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.

Future Corruption 2: Russ, Malzberg and Pronzini

Let's continue our exploration of evil and corruption with Roger Elwood and "science fiction's top writers."  As in our first episode, we'll judge these stories from 1975's Future Corruption based on whether they are successful as entertainment and/or literature, and take a reading on the evilometer, assessing whether they have anything interesting to say about corruption and evil, and the magnitude of the evil they depict. 

“Aurelia” by J. J. Russ

Just a few weeks ago I read J. J. Russ’s short story “Interview” and I thought it was OK.  Like “Interview,” “Aurelia” is a sort of grim joke.

The story takes place in the first two decades of the 21st century. Back in the 1980s the development of a contraceptive virus went awry, creating a plague that killed almost all the women on the Earth. Most men have turned to homosexuality for comfort and sexual satisfaction, but some live lives of lonely celibacy.  One such confirmed heterosexual is our narrator.

Perhaps the only woman left alive is Aurelia, the object of our narrator's obsession. Under the auspices of the National Parks Service, Aurelia performs a striptease several times a day. Seeing as she has a monopoly on the "female sex worker" sector of the economy, she is very popular, and her millions of fans have to make reservations years ahead of time to see her show. Our narrator sees her every three years or so.

Most of the story takes place at the National Monument that serves as Aurelia’s strip club. Russ describes Aurelia’s dance in detail, at a show at the end of the 2000s, and then one in 2011. While in line waiting for the 2011 show an aggressive “transvest” tries to seduce our narrator. When the transvest refuses to take no for an answer and starts groping the narrator, the protagonist punches his harasser.  The transvest then disrupts the show.  In the confusion Aurelia is revealed to be a robot: there are no women left in the world after all! The punchline of the story is when our narrator gets a look at Aurelia’s crotch, and finds an embossed plug which reads “Disney Enterprises.”

(It is always interesting to be reminded of how much counter culture types hate Walt Disney, though I think the Disney joke here pushes the story too far into outlandish farce territory.)

In the last lines of the story we learn that our narrator, after learning the truth about Aurelia, has succumbed to 21st century sexual mores and is now living with a boyfriend.

“Aurelia” isn't a great story, but I'd judge it acceptable as an entertainment.  I’m not sure Russ here successfully addresses the issue of corruption and evil; in his introduction to the anthology, Elwood tells us that “Aurelia” "hits the exploitation of sex--commercialization of a private act to a point of true obscenity," but I'm not buying it.  Is paying to watch a robot stripper worse than paying to see a real woman strip?  Does Elwood think all strip clubs are truly obscene exploitations of sex?  Is paying to watch a robot stripper really morally different than paying to see an attractive woman on a movie screen?  Does Elwood think the careers of Marilyn Monroe, Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor are truly obscene exploitations of sex? And who is being exploited in these situations, the women or the men, and who is exploiting them?  

"Aurelia"             Is it good?: It's OK                       Evilometer reading: Low

“On the Campaign Trail” by Barry Malzberg

Malzberg's fans know he is very interested in the JFK murder and presidents and political assassinations in general, and includes these elements in many of his stories. This story, a mere four and a half pages, consists of eight numbered paragraphs, each an entry in the journal or diary of the head of security of a politician’s national election campaign. Most of the text concerns attempts to murder the candidate, but the narrator also takes time to mention aspects of his not quite fulfilling love affair and to unleash some metaphors on the reader (“…when I replaced the receiver it was damp with little beads of sweat and saliva that clung to it like aphids.”)

I guess Malzberg is trying to paint a picture of a world gripped by paranoia and political violence, and in that he succeeds. Radicals and insane people are one source of the violence, but establishment institutions, like the police and the political parties, are also capable of political violence. The narrator writes in a cold and clinical style, perhaps to emphasize how “normal” political violence has become, and to suggest that people working for a political campaign are selfish cynics, their apparent dedication to the ideals they espouse just a pose. The description of the narrator's sordid and unfulfilling sexual relationship adds to the bleak picture of a world that has either degenerated, or, has simply stopped bothering to conceal the sad reality behind love and politics.

“On the Campaign Trail”    Is it good?: It's OK.    Evilometer reading: Moderately high.

“Streaking” by Barry Malzberg (as K. M. O’Donnell)

Malzberg sometimes manages to sell multiple stories to these anthologies by writing some of them under pseudonyms. (Malzberg has three stories in Future City, for example.  Future City was also edited by Elwood, and I sometimes suspect Malzberg gets multiple stories in these things because his friends are trying to shore up his finances.) There is a tradition of this kind of chicanery in science fiction; two of Robert Heinlein's more famous short stories, "Universe" and "Solution Unsatisfactory," both appear in the May 1941 issue of Astounding, the latter under the pen name "Anson MacDonald."

