1977 stories by George Alec Effinger, Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and Carter Scholz

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

It's Part Two of our look at Terry Carr's Universe 7, an all original anthology from 1977.  I own a hardcover copy of the book club edition which was formerly in the library of Des Moines resident R. R. Nurmi.  I own several volumes from the Nurmi library, including Anthony Boucher's A Treasury of Great Science Fiction. 

"Ibid." by George Alec Effinger

I know there are Effinger fans out there.  Well, here is where I tell you people that you have to buy a copy of Universe 7 because it is the one and only place where "Ibid." has appeared.

This is a decent Twilight Zone-style story that touches on Cartesian philosophical issues (can we trust any of our sense impressions?) and the question of whether life has any meaning if we cannot be confident of our knowledge of the outside world (if we can't tell if friends and family really like us or if our work is truly valuable, why not just become a slacker, a drunk or a suicide?)

Cathy Schumacher is an academic who suddenly finds messages directly addressed to her in academic journals, students' papers, supermarket celebrity magazines, even the local TV news!  Is she going insane?  Are mysterious eldritch forces aiding her? Tormenting her?  These bizarre problems are piled on top of more ordinary problems Schumacher is facing, the kinds of problems faced by many (most?) ordinary people: her work (teaching uninterested students about English literature) seems pointless and her daughter and husband are distant--he in fact may be having an affair.  Her response to these problems, revealed on the final page of the story?  Taking up alcoholism!

I like "Ibid."'s structure and themes, and the style is fine.  For a while I thought it should be more scary--the story doesn't transmit to the reader a sense of horror, it is a bit cold and clinical.  (If I opened up a supermarket tabloid and saw a headline that read "Hey, MPorcius, look out!") I'd probably just die right there on top of my cart full of Count Chocula and Ovaltine.)  But thinking further on the story, I have decided that it is less about the heavy kind of cosmic horror represented by the impossible messages, the kind of horror that drives people in H. P. Lovecraft stories insane, and more about one of the quotidian sadnesses of life, that we cannot have any confidence that those whom we love love us in return, the kind of sadness represented by Schumacher's relationships with her daughter and husband, the kind of sadness we see in Proust.  Because this sadness is so common, is experienced by so many of us, a low key tone makes sense, and keeps the story from descending into soap opera melodrama.  

Good.

"The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" by Gene Wolfe

I don't have to tell you that Wolfe is widely regarded as the best SF writer of all time and all that.  I read "The Marvelous Brass Chessplaying Automaton" in my copy of Storeys from the Old Hotel years ago, and here I go again.  This story must be highly regarded, it having been included in the Tor 2009 collection Best of Gene Wolfe.

It is centuries in the future!  The human race is reduced to a kind of Early Modern technological and political level, though educated people have knowledge of the computers of the past and can identify weather satellites in the night sky.  Perhaps to evoke thoughts of the Thirty Years War as well as Cold War fears of a NATO vs Warsaw Pact ground war, the story is set in Germany and people fling around references to Burgermeisters and have names like Hans and Gretchen and Karl.  A war with the Russians is underway, and has been for a long time; soldiers and deserters are everywhere, and in the distance can be heard the thunder of siege guns.  

A man comes to the village of Oder Spree who claims to own the sole surviving operable computer, a computer devoted to playing chess!  After the machine is demonstrated, an academic purchases it for the University, only to find the machine is a scam (much like the late 18th-century "Turk" automaton which captured the imagination of Europe and played such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin and Napoleon Bonaparte); a skinny mutant, a genius chess player with an oversized brain, hides inside the machine to make the moves.  The mutant falls in love with a local blue-eyed blonde and decides he wants to stay in Oder Spree; to this end he conspires with the academic to get his money back from the con artist, but a terrible tragedy results from their desperate plan.

Very good.  You've heard me praise Wolfe before, so you won't be surprised to hear me say the story is economical, full of memorable images, pulls at the heart strings, has clever foreshadowing, interesting premises, and a puzzling mystery.  Shall I voice my theory regarding the mystery?  Of course I will!  The mystery is that the chess-playing machine, to the surprise of the double-crossing scam artists, seems to start working on its own.  Now, Wolfe is a Christian who believes in the supernatural, so it is not impossible that we are to suspect that the machine is animated by ghost or deity as a means of punishing the sinful cheaters who callously put the blonde woman's life at risk.  A related possibility (one the unnamed narrator puts forward, but remember that Wolfe is famed for his use of unreliable narrators) is that the mutant has telekinetic abilities even he doesn't understand--it is his own guilty conscience that brings the antiquated machine to life.  But my favored theory (reflecting my cold-hearted materialism, perhaps) is that the machine is being used in strong sunlight for the first time in a long time (Wolfe mentions the sun and bright sky more than once) and the sunlight has recharged the computer's batteries via unremarked upon solar cells, allowing it to operate as it did a hundred or more years ago.

Like I often do with Wolfe stories, I read it twice in one day, enjoying it both times. Highly recommended.          
 
"Brain Fever Season" by R. A. Lafferty

This story is, according to isfdb, the final installment of a series of stories called "Men Who Knew Everything."  The story is a little opaque; maybe I would have had an easier time "getting" it if I had read some of the previous stories in the series.

The story's characters are immortal and eccentric geniuses who manipulate the world from behind the scenes.  Significantly, they "set up" the equator and the four seasons. The idea behind this story is that there are additional "seasons" which affect not the weather and length of the day, but the human mind.  There are, for example, seasons during which there is a flurry of large scale construction (the Great Pyramid of Giza was built during such a period, we are told) or a sudden flowering of artistic production.  In this story there is a sudden explosion in interest and publication of high brow scientific and philosophical writing, "an information-and-invention sort of fever," across the Northern Hemisphere.

