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.

Three stories by James Tiptree, Jr. published in 1972

As anybody reading this probably knows already, James Tiptree, Jr. is a pseudonym used by Alice Sheldon.  For ten years (1967-77) Sheldon published critically acclaimed science fiction stories under the Tiptree pen name, successfully hiding her true identity.  Tiptree is one of the famous SF authors I have never read, but that gap in my experience is closed today!

Charles Platt's profile of Sheldon in his 1983 book Dream Makers II makes her seem like a fascinating character who lead a privileged and heroic life: participation in safaris and scientific expeditions in Africa and India as a child, a successful career as a painter, work in the Pentagon analyzing aerial photographs in support of the U.S. Army Air Force in the Pacific War, work for the CIA during the early Cold War, then a stint as a behavioral psychologist.  In the profile she expresses the conventional lefty elite contempt for Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, but, being born long before our current identity politics era, she isn't afraid to paint a picture of Africa as a place full of cannibals and witch doctors who saw her, a little blonde girl, as some kind of goddess, or to say stuff like "much as I loathe Roman Catholicism as an authoritarian religion, Islam is worse."

Let's hope Sheldon's stories are as interesting and exciting as her own character and life were.  As part of my project of reading every story in David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1972 anthology Generation, I am reading the Tiptree stories included therein, "Through a Lass Darkly" and "Amberjack."  Also published in '72, the year of your humble blogger's first birthday, was Harlan Ellison's famous Again, Dangerous Visions, and I will be reading the Tiptree story included in that volume, "The Milk of Paradise," as well.  (Note that the Generation stories were purchased by Gerrold and Goldin in 1969, even though Generation wasn't published until 3 years later.)

"Through a Lass Darkly" 

In his intro in Generation to this story Gerrold praises Tiptree to the skies: "...if I had to pick one writer today as being the most all-around skilled architect of the short story as well as one of the freshest and most original craftsmen, I'd pick Tiptree.  No shit."

Amusingly enough, one of the two characters in "Through a Lass Darkly" is a man who writes an advice column under a female byline.  (In real life, libertarian journalist Nick Gillespie did this at Teen Machine magazine, ghostwriting an advice column for Alyssa Milano.)

The advice columnist is sitting in his office, banging away at the ol' typewriter, when a pretty girl teleports in.  She is from the year 2269, and speaks in a futuristic version of English which the columnist and we readers have to interperet as best we can. Deciphering her argot we learn that, in the 23rd century, sexual and social relations will be very different than they are today, with group marriages, and, apparently, government control over how many children a woman can give birth to.  When the girl learns that the columnist is a bachelor she is disgusted at his "perversion." (Interestingly, in the future there will still be a strong distinction between small town and big city values.)

In the same way that people in 1969 knew little about what went on in 1669, the girl from the future knows nothing of the typical concerns of a 1960s person, and when the columnist asks if there is nuclear war or race hatred in the 23rd century, she doesn't know what he is talking about.  Of course, her ignorance doesn't keep her from having an arrogant confidence that her society is far better and far more free than those of the past!

An entertaining and engaging story.

All three of the stories discussed in this blog post would later be included in Warm Worlds and Otherwise

"Amberjack"

This one is just three pages.  As with "Through a Lass Darkly" there is a level of intentional obscurity here, with long convoluted sentences and challenging metaphors and the use of onomatopoeia.  I think I have an idea of what is going on, though. While "Through a Lass Darkly" was light-hearted and a little jokey, "Amberjack" is heavy.

A young couple is reluctant to really commit to each other, to admit that they love each other, because of bad relationships with their parents and siblings, who were nagging, neglectful, etc; neither of them has ever had a good role model of a healthy love relationship.  One hot night they are sleeping on the fire escape of their apartment, and the woman admits she is pregnant; neither of them expects to find marriage or parenthood a happy situation.  Somehow a fight breaks out, and the woman falls from the fire escape to her death.  Then the woman's sister appears, telling the man she has been looking for them and suggesting she will help the man escape prosecution for the death of his girlfriend, her own sister--it seems like she wants the man for herself.

The three characters' names may be significant.  The man is called "Amberjack" throughout the story, but we are told that he was called "Daniel" when he first met his girlfriend, "'Rue."  Daniel brings to mind the lion's den, while an amberjack is a type of fish (which I did not know until today); the use of two names suggests some kind of uneasiness about identity, or a desire to be a different person than he was when he was with 'Rue.  'Rue's name always has that apostrophe, perhaps hinting that her bad upbringing has left her a truncated or incomplete human being?  "'Rue" makes one think of the phrase "you will rue the day," and also kangaroos, I guess.  The sister (who looks almost identical to 'Rue) is named Pompey, like the general who, during the crises during the last years of the Roman Republic, was allied with Julius Caesar but then sided with Cato and the Republicans against Caesar.  (Of course, the ancient Pompey suffered defeat and a depressing death, while this Pompey seems to have succeeded in her aims.)

This is one of those stories which forces you to decide how much time and energy you want to spend trying to figure it out.  Every line seems to contain a clue or a red herring.  I'm leaving this story with the feeling I often get after reading a Gene Wolfe story, that I enjoyed it, but that I probably missed something.

"The Milk of Paradise" 

In his intro to "The Milk of Paradise," the last story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Harlan Ellison brags/complains that he is exhausted from writing 60,000 words of introductions for the 800+ page book.  Then he tells us that "The Milk of Paradise" is the best story in the volume, and Tiptree is a "Giant" with a capital "G."

Like "Amberjack" this is an economical story in which every word counts and which has me straining my poor brain in an effort to puzzle out what is really happening.

The universe is inhabited by two races, the Humans and the moronic, inferior Crots.  But our protagonist Timor claims to have been raised by a third race, a race so beautiful and sophisticated that they make Humans look like Crots!  Timor was "rescued" from the planet of this super race when he was ten; he believes that a disease unwittingly brought by his Human rescuers wiped out the super race.

Timor has just finished training as a space scout and is the "newboy" at the space station.  Human society in the setting Tiptree presents us is very sexually permissive, and very casual about sex, and both women and men make advances on Timor. Timor is receptive to these advances, but his memories of the super race leave him unaroused by his fellow Humans--to him, Humans, even his own body, are disgusting! Timor even wears a grey outfit to cover his hideous "pink" skin--the beings of the super race have grey skin.