“Streaking” stars a spirit creature (or alien or something?) that can change its appearance and is able to predict the future.  (For the third time today we have a first person narrator.)  This being interviews college students who have run naked across the campus as a stunt; the creature is curious as to why the students are streaking. The being seems disappointed that the students would do something frivolous and pointless instead of committing violence in the name of justice: “’But three years ago you were rioting,’ I say, ‘you were burning the campus as a symbol of injustice and repression. Why this now?’”

The second half of this six page story is about the being’s interaction with a college chaplain. The chaplain gives a sermon on how the streaking is wrong, and the narrator takes the form of a laughing naked man and runs hither and yon through the chapel before vanishing. I don’t know if this is supposed to show how effective a means of epater la bourgeoisie streaking is, or how pointless it is; is the creature embracing the practice of streaking, or mocking it?

I'm not finding “Streaking”'s examination of corruption very persuasive. Is Malzberg suggesting that it is corrupt for the students to be doing something goofy and harmless like streaking instead of something destructive and violent like arson or rioting?  Is he suggesting that streaking is a sign of a lack of idealism?  To my mind such idealism was always a myth; protesters and revolutionaries talk about idealism, but their actions are in the pursuit of selfish psychological or material ends, they do what they do because it is fun to “get in the face” of people you resent and to steal or wreck their things, and/or because they are trying to seize power, privileges and wealth, or protect power, privileges and wealth they already have.  Streaking and burning down the campus have the same source and purpose--they are fun ways for young people to thumb their noses at the establishment (an establishment most 1960s and 1970s students were themselves already, or soon would be, a part of.)

In the same way I didn't get the "commercialization of sex" ideology of "Aurelia," I don't get the "you should burn down the campus" ideology of "Streaking."  And there is not much else to the story, so I'm going to have to give a thumbs down to this one.

"Streaking"                   Is it good?  No.              Evilometer Reading: Low

“Paxton’s World” by Bill Pronzini

Bill Pronzini, oft-times collaborator with Malzberg, hasn't exactly been winning accolades on this here blog, but maybe I’ll like this one?

Paxton lives in the 22nd century; he is a rich man because his father was a pioneer in robot development.  Paxton, however, hates science and technology: "He thought Science was a curse rather than a servant of mankind; he thought it was the direct cause of depersonalization and dehumanization, and that it was responsible for the death of individual freedom."

So, Paxton flees the Earth in a one-man space ship; over the course of the long journey he goes insane.

Paxton finds a planet where he hopes to live a life close to nature, without any science or technology.  The primitive natives worship Paxton as a god, and we see how much of a hypocrite Paxton is (or how insane the trip through space has made him) as he rules over the natives as a merciless dictator, destroying their culture and society to such an extent that they go extinct.  Paxton, the anti-science crusader, has inflicted on the aliens and this virgin planet all the evils he claimed science had foisted on the human race and Earth.  A century after Paxton's death Earth ships land on his planet and it joins all the other human colonized planets as a world dominated by science and technology.

This is the best story of the four I've read today; at least it is directly addressing the issue of evil and corruption in a way that makes some kind of sense.  Pronzini also leaves it up to the reader to decide how much to sympathize with Paxton: is the point of the story that people who complain the loudest about society are often hypocrites who would make an even worse hash of things if given the opportunity?  Or that science and technology are invincible tyrants, corrupting even the most resistant of people?

"Paxton's World"    Is it good?: Moderately good    Evilometer reading: High

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While not terrible, this batch of stories is a real let down after the first part of the book, which included the superior Lafferty and Gloeckner stories.  Lafferty and Gloeckner provided us believable characters in situations the reader can identify with, in stories that were really about corruption; today's stories are all flat fables with little or no concern for character or emotion, and three of them failed to say much interesting about evil or corruption.

Hopefully the writers represented in our final episode of Future Corruption-- Roger Elwood himself, Howard Goldsmith, Jerry Sohl and Gardner Dozois--can finish up the anthology on a high note.

Future Corruption 1: Lupoff, Gloeckner, Goldin & Lafferty

The world is full of evil, I think we can all agree about that!  (What we can't agree on is exactly who or what is evil; one man's courageous freedom fighter is another man's murderous terrorist, after all.)  If the world is full of evil today, what can we expect to see in the future?  Greater evil? Different evil?  Let's get our pessimism on (the kids still talk that way, right?) with Roger Elwood and a bunch of scribblers the people in the advertising department call "science fiction's top writers" and indulge in some literary speculations about Future Corruption.

