Protostars (1971): A Laurance, R E Margroff, A J Offutt & P Wyal

Alright, here it is, the final installment of our exhaustive treatment of Protostars, the 1971 anthology of sixteen all-new SF stories edited by David Gerrold, author of Deathbeast and Space Skimmer, and Stephen Goldin, author of A World Called Solitude and Assault on the Gods.

"Chances Are" by Alice Laurance

Gerrold's introduction to "Chances Are" is a long discussion of the New Wave and how New Wave stories differ from "traditional" stories.  In brief, "old wave" SF stories (says Gerrold) are optimistic adventure tales that focus on story-telling and creating characters in which a hero triumphs over obstacles, in which he masters the environment, while a New Wave story is pessimistic and "arty," focusing on technique rather than plot or character, and shows how individuals cannot change the environment in which they find themselves.  Gerrold whips out his Hegel and suggests that the old SF is the thesis and the New Wave the antithesis, and wonders what the soon to come synthesis will look like, and suggests it may look like Don Quixote. 

Alice Laurence's "Chances Are" is about the afterlife.  A twenty-something woman has just died, and is standing on a road between unscalable sand dunes.  As she follows the road, and chooses which way to go at intersections, she reminisces about her life and wonders if God is real and if people have free will.  She was a musician who lacked the talent or drive to make a living as a performer or composer, and when she tried to become a mother her child died in the womb.  At the end of the story she comes to a door; there is no way to pass around the door, so she opens it, triggering the total loss of her identity and the rebirth of her soul as that of a baby boy.

Each individual sentence and paragraph of "Chances Are" is fine, but the story as a whole is a big nothing.  The passages about God and free will are inconclusive things we've heard before.  The character makes no decisions (when she chooses between paths she does so at random, as there are no clues as to what lies beyond the next sand dune, no evidence on which to base a rational choice between one fork or another.)  Laurance doesn't seem to be trying to make any interesting point with this story (maybe she's saying that you should be decisive but if you aren't you'll be given a chance to try again?), and doesn't engage the reader's emotions.

I'm giving this story a thumbs down, but it only just slips below the "barely acceptable" category; "Chances Are" is not offensively bad, but it accomplishes nothing.

A Belgian publisher would reprint "Chances Are" in French in a 1973 anthology that also includes Pamela Sargent's "Oasis" and Stephen Goldin's "The Last Ghost," and in 1975 Laurance's story would appear in a McGraw-Hill anthology, Heaven and Hell, again alongside Goldin's "The Last Ghost."

"The Naked and the Unashamed" by Robert E. Margroff

In his intro to this one, Gerrold says that Margroff has figured out college campus riots, and come up with a way of preventing them.

"The Naked and the Unashamed" is a series of childish jokes, I guess a satire of the vacuousness of the political protests in which middle-class young people engage--college kids protest because it is a fun social activity that brings excitement and (an illusory) meaning to their easy lives, not because they have any deeply felt or carefully considered views about the way the world works.

In the future, there is no war or crime.  And college kids protest the lack of these exciting events--they have been denied the chance to participate in, or at least witness, essential aspects of human life.  When they start throwing dirt and shit at the college dean, the police break up the riot by spraying the kids with an aphrodisiac; the horde of protestors fall to the ground and engage in an enthusiastic orgy.  Some of the cops and journalists covering the event participate in the fucking.

Thumbs down for this waste of time.

"The Naked and the Unashamed" was reprinted in three different European anthologies.  I'll keep this in mind when somebody tells me how sophisticated Europeans are.

"My Country, Right or Wrong" by Andrew J. Offutt

Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we generally think of Andrew Offutt as the guy who writes sword and sorcery novels, sword and planet novels, and planetary romances with covers by Boris Vallejo, Rowena Morrill, and Jeff Jones.  But there is a pretentious Andrew Offutt who insists his name be spelled without capital letters, and it this incarnation of Offutt, I mean offutt, who contributes to Protostars.  In his introduction to "My Country, Right or Wrong," Gerrold says great stories all have an element of truth, and that he thinks offutt's tale here has that element of truth.

Despite the eye-grabbing absence of uppercase letters, this story is not particularly pretentious or groundbreaking.  In fact, "My Country, Right or Wrong," is a traditional sort of SF story that speculates about the future, engages in alternate history speculations, illustrates the law of unintended consequences, advocates limited government and denounces ethnic chauvinism.

Jeff Bellamy is a guy in 1978, a patriot who loves America but thinks the government is too oppressive, too many taxes and so on.  He sneaks into a time machine some other guy built and finds himself in 2078.  2078 is a kind of libertarian utopia, with limited government and high technology and all that.  But Jeff is shocked and disgusted when he learns how this world of freedom came to pass.  You see, in 1980, the Soviet Union conquered the United States!  But eventually the shortcomings of socialism became so obvious that reforms were instituted that lead to the current regime which is more capitalistic and democratic than that of America in 1978.

Instead of accepting that everything has turned out alright in the end, Jeff, who thinks America would arrive at this libertarian utopia without suffering the indignity of being conquered by the USSR, goes back in time to murder a young Lenin.  But history is very complicated, and somehow killing Lenin causes the Nazis to conquer America, so Jeff goes back in time again, this time to kill Hitler, but this causes a Czarist Russia to take over America.  Jeff eventually figures it all out, though it entails time paradoxes and some heavy personal sacrifice.

This story is OK, no big deal.  Offutt includes lots of details about life in the future, like what clothes people wear and the way social mores have evolved, as well as political discussions, that are probably superfluous, but they aren't that terribly annoying.  Perhaps lefties will find Offutt's championing of the market society and slagging of socialism irritating, as I found David Bunch's broad satire of our market society in "Holdholtzer's Box" tiresome.

Like so many stories in Protostars, "My Country Right or Wrong" has never been printed again.  

"Side Effect" by Pg Wyal

We approach the end of our journey.   But we've still got a big push ahead of us--"Side Effect" is over 30 pages long!  In his intro, Gerrold tells us this is one of the best stories in Protostars.  Well, let's see if I agree.

I do not agree!  "Side Effect," which has a subtitle that appears in parentheses, "(the monster that devoured Los Angeles)," is a ridiculous farce, a rapid-fire barrage of obvious jokes--many of them ethnic jokes and many of them sex jokes--as well as a satire of SF, though more a satire of the SF of the silver screen, like King Kong, the Godzilla films, and 1950s B-movies, than SF literature.  Jokes are made about greedy clannish Jews and predatory homosexuals and how women smell like dead fish, but also about Ronald Reagan and anti-communists, and the story, which gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, eventually evolves into a bizarre attack on white racism, so maybe the politically correct will cut Wyal some slack?

Art Noone ("Side Effect" is full of joke names for people and places, like "Judge Glans" and "Cunnilingus City") is a 35-year-old law clerk.  When he reads in the paper that an immortality drug is being tested, he is eager to be an early adopter and calls up his Jewish doctor who pulls some strings and acquires a dose.  The injection makes Art feels like he is 18 again, and he quits his job and hitchhikes across this great land of ours to Los Angeles.  Along the way Wyal makes obvious jokes about what we now call "flyover country" and Art runs afoul of the law and is imprisoned but escapes.