Timor's first assignment is to accompany an experienced scout, a black man, on a space mission.  Foreshadowing what is to come, the black scout, Santiago, jestingly calls Timor a Crot, and, because his skin is dark, Timor is able to experience some kind of sexual feeling for Santiago.  Santiago wants to explore the planet of the super race, and uses drugs and other invasive techniques to get the data out of Timor's brain. When the two scouts get to the planet, which Timor recalls as a sort of paradise of shimmering towers, Santiago laughs to find the natives to be grotesque little monsters ("grey rotten lumps") with colossal genitals who live in wretched mud huts.  "SUBCROTS!" he guffaws.  But Timor jumps into the mud with them, starts having sex with them.

It seems like Timor had living within him one of these aliens, or its consciousness, or something like that.  Anyway, he is happy to return to his true people, who, it is suggested, are going to "totally recondition" him so he can live as an equal among them.  (As with "Amberjack," I feel like I "got" almost the whole story but was confused by the last few paras; Pompey's arrival is confusing in that earlier story and in "The Milk of Paradise" I am puzzled over Timor's precise relationship with the grey lumps.)

I guess you can say this story is about how beauty is in the eye of the beholder and different cultures have different customs and so forth (a theme also evident in "Through a Lass Darkly.")  Someone like Sheldon, a wealthy Westerner who lived among Africans and Indians as a child, would no doubt be very aware of the vast diversity in values and mores across communities.  The story is also about race, and about identity, and about how such things are potentially fluid and open to interpretation; we learn immediately in this story that the protagonist has two names (just as we did with the protagonists of "Through A Lass Darkly" and "Amberjack") and as the story progresses people call Timor a Human, a Crot, and then (indirectly perhaps) a Subcrot.  

**********

These stories are all good--they are certainly better than most of the stories in Generation--and they have many of the attributes I admire in stories, like economy and a focus on human feeling and human relationships.  Significantly, they are all about people who have two names, two identities, like Sheldon, who, masquerading as Tiptree, did herself.  Perhaps we should consider to what extent each of the three characters chooses to take on a second name and identity, and to what extent a second identity is thrust upon them by others, and compare this to what extent Sheldon herself voluntarily chose to write under an obscuring pseudonym and to what extent she felt societal pressure to do so.

It is good to have gained a little familiarity with an important SF author, and it is nice to find that there is something to all that hype.  I will certainly read more of Tiptree's work in the future.

Another six tales from Generation: O'Neil, Toomey, Carter, Sky, Pumilia and Hensel

There are twenty-five stories in Generation, David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1972 anthology of stories by writers lauded as "the most dazzling new stars of science fiction."  Some of these "stars," like Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, Piers Anthony, the mysterious James Tiptree, Jr., and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, went on to have careers highly successful critically and/or commercially.  Others are people I rarely or never hear about.  Let's check out six stories by those relatively minor writers.

"...After They've Seen Paree" by Dennis O'Neil

The wife and I were recently in Dayton Ohio, at Carillon Historical Park, where you can see old locomotives, a plane built by the Wright brothers, lots of old cash registers, and that sort of stuff.  They have an exhibit on World War One which includes a Lewis gun and a 3-inch field gun.  Worth a few hours if that is your thing.

Anyway, the title of O'Neil's story brings The Great War to mind, and, like the song for which it is named, the story is about people who are changed by contact with the big city and with war.  As he does with the title, O'Neil fills the story with literary and historical allusions; Virgil, the Bible, Dylan Thomas, etc.

It is the post apocalyptic future!  Near a ruined city, a tribe lives simply and primitively, having sworn to eschew the evils of the past: the Democratic and Republican parties, TV, booze, etc.  Our protagonist, Norman*, is about to have sex with his cousin Tresa when a Volkswagen microbus with a computer brain kidnaps her and carries her off to the city.

Our hero spends a year reading the forbidden books (combat manuals with silly titles-- this story is supposed to be funny) in preparation to liberate his cousin from the city.  When Norman invades the city he battles the two last remaining U. S. Army soldiers and their battleforce of robot cars; Tresa is still alive, soldiers having kidnapped her for use as a sex slave.  Norman also learns the cause of the apocalypse, a race war which saw a cataclysmic exchange of fire between satellites and ground installations.

Norman brings Tresa out of the city, but she has changed.  Not only did the soldiers' surgical robots fill her breasts with silicone, but contact with the military and with urban decadence has turned her into a saidst who is sexually aroused by violence and a slacker who refuses to work the subsistence farm with the rest of the tribe.  The sweet and innocent Tresa is gone, and Norman considers killing her to expunge the tribe of her corruption (this resort to violence a reflection of his own corruption.)

Acceptable; the story moves at a brisk pace, gives you lots to think about, and the jokes, while not exactly funny, are not annoyingly poor.  According to isfdb, O'Neil has written several novels and over a dozen short stories; most of them seem to be about DC Comics characters.

*Norman is a good name for writers to give an "everyman" character because it sounds a bit like "normal" and "no man."  Ray Davies named the mentally ill office worker in The Kinks Present a Soap Opera "Norman," for example.  

"The Recreation" by Robert E. Toomey, Jr.

A lame gimmick story, less than two pages.  God is just like a short story writer: he creates planets and tries to sell them, does hackwork to make ends meet, gets depressed and turns to booze.  Earth is a planet he has been unable to place; while under the influence of a hangover he revises the Earth, adding humankind--the joke is that human beings are terrible because God made us when he was out of sorts!

Toomey is credited with a single novel at isfdb as well as seven short stories.  "The Recreation" would later appear in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, a book I borrowed from an Iowa library a few years ago.

"Constitution in E Flat" by Paul E. Carter

Carter has eleven short stories listed at isfdb.  In 1977 Columbia University Press published a nonfiction book he wrote about SF magazines which looks like it is probably pretty cool.