Future Corruption, unleashed on the public in 1975, has a gloomy Richard Powers cover (gorgeous reds and purples) that reminds me of Abraham Bosses's famous frontispiece to Hobbes' Leviathan, and text on the back cover that is meant to invoke Anthony's funeral oration from Julius Caesar.  All the stories are new to this collection.  All this is giving me a good vibe.

For fun, let's rate these stories not merely on whether they are entertaining or show literary merit, like we always do, but also on to what extent they further the supposed mission of the anthology, and on the magnitude of the evils they depict.

"Saltzman's Madness" by Richard Lupoff

I recently read Lupoff's novel Sandworld and gave it a mixed review.  "Saltzman's Madness" is actually a decent horror story, but I'm not sure it really belongs in a book that aims to "explore the outer limits of our potential for evil" or "speculate on the spread of corruption" in the future.

This is a longish (over 30 pages), rambling story with quite a few characters. Basically, Saltzman is one of the lead computer programmers at a software firm that makes operating systems.  Saltzman hates wasting time, is in fact with obsessed with using time wisely.  He hates to sleep, he insists on working on documents while riding in the car, and so forth.  One night in the bathroom (!) he has a sort of epiphany, and becomes convinced that there is a lot of time out there that we don't experience, that each minute is actually something like 100 seconds long, and each hour 100 minutes long, but beings from another dimension are using those extra 40 seconds and minutes.

Saltzman talks to a scientist who is doing research on tachyons, and to the office beatnik who talks about how marijuana, LSD and "speed" effect one's "time sense." Finally, Saltzman comes up with the idea that if he listens to Josef Rheinberger's "Organ Concerto in G Minor" through headphones, with the orchestral track and the organ track moving at different speeds, maybe he will be able to access all that extra time that is out there.

(I listened to the rendition of the Concerto at the link above while I wrote this, and have to admit I found it too high pitched; all those high notes pained my poor ears. Maybe the speakers on my laptop are to blame?)

H. P. Lovecraft-style, this experiment drives Saltzman insane and almost summons malevolent monsters to our universe from another dimension--or maybe not almost; could Saltzman's insanity in fact be possession by an alien creature?

Also Lovecraft-style, we know from the first page that Saltzman is in a government funny farm with some kind of multiple personality disorder; the story is almost entirely a flashback.

I enjoyed the story, but if someone complained that it was padded with overly long lectures on Einsteinian time-space theory and illegal drugs, and discussions of computer programming and high end hi-fi equipment, I would be hard pressed to disagree.

So, a thumbs up for "Saltzman's Madness," but a very low reading on the evilometer.

"Saltzman's Madness"   Is the story good?: Moderately good.   Evilometer Reading: Very Low

"Andrew" by Carolyn Gloeckner

Gloeckner has only four entries on isfdb, all for short stories published in the first half of the 1970s.  Googling around suggests that there is a Carolyn Gloeckner who writes biographies of sports figures and adaptations of popular classics for kids, but I don't know if this the same individual.  "Andrew," apparently, is her last published SF story.

"Andrew" reminded me of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice as well as episodes from Casanova's memoirs.

A black hole flies through the Solar System, destroying all the planets and exterminating the human race.  Just in time, a space ship leaves Earth with less than 2,000 survivors. The captain of the ship is a homosexual, and the twenty page story is about how he uses his position as captain to seduce a beautiful boy ("His face was childishly rounded, but his features were those of a Greek bust-- classic, symmetrical, elegantly defined.") The boy moves from his family's spartan cubicle where they eat protein bars every day and into the captain's richly appointed quarters where he can drink booze and eat gourmet food.  The captain fears that Andrew Garland's parents will object, but when they come to see him they just extort some extra rations out of him--they have essentially sold their son to the captain for use as a sex toy.

Before moving in with the captain, Andrew was recognized as one of the smartest pupils in the ship, and everyone expected him to become a high officer, even captain. However, access to alcohol and drugs absolutely corrupted him, and he abandoned his studies.  Years later the captain realizes the selfish thing he has done, turning a promising young man, who could have had an exciting and productive career and done a great service to humanity as a leader in the ship, into a parasite.

This is a quite good story.  All the human relations stuff is good, and all the SF stuff is good, and the story and all its scenes are just the correct length--Gloeckner conveys emotion and presents us a clear picture of life in the ship with the minimum amount of verbiage.  And "Andrew" is actually about what this anthology is supposed to be about: corruption.  The captain is corrupted by power and lust, Andrew's parents by poverty and greed, and Andrew by temptation.  In a situation in which the entire human race is reduced to fewer than 2,000 people, all these characters, instead of doing their duty to a fragile society, selfishly pursue their animal desires.