In La La Land, Art finds that he is growing.  As he grows, his skin gets darker.  Eventually he is like 18 feet tall and his enemies take to calling him "N-word Noone;" well, they don't actually say "N-word," they say the "N-word"--you know what I mean.  Art becomes violent, and in the long climax of the story Art leads the black residents of Los Angeles in an attempted revolution against the white establishment.  The racist mayor of L.A. transforms himself into a giant monster, and leads the resistance to the revolution and the counterattack of the white military.  The black rebels are almost entirely wiped out, and N-word Noone and the mayor climb to the top of City Hall for a final showdown.  The mayor is slain by Art, but then aircraft kill N-word Noone.

As I was reading the first 25 or so pages of "Side Effect," I was thinking I would judge it "barely acceptable."  But the ending fight is so long and repetitive and the jokes so broad and silly (e. g., the Los Angeles Police Department has a squadron of World War II Messerschmitts) that the story slipped down into "Thumbs down" territory.

Like quite a number of stories lately that I have been telling you are not very good, "Side Effect" may have value as an historical document that provides insight into the concerns and attitudes of people alive when it was written.  It was yet another story from Protostars to be included in the French Univers series of anthologies, the only place you will find it besides Protostars.

**********

And so our exploration of Protostars comes to a close.  Sixteen stories have appeared under the pitiless MPorcius microscope, and I've already told you which stories I think are good, acceptable and bad; now I'll go out on a limb, and, below, make a preliminary stab at the sterile and quixotic exercise of ranking them within those three categories.  I'm already regretting doing this, as I feel like I graded Bradfield and Goldin on a curve, offering unwarranted charity to the former and punishing the latter unfairly because his second story is in an inappropriate venue, but I'm not going to work on this any more, and I am also not going to just erase the list after spending so much time on it.  

Before we sign off, I should point out that several of David Gerrold's introductions to the stories are useful to the student of late 1960s/early 1970s SF because they offer the informed opinions of Gerrold, a successful novelist, editor, and screenwriter in the SF field, about the New Wave and about the working lives and psychologies of people with careers in the SF world in that period.

**********

PROTOSTARS: RANKING THE STORIES

Good 

1.  "In a Sky of Daemons" by L. Yep
2.  "Oasis" by Pamela Sargent
3.  "And Watch the Smog Roll In..." by Barry Weissman
4.  "The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin

Acceptable

5.  "Eyes of Onyx" by Edward Bryant
6.  "My Country, Right or Wrong" by andrew j. offutt
7.  "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" by James Tiptree, Jr.   
8.  "Holdholtzer's Box" by David R. Bunch
9.  "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" by Scott Bradfield

Bad

10. "Chances Are" by Alice Laurance 

11. "The World Where Wishes Worked" by Stephen Goldin
12.  "Side Effect" by Pg Wyal
13.  "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" by Leo P. Kelley
14.  "The Naked and the Unashamed" by Robert E. Margroff
15.  "Afternoon With a Dead Bus" by David Gerrold
16.  "The Five-Dimensional Sugar Cube" by Roger Deeley    

Protostars (1971): D Gerrold, E Bryant, S Goldin, & L P Kelley

Back in 2017 I blogged about David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's anthology Generation, an adventure that occupied us for four blog posts.  That same year I also blogged about their anthology Alternities, an expedition which exhausted three posts.  This grand tradition continues in 2022, as MPorcius Fiction Log takes a long gander at Gerrold and Goldin's anthology Protostars, a caper which, barring sudden death on the road, will occupy four blog posts.  Today, our second foray into Protostars, we'll be wrestling with the fifth through eighth of the book's sixteen stories, those by Gerrold himself, Edward Bryant, and Leo P. Kelley, as well as Goldin's second included story.  Collectively, these pieces take up fewer than 40 pages, so maybe we'll be getting out of the office early today and can beat that rush hour traffic.

"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" by David Gerrold

This is a joke story and a total waste of everybody's time; Gerrold takes a mundane metaphor about how a big rusty old bus is kind of like a large mammal enfeebled by age, and expands this one sentence idea to seven pages, describing automobiles attacking the bus the way you might describe a pack of wolves attacking an elk who just cashed his first social security check or a feeding frenzy of sharks tearing away at a whale with a broken hip as well as each other.  Many of the jokes are what I guess you might call puns, like saying a Mustang whinnies or a Firebird screeches.  Ugh.

Lame.

"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" was included by Leo P. Kelley in his 1974 anthology Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous, and would also show up in a French anthology published in 1976.

"Eyes of Onyx" by Edward Bryant

Gerrold in his intro spoils us, revealing that "Eyes of Onyx" is a retelling of the story of Jesus Christ, and goes on and on about how the story of Christ is the most prominent story in our Judeo-Christian culture and people are retelling it all the time and "Eyes of Onyx" probably wouldn't affect people in, say, Pakistan, as it does us here in America.  

Bryant writes his story in the voice of Juan, a 16-year-old Hispanic auto mechanic living in the dreadful future of rampant crime, promiscuous teenage sex, widespread drug use, (incompetent) government control of the health care system, the decline of religion, and electronic billboards that hover in the sky and obscure the stars at night.  Our narrator works with his Dad at their privately owned garage; Dad refuses to accept welfare or to sell his little garage to one of the big garage conglomerates.  

It is winter.  Into the out-of-the-way neighborhood where Juan's Dad has his garage comes a couple--the female member of the pair is pregnant and about to give birth, but they have no credit (I guess all money is in electronic form in this bleak future) so can't get a room at the inn.  The government doctor that serves this area is out of town on vacation.  So the narrator and his father put up the couple and Dad delivers the baby.  At this time the clouds part and Juan sees that comet he heard about on the news.  Then he has a chance to look at the baby, which has a powerful effect on him--he falls to his knees before this remarkable child!  The baby is a little girl with weird black eyes, and Juan theorizes that this baby is like Jesus, except that the God of Love has been overthrown or has given up because we people are so terrible, and the new God, a God of Hate, has sent his only daughter down here to punish us or force us to behave or something similarly horrible.

A gimmicky horror story, but not exactly bad; I didn't see the twist coming, and didn't even realize it was a horror story until I got to the end--I had expected the baby would be heralding an improvement in human life, not some kind of cataclysmic revolution.  We're calling this one acceptable filler.  Maybe "Eyes of Onyx" will be of particular interest to students of depictions of Latinos in SF?  I'm not exactly sure why Bryant chose to make the main characters Hispanic, maybe because the middle-class white people who are presumably the bulk of the audience for a SF anthology like Protostars have a vision of Hispanics as poor but industrious and more religious than non-Hispanic whites, and so more in tune with the story's down-and-out setting and Christianity-turned-upside down theme?  

"Eyes of Onyx" has been reprinted once, in 1975's The New Awareness: Religion Through Science Fiction.  

"The World Where Wishes Worked" by Stephen Goldin

Goldin's second story in Protostars was considered suitable for children in 1997 and included in a Scholastic anthology edited by Bruce Coville.  Before that, it was reprinted in one of those anthologies of short shorts with Isaac Asimov's name on the cover (in front of Terry Carr's and Martin H. Greenberg's) and in a "Nelson Mini-Anthology" published in Canada.  

