it one out of five stars and even admits he couldn't finish it!

Inexplicably, Knight not only included "The Bystander" here in Orbit 8, but in The Best from Orbit!  Damon, what are you doing?  Was Thom Lee Wharton the pen name of a loan shark? 

"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty

I recommended this one, the fifth story in Orbit 8, with some enthusiasm back in 2016 when I read it in Wollheim's 1972 World's Best SF.

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We'll get back to this 1970 anthology, but first we'll take a little trip to the 1920s and to the Moon with Edgar Rice Burroughs.                 

1972 (1969?) stories by Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, David Gerrold, Vonda McIntyre & Gardner Dozois

Did the Half-Price Books employee
deliberately put the price sticker over
the figure's face?

I've been trying to resist the urge to buy more books, but I got a gift card for Half-Price Books for Christmas and, when I went shopping for Kinks CDs to help make more tolerable all the driving that is an inevitable part of post-NYC life, I couldn't resist Generation, a 1972 anthology showcasing "new stars of science fiction" edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin.  (You'll remember I read Gerrold and Goldin's 1974 anthology Alternities, and that I have enjoyed four or five novels by Gerrold and two by Goldin.)  Not only do we have here an absorbing and crazy Robert Foster cover, but rarely-reprinted stories by Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg which I have never read, and numerous stories by other interesting writers.  

On the Acknowledgments page Gerrold gives us a hint of the odd history of Generation, saying it was assembled in 1969, but publication was delayed by unspecified problems (problems he takes care to say were not due to Dell, the publisher) until 1972.

Going in to Generation I assumed I would be facing very "New Wavey" stories.  In his introduction Gerrold takes pains to call the volume a collection of "speculative fiction," tells us that the best SF writers are no longer "preoccupied with science and scientists," but instead write about "what it means to be a human being," and that SF is no longer "content merely to entertain."  Gerrold admits that some "writers are still doing the space operas," but they "don't count," they are "no longer where it's at."  I find this needlessly hostile attitude a little irritating, and especially puzzling coming from Gerrold and Goldin--the books I have read by them, like Gerrold's Deathbeast, Yesterday's Children and A Matter for Men and Goldin's A World Called Solitude and Assault on the Gods, are full of entertaining battles involving monsters, laser guns, robots and space ships.  I also have the strong impression that Gerrold and Goldin are fans of old timey writers like Heinlein, van Vogt and "Doc" Smith.

More congenial is Harlan Ellison's back cover blurb, in which he subtly pooh poohs the idea of a collective "New Wave" and instead focuses on the fact that each writer is an individual talent.  In the past I have commented that one of the things I like about Ellison is that, while he has that angry young man thing going and is associated with pushing the envelope and encouraging innovative writing, he still has nice things to say about the writers of the past, people like A. E. van Vogt (whom he righteously championed as a candidate for the title of Grand Master), Poul Anderson, Edmond Hamilton, and L. Ron Hubbard.  You don't always have to tear down the old in order to build something new.

Enough preamble, let's check out stories in Generation by Wolfe, Malzberg, and Gerrold, as well as Vonda McIntyre and Gardner Dozois, and see if they are good representatives of the "fresh young talent" of 1969.

"It's Very Clean" by Gene Wolfe

Miles is a cultured young man (he reads Gunter Grass) and a virgin who has saved up a lot of money so he can go to a brothel where the whores are robots.  You probably remember that I've said Wolfe is my favorite writer, so you are not going to be surprised when I tell you that Wolfe very skillfully sets the scene and evokes our anxieties about our first sexual experiences and such socially and psychologically fraught practices as masturbation and prostitution.  And that the surprise ending actually surprised me. But what I say is true, this is another hit by the master.

"It's Very Clean" was published a second time in the 1996 anthology Cybersex, which has a hideously flat and busy computer-generated cover.  From Richard Powers, Robert Foster, Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta to this?  Sad!

"Vidi Vici Veni" by Barry Malzberg

This story is so outrageous that I am reluctant to tell you it made me laugh until I cried.  But I can't lie to my public--this story is hilarious!

"Vidi Vici Veni" (the title is a joke for all you classics scholars out there) is a cold and dispassionate government report about the sex crimes of a "supervising maintenance operator" at a "tool and die plant."  (Full disclosure: Your humble blogger spent some months working on and off in a machine shop doing tool and die work in the late '80s and early '90s.)  The actual meat of the plot is sort of obliquely described, but it appears that the main character's work generated in him an irresistible sexual desire, which he satisfied not only with his wife, not only with a very surprised male stranger (yes, this story is in part a joke about rape) but then with sundry inanimate objects, including pipes and furniture.  The punchline of the story is that his activities become famous and, if I am reading the obscure text rightly, that America is swept by a mass movement of people who have sex with inanimate objects.