"Constitution in E Flat" is set in a future United States overtaken by authoritarianism and decadence. The air outside is too polluted to breathe without nose clips or some kind of filter mask, and the US is involved in a world war on a broad front in Latin America and Africa.  This story takes place in a  noisy club where there are go-go dancers and all manner of drugs are for sale; a composer has set the text of the Constitution to music, and at the club is meeting two government representatives and the head of the Musicians Union to discuss the new composition.  (This is apparently a fantasy world in which people still care about symphonic music.)  One of the government guys expresses skepticism about the composition, and then the other one has him arrested on the pretext that this is evidence of insufficient patriotism.

I guess this story is supposed to remind you of Soviet Russia where government officials are always stabbing each other in the back and art is under the control of the State (the government guy who is not arrested has a sort of Russian-sounding name, "Rikhoff"), and suggest that the American people are becoming deracinated, divorced from their political and cultural heritage (in the final lines a singer sings "Ave Maria" in Latin but nobody in the club understands the words.)  This sounds like the basis for an interesting story, but something about Carter's style made my eyes glaze over and I kept forgetting which authority figure was which; I don't know, maybe it's me.  Merely acceptable.        

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" by Kathleen Sky

As I think I have mentioned before, Gerrold's introductions for stories in Generation by women come off as sexist by today's standards.  In his intro to "One Ordinary Day, With Box" he tells us that there is "certainly" no woman in the world sexier than Sky, and then shares his theory on what a "truly liberated woman" is: "not one who has forsaken her femininity, but one who has accepted it and wears it without falsity."

(For some reason Gerrold refuses to provide us readers any insights into the earthy masculinity and raw sexual magnetism of Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg.)

isfdb tells us that Sky has published five novels (two of them about the trials and tribulations of the crew of the starship Enterprise) and eight short stories, two of them collaborations with her husband (from 1972 to 1982), Stephen Goldin.

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" is an acceptable Twilight Zone-style story.  A greyish man carries around with him, from town to town, a light but bulky black box.  It contains, we are told, not what people want, but what they need.  For example, when a wretched drunk reaches into the box he gets a healthy sandwich (not the cash he wants) and when a boy-crazy teenage girl reaches into it she gets birth control pills.  People, we learn, always reject what they truly need.

This is a good enough premise, but the ending is a little weak.  When the greyish man reaches into the box himself, he just gets another box (the original collapses.)  "One Ordinary Day, With Box" was translated into German for Science Fiction Story Reader 5, and also appeared (like Roger Deeley's The Shortest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told, also from Generation) in Reflections of the Future: An Elective Course in Science Fiction and Fact.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" by Joseph E. Pumilia

We've actually encountered Pumilia before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, when we read "Hung Like An Elephant," which Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley.  That story was also purchased by Gerrold and Goldin, for Alternities.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" is about an immortal creature of pure energy who guards one of the spots where the different universes touch; if energy should leak from one universe to another then chaos could result, stars dying or exploding, the laws of physics breaking down, etc.  The Porter has to fight evil energy creatures who want to break into his universe and cause mayhem, and he faces his greatest challenge when a female energy creature seduces him and tricks him into opening the gate.

This is one of those stories that isn't actually bad, but just sits there.  Acceptable, I suppose.              

"A Sense of Thyme" by C. F. Hensel

This is one of those stories in which Death is an elegantly dressed man who walks with a black walking stick and drives a black Rolls Royce, who comes to you when your time is up and drives you to the train station to get on the train to the afterlife. Are there a lot of people who actually like these kinds of stories?

My mother used to tell us kids that the Santas we'd see in stores and elsewhere were Santa's helpers, and in this story there are numerous representatives of Death driving around in black Rolls Royces, each with a schedule to keep.  The Death in this story was a normal person horrified of death who joined the "firm" at the age of 19 because such a position confers immortality.

Today he is collecting an old woman reputed to be a witch.  She too, he learns, made a bargain to gain immortality and wisdom, many, many, years ago, but then gave up immortality to return to the mainstream of human life:

"It eventually occurred to me, my dear, by virtue of that wisdom gained at such cost, that I was imprisoned.  Trapped....As long as I never aged, I never learned the lessons of age.  I never developed....I became inhuman...."  

This is a sentimental story with lots of descriptions of the witch's beautiful eyes and a long scene in which Death cries and so forth.  I'm kind of shrugging it off, but I suppose some will find it moving and find the story's argument, that being immortal would be lonely and unfulfilling, comforting in a sort of sour grapes way.  Acceptable.

The "C." in C. F. Hensel is short for "Christina," and in his intro Gerrold tells us Hensel is "sexy" and "feminine."  Hensel has three stories listed at isfdb; the other two are collaborations with Stephen Goldin.

**********

All six of these stories feel like filler.  Too bad!  In retrospect, compared to the rest, the O'Neil feels ambitious, full of allusions and social commentary, while the Toomey looks even more like a lazy piece of junk.

In our next episode I will read the two James Tiptree Jr. stories to be found in Generation, and then I can proudly say that I have read every single story in the collection.  (I read Stephen Goldin's "Stubborn" back in late 2014 when I was flipping through 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.)  Stay tuned!

Generation, Part 2: Anthony, Bunch, Bryant (w/ Sutherland & Harper) and Yarbro

Let's continue our exploration of Generation, a 1972 anthology of stories that were probably written in 1969, stories by people promoted as "the brightest talents of the new generation of science fiction masters."  Today we'll read stories by Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch, Ed Bryant (one each with James Sutherland and Jody Harper) and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

"Up Schist Crick" by Piers Anthony

In my teens I read lots of Piers Anthony novels--Xanth novels, the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, the Battle Circle series, the Chthon books, the Orn books, the Apprentice Adept series, and more--because there was a lot of sex in them.  They were practically pornography (at least to my naive mind) and in the pre-internet era pornography (for a teen-aged MPorcius, at least) was hard to find.

"Up Schist Crick" would later appear
in Anthonology

"Up Schist Crick" isn't providing me any reason to revise my view of Anthony as a guy who writes about sex.  Our hero is William Zether, a junior executive at a big manufacturing firm.  In the files Zether has found evidence that a branch of the company has been test marketing a new kind of material in a tiny secluded town, and that the company bigwigs have forgotten about it.  Zether goes to the little isolated town, thinking maybe he can somehow appropriate the invention and make himself rich.