Gerrold's intro to "The World Where Wishes Worked" is a sort of woe-is-me thing about how people don't respect writers; even though I was rolling my eyes at its self-pitying tone, it offers some interesting info on the lives of professional SF people of the late 1960s and early 1970s, with particular details on Gerrold and Goldin's own careers, and so I found it more valuable than the story it introduces.

"The World Where Wishes Worked" really is like a kid's fairy tale.  A fool makes foolish wishes and he and the whole human race suffer the consequences.  The meat of the story is little logical conundrums, like how if a foolish person wished that he would stop saying foolish things he wouldn't be able to talk, because as a foolish person everything he tries to say will be foolish.

Thumbs down.

"Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" by Leo P. Kelley

In his intro to this one, Gerrold offers his definition(s) of what a science fiction story is ("Any science can have a story written about it--and that story will be science fiction" and "Science fiction is stories about things that may be possible, but haven't happened") and says there should be more SF about the behavioral sciences like psychology and sociology, and "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" is one of them.

It is the future, the year 2010, an overpopulated world in which you go to a communal cafeteria every morning and push buttons in the wall to get eggs and toast, but the crowds of fat people are so hard to push through most days you don't get to the egg button but only to the toast button.  Our protagonists are Lena and Arnold, a married couple, and the text refers quite a bit to their daydreams and other thoughts, none of which I found interesting.

Floating unnoticed among the humans of the overcrowded city are noncorporeal aliens who feed on the electric impulses that make up human thought.  They feed on Lena and Arnold, and as a result our two main characters forget their daydreams and cease indulging in them.  This, perhaps, is to the good; without these fantasies, they become more engaged in their circumscribed lives, more able to face its challenges with confidence and hope.

This story has almost no plot, the two stock SF elements (overpopulation and aliens who suck something out of you) aren't even connected, and its tone is relentlessly flat and boring.  Thumbs down for "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix."  It seems our friends who eat snails and frogs liked it; they reprinted it in a 1976 anthology.  (I'm toying with the theory that the Frenchies liked "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" and "Afternoon with a Dead Bus" because they thought these stories said something crummy about America, like we're all fat and ruthless and selfish or something.)  

**********

Am I becoming some kind of hard ass, or has this batch been totally lackluster?  None of today's stories merit the kind of scrutiny I lavished on the Yep and Tiptree stories that appeared in the first batch, and none of them has the emotional power of the first Goldin story in the anthology.  Only Bryant's story is competent and appropriate; Goldin's story today is competent but only appropriate for children, and today's Kelley and Gerrold stories are sterile tedium.

Well, we've got two batches to go; maybe we'll find something legitimately good among the eight stories that make up the second half of Protostars and get out of the rut we found ourselves in today.

Protostars (1971): S Bradfield, J Tiptree, Jr., L Yep and S Goldin

I can tell you're the kind of guy (or gal--that I can't tell!) who likes to get in on the ground floor.  Wants to be the first on his block.  Likes to be ahead of the curve.  Lives on the cutting edge.  The bleeding edge!  Ahead of her time!  The vanguard of the revolution!  

Protostars is for you!  Published in 1971, the year of my birth, edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin, it presents stories, never before published, by "the New Stars of Science Fiction," men and women "that you will be hearing much about in the future."  At least that is what the text on the cover says.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log, over the next four blog posts, we'll be reading the sixteen stories that debuted in Protostars.  I bought a copy of Protostars in 2019 at the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books as part of my tireless campaign to support local business (who could resist that Gene Szfran cover when it is going for 50 cents?), but you cheapos can read along at the internet archive. 

In his two-page italicized introduction to Protostars, editor David Gerrold pokes gentle fun at the pretentious introductions and lofty ambitions of some recent SF anthologies, Harlan Ellison's in particular, and he doesn't echo any of that goop about the authors in the book being "new stars in formation" that "you will be hearing about much in the future" that is all over the covers.  He just says the stories are entertaining and have no central theme beyond hopefully being thought-provoking on the question of man's role in the universe.  But he does wax ambitious about the glories of the science fiction field: science fiction, he tells us, is "the only literature of the twentieth century that consistently dares to speculate on the nature of reality and man's place in the universe;" science fiction is "theology for the modern man," that, unlike traditional religions, doesn't expect you to accept claims on faith--science fiction writers embrace the scientific method of presenting hypotheses and putting them to the test!  Alright!

After this stirring introduction, let's get right to it and read the first four stories in Protostars, contributions by Scott Bradfield, James Tiptree, Jr., Laurence Yep and Stephen Goldin.

"What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" by Scott Bradfield

Gerrold writes an introduction to Bradfield's story that is over four pages long, in which he talks about reading the slush pile at Galaxy, which is sort of interesting, and then tells us that writing is a job that requires training just like flying a jet plane requires training, and I'm like, OK, and then on the last page of the intro reveals that Scott Bradfield is fourteen years old and has a long way to go but takes science fiction seriously and "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" is "readable."  Hmm.

This story is not very good.  Luckily it is a mere three pages long.  (It is shorter than Gerrold's introduction to it!)  A baby is poorly treated by his parents, the mother who neglects to feed him, the father who hits him so he'll be quiet.  Then, apparently, aliens kidnap the child, burning down the house and killing the parents, I guess to hide their tracks.  The aliens put the kid in a cage like the cage you might keep a gerbil or something in; I guess we are supposed to reflect that the aliens are treating the kid like an animal, which is better than its parents did?  That a physical cage may not be as bad as a psychological cage?  

I guess Gerrold printed this story to encourage or support Bradfield or something, sort of an act of charity or an investment in the future of SF or whatever.  And you'll be happy to know that Tiny Tim didn't die, I mean, Scott Bradfield went on to have a successful writing career, with four novels and some 40 stories listed at isfdb--Jonathan Lethem, a famous guy I know nothing about, says Bradfield is one of his favorite living writers.  I, too, can afford to be charitable, and call "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" barely acceptable filler.  

It seems that "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" has never escaped confinement in the nourishing cage that is Protostars. 

"I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Gerrold's intro here expresses frustration that Tiptree remains hidden from view because he would like to meet this person, "one of the finest new science fiction writers in America today."  Gerrold admits the possibility Tiptree is a woman, a smart bet.

"I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" is a joke story, in part, I believe, a spoof of sword and planet stories and other stories in which a guy from Earth meets the people of a technologically or culturally inferior planet and becomes their leader and improves their society.  The story includes lots of contemporary references, to Montessori schools and to "Make Love, Not War" and stuff like that.  Notably, the tale contains so many dismissive references to the male organ that it seems obvious that this was written by a woman, but I guess that is easy for me to say because I already know Tiptree's real identity.

On a more elevated level, "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" might be seen as a jocular exposure of the contradictions and hypocrisies of much of respectable liberal thought.  The protagonist is an upper-middle class Terran, a wealthy and highly-educated mama's boy, who, finding himself on a planet inhabited by low-tech and bellicose people, is reluctant to pass judgement on their culture or interfere with their traditions, but nevertheless gets them to stop fighting wars for territory and cease sacrificing babies to appease the rain gods, and quickly transforms their warlike agrarian society into a modern industrial civilization, despite the efforts of the native elites to preserve the status quo.  The joke ending of the story, which like all the story's jokes isn't particularly funny, is that after the Terran leaves, the people of this planet follow his example and travel to every inhabited planet in the galaxy and turn every society, 4384 in total, into a modern capitalist civilization.  Having done this, the peoples of the 4384 planets wonder what to do next--maybe Tiptree is suggesting that modern secular society in which there is no war and no religion is somehow unsatisfying, that people need some kind of driving mission to be happy?  Or maybe I am trying too hard to see some kind of point in this story which is full of simple and straightforward jokes, including lots of tepid sex jokes?   