Maybe this story is a sort of lament that our modern society has become so mechanistic and we have become so alienated from our fellow humans that we can more readily feel for manufactured items than each other. Whatever the serious intent of the story, if any, it is so funny it gave me physical pain. If you are the kind of person who won't be offended by a joke in which a male rape victim tells the police, "it was more the surprise than the other thing; if I hadn't felt so depersonalized I might have enjoyed it," I recommend it highly.

(It would be great if somebody else who has read this would confirm my interpretation or provide an alternate one--the story really is opaque and tricky.)

"Vidi Vici Veni" has only been printed once in English, but was translated into French and included in a 1976 volume with a cigarette-smoking frog on the cover!  Zut alors!

"All of Them Were Empty" by David Gerrold

Gerrold, in his long intro to this story, says it is "a favorite child," one of his best stories.  He also tells us he wrote it while high on drugs, and didn't revise it--the first draft was the final draft!

"All of Them Were Empty" is a first-person narrative, delivered by Deet, a guy who smokes a lot of pot, drops acid, uses mescaline, and says things like "Doors like hungry mouths pulled at us," and "Cars like giant panthers prowled the night streets, rolling silent-rumbly through dark-lit intersections and wet gutter bottoms."  Deet is looking for a new high, but is afraid of heroin, so when he hears about a place offering "a new kick" he braves the "hungry mouths" and panther-like automobiles and makes his way through the city streets to the source of this new high, dragging his girlfriend Woozle ("She had sucking eyes") along.

In a narrow apartment two girls sell them the new kick.  Deet and Woozle strip naked and spread goop from a jar all over each others' bodies.  (This sounds like one of the oldest of the old kicks, but be patient.)  Tanks to the goop when Deet and Woozle hold hands they fly out into space, growing bigger and bigger until they dwarf the Milky Way and approach the limits of the universe.  Then they shrink and return to Earth, but somewhere along the way Deet lost Woozle, and when he gets back to the narrow apartment everyone is gone.

This is quite bad, with a pointless plot and a style that is annoying, not only long and tedious, but weighted down by repellant "experimental" techniques which consist of mind-numbing repetition.  But I guess it strikes a chord with some people; "All of Them Were Empty" was not only included in the Gerrold collection With a Finger in My I, but would later appear in an anthology devoted entirely to stories about drug use, Spaced Out.

"The Galactic Clock" by V. N. McIntyre

I thought McIntyre's stories "Only at Night" and "Recourse, Inc." were effective; and had hopes that "The Galactic Clock," which I believe has never appeared in any other publication, would be equally enjoyable.  My hopes were not realized.

"The Galactic Clock" is a long tedious story that consists almost entirely of obvious jokes.  Elroy Farnsworth is an academic who has bad luck.  When he drives he hits every red light.  When he walks he hits every "Don't Walk" sign.  When he puts important papers in the mail they arrive at their destination one day late and so he misses out on an important opportunity.  When he applies for a job the other applicant is a beautiful woman and the person doing the hiring is a lecher; another big opportunity missed. Page after page (21 in total!) of these kinds of jokes, jokes which are not actually bad, but which don't actually make you laugh, either.

As for plot, the plot is just one of the jokes writ large, an example of this dude suffering some misfortune.  I am going to have to give this one a marginal negative vote--it is not a crime like the Gerrold, but it is a pedestrian waste of the reader's time.

"Conditioned Reflex" by Gardner Dozois

Here's another piece which, I believe, has not appeared elsewhere.

"Conditioned Reflex" relates the thoughts of infantrymen as they await the approach of enemy troops, reminiscing about their childhoods, regretting never having had children, expressing disbelief that death could come in just a few minutes, and so forth.  It is suggested that these soldiers may be among the very last human beings alive, and the impending battle may be the very last of a war that will destroy all of humanity.  Dozois uses the story to muse about the possibility that mankind is reflexively and inherently, destructive, or that society has conditioned people to be destructive.

Back cover of my copy of Generation

This story is vulnerable to the charge that it is melodramatic and overwrought, and that it has no real plot.  I liked it anyway; the soldier's thoughts were all quite believable, even affecting, and the story is well-written, just the right length, and it kept my interest. Thumbs up!

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The Malzberg story in Generation is one of the funniest things I have ever read, and all on its own generously repays my two dollars. The Wolfe is quite good, and the Dozois is solid.  The McIntyre is competent, but it is sterile, having no emotional intellectual impact.  The Gerrold is surprisingly bad.