Of course, all this stuff I'm just telling you in a few sentences is revealed gradually through clues over  story's 17 pages, accompanied by lots of jokes and farcical explorations of the ramifications of the abrupt elevation of intellectual prowess of the average man.  This isn't a "realistic" look at what might happen if everybody all of a sudden got smarter (like Poul Anderson's Brain Wave), but a funny, silly story in which geniuses feverishly write books in 18 hours and publishers get them printed and into the stores in five hours, a response to the public's fervid demand for material like "Emanuel Visconti's Costive Cosmologies Freed," the widespread demand for which actually predates the completion of the book's first draft.

A recurring motif of the story is likening the desire for knowledge to sexual desire; people "howl" that they are "hot" for a book and "have to have it right now," and the brain fever season is compared to the rutting season or oestrous period of animals. The explosion in human brainpower first becomes evident when publishers and sellers of pornography (famed for being able to produce and distribute material quickly) start selling mass quantities of books like a Tibetan grammar and a volume on plate tectonics.

"Brain Fever Season" is alright, not great.  I didn't laugh at the jokes (many are just lists, like of funny names) and I didn't feel like my work figuring it out had a commensurate payoff.  Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had been already familiar with Barnaby Sheen and his troupe of weird geniuses.  Besides in Universe 7, you can read it in the 1984 collection Ringing Changes, in English or Italian!

"The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" by Carter Scholz

I've never read anything by Scholz before, but on isfdb I see he has worked with Barry Malzberg and Kathe Koja, writers whose short stories I like, and has some kind of collaborative relationship with critical darling Jonathan Lethem.  A good omen.

The intro to "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" contains what I like to think of as "mysteries," even if you skeptical types out there would probably call them "typos."  Carr tells us that Scholz has a story in Alternities--I just read Alternities and there is no Scholz story in there!  He also tells us Scholz has a story in Clarion IV--there is no Clarion IV listed on isfdb, though probably Carr is referring to Clarion SF, the fourth Clarion anthology.  Finally, we are told Scholz has contributed a story to Output, but what exactly Output is, my five-minute Google search does not reveal.

Enough with the mysteries, on with the story.  "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" takes place in 2016.  A means of sending a person's consciousness back in time to inhabit the brain of another person has been developed; you can't influence your host, but you can see through his eyes and share his thoughts.  The main character of the tale, Charles Largens, is a musicologist, and he has his mind sent back in time to ride as a passenger in Beethoven's head.

A large proportion of the story concerns academic angst and office politics: the grantmaker will pull the grant if they find out how the money is being spent, guys compete over a promotion to head of a department, Largens has sex with another academic's wife, composers suffer writer's block, Largens worries that he shouldn't have abandoned his creative career as a composer to become a mere critic and historian of music, he realizes that his academic career has been manipulated by his mentor, etc.

The science fiction elements of the story revolve around the fact that, while your host won't be influenced by a single or a handful of visiting psyches from the future, so many scholars enter the head of a fascinating cultural giant like Beethoven that ol' Ludwig Van begins to pick up the "crosstalk" and it has a terrible negative effect on him.  Beethoven's output is diminished as he loses sanity (the famous Ninth symphony ceases to exist!) and Largens begins to notice differences between the 2016 he leaves for the 1800s and the one he returns to after each transfer.  In the end of the story Largens acts to shut down the dangerous time travel program and abandons scholarly life to return to his true calling, creating new music.

This story is well-written and constructed.  The idea that scholarly research work is sterile and stifling, and can render a creative person impotent (one character literally gets too caught up in his Beethoven research to be able to achieve an erection and have sex with his wife) is provocative, reminiscent of the way (one suspects) that actual soldiers and politicians look down on military and political historians, athletes look down on sports journalists, novelists look down on critics, etc.  (Scholz's story also reminded me of Proust's idea that things like friendship are a waste of time for the true artist, distractions from his real work, his art.) Sterility, like impotence, is a theme of the story--2016 is called a " barren year" and we learn in an aside that New York City has been reduced to a population of only two million, so that instead of new buildings going up, buildings are actually being torn down!  Sounds even worse than the real 2016!

Worth checking out.  "The Ninth Symphony of Ludwig van Beethoven and Other Lost Songs" would later appear in British and German anthologies.

***********

A good anthology, with seven stories that I can definitely recommend and only one clunker.  Universe 7 earns the MPorcius Seal of Approval.

1982 stories from Russ, Effinger, Ellison, and Platt & McCarthy

The cover illustrates "Starhaven"
by Platt & McCarthy

Back in February I read the Thomas Monteleone story from my copy of the January 1982 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  Let's read some more from its 34-year-old pages.

"Souls" by Joanna Russ

Am I really going to read a forty-page story by a feminist college professor who (according to wikipedia) thought pornography was "the essence of evil in society?"  Besides seeming ridiculous, such an idea goes against all my free speech sensibilities.  What am I thinking?  Well, "Souls" won a Hugo and some other awards; let's see if we can figure out why.

"Souls" is set in medieval Europe, and is the tale of the Abbess Radegunde, narrated by an old man who knew her when he was a seven-year-old boy.  Radegunde is apparently some kind of genius--she was able to read at the age of two, and after an education in Rome could read and speak every conceivable language and was an expert on Christian scripture and classical literature.  She is also a skilled healer of broken bodies and soother of troubled minds.  Beloved by all for her extraordinary kindness and generosity, Radegunde also has great powers of persuasion, so that her words are always obeyed, making her the natural leader of the German village where her abbey is located.  This sounds like just the kind of protagonist a feminist college professor would dream up, a woman so good and so smart that everybody does whatever she tells them to!