Alice Bradley Sheldon (Tiptree's real name) has a reputation as a genius, but this story is just competent filler.

The SF community doesn't seem to agree with my dismissive assessment of "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty;" the story has appeared not only in many Tiptree collections, but the 1972 edition of Lester del Rey's Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year and a Russian anthology with a pretty crazy cover.

What is with the spacing and the punctuation in that Asimov quote?

"In a Sky of Daemons" by Laurence Yep

Isfdb calls this gentleman "Laurence," the table of contents of Protostars abbreviates his first name as "L.," and the back cover of Protostars calls him "Larry."  In his introduction to this "novelette" (like 38 pages,) Gerrold also familiarly refers to the author as "Larry" and says that Yep achieved the "unheard of" feat of receiving a Nebula nomination for his first published story.  "In a Sky of Daemons" is Yep's second sale, and it seems to have only been reprinted once, in a Dutch anthology.  Do Rembrandt's countrymen, a people famous for their dykes, windmills, wooden shoes and chocolate, know something we Anglophones don't?  

In climactic moments in Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, two novels I strongly recommend, treacherous women destroy the main character's art work.  Well, just such a crime kicks off "In a Sky of Daemons."

Yep's story is set in the far future, when humans have colonized alien planets and there are machines called mass converters that can make most anything--you toss in a handful of sand and rocks and the machine can make you gemstones, you toss in some dead organic matter and the machine can make you an apple or a pear.  The government can control the weather.  The people in the story wear "soma suits" (you remember your Brave New World, don't you?) that induce euphoria and live a largely communal life in a society of "Cells," though pairing off as couples is not uncommon.  

Our hero, Birth Chile, is a male artist living in the city; he has been in a couple's relationship with a materialistic hot chick, Honey Girl, and when he comes home to their apartment he finds Honey Girl has sold all his paintings and sculptures!  He storms off, walking out on their relationship and walking out to the country, to the shrine run by the oldest man on the planet, Holy Joe, who is kept alive by high technology.  Holy Joe is so old he can remember when this planet was colonized, and the days before the soma suits.  Most of the people on this planet are practically immortal, but the robots that serve the paternalistic and authoritarian entity that rules the planet, SET, regularly take people away to be killed; the people are later rejuvenated or "reborn," but without their memories.  Holy Joe is an exception; he is not immortal, and can truly die, but high technology has kept him alive for centuries.  In return for that technological assist, and for the ability to retain his memories, he has promised SET not to share his oldest memories, or consented to have some kind of hypnotic embargo put on them; SET, it seems, considers knowledge of the past to be a threat to its rule.  Holy Joe is treated as a kind of sage or guru, and people commonly come to his to ask questions, but his answers, for which he demands payment, are often vague or tricky, in the traditional manner of sybils and prophets, and he will reveal nothing about SET or life before the colonization of the planet.

Birth Chile wants to get some answers from Holy Joe, but Honey Girl shows up in her fancy air car to interfere, ostensibly for Birth Chile's own good.  In a fit of rage he immediately regrets, Birth Chile strikes Honey Girl, killing her.  SET's robots, which float through the air via anti-grav technology and are likened to angels, appear and take away the corpse and inject Birth Chile with drugs that paralyze half his body.

Birth Chile uses Honey Girl's air car to go to the place to which people who are to die are taken, and from which they eventually emerge reborn.  There, I think, he encounters the personalities of people who have been killed by SET and not yet reborn; these personalities join Birth Chile in his body, which is healed, and he acquires memories that explain the mysteries of the past.  We readers are treated to a series of flashbacks, first to a space naval battle between an Alliance and an Empire, and then to scenes of the founding of the colony at which the story takes place.  The battle was a raid by a fleet from an alliance of worlds that sought to steal from the Empire the secret of immortality, which the Empire had refused to sell them on the grounds that they were too uncivilized for it.  The Alliance raiders were defeated and captured, given the immortality treatment and then put on a distant planet--the colony where Birth Chile and Honey Girl and everybody else in the story lives is their prison/sanitarium and SET their jailer/therapist.  The best image in the story is a reflection of the fact that the prison colony is on a planet deep in extragalactic space--so far is this world from the Milky Way that the stars in the sky are all concentrated in a single disc, like the accusing eye or hungry mouth of a demon.

In the climax of the story Birth Chile--now first person narrator, when the story for most of its length has been in the third person--deactivates SET (a computer) in a close quarters fight that I guess is supposed to remind you of a fight between a knight and a dragon or between Thor and the Midgard Serpent.  The humans take control over the robots, and in a sense-of-wonder the-resourceful-human-race-has-a-heroic-history-of-adventure-and-exploration-ahead-of-it ending, Yep makes it clear that the people of the prison/sanitarium planet, now liberated/cured, are going to build a vital independent society, cast off the soma suits, build FTL ships and return to the Milky Way.

"In a Sky of Daemons" is an ambitious and challenging; I found it a little hard to understand, much of it being dense, parts of it being fragmented, and the characters' personalities, motives and actions being often surprising and mysterious--I read it twice because I felt I hadn't really got it the first time round.  Yep fills his story with allusions to Christianity and to Eastern religions, and there are lots of what I take to be references to the work of T. S. Eliot (apparent references to The Waste Land include: the first line of the story, which reminds readers of the epigraph to Eliot's famous poem; the prominent appearance of the phrase "Unreal city;" and a sentence which ends "living in the dust and eating roots and grass...."), whose work of course is itself full of allusions to Christianity and to Buddhism.

I found it to be a hard nut to crack, but I think the work was worthwhile, so I'm giving "In A Sky of Daemons" a thumbs up.  Its integration of religious themes, references to high literature, a struggle for human freedom, scenes of warfare and a sword swinging hero remind me of Gene Wolfe's work; maybe Wolfe fans should check this story out.

"The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin

Goldin, who I guess acted as Gerrold's close assistant in editing this book, has two stories in Protostars and this is the first.  In his intro to "The Last Ghost," Gerrold talks about Goldin in a way that feels parental, striking a tone I felt indicated they have some kind of intimate but not necessarily equal relationship, as if Gerrold sees himself as Goldin's mentor or something (Gerrold, in his writing, always seems to "put himself out there"--dude is an open book who wears his heart on his sleeve as we cliché-slinging guys say.)  Gerrold tells us Goldin is good and gentle and is growing as a person and as a writer and this story says something about all of us that most of us don't want to openly admit.  

