Worlds Enough and Time by Joe Haldeman

"...you have come to me because people are quite reasonably not doing what you want them to do.  You want my skills to subvert them.  For the good of the community, of course."

It's time to finish Joe Haldeman's Worlds trilogy.  I read the first volume, Worlds (1981), back in April, and then volume two, Worlds Apart (1983), early this month.  Today it's the final book, Worlds Enough and Time, published in 1992.  I don't actually own a copy of Worlds Enough and Time, and am taking advantage of a scan of the American hardcover edition that is available at the bounteous internet archive.

As you may remember, near the end of the 21st century, twelve years after a nuclear/biological war destroyed civilization on Earth, the people of the satellite societies orbiting Earth, led by the biggest of these "Worlds," New New York, built a star ship and sent it on a colonization trip to Epsilon Eridani, a trip expected to take between 50 and 100 years.  Aboard is our heroine, Marianne O'Hara.  Marianne, we have been told repeatedly, is some kind of prodigy, bound for great things, and in the early chapters of Worlds Enough and Time we learn that the leaders of the starship effort, for years during its construction and preparation, have been keeping a close eye on her and secretly manipulating things like the hierarchical structure of the project's management in order to clear a path for the genius who is Marianne to be elected chief executive of the ship when the current executive dies.  That executive, it is suddenly discovered, when the starship has only just begun its journey, is sick and will die in weeks!  He takes Marianne under his wing, intent on molding her and guiding her so that she won't pull any political boners on her way up the ladder and so that once she reaches the top she won't use her gifts to do anything radical and thus disastrously upset the ship's fragile little society of ten thousand people.

I have been comparing these Worlds books to the work of Robert A. Heinlein, something Haldeman invites us to do by dedicating Worlds Apart to Heinlein in a way that demonstrates Haldeman's affection for and close knowledge of RAH's fiction.  Heinlein novels are full of mentor figures, and the guy who takes Marianne under his wing is just such a figure, though he doesn't have time to give any long lectures as some of Heinlein's mentors are wont to do.  I suspect this guy, a free market economist who also thinks a ship must be run as a virtual dictatorship and who reveals to Marianne that all the votes taken on the ship are rigged by the elite, is supposed to be an embodiment of Heinlein's own thinking and the tension within RAH's his work.

(As I have said numerous times on this blog, classic science fiction, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories to Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to much of the oeuvre of A. E. van Vogt, is always telling us that a secret cabal of superior people acting behind the scenes is in control of society, and often asserts that this is not some intolerable injustice or dreadful menace, but a perfectly good idea.  Haldeman follows this hoary old SF tradition here in Worlds Enough and Time.)

Haldeman spends little time talking about Marianne's rise to power, and even less about her tenure as chief executive--as her mentor had hoped, she does nothing dramatic, and Marianne is fortunate in that none of the numerous disasters that strike the ship occur during her administration.  Instead, as in the earlier volumes, much of the narrative is taken up with the drama of Marianne's family life and sex life in a society in which group marriages are the norm and nobody is expected to remain faithful to his or her spouses.  One such plot thread is about Marianne's daughter.  Selected by the authorities to be a mother, Marianne at first tries to have a baby through implantation in her womb of one of her own frozen ova fertilized by an amalgam of her two husbands' DNA--one of her husbands is a drunk and the other is a hunchbacked cripple, and the medicos are trying to fashion a baby that has neither of those men's genetic weaknesses.  This baby miscarries, however, and on her second try Marianne opts for a test tube baby, a clone genetically identical to her grown in a machine.

It sometimes feels like in these Worlds books that Haldeman is portraying the 20th-century life of Western peoples as a hell of racism and sexism and violence and presenting life in the Worlds and on this starship as an alternative, a paradise of communitarian values guided by an enlightened elite, but every so often he hints that there is a dark side to, or at least a heavy price to pay, for this free-love-no-guns-and-no-money utopia.  When Marianne's little clone is decanted from its artificial womb she is allowed to hold it, but only for the briefest of moments.  Little Sandra instantly starts grabbing and biting at Marianne's breast, but is then taken away from her:

She [Marianne] cleared her throat.  "Could you induce, uh, lactation?  If it was--"

"Physically," [the doctor tells her] "it would be no problem, just some hormones.  But we can't let the infant bond to you.  It would make things difficult in the creche.  It would make things difficult for you."