Generation's 25 stories include pieces by Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch and Ed Bryant, writers I have some familiarity with, and two by the famous "James Tiptree, Jr.," a writer whom I hope to start reading soon. We will definitely be coming back to Generation.

Future Corruption 3: Elwood, Goldsmith, Sohl & Dozois

Here comes the third and final installment of our examination of corruption and evil with Roger Elwood and ten other toilers in the salt mines of the speculative fiction world of 1975. Four stories today, one each from editor Roger Elwood, Howard Goldsmith (of whom I've never heard), Jerry Sohl, and Gardner Dozois.

Look!  I'm not kidding!

"Feast" by Roger Elwood

This is a boring literary exercise, five pages of images, little prose poems set apart from each other by employing different fonts and strange enjambments and odd punctuation.  The images are of people, in a world facing food shortages, resorting to cannibalism. Who is to blame?  The last line tells the tale: "And we begin the feast that society has forced upon us."

I understand that editors are expected to buy a story from themselves when they put together these anthologies, but at least try to write something that isn't an actual insult to us, for Christ's sake.

A waste of time--I'm not even breaking out the evilometer for this one.
 
"The Last Congregation" by Howard Goldsmith

This story is two pages long.  A robot cleric laments to his robot congregation that religion and secular philosophies have all failed to keep mankind from engaging in a nuclear war that has destroyed civilization.  Then a "neo-Neanderthal" smashes the robots with a club.

Another waste of time.

"Before a Live Audience" by Jerry Sohl

Back in June of last year I read a story by Jerry Sohl, "I am Aleppo," in another anthology edited by Elwood, and didn't care for it.  This will be my second exposure to Sohl's work.

This story was a relief after the crummy Elwood and Goldsmith stories, like coming upon a Greek vase or a Roman sculpture in the art museum after walking by a Jackson Pollack and a Jasper Johns.  Here we have an actual story with characters and a plot that tries to say something about worthwhile topics, like how we may achieve happiness and psychiatric methods.  The story also delivers when it comes to what this anthology is ostensibly about: the characters make moral decisions, and many of them are corrupted by temptations.

Sohl tells the story in flashbacks and journal entries and that kind of thing, but, in brief, here is the plot.  A man arrives in the late 20th century from a utopian future, but accidentally materializes in front of a moving automobile and lands in the hospital. He heals up, but because he doesn't know what the hell is going on (like what year it is or who the president is) he ends up in a mental institution.  The institution is run by a woman who employs novel methods; a follower of Thomas Szasz, she thinks that there is really no such thing as mental illness.  She feels that people who appear mentally ill are simply acting irresponsibly, and through a system of punishments and rewards, she tries to get her patients to change their behavior.  Her methods often achieve success, and she has a high reputation.

The director of the mental institution comes to believe that the time traveler is telling the truth about his origins, and she becomes obsessed with the possibility of travelling to the utopian future, of being happy there.  She resorts to using her methods of punishment to torture the secret of his handheld time machine out of the man from the future, but he refuses to succumb, and dies from her mistreatment.  Later, tinkering with the device, the psychiatrist is transported to ground zero at Hiroshima, seconds before its destruction.

There's more to the story, more details and characters, and none of that material is extraneous or gratuitous, it is all entertaining or adds to the theme of the story. "Before a Live Audience" is seventeen pages long, and each page deserves to be there.

A good story, bravo to Sohl.  After the irritating Elwood and Goldsmith contributions, "Before a Live Audience" has restored my faith in the written word!      

"Before a Live Audience"     Is it good?:  Yes!    Evilometer Reading: High. 


"The Storm" by Gardner Dozois

Dozois is famous as an editor, and also has a good reputation as a writer; SF fan and R.A. Lafferty enthusiast Kevin Cheek has praised him in the comments to this very blog, and I certainly enjoyed Dozois' collaboration with Jack Dann, "Down Among the Dead Men."

"The Storm" is the tale of Paul, an aspiring writer.  The story alternates between two periods of Paul's life.  Half the sections of the 25 page story are about Paul's childhood, the day on which he and his mother pack for a move to Ohio, away from Paul's father and their home in a town on the Atlantic coast.  That very day a big storm rolls in.  The other sections of the story depict Paul's disastrous early adulthood in New York City.  Paul lives in Manhattan, holed up in his apartment, depressed over breaking up with his fiance, severing ties with his best friend, and losing his job.  I lived in Manhattan in the late '90s and the 2000s, and I thought it was beautiful and thrilling, but Dozois, writing in the 1970s, tells us that "Manhattan was a place that fed you hate, contempt, bitterness, and despair...."