"The Last Ghost" is a seven-and-a-half page story about death and having your consciousness uploaded into a computer so you "live" forever.  (We just read a story on similar themes by Gerrold.)  Two incorporeal beings meet in a silent black nowhere, but they sense each other and communicate.  One has been in this void for a long time, is male, taciturn and has almost no memory.  The newcomer is female and voluble and mentally acute.  The female's body died five thousand years ago, and she has spent all those centuries as a computer file or simulation or whatever, in robot bodies, having adventures and exploring the galaxy and studying.  She must be in this black limbo because of a computer malfunction.  She tries to figure out what is up with this other entity, who is almost catatonic and unable to express himself.  By the end of the story we learn the tragic truth.  Before the computer uploading system was available, the souls of those who died would come to this blackness, which is a sort of waiting room or staging area from which people would then transition to the afterlife proper.  One soul, this quiet guy, was left here in this limbo to point the way to the newly dead.  But when people stopped truly dying because everybody's personality got uploaded into a computer, he was left alone, and being alone with nothing to do and nobody to talk to for like 5,000 years has made him almost a vegetable.  Being with this woman is reviving him, but then the woman is sucked away as the computer malfunction is fixed.

When you stop and think about this story, it doesn't make any sense (this is the first computer malfunction in 5,000 years?  For 5,000 years nobody refused to have his personality uploaded or was prevented from doing so by an accident or negligence?  Uploading your personality to a computer doesn't move your soul to the computer, it is just recording a copy, so if cancer or a car wreck or a terrorist attack kills you, your soul would still go to the afterlife) but the story still works on an emotional level when you first read it, as Goldin does a good job of presenting it and keeps it succinct.  So I'm giving it a mild recommendation.

"The Last Ghost" was nominated for a Nebula and has been reprinted in several anthologies; it is also the title story of a 1999 Goldin collection.

**********

We're only a quarter of the way through our exploration of Protostars and already the front cover with its mesmerizing Gene Szafran illo has fallen off my 50-year-old copy.  Thank heavens I have already made a high resolution scan of the cover so it will live forever in a computer network!

We'll be wrestling with four more stories from Protostars in our next episode--stay tuned.       

1973 Tomorrows by D Gerrold, J Blish and G R Dozois

Let's finish up Ten Tomorrows, the 1973 anthology of all-new SF stories (the back cover somewhat questionably calls them "thrillers" and "adventures") edited by Roger Elwood.  The last three stories in the book are by David Gerrold, James Blish and Gardner R. Dozois, and collectively take up like 80 pages, which sounds like a lot of pages, to be honest, but I think I can, I think I can, I think I can....

"An Infinity of Loving" by David Gerrold

I guess you'd call this a philosophical story, more a series of ideas than a traditional story.  

"An Infinity of Loving" starts by describing two good-looking young people who are in love, and how beautiful and wonderful their love is, and talking about all the unlikely coincidences that go into two people meeting each other by chance and falling in love.  Even though these two individuals are young, attractive, straight and white, Gerrold tells us the love of old ugly homosexuals of some other ethnicity would be just as wonderful.  

Then comes the subject of death, another thing that often comes about by unlikely coincidences, but which inevitably happens to everybody, and with it, the end of any wonderful love relationship the deceased was a component of.  This part of the story betrays the preoccupations of the period in which it was written, with allusions to political demonstrations, rock musicians dying of drug overdoses, and politicians getting murdered. 

The two lovers fear death, and take steps to ensure they, and their love, will live forever.  They have their brains networked together via elaborate surgeries and computer implants, and their personalities uploaded into a computer network.  The last section of the story lets us know that this is basically a scam, that the reproduced personalities in the network are not really the people upon which they are based, and each individual personality is experiencing not a true love relationship with another personality, but mere solipsistic self love.  Gerrold's story is a warning against integrating yourself into technology, arguing that it is a bogus sham experience and true life is connected to the body.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis, and I don't disagree with its arguments, but it feels long and the points it makes are sort of obvious and banal, and Gerrold doesn't dramatize his arguments by presenting us with compelling characters or a gripping plot, he just sort of tells them to you.  While I was reading "An Infinity of Loving" I kept checking to see how many pages were left, anxious to put this experience behind me, so I have to give it a, marginal, thumbs down.

"An Infinity of Loving" has never appeared outside of Ten Tomorrows.

"A True Bill" by James Blish

Sacre bleu, the subtitle to this story indicates that it is "A Chancel Drama in One Act."  Do I really want to read a 25-page play ("Time: Today...Place: A courtroom") designed to be performed in churches?  I guess I am doing it anyway.

In the intro to the play provided for its appearance here in a book purportedly filled with "Great New Science Fiction Stories," Blish reports he and his theatre group put the play on in fifteen churches in what we residents call "the DMV" back in 1966.  Blish makes sure to tell us that one of the churches was in a black slum and that one of his group's lead actors was a black man and that this guy was a great actor.

Blish's play is a reworking of the story of the death of Jesus Christ, with the roles of the Romans played by people much like American soldiers, and that of the Jews by people who are supposed to remind you of Vietnamese people.  (Blish doesn't use any of those proper nouns; instead the soldiers are members of "the Occupying Forces" and the natives are called by the non-coms, though not by their officer, "the gooks.")  Two days ago a native judge allied to the Occupying Forces had three troublemakers hanged.  Today the Occupying Forces and a different native judge are holding an inquest to determine if the three prisoners were justly executed.  Witnesses are called, and their testimony, and stuff said by people in the crowd, make it clear that one of the three people executed was a man who preached brotherhood and peace and got caught up in native politics and whose death was desired by his native enemies.  Among the witnesses and in the crowd are characters like Mary, mother of that man of peace, and Magda, a prostitute who was a follower the man of peace, who play the roles of their Biblical namesakes, as well as caricatures or archetypes of stereotypical 1966 Americans, like a teen-aged hippy who says "Don't blow your cool, baby," a doctor who psychoanalyses the man of peace, a housewife who is worried about inflation, etc.

I found "A True Bill" to be a gimmicky waste of time, though I suppose it could be seen as a useful primary source, an artifact that offers insight into the thought of people in 1966 and into the thinking and career of James Blish.   

You are not going to be surprised to hear that isfdb does not list any other printings of  "A True Bill" after its appearance here in Ten Tomorrows.

"In a Crooked Year" by Gardner R. Dozois

Ten Tomorrows ends with another long piece--like 40 pages--that has only ever appeared in Elwood's anthology here.  "In A Crooked Year" has four epigraphs, lines of poetry from Dylan Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Aram Boyajian, and an exchange of dialogue from Catch-22.

The protagonist of "In a Crooked Year" is a survivor of World War Three!  A wounded soldier serving in Pennsylvania, he deserted when his unit was about to fight a battalion of enemy paratroopers and so lived on after his comrades were wiped out; apparently all of those invading paratroopers were also killed.  (The enemies are never identified, because the point of a story like this is not to criticize or stoke the readers' resentment of some foreign country or some political ideology--the point of a story like this is to criticize and stoke your resentment of the entire human race!)  Our main character thinks he is the only human being left alive in the world!

The text of "In a Crooked Year" is at times impressionistic and often mind-numbingly overwritten, offering us readers long sentences that signify little.  Lengthy passages describe stuff he sees, and these descriptions are confusing and vague, a reflection of the physical and mental toll the deserter's experiences are having on him; the man's thought processes are also related, illustrating his loosening grip on sanity.  Here's a short, but otherwise representative, paragraph:

I open my eyes again and let the colors rave at me, drinking them, touching and tasting their subtle, oscillating textures.  I am afraid that the world will absorb me, drown me in its intensity until I become just another light wave spinning and vibrating along the color spectrum, or at best a single leaf nodding its head among the vast sea of living green.