Sure enough, in the little town he discovers everybody is using the new material, an unbreakable one-molecule-thick stretchable fabric which has a wide variety of applications.  The most provocative use is as a transparent one piece suit which keeps the wearer comfortable and safe.  Because the material is so very thin and absolutely impenetrable by liquids, women wearing it can have risk-free sex without any other sort of precaution.  This convenient form of birth control has lead to a culture of casual sex in the little town, a culture which Zether takes advantage of soon after his arrival.

There is a catch, however.  The woman Zether had sex with is very marriage-minded, and her guardian is ready to vigorously defend her honor, so the story's main plot thread concerns Zether's efforts to escape the area and the impending shotgun wedding, a real challenge because his car has broken down on the ill-maintained road leading to the town.  

Looking beyond the story's erotic aspect and its climactic scatological humor, "Up Schist Crick" has much in common with a traditional SF story in which a new piece of technology is proposed and the writer speculates on how it will affect society; there are many passages describing the material and its many uses.

Acceptable.

"The Lady was for Kroinking" by David R. Bunch

I've read a number of stories by Bunch and I haven't been very impressed by him, but here I am, reading him again.  Bunch stories are always short, at least.

"The Lady was for Kroinking" would
later appear in Future Pastimes

"The Lady was for Kroinking" takes place in the future, and is mostly a dialogue between two characters, a man and a woman.  The "point" of the story is that the pace of future life is such that it drives people to sadism. The go-go life of the future fills people with rage and hate, feelings which, if left unvented, will cause dangerous levels of insanity.  So, the people of the future regularly patronize "Enjoy-Your-Hate houses," which are kind of like brothels, but instead of prostitutes these establishments provide realistic rubber dummies for customers to torture. Most of the text of the story consists of the woman's detailed description of the elaborate tortures she inflicted on a particularly interesting dummy earlier in the day.  Sample detail: the dummy had installed in its artificial head real lambs' eyes, so when the torturer penetrated them with red hot rods she could smell burning flesh.  The punchline/twist ending (?) of the story is when the man and woman kiss each other goodbye; they bite each other's lips so hard they both bleed profusely.

At five pages this story isn't quite long enough to get tedious, and I can't help but admire its audacity and bizarreness.  So I think I can give it an acceptable grade.

"Beside Still Waters" by Ed Bryant and James Sutherland

I have read several stories by Bryant, and have a better opinion of Bryant than Bunch; while some of Bryant's more self-indulgent and experimental pieces have aroused my distaste, he has also produced some well-written and well-constructed stories which I have liked.

James Sutherland has only one novel and four short stories listed at isfdb; one of the four shorts was slated to appear in The Last Dangerous Visions and has thus never been published.  (Oh, Harlan....[shakes head sadly.])

"Beside Still Waters" is a silly sort of story, one of those things in which some mythological creature suddenly appears in 20th-century America.  Bryant and Sutherland play it for laughs rather than trying to evoke a sense of wonder or horror.

Sidney Bates lives in LA, a divorced father with custody of his kids who has trouble meeting his alimony payments to his ex-wife Edna.  (I remember from my childhood viewing of Johnny Carson that California divorce law was a rich mine for jokes in the '70s; wikipedia indicates that California was the first state to pass a no-fault divorce law, in 1969.)  Bates has a pool, and dangerous creatures (a shark, a giant frog, a crocodile, etc.) and weather phenomena (an iceberg, a waterspout) have been appearing in it.  He contacts a psychic detective, who figures out what is going on: the pool draws water from a spring guarded by a beautiful naiad.  The detective summons and opens negotiations with the naiad, and there is a happy ending for everybody: the psychic detective has an affair with the naiad and when the supernatural creature learns that Edna, not Sidney, had the pool installed, one of the naiad's monsters kills Edna when she comes to visit to nag about her alimony payments.

This story is OK.      

"Beside Still Waters" and "Nova Morning" only ever appeared in Generation

"Nova Morning" by Ed Bryant and Jody Harper

This is Harper's only credit at isfdb.  Gerrold tells us Harper is good-looking and worked as a go-go dancer in Beirut, Lebanon, in case you were wondering.  (As Karen at goodreads suggests in her review of Generation, Gerrold talks about the female authors represented in the anthology in a way that probably wouldn't fly today.)

This is one of those arty stories in which almost every line of prose includes a metaphor and in which the paragraphs of prose are separated by snatches of italicized verse.

It is the end of the world!  Almost everybody is dead!  But Lea, a young poet, is still alive, on a college campus in Manhattan.  She goes to an empty classroom and activates the recorded lecture on metaphysical poetry.  Then a young man with whom she has a relationship, for whom she has even written a poem, appears; he wants to have sex, and she is revolted by his blunt overtures.  ("Let's fuck.")  She reads him her poem and he calls it "rotten."

Lea resists the urge to go away with him ("It's incredible, what a wretchedly bad bargain we are together--even if there's no one else"), but then succumbs; after all, how should she expect people to act at the end of the world?  "It's the way it is now," he tells her.  "You got to take it like that."

This story is alright.

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Yarbro is a big success; she has published a huge stack (thirty or so) of those sexy vampire novels which (I assume) are mostly read by women, and she has won a bunch of big awards.  I didn't like her postapocalyptic novel False Dawn when I read it, but what do I know?  Gerrold tells us that this is the third story she ever sold--from little acorns!

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'"
was later included in Cautionary Tales

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'" is about how the impoverished citizens of a tiny isolated village (in some kind of mythical medieval or early modern land, I guess) amuse themselves and enliven their dreary lives by spreading rumors and engaging in absurd speculations.  A mentally ill homeless man spends his time reclining at the "sand pit" where the villagers throw their refuse, singing to himself and tracing designs in the sand. When the tax collector comes to town he chokes to death on a hunk of meat, and, because the madman was scribbling on a piece of paper with a bit of charcoal at the same moment, the villagers begin to think the insaniac is some kind of wizard or holy man, and begin visiting him, hoping to receive sage advice, even making him a crude crown and giving him a fine robe.  The fact that the madman ignores them does little to shake their faith.

This is essentially the whole story.  Merely acceptable.