"Andrew"   Is the story good?:   Good!      Evilometer Reading:  Moderate


"Prelude to a Symphony of Unborn Shouts" by Stephen Goldin

Recently I read a very short story by Goldin and thought it pretty good.  Years ago I read one of Goldin's novels, A World Called Solitude, and also liked it.  

One of the reasons I liked the Goldin short short referred to above is that it had characters, plot and emotion.  Unfortunately, "Prelude to a Symphony of Unborn Shouts" has none of these.  It is one of those stories (six pages long, in this case) which consists entirely of newspaper clippings and quotes from fictional pundits.

The topic Goldin is addressing here is overpopulation.  (I guess he thinks it is evil to have children?Or more children than he has had?)  Set in the 1990s, the newspaper clippings describe how governments react to an overpopulation crisis by encouraging people to use contraceptives and have abortions.  Religious people resist these moves. The story is supposed to be funny (I think), and includes banal jokes from a fictional comedian.  Here's one of the jokes:

"You know, if they really wanted birth control, they'd simply outlaw aspirin.  Then the girls could have as many headaches as they wanted."  

The clippings about religion paint the religious as violent goofballs, and the final clipping is about food riots that (presumably) resulted due to overpopulation, so it is clear where Goldin's sympathies lie.  Maybe this story will appeal to militant atheists and people who are really worried about overpopulation.  I'm a laid back atheist and I'm not worried about overpopulation, and the story is not interesting or amusing or persuasive, so I thought it was quite lame.

"Prelude..."  Is the story good?:   No.      Evilometer Reading:  Low

"Heart Grow Fonder" by R. A Lafferty

I've read a sizable amount of Lafferty stories since I started this here blog, and for the most part I have found his stories amusing and thought-provoking.  It will be poetic justice if, after dedicated atheist Goldin laid that clunker on us, committed Catholic Lafferty can deliver the comedy goods.

Lafferty does not disappoint; "Heart Grow Fonder" is fun and entertaining and is all about temptation and the evils of deceitfulness, marital infidelity, thievery, and trying to be something (and someone) you are not.

Simon Radert is happily married and enjoys his work (apparently he is some kind of accountant or finance expert--Lafferty calls him a "paper pusher" and assures us he is well remunerated.)  When some swingers, the Swags, move in next door Radert is initially hostile to them, calling them "creeps," but it is not long before he is coveting sexy Mrs. Swag.

We learn that Mr. Swag has the ability to swap minds and bodies with people, and he shifts his own consciousness into Radert's body for an hour at midday so he can have sex with Radert's wife.  Mrs. Radert, at least initially thinking this is her own husband expressing renewed interest in her, is thrilled.  Swag starts doing this every day at noon like clockwork, and Radert, in Swag's body during these periods, succumbs to temptation and starts having sex every noon hour with Swag's wife.  (Swag's wife is aware another man is inhabiting her husband's body and responds with enthusiasm; she has many such liaisons every day!)

Radert not only succumbs to the temptation to betray his wife and marriage.  Being in Swag's body provides him access to Swag's bank accounts and financial papers, and Radert begins shifting money from Swag's accounts to his own (as well as engaging in far more complex swindles.)  Before the story is over Radert is even plotting Swag's murder.

"Heart Grow Fonder" benefits from Lafferty's jocular style, and moves briskly, but I found the end of the story, as various characters' duplicitous schemes collide, somewhat confusing.  

Notable about the story is that Lafferty does not follow the paradigm set out by the text on the cover of the paperback, that the stories be about the future and science. (To be fair, in his introduction to the volume, editor Elwood does not lay out these "rules," and perhaps they were concocted just for marketing purposes after the stories were compiled.)  This story is not about science or the future.  Lafferty specifically informs us that the body switching as depicted in the story is not scientifically possible, and attributes it to supernatural means, mentioning the devil repeatedly, and implying that Radert is bound for hell thanks to his sins.  Lafferty also argues, as we might expect a religious person to, that there are more ways to look at the world than the "scientific" way, and suggests that scientists are as susceptible to bias and error as anybody.

Like most of Lafferty's work, fun and thought-provoking.

"Heart Grow Fonder"  Is it good?: Yes.   Evilometer Reading: High.

     
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The Goldin piece was poor, but it was short.  I enjoyed the Lupoff story, and the Gloeckner and Lafferty stories were even better and addressed issues of temptation and corruption in an emotionally affecting and intellectually engaging way.  So far I'm really enjoying Elwood's anthology.

In our next episode, more corruption, this time with our old friends J. J. Russ, Bill Pronzini, and Barry Malzberg.