We also get lots of sentences repetitively describing the deserter's hardships and wretched efforts to survive--his aches and pains, his crying and vomiting, his meals of raw snakes and slugs, his dreams and delusions.  As the above extract demonstrates, "In a Crooked Year" is sometimes written in the first-person in the present tense, but at other times the text is in the past tense and delivered by an omniscient third-person narrator.

The deserter suffers survivor's guilt, and is reluctant to go to the battlefield where his unit was destroyed, but eventually does so, thinking there may be preserved food and other supplies there that he can salvage--he's not really finding enough bugs, reptiles and roots to make up a healthy diet.  The first chapter of the story ends with the survivor yelling at God and at the human race.

In the first chapter of the story there was a lot of philosophical talk about the protagonist being the last man on Earth, but in the second (and final) chapter it becomes clear that there is at least one other survivor; presumably this is an enemy soldier, as he shoots at our hero, but misses.  Winter comes, making survival even more difficult, and our insane protagonist sacrifices a bird in hopes this will cause winter to end.  He manages to survive the winter.  In spring, he shoots down the enemy soldier.  Then, he shoots himself.  

If I had to guess what this story is trying to convey, I would say that Dozois is suggesting that the human race is arrogant and destructive towards the beautiful natural world as well as self-destructive, and that man and his technology (one of the protagonist's delusions is that the broken pieces of various armored vehicles have assembled themselves like a Frankenstein's monster and this zombie machine is slowly closing in on our hero) are a cruel burden on that beautiful natural world, but that nature will endure man's presence and thrive after he destroys himself.     

"In a Crooked Year" is a slog to read; dense and slow, it goes on forever and you rarely feel like you are getting anywhere.  Thumbs down!  

**********

Three stories with obvious and banal points to make that make them in ways that are not entertaining and chew up lots of the brief time you have left on this Earth.  And I don't even sympathize with Dozois's supposed insights!

Three losers in a row?  Each one worse than its predecessor?  Ouch!  

**********

Folks, it's time for tonight's Top Ten List!  Tonight's list: Top Ten Stories in Ten Tomorrows.

TOP TEN STORIES

IN

TEN TOMORROWS

10. "In a Crooked Year" by Gardner R. Dozois

9.  "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" by Robert Silverberg

8.  "A True Bill" by James Blish

7.  "The Freshman Angle" by Edgar Pangborn

6.  "An Infinity of Loving" by David Gerrold

5.  "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" by Anne McCaffrey

4.  "A Few Minutes" by Laurence M. Janifer

3. "The Defenseless Dead" by Larry Niven

2. "Matthew" by Pamela Sargent

1. "Yahrzeit" by Barry N. Malzberg

**********

Can I recommend Ten Tomorrows, a book with five bad stories and four good ones?  I actually think I can!  Well, to special people with particular interests, at least!  While it is true that two of the good stories in the book--Malzberg's and Niven's--are available in other books (and on the world's greatest website, the internet archive), the other two, Sargent's and Janifer's, are not, so maybe Sargent and Janifer fans should get a hold of the book.  Similarly, students or collectors of Blish, Gerrold, Pangborn, and Dozois have no other avenue to experience the stories included here.  Finally, and I know I have suggested this already, repeatedly, Ten Tomorrows is a primary source for those who want to learn about the New Wave and the 1960s and 1970s from the horse's mouth and not from tendentious secondary sources.

Call me crazy, but another all-new SF anthology from the 1970s in our next episode!  Steel your nerve!

1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold and James Sallis

I recently found myself in Myrtle Beach, celebrating the birthday of one of my in-laws.  Of course it is nice to walk on the beach, finding dead crabs and hearing the surf and seeing how the moonlight is reflected on the breakers and all that, and I had a good time at the pottery stores in Seagrove, NC, and the antique stores in places like Weyer's Cave, VA, and Bennettsville, SC at which we stopped on the drive down, but let's be honest: Myrtle Beach is a hideous tourist town where I don't really belong.  So I had ample time to sit in the decrepit condo my in-laws rented and read old issues of Weird Tales and a 1971 paperback SF anthology I brought with me, Nova One.  Nova One, first of a series of four, was edited by Harry Harrison and first published in 1970 in hardcover.  My copy of Nova One once was part of the library of the M. I. T. Science Fiction Society, which is fun.

In his introduction to the volume, Harrison stresses that science fiction is about science, and argues that we should see H. G. Wells as the first science fiction author, obliquely dismissing Mary Shelly's claim ("Modern SF definitely does not date back to the second century and Lucian of Samosata, or even to the Gothic and fantastic novels of the last century.")  Then he crows that, while the mainstream short story is essentially moribund, science fiction writers continue to produce a large volume of short stories in magazines.  Finally, he produces somewhat vague arguments for why stories from a book of new stories like this one (13 of the 15 pieces in Nova One are brand new) should be better than stories written for a magazine.

Ray Bradbury's name is at the top of the list on the cover, but his contribution to Nova One is not a new story but a three-year-old poem, "And This Did Dante Do," which appeared in 1967 in Florida Quarterly.  The angle of this poem is that living in Chicago is hell, its fanciful conceit that Dante Alighieri created the Windy City in a dream or by travelling to the New World via some machine of his own invention.  That the monstrosity Dante is devising is Chicago is revealed at the end of the poem as a kind of surprise punchline, and Bradbury's complaints about the hog butcher to the world--there is pollution; apartments are small--could probably be said of any decent-sized 20th-century city.  This poem isn't all that bad an example of silly verse, but I enjoyed city life when I lived in a real city and so can't get behind the point of view Ray is espousing here.  

Our beloved Barry Malzberg has two stories in Nova One.  "Terminus Est" I read in 2018 when I decided to read all the stories that made up the fixup novel Universe Day as well as the novel itself; I really liked "Terminus Est" and suggested in my blog post that Malzberg was hewing closer to genre literature conventions when he wrote it, to its benefit.  "In the Pocket," which appears in Nova One under the pen name K. M. O'Donnell, is one of the stories upon which Malzberg's novel The Men Inside is based.  I read The Men Inside before I started this blog, and am toying with the idea of rereading and blogging about it; if I do I'll talk about "In the Pocket" in the same post.  Suffice to say here that "In the Pocket" is a pretty good story and doesn't feel like a fragment or anything.     

Now, let's read three stories new to me by authors with whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some familiarity, Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold and James Sallis.

"Swastika!" by Brian Aldiss

This, Harrison warns us in his little intro to "Swastika!," is a joke story about Adolf Hitler!  The jokes in Aldiss's novel about serving in Burma during the Second World War, A Soldier Erect, made me laugh, so maybe the humor in this story will also work on me?  

Or maybe not.  Our narrator, whose name is Brian, has a meeting with Hitler, who survived the war and is living under an assumed name in Ostend.  The bulk of the story, I guess, is satire, the point of which, I guess, is that 1960s politicians are really little better than Hitler.  Lyndon Baines Johnson, Fidel Castro, Moshe Dayan, King Hussein of Jordan, and Sukarno, among others, are all said to have consulted Hitler, begging for his guidance, while Hitler admits to finding admirable qualities in Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace and to having enjoyed the spectacle of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  

Throughout the story Brian expresses admiration for Hitler, and the punchline of the story is that Brian has come to Ostend to get Hitler to sign a contract so that Brian can put on a musical of Hitler's life, the title of which will be "Swastika!"  Mel Brooks's The Producers was in movie theaters in 1967, and it is a little odd to see Aldiss and editor Harrison not spiking this joke and coming up with some other gag for the ending of this 1970 story.  Maybe "The Producers" wasn't shown in England?