When Vikings attack the village, Radegunde tries non-violent resistance and to appease the raiders by just handing over all the abbey's treasures.  This works about as well as you'd expect it to.  After half the villagers get massacred and all the young women get raped, Radegunde uses her uncanny abilities and extensive knowledge to heal the sole Viking casualty and to ease the mind of one of the rape victims, who has gone insane.

In the second half of the story we learn there is more to Radegunde than meets the eye!  She has vast psychic powers--she can see what is going on anywhere in the world and read and control the minds of people nearby!  She has contempt and pity for everyone because everybody is so selfish and greedy and hateful!  She doesn't believe any of that Christian gobbledygook herself, but is more than willing to tell everybody comforting lies like "your friends who got murdered by the Vikings are happy up in heaven!"

The crisis of the Viking attack spurs Radegunde's mind, and, casting her clairvoyance/remote viewing powers skyward, she discovers she is not really human, but a member of a peaceful space faring race!  I think she is on Earth to study us and try to improve us, her alien nature hidden from her own mind, kind of like in Doris Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell.  Her true origin was concealed from her because our world is so evil that it would drive one of these goody goody aliens insane to live here--witnessing the evil of the Earthman, for these extraterrestrial paragons, is like being raped by a Viking!

Before the Vikings can drag her off to slavery Radegunde's true fellows arrive in their spaceship and whisk her away from our crappy planet!  (The Earthlings think she was carried to Heaven by angels.)

So, "Souls" is one of the many SF stories which damn the human race for its manifold sins by contrasting us with utopian aliens.  People love these kinds of stories--no wonder it won a Hugo!  But "Souls" is better than a lot of those other stories which denounce our civilization; Russ focuses on characters and their emotions, has a good writing style, and fills her story with lots of classical and medieval factoids.  Maybe this story really deserved that Hugo!

"Souls" is a long story, and Russ has room to fit in thought-provoking philosophical points and psychological theories.  One of the themes that comes up several times in "Souls," one that is reminiscent of Russ's "Zanzibar Cat," is the power of the storyteller and the artist.  The Abbess's storytelling helps mend the psyche of the rape victim, and, reminding me of Russ's abomination of pornography, Radegunde relates how nude statues she saw in Italy excited in her a sexual desire.  Reminding me that Russ was a lesbian, Radegunde explains that she never took a lover in Italy because men are universally evil--it was impossible for her to find one who didn't disgust her.  The idea that real men can't measure up to idealized depictions such as those of Greek gods also reminded me of one of the standard criticisms of pornography, that it damages real-life erotic relationships by creating unattainable expectations.

So, my fears that "Souls" would be an impenetrable New Wave morass or a leftist harangue were unfounded; this is a smoothly written traditional science-fiction story with a feminist edge; that edge doesn't overwhelm the literary virtues of piece, which is engaging and entertaining as well as polemical.  I didn't expect to be giving this one a positive review, but life is full of surprises.

"Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" by George Alec Effinger

In the intro to this story, editor Ed Ferman calls it "preppy science fiction." When I was a kid there was a lot of talk about preppies, jokes about them and their clothes and so forth, but I never met any preppies and really had no idea who they were or why I should be laughing at them. As an adult, of course, it looks to me like these jokes were just a lot of naked class envy, at least on the part of the people I knew as a kid.  Maybe actual preppies had a good sense of humor and enjoyed all the jokes.

Anyway, "Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" is a parody of Edgar Rice Burroughs' immortal classic A Princess of Mars, one of my favorite books.  What if, instead of an American Civil War veteran, an upper-middle-class college girl who loves to shop was magically transported to a war torn Barsoom?  Effinger doesn't produce a plot here, he just exactly copies various things that happen in Burroughs and has his broad caricature of a character slotted into the John Carter space, in the same way an episode of the Simpsons or South Park will have everything that happened in The Prisoner or Great Expectations happen to one of the cartoon's regular characters.

In my teens and twenties I thought this kind of thing was funny, but I'm 44 years old now, and I thought this story a waste of my time.  Presumably there are lots of people who find this story amusing--believe it or not, it has like ten sequels!

"The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists" by Harlan Ellison

Gadzooks, another derivative joke story!  This one is a parody of the story of Christmas, full of ethnic jokes and references to 20th Century pop culture.  Kaspar (Chinese), Balthazar (black) and Melchior (Jewish) drive a Rolls Royce across the desert, following the star that marks the site of the messiah's birthplace.  Like the Effinger, I thought it lame, but I'm sure it has its partisans, people who think it hilarious that Balthazar calls Kaspar "Yellow Peril" and carries around the collected works of James Baldwin and a "hair-conking outfit," that Kaspar calls Balthazar "Black-is-Beautiful over there," and that Melchior is a hypochondriac who says things like "those latkes are sitting right here in my chest" and "You know, it's funny, but he [the baby Jesus] doesn't look Jewish."

"Starhaven" by Charles Platt and Shawna McCarthy

Ed Ferman tells us this is a "SF gothic."  You can believe I was hoping, praying, that this was not another feeble joke story.

"Starhaven" is a parody of or homage to those "gothic romances" in which an innocent young woman is swept off her feet by a wealthy man and, in his big old house, discovers sinister secrets.  The big old house in this story is the centuries-old space station, Starhaven.  Once aboard with her beau, the narrator discovers a secret door, meets the crazy great-grandfather, and is sexually enjoyed by clones of her boyfriend whom she initially mistakes for him.  Those clones are illegal, and so to protect the secret of their existence the great-grandpappy will now try to murder her! Fortunately the old robot butler and her boyfriend help her escape the station.  The fiance declares that he truly loves her, and is willing to give up his family's wealth to marry her.  The End.