As the novel proceeds, the creche system starts breaking down and Marianne develops a strong relationship with Sandra--this relationship is probably the most important in the book, and figures prominently in the surreal sense-of-wonder climax of the novel.

Marianne's clone baby is of course only the second duplicate Marianne on the ship--in Worlds Apart she had her brain more or less read into a computer, so that a piece of software simulating her personality at the time just before the starship left Earth orbit lives in the computer.  This second Marianne can learn and evolve almost like a real person, and not only holds conversations with the original flesh and blood Marianne but is privy to all the ship's computer systems and databases, including ubiquitous security cameras and mikes, so it knows everything that happens on the ship.  Haldeman likes to mix up his narrative techniques, and while some parts of Worlds Enough and Time are Marianne's own diaries, much of the novel consists of the stories the computer simulation Marianne tells to people two thousand years after flesh and blood Marianne's death.

Besides the many sexual encounters and tragedies that constitute Marianne's relationships, Haldeman focuses on the technical aspects of running the starship and colonization effort  and the many problems the mission faces.  Morale on the ship is often low, and suicide is rampant; people like Marianne are directed to have children in order to buoy the sagging population.  Many people turn to strange new anti-social religions that make them unproductive citizens.  A year after the ship leaves Earth orbit, religious fanatics back on New New York sabotage that World and transmit to the starship a devastating computer virus that erases many important records, technical manuals needed to operate the ship, and much of Earth's literary heritage.  Then half way through the book, like five or six years after the ship has left Earth orbit, a mutant virus kills all the plants on the ship!  It might be years before the farms can fully recover, and the vats can only produce enough yeast to keep a fraction of the people on the ship fed, so like 75% of them have to go into deep freeze.  Unfortunately, for some technical reason, you have to be in deep freeze at least 45 years.  Oh yeah, and like 20% of people die in deep freeze.  Hey, it's still an experimental process!

These problems don't stop the mission, in part because Marianne's old lover on the post-apocalyptic Earth, Jeff, is building a new civilization, and has finally got a transmitter running that can send info to the starship, though by that point it takes years for a message to travel between Terra and the starship.

After her tenure as chief exec, Marianne, age 55, and her daughter, Sandra (she's like eighteen, I think), themselves go into deep freeze.  When they are roused the ship is only a year away from Epsilon Eridani.  Building a colony on Epsilon 3 is going to take a lot of mechanical skills that few people on the ship have, and a lot of manual labor that few people on the ship are keen on performing.  Back in our solar system, Marianne was the lead administrator on the project that developed that system of reading some people's brains so that their skills and inclinations could be written into the brains of others.  Once awakened, Marianne becomes a leader in manipulating people into being reprogrammed to be eager carpenters or plumbers or tractor mechanics or whatever. 

The last 75 or so pages of the book cover the exploration and colonization of Epsilon 3 during Marianne's lifetime.  Marianne faces more tragedy as her family members get killed, but she also becomes the savior of the human race--all that talk through three books of her high IQ and unique experiences has been leading up to this.  On Epsilon 3 the colonists meet aliens with god-like power--they can teleport anywhere in the universe instantly, they can blow up planets with their minds, they can reprogram our minds.  In fact, it was these jokers who massaged the brains of the leaders of the starship project way back in the beginning so they'd pick Epsilon Eridani as a destination because there wasn't already an intelligent race in the Epsilon system for us to corrupt or murder.

As we've seen in other SF stories, these masters of the universe fear humanity is too violent to join interstellar civilization and put us on trial for our lives.  They give Marianne a test which involves horrendous physical and psychological torture--if she fails the test these entities will exterminate the human race in the Epsilon system and back in the Solar system.  One component of this test, which has the aliens teleporting Marianne to all different planets and even changing the shape of her body into that of a scaly amphibious beast from another world, is making her choose between being tossed into a river of lava or letting them toss Sandra into it.  Luckily for all of us, Marianne passes the test, and luckily for Marianne the aliens pull her out of the lava before she dies and the doctors on Epsilon 3 are able to rebuild her ruined body.  In gratitude, Epsilon 3 is named after Marianne and future generations actually construct a religion around her and her diaries.