Dozois does a good job of describing everything Paul sees and feels; the story is vivid and compelling.  Until the climax, "The Storm" reads like a literary story about a sad life, full of rich description.

Trapped in his dilapidated apartment with no food or water, disgusted by an invasion of cockroaches, Paul becomes so ill and depressed ("partially freed from the bonds of ego") that he achieves a new and elevated state of consciousness!  In touch with his "superconscious," Paul can sense all the things that had, would, and could have happened to him, and to all mankind!  His mind travels back to the day of the storm, a major turning point of his life, and he chooses to experience the worst of all the possible outcomes of that day. Dozois describes in detail how the storm develops into a hurricane that demolishes the seaside town and massacres the town's inhabitants, including Paul himself.

This is a solid, well-written, entertaining story, and I am definitely recommending it. However, the expanded consciousness business does feel a little like it comes out of left field, and I don't think the story addressees the issues of evil and corruption.  Paul has a crummy life, but it just seems the result of incompetence and/or bad luck, nobody seems to be preying upon anybody else.

"The Storm"   Is it good?:      Quite good.     Evilometer Reading: Low.

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So there it is, Future Corruption, twelve 1975 science fiction stories.   Can I recommend this anthology? There was some half-assed junk from Goldin, Elwood and Goldsmith, but they constitute a small percentage of the book's page count.  Four of the tales I can heartily endorse--the Gloeckner, Lafferty, Sohl, and the Dozois--and the Pronzini, Russ and Lupoff are worthwhile.  (As for the Malzberg stories... well, we've seen better things from him.)  So I can definitely recommend the book as a whole.

All you New Wave and literary SF aficionados will perhaps want a copy, as one of the Malzberg stories and the Lafferty story have never appeared anywhere else.  People interested in portrayals of homosexuality in SF may also want a copy, as Carolyn Gloecker's "Andrew" and J. J. Russ's "Aurelia" have also never been reprinted.  Many of the stories also have as their springboard fears of overpopulation, so if that is your thing, maybe Future Corruption would be a worthwhile purchase.

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At the back of Future Corruption is an ad for Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men.  As part of my Christmas/New Year's obligations I called my mother on the telephone, and she told me she was planning to read All the President's Men soon. Even though my mother has spent her entire life as a suburban housewife who watches TV all day, she likes to think of herself as a member of the 1960s counter culture and a left-wing activist.  When I told her I had been to South Carolina over the holidays to see in-laws (my mother refused to attend my wedding and has never met any of my in-laws) she exclaimed, "I hate the South!"

"Do they have open carry there?" she inquired.

"I didn't read up on the legislation before I went there," I told her.

"You would have seen the guns!  They bring guns to McDonald's!" Mom assured me, exasperated at my ignorance.  Instead of telling me how disappointed she is in me, as she has on Christmas telephone calls of years past, this year Mom enlivened our one-sided conversation by bitterly complaining about "old white men," who are apparently undoing all the work Mom's fantasy self did back in the '60s (while her physical self was in high school.)  My mother is some kind of genius; she says the same things the grad students and professors back in New York used to say every day, without ever having set foot on a college campus.

Future Corruption also has a page advertising "more exciting science fiction from Warner Paperback Library." Of these thirteen books, I've only read two.  I believe I read the stories to be found in Death Angel's Shadow in the later collection Midnight Sun, about four years ago, but I can't remember anything about them.  These stories are about Kane, Karl Edward Wagner's immortal wizard/warrior anti-hero.  Kane has many fans, but he never struck a chord with me the way Elric, John Carter, Conan, or the Grey Mouser did.  My favorite Wagner story continues to be the brilliant "Sticks."

Back during my New York days I read the Bison Books 2000 edition of M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud.  It felt quite long, but the idea of a guy being the last person on Earth, and deciding to spend his time burning down the world's cities, is pretty cool.

Poul Anderson's oeuvre is so large that I have never even heard of The Virgin Planet.  I also have not heard of Robert Miall or Martin Caidin.  I avoid John Jakes because I thought the first Brak the Barbarian thing I read was terrible, and Ron Goulart because I assume his work is broad satire I will find more annoying than amusing.  I should probably give the famous Philip K. Dick a second chance, but in my New York days I read a novel of his and immediately forgot everything about it, including the title.  I have mixed feelings about Keith Laumer; I thought his portion of Five Fates was alright, but the Retief and Bolo stories I have read have been pretty pedestrian.