Platt and McCarthy play it more or less straight ("Starhaven" feels more like a pastiche than a satire), and the jokes aren't too distracting or outlandish; I'll judge this one acceptable.

**********

If you follow the SF gossip you perhaps remember that a few years ago Barry Malzberg got in trouble with feminists because he admitted he thought some chick was hot or something; I don't recall the details.  I felt bad for poor Barry, but something in this issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction made me consider that Malzberg's suffering might be justly filed under the heading of "poetic justice."  The first letter in the magazine's letter column is from Charles Platt, who is writing to defend himself from a claim by Malzberg in the pages of F&SF that Platt doesn't care for women writers.  Platt spends the letter, of which I provide a scan here, detailing the evidence that he likes the work of numerous female writers and has supported women authors in his capacity as an editor of books and periodicals.  It makes it a little harder to sympathize with Malzberg as a victim of unfair charges of sexism if he himself has made a practice of levelling, apparently unfounded, accusations of sexism at other members of the SF community.  I wonder if Malzberg ever explained or apologized for his comments about Platt.

**********

This is a good issue if you are into joke stories or feminist topics--Michael Bishop's Books column includes much discussion of stories by women, including two stories by Russ.  The Russ and Monteleone stories justify my own purchase, and there are still three pieces of fiction in the magazine I haven't read yet.

     

January 1974 stories by Ted White, Janet Fox, J. J. Russ, and "Susan Doenim"

Let's tackle the rest of the fiction from my copy of January 1974's Fantastic.

"...And Another World Above" by Ted White

White, editor of the magazine, includes a longish story by himself; on the Table of Contents it is called a "novelete."  In its introduction White tells us it is the first in a series of stories about his character, "Long Hand," but I'm not finding any evidence online of further stories about the character.

Which is too bad, because "...And Another World Above" is a pretty good piece of work, a good start for a novel or a series of closely connected stories.  It doesn't really work as a stand alone tale, as it spends all its pages setting the scene and introducing the characters, so there is no conflict or climax or resolution.

Long Hand (is this name some kind of writerly in-joke?), a teenage boy, is a member of a nomadic tribe of only 22 people.  They can only barely eke out an existence in the barren desert they inhabit, and have virtually no technology--Long Hand has never even seen a wheel!  One day the band is visited by wise men who have magical (or high tech) healing abilities.  These wise men do some good deeds for the tribe, and then leave.  Long Hand, curious, follows them, and witnesses them teleporting away. Imitating their actions, the boy himself is teleported.

He reappears in a much more fertile land, one of towns, farms and rivers, and a population that wears clothes and uses wagons.  The sky is also different; White seems to be hinting that this world is on the interior of a globe or cylinder with a sun in its center, like in the generation ship in Gene Wolfe's 1990s Book of the Long Sun or Edgar Rice Burroughs' 1914-1963 Pellucidar books.  Long Hand meets an older woman who is a mind reader, and becomes her assistant.  He also meets a friendly teenage girl in a town, and loses his virginity with her.  Then the story is over.

I liked White's writing style, and the way he handled the characters was pleasant.  I think I would have enjoyed following Long Hand as he explored his new world and did whatever the plot would end up consisting of, going on a quest or fighting in a war or whatever.  Is there any chance one of White's novels is a continuation of this story?

NOTE:  There's a fun story autobiographical story by White about his relationship with Harlan Ellison available online here; check it out, it is like something Harvey Pekar would write, and even includes charming cartoons!

Mike Kaluta's illo for "She-Bear"; I
don't get the Asian style; this is a Northern
European story (Arcana invokes Odin)

"She-Bear" by Janet Fox

I'd never even heard of Janet Fox before reading this story; apparently she is most well-known for a series of novels about an alien called Scorpio who travels through time.  Those novels appeared under the pseudonym Alex McDonough.

"She-Bear" is a competent, if ordinary, sword and sorcery adventure.  Maybe I'm supposed to praise it because it's about a woman who kills people with a magic sword instead of about a man who kills people with a magic sword?  Be that as it may, I liked "She-Bear,"--the plot is solid, and Fox's style and pacing are good.

Arcana is a "tall, sturdily-built girl" climbing snow-covered mountains on a quest to find a magic sword and kill a troll.  The sword is imbued with the bloodthirsty soul of the great king of a forgotten people, and when Arcana has to fight rapists, the sword basically fights for her, guiding her hand in intricate fencing moves.  Besides her magic sword, Arcana (who is a witch) is accompanied by a daemon trapped in the body of a blind horse, and a handsome man who is in her thrall, she having used the magic sword to outfight him and win his obedience.  A romance seems to be brewing between the two, but is not consummated within the period of the story.

While a complete story, "She-Bear" feels like an episode in a series, and I'd certainly be interested to read more about Arcana, the captive daemon, and the thrall and their Conan/Elric/Grey Mouser-style adventures.  Fox published something like 50 stories in anthologies and periodicals, so with luck I will encounter some more of her work in my usual course of scrutinizing tables of contents in libraries and used book stores. 

An entertaining fantasy caper with some effective horror elements; thumbs up. 

"The Interview" by J. J. Russ

J. J. Russ only has six entries, all short stories, on the isfdb.  White tells us this is a Kafkaesque story, and that Russ is a published poet.