Worlds Enough and Time is a good read, even if its themes (religion is a load of crap, aliens put us violent humies on trial, we'd all be better off if scientific experts ran our lives for us) are ones we've seen before.  I like all the technical stuff about life in space and colonizing a new planet.  But I have to say that the second Worlds book, Worlds Apart, is the best.  That book is full of fighting, which is entertaining, and the considerable portion of it that takes place on Earth with Jeff as its protagonist adds variety.  The relationship of Jeff and Marianne is also more affecting than any of Marianne's many other relationships, though the Sandra relationship is pretty good.

The Worlds trilogy is not spectacular, but it is a success.  I'm glad I gave it a whirl.

Worlds Apart by Joe Haldeman

The system she'd grown up in was a crazy-quilt of electronic democracy, communalism, anarchy, bureaucracy, technocracy.  She knew the anarchy was largely an illusion, a formalism that the actual power structure tolerated as a safety valve.

We recently read Joe Haldeman's 1981 Worlds, and today we tackle the sequel, 1983's Worlds Apart.  I own the Ace paperback, which quotes a New York Times review that compares it to William Golding's Lord of the Flies, one of the more memorable books we were forced to read in school.  (If you've got an itch to read about one of Golding's very literary novels, consider checking out my blogpost on Golding's Pincher Martin.)

Worlds in some ways reminded me of the work of Robert Heinlein, and Worlds Apart is dedicated, in a slightly oblique way, to Heinlein, the dedication presented as being to a list of famous Heinlein characters.

After two pages of setting the scene and reminding us of what happened in Worlds, we are in hard sf territory as smarty pants Marianne O'Hara is learning how to wear a space suit--New New York, the asteroid in Earth orbit where a quarter of a million people live, was damaged in the war that just wiped out civilization on Earth and even bookworms like Marianne have to pitch in with the repairs, going on spacewalks during which they must manipulate girders and other building materials in zero gee.  We also learn various things about the changing demographics and economics of the satellite that result from an influx of refugees from more severely damaged Worlds (as these big inhabited satellites are called) and because there are no more raw materials forthcoming from the blasted Earth.

My copy, front

In Worlds we got like 30 pages on New New York and then Marianne was down on Earth, getting mixed up in various social entanglements and dangerous espionage jazz.  Worlds Apart starts in a similar way--Marianne does that zero gee work, enters into a group marriage with two men on the station whom we met in Worlds, and then on page 29 she gets sent on a dangerous mission to Earth!  Marianne may be a scholar in her early twenties, but she is one of the very few people on New New York to have ever been on Earth or been in a gun fight...or even held a gun!  So she is handpicked for the mission.

The war that destroyed civilization on Terra was triggered by a revolution, and the revolutionaries launched their catastrophic uprising when the American economy was already in crisis because of a trade dispute with the Worlds.  So some Germans blame New New York for the holocaust, and they want revenge!  There is one last space shuttle at the spaceport in Zaire, and these jerries are making their way south from the fatherland to it, bringing with them a nuclear bomb which they plan to detonate on the surface of New New York kamikaze-style.  New New York doesn't have any pistols or rifles, much less a laser cannon or ballistic missile launcher, so they can't just bomb the Zaire spaceport and be done with it--instead they are sending down to Africa a commando squad of eight people armed with four jury-rigged flamethrowers less deadly than a revolver, and Marianne carries one of the flamers.

On the Earth's surface, Marianne and the rest of the squad from New New York have to wear their spacesuits, because the air is full of a biological weapon unleashed on the world by the commies during the recent war.  This virus has killed almost everybody on Terra over the age of twenty, so all the groundhogs the team from New New York runs into are kids!  Back when Marianne was a transfer student on Earth, sub-Saharan Africa was more civilized than the USA--like on New New York, ownership of firearms was verboten in Zaire.  (Libertarians might like the attitude towards sex of the Worlds books, with legal prostitution and a wide variety of forms of marriage, but Haldeman's apparent position on the right to keep and bear arms will make them groan.)  But now the place has reverted to savagery, and the kids attack them with spears and bows--these orphans blame the Worlds for the war that killed their parents.   