This story is not funny or interesting.  Any effect it might have on the reader relies on the shock value of the narrator expressing admiration for Hitler, from the absurdity of Hitler's claims that he hasn't really lost the war because the war isn't really over yet or the idea of a musical about Der Fuhrer, or from reader sympathy with Aldiss's shallow criticisms of 1960s politicians, which essentially amount to name-calling--Aldiss's attacks on LBJ and the rest aren't much more specific or persuasive than Bradbury's attack on Chicago in "And This Did Dante Do."  Aldiss's strategies in this story are basic, even childish, though maybe when the story was published their audacity excited readers.  Thumbs down from me in 2021, though.          

"Swastika!" would be included in Aldiss's oft-reprinted collection The Moment of Eclipse as well as Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss.  

"Love Story in Three Acts" by David Gerrold

Gerrold may be most famous for the tribbles of Star Trek which are so suspiciously like a creature from Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, but I always think of Gerrold as the guy behind the novels Deathbeast and Yesterday's Children, both of which are noteworthy and crazy in their own way; also memorable are the Chtorr books.  Relatively recently I read Gerrold's novel Space Skimmer, which I have to admit is not nearly as remarkable as the aforementioned books.

This story here is about a married couple...of the future!  In Act One they have sex and then consult the computer which has been reading their vital signs through bands on their wrists.  It reports they only achieved 34% pleasure!  The wife pesters the husband about getting a computer that will be even more invasive--I mean helpful--so they can get a better score.

Act Two is at the husband's office.  A salesman comes by; he was contacted by the wife.  He convinces a reluctant husband to invest in a computer system that won't just read the couple's vitals while they are having sex, but guide their movements to better pleasure each other!  

In Act Three the device is installed and the wife convinces the husband that they should use it.  (This entire story is about the husband resisting pressure from others but eventually giving in to their manipulations--the modern world of feminism, capitalism and technology--as depicted in this story--is a world in which men are at the mercy of women, businesspeople and machines.)  They hook themselves up to all the wires and then have better sex than they have had for years.  The optimistic trick ending to the story is the revelation that they forgot to turn the computer on--if their sex was better it was because of some reinvigorated rapport between them...or the placebo effect.

Acceptable.   

"Love Story in Three Acts" would resurface in a Gerrold collection and in anthologies, including a French one and an English one which has what must be one of the worst book covers of the 20th century.

"Faces & Hands" by James Sallis

I've read several things by Sallis, like the experimental "Field," "Delta Flight 281," and "The First Few Kinds of Truth," none of which I thought were worth my time.  But maybe this time Sallis and I will be on the same wavelength--hope springs eternal!

It is the future!  Mankind has achieved the ability to travel between the stars.  The Earth has recently joined a space federation called "The Union" which seems to be culturally dominated by people from the Vegan system--everywhere you go people wear Vegan fashions and speak Vegan.  In his little intro paragraph to "Faces & Hands," Harrison tells us Sallis is a poet, and Sallis employs little word games to make his story feel more alien or futuristic.  On the first page of the story we find that the cliché "playing by ear" is now rendered "playing by air;" on page two we learn that "ziggurat" is now styled "zikkurat" and that the name Stein is pronounced "stain."  

Our narrator, immediately after graduating college, was recruited by a guy named Stein to work as a "Courier," a sort of interstellar diplomat.  He relates how, while on a diplomatic mission, he got temporarily stranded on the planet Alsfort thanks to a labor strike.  While waiting for interstellar travel to resume  he sat in a "wayroom" by the spaceport, drinking and people watching.  Sallis gives us several pages of descriptions of people the narrator sees in the wayroom, giving us an idea of how diverse the Union is.  The most pages get devoted to a bird-like alien woman, a beautiful singer, who sits and talks to the narrator.  She describes how the culture of her race of bird people has been changed by contact with the peoples of the Union, changed in a way that causes social upheaval, with some embracing new technologies and ideas and others resisting them.  Presumably these bird people and their problems are supposed to remind us of the fate of Third Worlders who become integrated into the world economy dominated by Western ideas and technology.  Later Sallis makes his point explicit, that engagement with other cultures/economies/polities can both bring benefits and exact costs, and that whether such engagement is on balance worthwhile is not necessarily obvious.  

"Faces & Hands" is in two parts.  The second part is in the third person and takes place after a space war between Earth and another planet; Vega sided with Earth and was severely bombed, reducing this formerly leading society to penury (there are blackouts due to rationing of energy, as in poor countries nowadays and, according to rumor, California.)  The narrative of this eight-page section of the story concerns a prostitute who has mild psychic powers and a space traveler who spends time with her.  There are animal metaphors and a scene with bohemian artists that, I guess, is meant to show the effect of war on culture and maybe how different generations respond differently to change, echoing something the bird-lady said in the first part.  

Because it presents characters and images and human emotions, seems to be responding to interesting historical events like imperialism, the World Wars and Cold War, and the growth of international trade, and sort of has a plot, this is the best story by Sallis I have ever read.  I don't love it, but it at least is worth reading. 

"Faces & Hands" has been reprinted in Sallis collections (as "Faces, Hands") and in an anthology printed in brave little Belgium.  

**********

It is always interesting and often fun to look into these old SF anthologies.  So more short stories from one of the anthologies on the shelves of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

Space Skimmer by David Gerrold

("That's what he wanted from you, Mass--just a little affection in return.")
("I--don't know.  I'm not very good at--affection.")
("Well, try it again.")
("Hello, puppy.  Nice puppy.")
(--Bright giggling, bubbly laughing, pink streaked, happy bursting, yellow flashing, swirling--warm wet LOVE--!!--)

The copy Joachim and I read

You will recall that, in the year of our Lord Two Thousand and Eighteen, Joachim Boaz, mastermind behind the Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations blog and one of this blog's biggest supporters, made a generous donation of SF books to the MPorcius Library, and that I have been gradually working my way through them.  Today we look at a fourteenth title, Space Skimmer by David Gerrold, a 1972 paperback from Ballantine.  I like Gerrold; before this blog emerged from my addled pate to haunt the interwebs, I read three of his Chtorr books as well as Yesterday's Children; Gerrold's Deathbeast was one of the first books I blogged about.  I thought all five of those books worth reading, so, with some level of confidence, let's see what Space Skimmer is all about.

(Joachim blogged about the novel back in 2012; click the link to read his review, which is much less spoily than mine!)

The first 58 of Space Skimmer's 218 pages get us acquainted with a guy by the name of "Mass."  Mass is the product of genetic engineering and selective breeding, a human being short (four feet tall!) and wide and strong.  A thousand years ago his home planet of Streinveldt was colonized and brought into the expanding human space empire; his people were designed to thrive on that high gravity (2.5 G) world full of monsters and valuable minerals.  Some 400 years ago Streinveldt lost contact with the Empire, and Mass has left his home world in his one-man space ship, apparently on a quest to find out what happened to the Empire, which at one point must have spanned over one thousand light years and consisted of over 11,000 inhabited planets.