This is a first person narrative in which the protagonist endures a job interview in a dystopian world in which there is only one company to work for and the unemployed are "disappeared" soon after losing their positions.  Our narrator is presented with impossible challenges at the interview, like being asked to recall something from the day of his birth, or define words that the interviewer has just made up.  The story is mildly amusing, though it feels a little long and I spotted the twist ending early.

Acceptable.

"Heartburn in Heaven" by Susan Doenim

When I looked up Doenim at the isfdb I was surprised to find that this was a pseudonym used by George Alec Effinger.  In his intro to the story Ted White reports that "Miss Doenim" recently graduated high school--in 1974 Effinger, born in 1947, was 27 years old!  Was White in on the joke, or was he the victim of an elaborate charade on Effinger's part?  Is the "affectionate dedication" to Harlan Ellison sincere, or some kind of dig?

I liked Effinger's 1973 story, "City in the Sand," but was not impressed by several of his earlier stories. "Heartburn in Heaven" isn't terrible, but I can't quite say I enjoyed it; it is a sterile literary exercise.

A man awakes naked in a long steel corridor.  He can only vaguely remember his earlier life; he doesn't even recall his own name.  On the floor are a scrubber and a can of polish.  He eventually learns that if he polishes the walls of his prison, food will appear.  Exploring, he meets other prisoners; none know any more about how they got here than he does.  The inmates cannot live communally, because their food only appears in the place where they awoke.   The female prisoners have a little more mobility, because they will have sex with men who trade them half a ration of food for the privilege. 

And that's all folks, we never learn anything about how or why he is in this environment, or who put him there.  I guess this is just a (tepid) allegory of life.

Barely acceptable.

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All in all, this issue of Fantastic is pretty good.  White, Malzberg and Fox provide stories I can confidently recommend.  The Meyers, Russ and Effinger stories, all of them odd in one way or another, get (perhaps grudgingly) passing grades.  That leaves us only one truly bad story, the anemic Bunch piece.  And the ancillary matter--editorial, letters, the whole business of Effinger impersonating a young woman--are fun.  So, reading this magazine has been a positive experience, and opened my eyes to two authors, White and Fox, worth a further look.

Stories from 1973 by C. S. Claremont, Geo. Alec Effinger and David Drake

In the past I have mentioned that I often am not sure what to read, and will allow myself to be guided by the Fates.  Recently, in an Iowa antique mall, I came upon a copy of the April 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was charmed when I saw that a previous owner of the periodical had read and graded each piece of fiction therein.  I willingly parted with two bucks and brought the issue home with me.  This artifact provided me not only the chance to pass judgement on the work of science fiction writers, but the opportunity to pass judgement on the judgement of an unnamed stranger!

This week I read this individual's favorite story from the issue, "Psimed" by C. S. Claremont, his or her least favorite tale, Geo. Alec Effinger's "The City on the Sand," and a story which received the modal grade (look, I'm using math words), David Drake's "Arclight."   Of the eight novelets and short stories in the issue, five, including the Drake piece, received "g"s.  Let's see if MPorcius Fiction Log is on the same page with the SF fan we can know only as "Previous Owner."

"Psimed" by C. S. Claremont

If you look at Previous Owner's handwritten note, I believe we can gain an insight into his or her thought process.  It looks like Previous Owner was going to give "Psimed" a score of "VG," but then realized he/she was shortchanging Claremont, and upgraded "Psimed" to "Excellent."  (I am disregarding the possibility that Previous Owner's grade is the neologism "vexcellent," meaning "having the ability to cause a high degree of vexation.")            

I've never read anything by Claremont before--in fact, I had to do some research to find out if Claremont was a man or a woman.  As people reading this probably already know, Claremont usually goes by "Chris Claremont," and is staggeringly famous for writing about Marvel's X-Men and collaborating with George Lucas on some fantasy novels.  I'm learning every day!

My man tarbandu has written a little about Claremont's comic book work and I think it is fair to say that tarbandu would not use words like "excellent" to describe it.  Torn between the disparate opinions of tarbandu and Previous Owner, I tried to go into "Psimed" with an open mind.

"Psimed" is the story of Petra Hamlyn, a female doctor in a future high tech New York.  I get the impression that Claremont often writes female protagonists.  Hamlyn is a showy individualist, wearing jewelry and short skirts in a society in which fashions are androgynous and conservative.  Male characters stare at her legs, female characters think she looks like a prostitute.  When a new colleague calls her "Doctor," she corrects him: "My name's Petra.  I'm afraid I despise formality...."

The child of a wealthy man collapses of a rare disease, and Hamlyn's team of doctors try to save the kid.  Hamlyn and the kid are both psychics, and, in this universe of Claremont's, psychics tend to lose their powers and get all angsty and then commit suicide.  There is some melodrama as the kid goes berserk upon learning he has lost his psi powers and when Hamlyn has a painful flashback to when she lost her powers while terrorists tortured and murdered her husband.  Hamlyn also has sex with the new colleague.  The story ends when the kid dies, and another one of Hamlyn's colleagues, a psychic who has melded his mind with the kid in an effort to save him, also dies.

I'm no expert on the X-Men, but it seems like the themes of this long, boring, and histrionic story about a small elite of angst-ridden people with special powers who are expected to use those powers to help society, have something in common with the themes of those X-Men comics.

So, what did Previous Owner like about this story?  I guess lots of people are into medical dramas, and into stories about people with special powers who suffer angst and alienation.  I don't find medical stuff interesting, and while I sometimes like the whole alienated mutant thing (I just gave Kuttner and Moore's "The Piper's Son" a positive review), I didn't think this was a good example.