The mission is a success: the shuttle is seized, along with some valuable nitrogen from a cryogenics lab at the spaceport--nitrogen is one of the critical raw materials New New York used to import from Earth.   They also pick up some stowaways, two African kids, one of whom survives the shuttle's acceleration; on New New York scientists take samples of the virus from her and synthesize a cure.

My copy, back

I am tempted to see this Zaire spaceport episode, in which Marianne has to shoot some kids who are attacking with primitive weapons and a bolt action tranquilizer rifle loaded with poison darts, as a sort of allegory or microcosm of Western imperialism--an advanced society, pursuing resources and participating in military competition with a second advanced society, finds itself fighting primitives and carrying off not only valuable resources from the primitive people's place of residence but some of the primitives themselves.  I thought a theme of Worlds was admiration and sympathy for black people, who have suffered in a world created by whites, and I think I see that theme in this sequel as well.

Four years after the start of the war, two years after the Zaire mission, New New York receives a weak signal from the SouthEastern USA--it is Jeff, Marianne's boyfriend while she was on Earth, the rogue FBI agent who saved her life repeatedly with his fighting and survival skills.  Apparently his acromegaly has rendered him resistant to the virus that has killed almost all other adults.  Employing his first aid training and knowledge gained from old medical books, Jeff has become a travelling doctor, trading his services for food and other items of value.  Haldeman devotes a quarter or a third of Worlds Apart to chronicling Jeff's adventures as he travels around a world full of hideous mutants, dangerous bandits, and adherents to a religion that reveres Charles Manson, helping people and fighting for his life.  This is real post-apocalyptic stuff, lots of violence and grue, lots of scavenging and ruins.

As the years go by, Marianne rises in the ranks of the administrative apparatus ("Having attained Grade 15 in only five years of service made her something of a prodigy....")  We learn all about the way New New York is managed in Worlds Apart, and find it is a collectivist technocracy run by headshrinkers!  There is said to be no politics, with personnel decisions being made by a Board of experts based on "exhaustive psychological testing" (there is little private property on New New York and so no market incentives or competition.)  At times I thought Haldeman was trying to have his cake and eat it too, dressing up the rule of an unelected elite with liberal trappings--we are told there is freedom of speech on New New York and there are plenty of references to referenda on public issues and elections for "Policy Coordinators"--but Haldeman does show us some of the dark side of this rule by unaccountable bureaucrats when Marianne is called in for questioning one day by a member of the Board who refuses to give her name.  This member of the ruling class administers a drug to Marianne and hypnotizes her into having the right attitude--satisfaction with the work the Board assigns her, an eagerness to obey them, and a willingness to snitch to them about her husbands!

This ambiguity, the tension between the vision of New New York as a collectivist tyranny and the vision of New New York as a peaceful sexually liberated utopia, reminded me of the tensions we see in the body of work of Robert Heinlein, who we often think of as a libertarian but who also stressed in much of his fiction the idea that a ship can't survive unless the crew obey the captain slavishly--New New York, a city in a hollowed-out asteroid orbiting Earth, is, of course, much like a huge ship.

The novel also follows New New York's various high tech projects, like building a starship capable of reaching Epsilon Eridani in 50 or 100 years (which involves mining for fuel an antimatter star that lies nearby) and sending drones with plague cure down to Earth.  Jeff is sent some of the cure, but people who worship Charles Manson have come to accept death at the age of twenty as a divine mandate and refuse treatment!

Both of Marianne's two husbands, they being among the top engineers on New New York, are prominent among those working on the starship project, and Marianne herself ends up getting an important post as an administrator on the project, the responsibility of selecting who will be heading to Epsilon Eridani.  The star ship will carry ten thousand people, and she must carefully chose them based on measures of physical and mental suitability and with an eye that all the many skills a new colony out there in orbit around another star will need be represented among them.  But thanks to the mass death brought on by the war, many occupations have become the preserve of a rare few, with only a handful of people, or even just a single individual, educated in their ways, and many of those people are too old or unhealthy, or unwilling, to leave New New York.