**********

My reaction to all five of these stories was lukewarm; none of them is actually good, but none excited my resentment, either.  I can imagine people being offended by the Anthony and the Bryant/Sutherland for what they would call sexism (though whether we should admire or deplore the protagonist of the Anthony is left ambiguous, and he does suffer his comeuppance in the end, frustrated in all his designs and humiliated into the bargain); being shocked or sickened by the Bunch; being touched by the depiction of a sensitive woman being treated like a sex object by a brute in the Bryant/Harper piece; and finding the Yarbro piece amusing, but somehow I was not strongly affected by any of them.  Maybe I'm getting blase in my old age, maybe all the stories are successful on their own terms, all achieve what they want to achieve, but I am not really the audience for what they are doing.

More Generation in the future; I've decided to read a bunch of included stories by writers I've never heard of, always an interesting exercise.

**********

My copy of Generation has bound within it a page of full-color advertisements.  Alas, these ads are not for science fiction books.  On one side, the people at Schick exhort us to embrace the new and different, in particular their new single-edged razor.  On the other is an ad for a free book of advice for car buyers; seeing as the book is produced by the people at Ford Motor Company, I doubt it includes my own advice to car buyers, that they buy a Toyota.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It's Very Clean" by Gene Wolfe

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

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

"Vidi Vici Veni" by Barry Malzberg

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

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

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

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

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

"All of Them Were Empty" by David Gerrold

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

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

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

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

"The Galactic Clock" by V. N. McIntyre

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

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

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

"Conditioned Reflex" by Gardner Dozois

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

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

Back cover of my copy of Generation

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

**********

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

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

Return to Alternities: 1974 tales by Jack C. Haldeman II, Robert Wissner, Arthur Byron Cover, and Steven Utley & Joe Pumilia

Let's dive back into that "nova of superb new young writers," 1974's anthology from Dell, Alternities, edited by David Gerrold of "Trouble with Tribbles" fame.

My copy of Alternities was previously owned by a Fred Thivener, who had one of those cool embossing devices.  One is led to wonder what Fred thought of Alternities, if he "relished and remembered" the stories we will be talking about today.  (Unless I am mixing up one Fred Thivener for another, the man who owned this book was an important person here in Columbus and received a pretty extensive obituary at the Dispatch.)

Fellow SF fan Fred Thivener, we salute you!

"Sand Castles" by Jack C. Haldeman II

This story is a pointless waste of time, and it is 17 pages long!

Two men, astronauts, are stranded on an alien planet after their ship crashes.  The remarkable property of this planet is that, while upon it, the men's thoughts are made manifest--the narrator imagines a dish of ice cream and it appears and he eats it.  His comrade imagines a stack of Playboy magazines and they appear and he cuts out the centerfolds and pastes them into a scrapbook.  The men have to make an effort to make things appear, and have to have extensive knowledge of the thing they are trying to conjure up; it seems that wishing into existence a means of transport back to Earth, or even of communicating with Earth, is beyond their abilities.  If attention lapses, things created in this way can simply fade away.

There are friendly natives on the planet, though they may be simply more creations of the narrator's imagination.  You cannot trust that anything in this story is real.  The natives say things about time ("The concept is fuzzy to us") and facts ("Facts are fuzzy things and are open to a great deal of interpretation....I don't see why you bother with them") that add to the story's pervasive feeling that nothing is real and no knowledge is reliable.

Maybe Haldeman is trying to say something about epistemology and causality, that you can't trust your sense impressions and we have no real reason to believe in cause and effect (maybe this story is Haldeman's response to just having read some Descartes or Berkeley or Hume?)  Haldeman doesn't use the scenario to tell a traditional story--the characters don't learn anything or accomplish anything, and nothing happens to inspire any feelings in the reader beyond frustration and boredom (it is not one of those stories in which the mystery is solved in the end.)  Haldeman just piles on crazy images (aliens hunting with Duncan yo-yos, a horde of three-inch tall people, a 300-pound black man sitting on a throne surrounded by naked girls and wearing a "Gay Power" T-shirt) and boring jokes (a simulacra of the narrator's sister is conjured up and the narrator tries to prevent his fellow castaway from having sex with her.)

Quite bad.  This printing here in Alternities constitutes the sole appearance of "Sand Castles" before the public.  This Haldeman, brother of the Haldeman who produced MPorcius-approved novels like Mindbridge and the enduring classic Forever War, has a long list of publications at isfdb and presumably most are superior to this thing.

"The P. T. A. Meets Che Guevara" by Robert Wissner

Wissner has five credits on isfdb, one of them unpublished because it was to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive Last Dangerous Visions.  That's right, folks, Ellison's indifference and incompetence are keeping 20% of this gentleman's literary output from his fans (if any.)

This story, five pages, is a first-person narrative describing an emergency P. T. A. meeting from the point of view of a father in attendance.  The meeting has been called because of an outbreak of vandalism at the school.  Feminists will note how much of the five pages are taken up by the narrator's assessments of various female teachers' physical attributes and sexual desirability.  There's nothing funnier than jokes about how an old fat woman probably never had sex, am I right?  The SF component of the story is the narrator's fantasy that the troublemaking kids, including his own eight-year old daughter, are revolutionaries who may break into the P. T. A meeting and murder the faculty as well as any parents who resist.

This story is not good, but it kept my attention and inspired some kind of reaction in me, so has managed to claw its way into the lower reaches of the "barely acceptable" category.

"A Gross Love Story" by Arthur Byron Cover  

A look at his credits on isfdb is giving me the idea that Cover is a writer promoted by Harlan Ellison whose work is meant to be funny.  He also has written books in shared universes and TV and computer game tie-ins.  (Damn, I haven't thought about Planetfall in years.)

In 2009 tarbandu reviewed Cover's first novel, Autumn Angels, (he awarded it 3 of 5 stars), which he tells us has a long intro from Ellison.