Previous Owner Grade: Excellent

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Not good

"The City on the Sand" by Geo. Alec Effinger

I've already encountered Effinger and his short stories during the course of this blog's life.  My feelings have been mixed.  Let's see if "The City on the Sand" tips the scales one way or the other.  SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz thinks highly of Effinger, so again we see a blogger I admire at odds with the mysterious Previous Owner, who was at a loss for words to describe his or her unhappiness with "The City on the Sand."  Who will I side with?

"The City on the Sand" is a consciously literary and subtly amusing story about decadence and a life wasted.  It takes place in an alternate early 20th century world (they have electric lights and radios) in which Western Europe is so decadent that its people have not bothered to conquer or even explore the New World or Sub-Saharan Africa.  The main character, Ernst Weinraub, is a would be poet and novelist who has traveled Europe, but found no place truly congenial.  So he has settled in the one city of North Africa, where he sits at an outdoor cafe all day, drinking and watching people walk by.  He has an outline for a trilogy of novels but has made no progress on the novels in years.  When it rains he doesn't even have the energy to move inside or lower the awning.

Weinraub has done nothing with his life, he has no friends, no wife or children.  He doesn't make an effort to get his poetry published; he just hopes some tastemaker will spot him sitting in the cafe and "discover" him.  When people try to develop a relationship with Weinraub or enlist him in their projects (a Polish political activist is trying to raise a volunteer army to free slaves or something like that) he just waves them away.

I have to disagree with Previous Owner again.  Effinger's style here is good, and the setting and tone of the story are good.  I can see why someone wouldn't care for "The City on the Sand," though-- there's not much plot and certainly no action or sex.  This is a literary mood piece, but it is a good one and I quite like it.  My opinion of Effinger has just gone up.

Previous Owner Grade: ugh

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good

"Arclight" by David Drake

In my youth I read and enjoyed Killer, which is about a space alien murdering people in ancient Rome, and was written by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner.  I read a couple of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, and they just made me shrug.  I quite liked Drake's short story "The Barrow Troll," and in late 2010 I read his novel The Voyage and wrote a three star review of it on Amazon in which I focused on the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of amoral jerks.

So, that is a brief history of my relationship with David Drake, who seems like a competent writer but whose isn't always ideally suited to my temperament.  I was curious to see how I would respond to "Arclight."

Well, for once I am on the same page as Previous Owner; this is a good story.

Drake served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, and this story draws on his experiences.  A cavalry unit (the main characters operate ACAVs, M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with additional machine guns and armor) accidentally uncovers an ancient Cambodian temple.  There is a hideous idol in the temple which the troops damage in the course of investigating the ruin.  Over the succeeding nights the soldiers dream of this monstrous statue, and some of them are mysteriously killed, their bodies horribly mangled.  Was it communist guerrillas who killed them?  A ravenous tiger?  We readers know it was an invisible demon!  The demon's campaign of vengeance ends when the U. S. Air Force bombs the temple into oblivion, demolishing the idol.

This is a solid entertaining horror story.  We've all probably read lots of stories about monsters from ruins terrorizing people, but Drake's story really benefits from its setting among American soldiers in South East Asia.  For example, I found the military stuff interesting (I was not familiar with the terms "ACAV" and "arclight" before.)  So, thumbs up for this one.

Previous Owner Grade: g

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good.

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Even if Previous Owner and I have different tastes, I enjoyed my exploration of his or her old magazine, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about three authors I have only had a limited exposure to.

The April 1973 F&SF also has a bunch of interesting ads.  On the first page of my copy (which I suspect is in fact the third page--I think the first sheet of my copy was lost) we have an ad for an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Hubba hubba!  Also, an ad for a novel about what would happen if some guy figured out astrology was real.  I'd be curious to read some of the sex stories (despite the embarrassingly dumb font they use in the ad for the title), but the astrology book sounds horrible.

In the back of the mag (we cool people call magazines "mags," you know, to save time) we have the "Market Place," which is full of fun classifieds.  I had no idea there was a town in California called "Brubank."  Not only is there such a town, but the people there love dinosaurs!  There's an ad for Dianetics; these were the days before the Elronners had that John Travolta and Kirstie Alley money and could afford those TV ads we all remember.  A guy in Hawaii is willing to teach you telepathy.  You can mail three questions to a psychic in Illinois and for only ten bucks he will use his powers to answer them.  And if you don't have ten dollars and live in South West Canada, a guy will teach you how to pan for gold right in your own neighborhood!  Awesome!  

Click to read about all the bargains I missed in 1973 when I was two years old

Three 1971 stories by George Alec Effinger

I guess I bought Clarion, an anthology of stories from a 1970 writers' workshop in Pennsylvania, a few years ago because of the Robert Thurston stories.  I quite liked Thurston's Alicia II, which I read in my youth and reread in my 30s, and which I glowingly reviewed on Amazon.

Going through my books this week while tidying up my study, I flipped though Clarion and found that it had three stories by "Geo. Alec Effinger," and on a sort of whim decided to read them.  I guess I had Effinger in mind because Joachim Boaz mentioned him recently; Boaz loves Effinger's novel, What Entropy Means to Me.

Two of these three stories never appeared anywhere else, so Effinger completists will want to seek out this paperback.

"Trouble Follows"
In his intro to this seven-page story editor Robin Scott Wilson tells us Effinger "has enormous talent and a brilliant future."

This story isn't very good.  It is a letter written by a college student to another college student, telling the story of how an old drifter came to the campus student union one day.  We get overly long descriptions of peoples' clothes and hair, and of the student union.  The drifter uttered some gnomic wisdom, and our narrator made fun of him and insulted him, calling him a "hippie creep" and jocularly comparing him to Odysseus.  The narrator basically drove him off campus, but that evening felt compelled to join the old man, and took to the road after him.  Months later, as he writes this letter, he has not found the drifter yet.