Marianne, working with a psychologist, develops a solution to this staffing issue that some may suspect is an offense to human dignity.  A computer program is developed that can examine your brain and record your personality.  (A side effect of this is computer software that simulates your brain at a certain point in time with which you can hold conversations; Marianne is the first to have her personality reproduced and she talks with her simulacra--it is like having a conversation with herself.)  Parts of these recorded personalities can be written into some other person's brain, so, if it is felt that the star ship needs an expert in the fashioning of lab equipment, but the only dude who is well-versed in producing test tubes and beakers refuses to volunteer, a reading can be made of his brain and then a passion for test tube manufacture can be implanted in the brain of some adventurous bloke champing at the bit to take a one-way trip out of the solar system.

One of the recurring themes of Worlds Apart is how Marianne is torn between different courses of action, must decide between different roles and life paths.  As in Worlds, she has to make decisions about the many men in her life.  Decisions perhaps more exciting to dedicated SF fans are her career decisions--does she really want to fly off to Eridani Epsilon with her husbands, or stay in our Solar System and become a diplomat working to build a productive relationship between the Worlds and the Earth, the job which all her education and experiences have prepared her for perfectly?  Eight years after the war she takes on the leadership of an expedition down to Westchester County (the county directly north of New York City), which her experiences on Earth ably suit her for.  Of course this job gets in the way of her work selecting and recruiting the crew of the star ship.  The object of this mission is to help some young people there in Westchester start a functioning farm, and Marianne spends months on the Earth's surface, including dangerous forays into Manhattan in search of equipment and supplies where she has to confront feral dogs and rival scavengers.       

The expedition is not exactly a success, and, as with the Zaire commando op, I have to wonder if this humanitarian mission is some kind of commentary on white intervention in nonwhite territories/societies.  (The leader of the Westchester group, and the more memorable Westchester characters, are black, and the mission, though well-intentioned, arguably caused the Westchester residents as much trouble as it solved, as well as getting some spacers killed.)

Worlds Apart is 227 pages long, but the print and margins are pretty big (compare page 75 of Worlds Apart to page 75 of the 1972 printing of A. E. van Vogt's The Beast below) and there is a lot of brisk sex and violence, so it never feels slow or long.  The Westchester expedition and Jeff's success in organizing a sort of stable settlement in Florida form a sort of climax around page 200.  The last 10 percent or so of the book briefly let us know what happened in the period from ten through 24 years after the war.  Disillusioned by all her trips to Earth, each of which has ended up with her fighting for her life against dangerous characters and experiencing the death of people she cares about, Marianne embraces the star ship project.  Twelve years after the war, the star ship leaves New New York with her aboard, and twelve years after that it becomes clear that the new antimatter engine is efficient enough that they will reach Epsilon Eridani within Marianne's lifetime.  Marianne receives a message from Jeff, who is achieving success in expanding civilization in the SouthEast of the former United States, squashing the Manson religion and introducing forms of democracy and the rule of law.  Thus the novel ends on twin notes of hope and with the good old "sense of wonder," the idea that mankind's future is ripe with astounding, limitless, possibilities.

Worlds Apart is a smooth and entertaining read--I think I enjoyed it more than Worlds.  All the hard sf stuff--living and working in space and figuring out how to staff and supply a star ship, et al.--and the action scenes, which involve many different types of weapons and lots of gore, are good.  I also thought the human relationship scenes were more effective here in Worlds Apart than in Worlds--in particular the scenes suggesting that, as they separately go about their busy and at times horrible lives, Marianne and Jeff are quietly heartbroken over their separation, each having been the love of the other's life.  I also liked that Marianne was less of a passenger and more of a driver of the plot here, that she actually had to make decisions and live with them.

A solid book I don't hesitate to recommend.  Soon I will read the final book in Haldeman's Worlds trilogy, 1992's Worlds Enough and Time, and you'll hear all about it here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

Worlds by Joe Haldeman

Jeff hadn't mentioned the third alternative, that I marry him and stay here.  What would that be like?  Marianne O'Hara, groundhog.  I couldn't see it.  Not even in this wonderful city.  The Earth is closed space; history's mistakes endlessly repeating.  The future belongs to the Worlds.   