"A Gross Love Story" appears to us as a script or screenplay, consisting mostly of dialogue between characters A and B.  The setting is a graveyard at night, with a castle in the background.  (Despite the castle, the thing takes place in America.)  A and B are graverobbers in the employ of a vampire they call "the doctor" (he also conducts Frankenstein-type experiments.)  The dialogue consists largely of juvenile jokes: B is a "retard" from being hit in the head too often by his mother and consistently says "William G. Buckley" instead of "William F.," while A is a homosexual who was born without a penis and laments that the doctor is a prude who won't let him bring "cute boys" to the castle and declares "I was born without a dick but I wasn't born a homosexual!  Queers are made, not born!"

There is stage direction, like when A and B have to hide behind a tombstone because drunken Irish cop Clancy is walking by.  (Yes, this is the second drunken Irish cop in Alternities.  Erin go bragh!)

They dig up a beautiful young woman, recently dead, and B falls in love with her and is inspired to have sex with the corpse, but halfway through foreplay loses interest when he learns the girl was Clancy's sister, a slut.  Like the doctor, B is a prude and wants his first time to be with a virgin.

Bad, but so audaciously and single-mindedly childish, vulgar and insensitive to today's protected classes that I think it merits elevation to the "barely acceptable" category.  It is sort of like an intentionally crude and offensive underground comic, and I think those who appreciate that sort of thing may appreciate "A Gross Love Story."

"Message of Joy" by Arthur Byron Cover

This is a first-person narrative of an insane person living in a future Earth which suffers overpopulation and mass unemployment and is run by a sort of totalitarian government which pacifies the populace by handing out marijuana.  Our narrator is rebellious, and is (or at least he believes he is) wanted by the government for starting a riot during which many people were killed.  The story includes copious use of slang and colloquialisms made up by Cover, like "flippers" for feet and "fin" or "claw" for hand.

All of a sudden, while laying in bed, high, the narrator comprehends the secret of perfection and happiness, represented in the story by a brief tune: Dum-de-la-dum.  He goes out on the street to try to share the secret of perfection with people.  People are not interested.  He hires a prostitute and murders her, then starts fights on the street until knocked unconscious.  The End.

There's a glimmer of something happening here (I can imagine Malzberg doing something like this), but not enough to be worth your time.  Thumbs down.

"Womb, with a View" by Steven Utley

Utley has a long list of short fiction and poetry at isfdb, though I have never read him before.

"Womb, With a View" is about a gynecologist who bent over a patient, "separated her labia and peered up her" and found himself gazing upon the star-spangled blackness of deep space!  Is he insane?  No, his nurse sees the same thing!  Then small flying saucers start flying out of the poor woman!  Alien invaders put a space warp in this poor woman's reproductive organs!

This is a gimmicky trifle of a story, but it is competent.  Acceptable.

Utley is big in Germany

"Hung Like an Elephant" by Steven Utley and Joe Pumilia

We are used to reading SF stories that ask questions like: What would it be like if aliens invaded the Earth?  What would happen if the Earth colonized the Moon?  What might life be like on a planet with extremely high gravity or in the zero gee of space?  What will government, the family, religion, the environment, war, and crime be like in the future?  Well, Steven Utley seems to specialize in asking the question, "What if something impossible happened to somebody's crotch?"

The narrator of this story wakes up one morning to find that his phallus has fallen off and been replaced by the "lemon-sized" head of an elephant. For good measure, his navel has been replaced by a mouth which sings 1950s rock and roll.  He discovers his penis crawling around the bed like a bewildered worm, and he puts it in a jar.

(Remember when Rael and John met Doktor Dyper and then that giant bird?  Damn, that was really something.)

The narrator's girlfriend, thinking him joking, storms out, and his doctor has no idea what to do.  Religious people debate whether he is a miracle, a guru, or the devil, and a freak show tries to hire him.  Our hero decides that he is just the latest of the jokes God has been playing on the human race, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Battle of Little Big Horn, events impossible which insist on happening anyway.

Too long and disorganized, this one slips below the "acceptable" criteria to earn a marginal negative rating.

"Hung Like an Elephant" was co-written with Joseph Pumilia.  A quick glance at his isfdb page suggests Pumilia has mostly written "weird" stuff, by which I mean Lovecraftian horror, Robert Howard-style fantasy, and erotic horror.

Interestingly, both "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb, with a View" were translated into German; they never appeared in English a second time.

**********

Alternities is shaping up to be a quite odd and quite poor anthology.  But we still have five stories to go, including stories by perhaps the biggest name authors in Alternities. Maybe in our next episode, when we talk about those five pieces, we'll find reason to revise our opinion of this unusual project of David Gerrold's.         

1974 stories by Barry Malzberg, David Bunch, Ed Bryant and James Sallis

The back cover text of Alternities ("DAZZLING VISIONS...unfettered by strictures and taboos..probe the forbidden...."), and the titles of the included stories (e. g., "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb with a View") made me think the anthology, published in 1974 and edited by David Gerrold (associate editor, Stephen Goldin), was part and parcel of the New Wave.  But Gerrold's intro makes me wonder if it is a blow struck against the New Wave:

Science fiction has been standing neck-deep in bullshit for so long....Science fiction used to be fun.  Now it's become "important," with all the resultant literary in-breeding and incestuos navel-studying that implies.  Too many writers have forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money....I want science fiction to be fun again....The goal of this editor is to provide a place for stories that I believe are worth reading because they're "fun" in one way or another.

In this intro Gerrold seems to be calling out (though not by name) Golden Age writers L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein for acting and/or being treated like gurus:

Being able to tell a story--no matter how well--doesn't automatically qualify a man as a magician.  (Oh hell, we really are the special dreamers, but "special dreamers" shouldn't be capitalized and turned into a religion.  That way leads only to Scientology and Terminal Grokking.)

More subtly, I think Gerrold criticizes Harlan Ellison, who likes to write long intros to stories in anthologies he edits:

The stories [in this book] speak for themselves, which is why I have specifically avoided introductions at the beginning of each one.  That's one of the places where the bullshit quotient is highest.

Zing!

It makes sense for Gerrold and Goldin to be the editors of such a volume, as, while they both have agendas that are evident in their fiction (advocacy for social acceptance of homosexuality in Gerrold's fiction and hostility to religion in Goldin's), both are strongly influenced by Golden Age SF (Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr books reminded me alot of Heinlein's juveniles and Starship Troopers, and his Yesterday's Children was reminiscent of van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle; Goldin has worked with and in the style of E. E. "Doc" Smith) and their novels (that I have read, at least) are primarily entertaining adventure stories.