Maybe there is some kind of symbolism or literary allusion here; are the narrator and the old man supposed to be like the Wandering Jew?  Or is the narrator supposed to be like Telemachus, following his (spiritual?) father?  Does the wandering represent man's life, spent on a fruitless quest for wisdom or repentance?  Well, whatever.

I love extravagant ad copy like this,
especially with deflating typos

"A Free Pass to the Carnival"
 "A Free Pass to the Carnival" appeared in the May 1971 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as well as here in Clarion.  Wilson calls this satire "a perfect literary setpiece," comparing it to Johnathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World, which all you literary historians out there already know consisted of letters by a fictional Chinese visitor to England expressing Goldsmith's gripes about British society.  I can't say I was excited to hear what Effinger's gripes were about American society, but I figured I would be able to handle a mere 7 pages of gripes.

The story takes place in New York, which a family of aliens known as "lords" is visiting as tourists.  It seems like the aliens have the Earth at their mercy; it is suggested that they can just take what they want from stores and pay only if they choose to.

The adult aliens think New York and human beings suck balls.  They allege that humans suffer an inferiority complex because of the superiority of the lords, and their culture has suffered.  They lament that human goods are all mass produced instead of handcrafted (I guess these aliens got to Earth in a handcrafted star ship.)  They theorize that humans are sexually frustrated, which is reflected in their debased economic, political and religious lives.  And so on.  The child alien in the story starts off finding New York exciting, and even finds a human girl attractive, but by the end of the story is a human hater like his parents.

Who or what is being satirized here?  Does Effinger believe all that stuff the aliens say about sexual frustration, mass production, and how humans (or just Americans, or just Westerners?) "sell themselves" and "put prices on everything they have?"  Maybe he does.  But the aliens are not exemplars; Effinger also seems to be using them to satirize the way adults pass their prejudices on to their children, and how First World people think of the Third World and how First World tourists behave in Third World countries (at one point the question of whether the folk music in a Village dive is "authentic" is raised.)

I thought "Trouble Follows" was too lame to bother figuring out, but this one is far more interesting.  Marginal thumbs up for "A Free Pass to the Carnival."

"The Westfield Heights Mall Monster"
Effinger told Wilson that this story is the "transcript of a nightmare...I woke up shaking, and crawled out of bed to write it."  Wilson tells us it is so good that having it in his anthology makes him feel like the guy on Columbus's ship who was first to spot a sign of the New World.

The story takes place in the future, after some kind of socialist revolution, and is about a guy who goes to the movies, which are free.  He gets a coke from the coke machine, and, here comes the joke, the coke machine dispenses plastic packets of cocaine!  Also free!

Most of the story consists of a detailed description of the film.  There are lots of lines like, "The camera swings left, down the main street, focusing on a large suburban shopping center," and "...the background music has returned to that ominous mode...."  The movie, apparently, is an anti-capitalist propaganda film in the form of a horror movie.  It follows two teenagers as they go to the mall, where the stores become blobs that chase them down and assimilate them.  The end of the story is full of famous phrases and references to famous images, including Winston Churchill's "we shall fight on the beaches" speech, a line from the Beatles' "Penny Lane," the Black Power salute at the Mexico City Olympics, and the October 21, 1967 photos of  protesters with flowers facing National Guardsmen (Effinger seems to be conflating two photos, taking the female protestor and the bayonets from the Marc Ribaud photo and adding them to the Bernie Boston photo in which the (male) protester actually puts a flower stem in a rifle barrel.)

This story isn't terrible, but it certainly feels long (we get detailed descriptions of the teenagers' attire, for example) and it doesn't impress upon you any strong feelings, just a sort of free form dissatisfaction with the universe.  (In the intro, Effinger explains that he is "fed up with society," but also skeptical of revolution, or, as he puts it, "bro, the Revolution don't look so cool from here, either....")  I think I've giving this one a borderline negative vote.

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So far, the most entertaining thing about Clarion has been the hysterical enthusiasm of the intros and advertising blurbs; the critical pieces, like Harlan Ellison's (sample passages: "these Clarion writers are in the noblest traditions of those who have dealt with High Art," and "the revolutionary writers of sf hurl fire and thunder and lightning in their work...") promise more of the same.  The Effinger stories have been tepid, so right now I can only recommend Clarion as a kind of historical document, providing insight into literary SF's hopes and fears in 1970, but I'll read some more of the fiction in the coming days and see if there are any gems in here. 

The New Mind and new (to me) authors: Bauer, Effinger, and Sohl

Today we are exploring new frontiers at this here blog.  New to me, at least.  I'd read four stories from Roger Elwood's 1973 collection of original science fiction stories, Frontier 2: The New Mind and liked them all, so I decided yesterday to press my luck and read three more, all of them by writers I had never read before.

"From All of Us" by Gerard M. Bauer

In his intro to the book, editor Roger Elwood informs us (warns us?) that Bauer is 19 years old and that "From All of Us" is his first sale.  The story is full of odd word choices that I think an editor should have done something about.  The very first lines of the story are, "I was born insane.  Mad.  Or to use the erudite term, 'mentally retarded.'"  Do educated people ever use "mentally retarded" as a synonym or euphemism for "insane?"  On the second page the word "acknowledge" is used in an unusual and off-putting way, and the third page "repulsively."  This story had me itching for my red pen. 