My copy

I've owned a copy of Joe Haldeman's Worlds, a 1990 Avon paperback edition of the 1981 novel, for quite a while.  A twitter discussion of the cover art for the 1984 edition of the 1983 sequel, Worlds Apart, brought Worlds to mind so I decided to read it.

It is the future, the late 21st century.  Orbiting Earth are forty-one "Worlds," asteroids which, collectively, have a population of almost half a million people.  This is hard sf, and in the start of the book we hear how the asteroids were hollowed out and moved into position and spun for gravity and how they are mined for minerals that are sold to Earth and other Worlds, etc.  One of the most prominent of the Worlds is New New York, home to 250,000 people, including our protagonist, Marianne O'Hara; Worlds is sort of a biography of O'Hara's early life, you might call a bildungsroman.

Worlds immediately reminded of Robert Heinlein's work.  Like "The Menace from Earth" and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Haldeman's novel is largely concerned with speculations on what it will be like living on a satellite of Earth--the relationship between the satellite dwellers and the Earthers, in particular--and on future family arrangements and sexual life.  Like so many of Heinlein's juveniles, it follows a young person as he or she goes on an adventure, learns about the universe, and gets mixed up in war and/or politics.  Other Heinleinian notes are sounded--nudism, revolutionary organizations, ways in which a polity might limit the franchise, for example.

In the 21st century group marriages and regularized sexual promiscuity, of varying kinds, are the norm, with different customs prevailing on different Worlds, and drugs are used to control the onset of puberty and fertility--some girls have sex and bear children at age twelve, others elect to hold off puberty until they are 17 or 18. 

Marianne O'Hara is a superior person, a girl who delays puberty until 17 and spends her teen years focusing on her education, including grad school.  In the 21st century group marriages and regularized sexual promiscuity, of varying forms, are the norm, with different customs prevailing on different Worlds.  Drugs are used to control the onset of puberty and fertility--some girls have sex and bear children at age twelve, others, like Marianne, elect to hold off puberty until they are relatively old.

First edition

A genius, who has had academic papers published before her chemically-induced adulthood begins, Marianne wins a scholarship to spend a year doing postgraduate work on Earth--only one in a thousand people from Marianne's asteroid ever get the opportunity to visit Earth, we are told.

We spend like 30 pages in orbit as Marianne grows up, learning about the Worlds' array of cultures and meeting minor characters, and then our hero, at age 19 or 20, starts her visit to Earth in New York.  My old stomping grounds, in 2084 when Marianne gets there, is a crime ridden mess where there is a heavily armored cop on every corner, ordinary people wear long knives to deter muggers and rapists, and the Empire State Building is in ruins, left that way as a memorial of the Second American Revolution or Second American Civil War that put in place the current form of government.  Marianne makes friends with various people, becomes a crime victim, gets mixed up with an underground group of rebels who aren't crazy about the current form of government--they profess to be libertarian activists who act within the law in pursuit of a more representative government and consider violence a last resort, but in fact they are heavily armed terrorist revolutionaries who assassinate people with lasers and have already infiltrated high levels of government.

Haldeman uses a variety of narrative techniques in Worlds.  Much is in the third person, be he also offers up primary documents, like letters Marianne exchanges with her friends back on New New York, a media interview of one of her friends who describes Marianne's relationship with a third figure, diaries and journals written by Marianne and people who know her.  This way Haldeman can, for example, in one chapter--a diary entry--show us Marianne's view of the terrorists immediately after meeting them, and in the next chapter--a third-person omniscient passage--explicitly show how they are misrepresenting themselves.