(I wrote about Gerrold's celebration of dinosaurs, laser guns and gore, Deathbeast, in 2013.  This year I wrote about Goldin's Assault on the Gods.  Joachim Boaz reviewed Yesterday's Children in 2014; in the comments to his review we discuss the radical differences between the original edition of the novel and the revised one.)

Gerrold's intriguing introduction to the volume has me wondering what Alternities has in store for us.  Let's check out some of the stories; in this post we'll look at contributions by people we've read before: Barry Malzberg, David R. Bunch, Edward Bryant and James Sallis.

"Before the Great Space-War" by Barry N. Malzberg

ATTENTION!  Calling all Barry Malzberg completists!  If isfdb is to be believed, "Before the Great Space-War" has appeared in one and only one publication, right here in Alternities.  Order your copy today!

"Before the Great Space-War"'s six-pages consist of messages sent back and forth between an invasion force and HQ.  First we have messages from Interstellar Scout Wilson, who is making friends with primitive natives on some planet, learning about them in preparation for the invasion.  The natives have invited Wilson to a mysterious ceremony, and HQ insists that he accept the invitation, but Wilson is reluctant.  Perhaps fearing that he will be relegated to the "basket of deplorables," Wilson assures HQ that "it is not, not xenophobia which makes me reluctant to participate in the Ceremony of Hinges but merely a certain shy reluctance...."  Later messages indicate Wilson has gone native--he vows to join the locals in resisting the invasion force.  The final communications, to and from the commander of the invasion force, suggest that the entire fleet has been suborned and seduced by the natives, who are cannibals and hope to entice down colonists to serve as the meal at the next ceremony.  Presumably the space war of the title is between the now-cannibalistic spacemen and a fleet sent to rescue or destroy them.

Trifling perhaps, but the style is the classic Malzberg we fans are used to and so "Before the Great Space-War" is an acceptable entertainment.

"How Xmas Ghosts are Made" by David R. Bunch

This story is four pages long and is perhaps the kind of thing that "breaks taboos" in its irreverent attack on America's bourgeois society and its rituals and mores.

A married couple with two young children (three and four) is out Christmas shopping.  Bunch stresses that the mother wears expensive clothes, perhaps trying to excite the reader's supposed envy of the rich, or just lampoon the pretensions of American consumers.  In an ironic deadpan Bunch describes how Mom slips in the snow and is run over by public busses trying desperately to keep to their schedules.  Mama is torn in half by the machines as husband and children watch; the pieces are then carried away by the wheels of the vehicles so that the woman has simply vanished without trace.  Right before she is killed Mom is thinking of suing somebody for causing her fall, a means of defraying the cost of all those Christmas presents.  (Bunch never spells out "Christmas," it is always "Xmas," like ten times.)  A drunken Irish cop is no help and Papa can find no witnesses; in the coming years Papa and kids embrace the fiction that Mom abandoned them.

If you haven't heard enough that Christmas is too commercialized and people these days are in too much of a hurry and Americans are too selfish and materialistic and litigious and religion has become a pro forma scam and the government is a callous and incompetent racket, well, here is your chance to hear it again. The style is alright and at only four pages this thing doesn't overstay its welcome, so I guess I can award "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" the coveted grade of "acceptable."

Like Malzberg's "Before the Great Space-War," Bunch's "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" seems to have appeared only in this volume; Alternities is shaping up to be a must-buy for all you fans of short wacky misanthropic trifles.

(Back in 2014 I read other Bunch stories about how crummy American society is and about people getting run over.  Apparently in 1974 Bunch really had hit and run accidents on his mind.)

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

This is the third story from Alternities that has never appeared anywhere else, but the first which I can't dismiss as a trifle; Bryant really tries to construct a provocative and believable alternate reality here.  "Cowboys, Indians" depicts a United States onto which a sort of Vietnam War template has been placed--the country bubbles with revolutionary fervor, while Canada (!) and Communist Vietnam send agents and commandos to infiltrate the USA as part of their covert war on America.

Our narrator is a young rancher from Wyoming.  At college he got radicalized by smoking weed and reading Marxist texts; this story includes flashbacks to his youth (episodes illustrating how violent and racist people in general or maybe just Americans in particular are) but primarily describes a raid on a government facility in which he participated.  The raid team includes a Vietnamese agent (his eyes altered so he can pass for a Mexican laborer), a female Canadian "exfiltration expert" equipped with electronic jamming devices, and another American radical.  Their mission is to sneak into a fortified lab in the countryside (where an addictive birth-control drug is being developed for use in the effort to limit the fecundity of urban blacks) and rescue a scientist (an expert on steroids) being held there against her will.  The scientist will be extracted via a Harrier jet that revolutionaries have stolen from the USMC!

The raid is a disaster; not only do some of the team members get killed, but the steroid scientist has been used as a guinea pig by the government researchers: "She was no longer a woman, and I didn't know what she was."  The narrator escapes with his life and abandons the cause of revolution.

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

I've read two stories by James Sallis before, "The Field" from Quark/3, which I gave a thumbs down to, and "Tissue" from Dangerous Visions, which I thought was more worthwhile.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" is a sort of four-page literary experiment in which the narrator describes his wife walking down a street barefoot, watched by five men, as she collects mail and steps on an earthworm which has died on the pavement.  We hear about the wife's thoughts (she is an artist) and get to read a piece of her mail and hear a pitch for her husband's idea for a stage play based on this walk.

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

Sallis's second story in the anthology is just two pages.  It describes a dream or maybe just a load of nonsense in the first-person.  The narrator takes a flight to the city where a friend lives, and along the way there are visions of warfare, cannibalism, and crime.  The narrator gets on the plane never having considered writing a novel before, but during the flight he becomes a best-selling novelist.

I can't recommend this, either.

Both "The First Few Kinds of Truth" and "Delta Flight 281" would show up in the 1995 collection of Sallis's work entitled Limits of the Sensible World.