Jim, our first person narrator, is from the Twin Cities, which, in real life, is home to perhaps the finest SF bookstore in the world, Uncle Hugo's, which I have visited once and highly recommend.  Jim and his parents are on a road trip through Montana; I don't think I've ever been to Montana. 

Jim is twelve years old, and a genius, but, because he is mute and his arms are too weak to write, he is considered mentally retarded.  He receives a telepathic call, and escapes his dreadful and pathetic parents to join a secret community of people with physical birth defects and astounding mental abilities.  Their leader is a biracial ("mulatto" is the word used) scientist who has built a machine that can cure Jim's physical problems, a second machine that can telepathically teach him a library's worth of knowledge in a few week's time, and a third machine that can teleport everybody to another planet.  In no time Jim has the body of a healthy 25-year old and is having marathon sex sessions with a beautiful 20-year-old woman whom the mulatto assigns to him as his "mate."  

The National Guard detects the nuclear reactor the mulatto secretly built and, along with some local ranchers, attacks the fortress of the mute geniuses.  The mute geniuses teleport to a planet with perfect weather and live happily ever after.  The last lines of the story express Jim's contempt for those of us stuck on our "dead and stagnant" Earth.

This is a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy, silly enough to be interesting and amusing, though perhaps not in the way the author intended.  Perhaps it has value as a kind of window into the 1973 zeitgeist, or into the mind of an alienated teenager.

I didn't look up Bauer on isfdb until after I had read the story; when I did, I found this was his only published SF story.  In 2003 he signed a letter from the SFWA urging the powers that be to continue exploring space despite the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, so I guess he was still an active part of the professional SF community 30 years after his single sale.      

"New New York New Orleans" by George Alec Effinger

Every day I find a new reason to miss New York.  I recently learned that the institution that owns the house we are renting expects us to mow the lawn.  I haven't mowed (or mown) a lawn in like 25 years!

I've been to New Orleans.  I wasn't crazy about it.

"New New York New Orleans" is a well-written example of what I call "a Twilight-Zone-style" story.  Two guys living in New York City notice that characteristic elements of New Orleans are popping up in the Big Apple; Louisiana cooking, a huge paddleboat in the Hudson, tourists carrying New Orleans souvenirs who actually think they are in New Orleans, etc.  There has been a wrinkle or warp in the fabric of reality, and it is getting worse all the time.  Eventually it becomes clear that the entire country, or maybe the entire world or universe, is descending into chaos, with people and things appearing and disappearing.  There is no explanation for this, or resolution of the plot; the characters can only accept this strange new state of affairs.

The tone of the story is basically humorous, though with an undercurrent of fear and alienation (of millions of people in New York, only three of them seem to notice what is happening; the changes seem to be affecting most peoples' brains or psychologies.) 

This story is sort of "meta"--one of the two characters reads SF novels--and includes pop culture references--the other character watches lots of TV.   People familiar with Manhattan and/or The Big Easy may appreciate all the references to streets and landmarks from those towns. 

This sort of thing isn't really my cup of tea (there was nothing to make me intellectually or emotionally engaged, and the jokes didn't make me laugh), but I can see it is a good specimen of its type and the style is good.  I'm not averse to reading more Effinger stories, should I encounter any in other anthologies I buy for other reasons.

This story was expanded into a short novel that I do not plan on reading.

"I Am Aleppo" by Jerry Sohl

I haven't been to Syria, so no personal reminiscences this time. 

"I Am Aleppo" is a confusing and ridiculous story.  I also thought some of the sentences were poorly structured.  As I was reading it I kept checking to see how many pages I had left, I was so eager to put it behind me.

Scientists get the idea from some primitive and peaceful natives that crime, war, and mental illness occur because people don't process their dreams correctly.  So they figure out a way to hook people together with wires so a person who is awake can watch a sleeping person's dreams.

It turns out that when we dream, our souls or minds or whatever travel to another dimension, or maybe that when we dream people from another dimension who share a collective consciousness can enter our minds.  Anyway, somehow, these people from another dimension are in our dreams, and can kill us.  In the story, two different scientists die in real life when a weightlifter, in their dreams, strangles them.

Somehow, the scientists rig up a tank attached by wires to the dreaming sleeper, and capture the murderous weightlifter in the tank.  They shut the power to the tank off, so the muscleman from the dream dimension dies.  All the other people in the dream dimension feel their fellow member of the collective conscious die, so one of the dream people who looks like a hooded Arab with a scimitar and calls himself Aleppo vows revenge.  A third scientist gets hooked up and dreams, and he is attacked by Aleppo and fights him hand to hand.  The waking scientists capture the Arab in the tank and unhook their colleague in time to save his life, or so they think.  Somehow, their colleague's soul is in the tank and Aleppo's soul is in the scientist's body-- the dream Arab, animating the scientist's body, massacres everybody in the lab with a butcher knife he found someplace.  The end.

I didn't like the style of the writing, and as for the plot, there was just too much going on that made no sense and was not explained satisfactorily for the story to be at all convincing or enjoyable.  The waking person hooked up to the dreamer doesn't see the same images as the dreamer, he sees a third person perspective on the dream, like he is another person in the dream, but one the dreamer is not aware of.  I didn't understand how the people from the dream world got into the tank either.  It also seems like most of our dreams come from our own minds, that only some of the components of our dreams come from the dream dimension, and somehow the scientists could tell with their instruments when a dream world person had invaded an Earth human's dreams.  There is also a hint that the dream people are the souls of Earth people who have died, and that they can return to the Earth as the souls of newborns.  Maybe all this stuff is better explained in the novel I, Aleppo, published three years after The New Mind.

Anyway, I didn't like "I Am Aleppo."

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Exploring new frontiers is not always profitable.