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

The original hardcover edition

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

“Rubber Room” by Robert Bloch

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Sunshine Club” by Ramsey Campbell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

“Goblin Night” by James Schmitz

Yesterday I read James Schmitz’s “Lion Loose” and was disappointed that it did not live up to the accolades SF authorities Malzberg and Dozois had accorded Schmitz.  Today I read Schmitz’s “Goblin Night,” which first appeared in a 1965 issue of Analog, and was pleased: it is better than “Lion Loose” in every way.

Telzey Amberdon is a 15-year-old college student on a camping trip in a vast and thickly wooded park.  Schmitz deftly sketches out an interesting milieu for Telzey and her adventure: before this planet, whose night sky is rarely dark because of the multitude of bright stars in the planet’s vicinity, was colonized by humans this forest was home to powerful creatures the settlers called spooks, dangerous predators which the colonists were forced to wipe out of the area.  Unknown to her fellow students, Telzey is a talented telepath, and her powers bring to her attention the fact that something horrible is going on in the park: an intelligent man, driven insane by a terrible disabling accident, has been using the park as a hunting ground for that most dangerous of game, his fellow humans.  Soon Telzey herself is the quarry in a deadly chase through the woods, contending with the sadistic villain’s both high tech and savagely primitive methods.

 

This is a hoary old plot, but Schmitz, by adding numerous SF elements, creating in his villain a compelling character, and by setting a fast pace and sticking to it, makes it work, and I quite enjoyed “Goblin Night.”   

   

I read the free e-text available at the Baen Books website; “Goblin Night” is the fourth chapter of the book Telzey Amberdon, which includes illuminating afterwords about Schmitz’s career and the setting of most of Schmitz’s stories by Schmitz fans Eric Flint and Guy Gordon.

“Lion Loose” by James Schmitz

In his introduction to The Best of Jack Vance, important SF critic Barry Malzberg praised James Schmitz, saying he was “the greatest portrayer of total alienness in science-fiction.”  I could not recall hearing of Schmitz before, and Wikipedia was full of praise from Gardner Dozois for Schmitz’s prominent female protagonists and well-developed , psychologically complex characters.  Sounded good, so I hunted down Schmitz’s Hugo-award-nominated story “Lion Loose.”  I read the Baen Books e-text (a free sample chapter from Trigger & Friends), because it popped up first during my search, but the Gutenberg version, which reproduces the Schoenherr illustrations from the story’s 1961 appearance in Analog, may be preferable to some.   

Broad-shouldered muscleman Quillan, some kind of interstellar G-man in disguise as a space pirate, is staying at the Seven Star Hotel, a space station hanging out in the middle of interstellar space that serves as a trade depot and luxury hotel, when he is approached by Reetal Destone, a sexy blonde he has worked with in the past.  She is a private detective/industrial spy, and, like Quillan, she is armed to the teeth with ray guns and espionage equipment.  Reetal informs Quillan that the manager of the hotel and the head of hotel security are in cahoots with the Brotherhood, a sort of space mafia, and, after making some kind of transfer of illegal goods, they are going to blow up the hotel and the thousands of people in it!  Unbeknownst to the hotel guests, the corrupt half of the security force has already murdered the honest half, taken over the control room of the space station, and planted the bomb nobody knows where.  Quillan, Reetal, and a handful of armed guests and hotel staff have just six and a half hours to retake the station from 70 ruthless criminals before the ship with the illegal cargo arrives.

Quillan easily infiltrates the criminals’ group, and, thanks to his fame in the underworld (the murderers and thieves know him by his nickname, “Bad News”) and his fast talking ability, is soon made one of the leaders of the criminal enterprise.  The head criminals reveal that the illegal cargo is fifty ogre-sized carnivorous monsters that have the ability to pass through solid matter.  The crooks had a sample monster on the station already, but it has escaped and it is now free within the hotel.  Quillan is given the job of recapturing the creature.

The style, characters and tone of "Loose Lion" are bland and pedestrian.  The plot, as Quillan hunts the dangerous monster and sows dissension between the two groups of criminals, isn’t bad, but it isn’t stellar.  Action fans may complain that almost all the fighting takes place “off screen,” and that the resolution of the monster portion of the plot is anti-climactic.  Most of the story consists of conversations. 

   

So, a middling pulpy story about space pirates, alien monsters and ray guns.  I have to admit that it did not live up to Malzberg and Dozois’s praise. It wasn’t particularly “alien”; in fact the characters sling tired 20th century clichés like “out of my cotton-pickin’ mind” and “it was big as a barn door!”  The woman protagonist gets captured and tortured by one man and then rescued by another.  And I thought the characters pretty cardboard.  Presumably Malzberg and Dozois had other Schmitz stories in mind; hopefully as I read a few more Schmitz tales I will encounter one of them.