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Despite Gerrold's complaint that SF writers have "forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money," this anthology appears to be full of stories with thin or nonexistent plots and little or no characterization, stories which would only appeal to a very small market.  The Malzberg, Bunch and Sallis stories are what I would expect from them, but they seem to go against the sensibilities Gerrold propounds in his intro.  Very strange.

(Bryant's work seems to actually try to fulfill Gerrold's mission, and it is the most successful of the stories we read today.)

There are 16 stories in Alternities, which leaves 11 to go.  We'll look at about half of those in our next episode.

The Rolling Stones by Robert Heinlein

My copy - I paid double cover price!

As a child, I always thought it odd that one of the most famous rock bands, the most famous music magazine, and the most famous song by the musician sophisticated people were supposed to like, were all variants on "Rolling Stone."  I also didn't understand the cliche "A rolling stone gathers no moss."  Is moss good or bad?  The world was a mystifying place when I was a kid.

Like everybody, I love the Heinlein juveniles.  I read Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones when I was a child, and for the last year or so have wanted to reread it, but for some reason I never saw it in a library or used bookstore.  Finally I discovered it at a store in Mankato, Minnesota, where I paid $3.50 for a Ballantine 1978 paperback; it was by far the most expensive of the fifteen paperbacks I bought that day.  (Philip Jose Farmer's The Green Odyssey was runner up at $2.50; all the others were less than 2 bucks.) 

The Stones, who live on the moon, are a family of geniuses.  The grandmother, Hazel, is an engineer who was among the first moon colonists and helped write the lunar constitution.  The father, Roger, is an engineer who served as mayor and now writes a TV show.*  The mother, Edith, is a doctor and a sculptor.  The fifteen-year-old twin boys, Castor and Pollux, got rich designing a valve and the four-year-old son, Lowell, is a chess master and some kind of psychic.  (There's also a teen-aged daughter, Meade, who feels a little underwritten and seems like a mere mortal; I'm afraid she is just there to fulfill the plot's need for another person to look after the baby while everybody else is on adventures.)

A British edition

The twins' plan to engage in interplanetary trade evolves into a pleasure cruise for the entire family when Roger decides to buy a rocket ship to serve as the family's private space yacht.  Then it is off to Mars and then the asteroid belt.  The Stones don't get involved in any wars, revolutions, or violent crimes--in fact, some of the episodes in the book are more reminiscent of a TV sit-com than a traditional adventure novel, revolving as they do around the twins' get-rich-quick schemes and little Lowell's precocity.  One of these capers appears to be the inspiration for the famous Tribbles episode of Star Trek, written by Heinlein fan David Gerrold.

On the more serious side, Edith risks her own life curing a plague, and Hazel and Lowell get lost in the asteroid belt while low on oxygen due to the twins' negligence.  (You could say that the overarching plot of the book is the maturation of the twins, their education not only in math but in the need to act responsibly.)

This book has tons of science, or perhaps I should say, math and engineering.  There's lots of talk about orbits, reaction mass, parabolas, etc.  In some ways the book is a love letter to mathematics.  ("...the complex logics of matrix algebra, frozen in beautiful arrays...the wild and wonderful field equations that make Man king of the universe....")   The science stuff all seems pretty realistic; there's no hyperspace or artificial gravity, for example, so the trip from Luna to Mars takes like six months, and is carefully timed to coincide with optimum points in the planets' orbits. 

Heinlein gets flak for the anti-feminist sentiments in Podkayne of Mars, in which the title character expresses a fascination with babies and the wise mentor character opines that a woman's true responsibility is raising children, so it is interesting to see a more feminist-friendly point of view in The Rolling Stones.  Not only are Hazel and Edith talented professionals, self-sacrificing heroes, and mouthpieces for some of Heinlein's social/political beliefs (Hazel is a strong supporter of the right to bear arms), but Hazel complains about the sexism in the workplace that slowed down her career and threatens Meade's.

Besides the right to bear arms, Heinlein includes some of his other hobbyhorses in the book.  A naval officer himself, Heinlein, stresses the importance of always obeying the captain of the ship.  We also can detect Heinlein's admiration for rugged individualists and business people; the twins and their grandmother are avid and unashamed pursuers of the almighty dollar.

Spoilerific back cover of my copy

One of the interesting things about The Rolling Stones is the TV scripts* which Roger, and then Hazel (in fact all the family members play a role in shaping the scripts), write.  Their show is an adventure serial, and it seems to be a sort of foil for The Rolling Stones itself.  Whereas The Rolling Stones is based on real science, stars an upper-middle class family, and is full of life lessons about the importance of knowledge and ethical behavior, the TV serial is a frivolous and ridiculous piece of low common denominator entertainment for children, full of invincible heroes, despicable villains, and incredible cliffhangers.  Roger himself seems to hate the serial, and looks forward to killing off the hero in the final episode.  In some of his other books, perhaps most prominently in the lamentable Number of the Beast, Heinlein engages in literary criticism and writes homages to his favorite SF writers; it is hard not to see the SF story within The Rolling Stones as a spoof of some of the pulp adventures which appeared at the same time, perhaps even the same magazines, as Heinlein's own stories in the 1930s and 1940s.  Whether this is a loving spoof or a condemnatory one, I am not sure.

A few days ago I suggested that, to enjoy the work of R. A. Lafferty, Barry N. Malzberg and A. E. van Vogt, you can't judge their work by the standards appropriate for more conventional SF.  I think the Heinlein juveniles fit comfortably in the nominal category of "conventional SF," and I think if we judge The Rolling Stones by those standards, the novel achieves a high score.  There are likable characters, an escapist but believable plot, lots of realistic science, interesting aliens, and speculations on what life will be like in the future.  The book is a "juvenile," but it doesn't talk down to the reader; you are expected to know who Dante, Homer, George Eliot and Sir Walter Scott are, to know what happened in 1861, and to know what "Carcassone" signifies.  (I confess to failing the test; I had no idea what Carcassone was all about until I looked it up on Wikipedia.)

A good example of classic (and family-friendly!) SF by a skilled writer. 

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*I think this 1978 edition I just read is revised; I swear on Cthulhu's grave that when I read The Rolling Stones as a kid Roger and Hazel were writing a radio serial.