Mass flies to a planet of ruins where he finds an Imperial computer that provides some clues, and continues to other planets--some inhabited by humans with various body types suited to their local environments, others abandoned--collecting further clues.  Eventually he discovers one of the super spacecraft of the late period of the Empire, a space skimmer.  The space skimmer looks like a snow flake and has no exterior walls or engines or guns per se--its exterior, propulsion system and defensive mechanisms are all invisible (or nearly invisible) force fields.  It can cross a light-year in two hours (a conventional ship can only travel a third of a light year in a day) and need never stop for fuel or supplies--it gathers energy from stellar radiation and can synthesize anything required.

There is a lot of exposition and description in this book; Gerrold talks about the nature of a space empire--the relationship of the metropole to the peripheral states, the relative importance of information, culture, military might, and trade, etc.--and describes in detail Mass's efforts to learn how to fly the space skimmer, which he controls by typing in commands on a keyboard.

In the second quarter or so of the book we meet Ike of planet Manolka, the planet of immortal and unchanging synthetic men, each of them perfect, each of them identical, each of them connected to every other via a collective consciousness "mass mind" managed by huge subterranean artificial brains.  Gerrold spends quite a number of pages describing how perfect Ike (like all his confreres) is, and then unleashes some experimental prose consisting of sentence fragments with lots of parentheses and em dashes to represent the reaction to Mass of this collective mind.  The Manolkan mass mind finds Mass to be terribly inefficient, and when one of its members (Ike) reads the computer memory device (a thing that performs like a floppy disk or USB flash drive performs IRL) Mass has brought with him, it learns about individualism, something the mass mind erased from its own memory centuries ago.  To protect the collective consciousness form such dangerous ideas, Ike is severed from the collective mind, and begins a career as an individual, joining Mass on his quest to learn about--and perhaps find what remains of--the Empire.

Gerrold spends a lot of time on Mass and Ike getting to know each other; as an unchanging construct that only has recently been liberated from a mass mind, Ike has no idea what art or sleep are, and finds bizarre such concepts as eating and drinking and inebriation, even repellent in their inefficiency.  Gerrold fills this novel with his own poetry, and the most lengthy example is in this section, a four-and-a-half-page drinking song reminiscent of Beowulf that Mass performs while trying to teach Ike to sing.

On the otherwise blank page after the title page of Space Skimmer, Gerrold thanks Larry Niven for allowing him to "borrow" an idea.  About halfway through the novel we get an indication of what that idea might be.  In his Ringworld books, Niven dramatizes the possibility that luck is actually "real," and that it is a heritable trait one might breed creatures (including people) for, just like height or intelligence or eye color or whatever.  Mass and Ike, searching another planet for info on the Empire, encounter an eighteen-year-old hereditary prince who was born some four hundred years ago, but accidentally put in suspended animation.  Mass wakes him up and Prince Tapper explains that he is a member of a long line of people bred for luck, but something went awry and he is unlucky, being left in suspended animation for four centuries is one example of his ill luck, another is that he is a hemophiliac.

Tapper (and his adorable little puppy!) join Mass and Ike on the skimmer.  Tapper is another person Mass has trouble understanding.  Streinveldt is a rough and dangerous world where everybody has to work hard and it is strength that is prized and respected; to become a prince on Streinveldt one must fight monsters or lead war parties, and Mass finds Tapper, who has a sweet voice and soft hands and was born a prince in a society that exalts poetry and good taste, to be contemptible and even disgusting.  Mass is similarly disturbed when Ike meets another synthetic man and the two go into "rapport," touching to temporarily form a two-unit collective consciousness, which Mass (clever Tapper realizes) interprets as sexual intercourse that is perverse because it is unconnected to reproduction.  Gerrold is gay, and presumably Mass's reaction to Tapper and to Ike's relationship with another android is a way for him to write about (conservative? traditional? religious?) straight men's hostile attitudes towards homosexuality.  (Later in the novel, working in the tradition of SF titans Theodore Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein, Gerrold somewhat obliquely suggests that maybe incest and bestiality aren't such a big deal.)

In hopes of getting Tapper's hemophilia cured, the characters fly to a planet where there are reputed to be fine doctors.  A woman there, Edelith, examines Tapper and decides he doesn't have "real" hemophilia, just a psychosomatic kind brought on by some childhood trauma--all of his bad luck, this distaff Sigmund Freud suggests, is the result of psychological issues.  Edelith accompanies the party to yet another planet, where there are reputed to be psykers who can look into Tapper's mind.  Edelith provides yet another character for Mass from macho Streinveldt to bounce off of--he is made uncomfortable by a smart capable woman.  It is also in conversation with Edelith that the characters figure out that the space skimmers must be the reason the Empire collapsed--the space skimmers are so powerful that they made their captains invulnerable and thus irresponsible.

Our motley crew of heroes acquires an empath in the form of a skinny girl, a clone--the psyker planet produces these clones on an assembly line and sells them into indentured servitude.  The model of clone they pick up--her name is Aura--is fragile and short-lived.  Aura can sense everybody's feelings, and she senses that Edelith and Mass argue so much because they are in love but afraid to let down their defenses.  During the crisis of a skimmer malfunction, Mass lets down some of his defenses and shows that he cares for others; meanwhile Aura and Tapper have been falling in love.

With Edelith's guidance, Aura facilitates all the characters--Mass, Ike, Tapper, Edelith, and Aura, and even the puppy and the skimmer!--forming a collective mind.  We get like a dozen pages of em dashes and parentheses.  (See epigraph to this post.)   Edelith solves everybody's psychological issues--even the skimmer has a psychological issue (that is what caused the dangerous malfunction)--and everybody learns to love each other across all barriers of culture, gender, and species.  The characters resolve to work together to revive the Empire.  But the story ends on a tragic note--when everybody returns to his, her or its own body, they find that Aura was exhausted by the effort of linking everybody's minds, and is dead.

Space Skimmer is OK if you don't mind a story that is mostly conversations and descriptions and has as its point that we should all love and accept and understand each other.  There is very little tension or suspense or surprise--those first 58 pages include adventure stuff with dangerous enemies and weapons and so forth, but that is all dumped for conversations for the remaining three quarters of the novel.  The novel is episodic and lacks a central through-line--the quest to learn about the fate of the Empire is largely forgotten after Tanner comes on the scene and then resolved in a casual way without any drama or impact, and the decision to rebuild the Empire comes out of nowhere.  We learn all about Mass and Ike in the first half of the novel, but after that new concepts and characters will suddenly just pop up and receive little elaboration.  For example, we are supposed to see the death of Aura as tragic, but she only appears on page 179 so we barely get to know her before she makes her sacrifice and dies on page 217.

Another character issue has to do with Mass, whose role in the novel shifts halfway through.  In the first 80 or 90 pages he seems like a good-natured guy, committed to exploring the galaxy, and he drives the narrative and overcomes obstacles, but in the rest of the book he is angry and closed-minded and other characters drive the narrative and resolve problems.  In the second half of his novel Gerrold uses Mass as a foil for the more sophisticated and liberal Tapper and Edelith, who show Mass the error of his ways and repair his stunted psychology.  It feels kind of like Gerrold's intended role for Mass changed as he was writing, and he didn't have time to go back and revise the first part of the manuscript in order to make Mass's personality more consistent.

Acceptable.