The bulk of the plot of the novel consists of three intertwined threads.  One is Marianne's relationships with a number of men, and her decisions about whether she should have sex with each of them and which of them she should marry--remember, this is the promiscuous sex/group marriage future in which it is normal to have multiple concurrent lovers and spouses.  The men are all very different from each other, on New New York there's John the crippled engineer, Charlie the big muscular religious man from a World where they have a sex-focused religion and people customarily have sex in public, and Daniel, a scientist.  In New York there's Benny the poet and painter who gets mixed up with the revolutionary group, and Jeff the FBI agent who is taking classes.  The spy stuff involving the revolutionaries is another thread, and a third is souring relations between the USA and New New York, involving boycotts and embargoes and tariffs and all that, the result of sudden economic change when some valuable minerals are found on the moon--these minerals can substitute for stuff New New York is currently buying form Earth, and provide an opportunity for greater Worlds independence from Earth.  The danger of being arrested by the US government, or murdered by the rebels, or stuck on Earth because of the embargo, of course complicates things and dials up the tension when Marianne is considering with which men she should have sex and with whom she should build her future.   

Marianne goes on a group tour of Europe, Africa, and Asia, and we get plenty of travelogue stuff.  Marianne writes in her diary that Black Africa is "friendly and modern" but Haldeman doesn't expand on that at all.  He has much more to say about England, France, and the Islamic world--the Muslim countries are portrayed as abominably sexist, the women--including tourists like Marianne--forced to wear chadors, the men groping the female tourists at every opportunity.

Back in America everything comes to a head as relations between the US and New New York get so bad that blackouts occur because New New York stops selling solar power to Earth.  Under cover of the blackouts the revolutionaries make their move, detonating nuclear bombs in Washington D.C. and Chicago and declaring that they are the new government.  The USA is in total chaos--half the FBI and half the military are loyal to the revolutionaries and so these institutions are too busy to maintain order, and criminals take advantage of the power vacuum.  In the confusion missiles are launched from the US that strike many of the smaller Worlds, killing thousands of people and sending thousands as refugees to New New York, and then there is a nuclear exchange between the US and the communist states, leaving the Earth an absolute wreck!

Just before the blackout and revolution Marianne is kidnapped by revolutionaries for use as a bargaining ship or something (she is the most famous Worlder on Earth) and is rescued by Jeff the FBI agent, who has gone rogue from the Bureau.  When America falls into chaos Marianne and Jeff have to travel across the violence-stricken countryside to get to the spaceport, but there is no room for Jeff, so Marianne leaves for New New York without him. 

Worlds is good, but it is all plot, it didn't move me--I didn't really care which guys Marianne banged or married, which of them lived or died.  One of the reasons the novel felt a little flat is that Marianne doesn't really drive the plot, she doesn't set goals and then try to achieve them--as a student she follows a schedule, and then during the world-shattering revolutionary crisis she is a victim of circumstances.  She goes here and there, meeting some people who try to abuse or exploit her and some people who are nice to her and help protect her from the not nice people.  After all the talk of her being so single-minded and smart in the first 30 pages of the book, she doesn't do much that is particularly smart or assertive on Earth--I can't remember her ever using her smarts to overcome an obstacle or preserve her life or anything like that.  Rather than exercising the values and abilities she brought with her to Earth from New New York, she is corrupted by life on Earth, forced to commit acts of violence that she hadn't thought herself capable of. 

If the novel has a point, it is about the folly of (white and Muslim) man, whose ambitions and fears and weapons and sexism cause murder and oppression and eventually destroy the world.  To Marianne, Earth people seem insane ("What's wrong with you groundhogs?  What the hell is wrong with you?"), and Haldeman explicitly tells us that the guy who launches the missiles at the Worlds and at the communist countries does it because he is insane.  (One might quibble that this is weak storytelling--after coming up with complex political and economic reasons for the dispute between New New York and the United States, Haldeman is content to explain a nuclear war with "And then this crazy guy pushes a button....")  We only spend like 15% of the book on New New York, but we learn that on that World there are no guns, people don't accumulate wealth, and people are sexually liberated--maybe it's Haldeman's idea of a utopia.  (Maybe the symbolic reason Jeff can't come to New New York is that he has blood on his hands from shooting criminals...doesn't that sort of thing happen to King David in the Bible?)

Non-whites, African-Americans in particular, come off well in the novel.  Marianne loves Dixieland jazz and the people who treat her nicest are some black musicians who invite her to play clarinet in their jazz band in front of a packed house, and we get a long scene of her playing with them; for Marianne, the evening spent playing with the band feels like "six bright hours of orgasm."  This chapter is also significant in that it is one of the few times in the book when we actually see Marianne's talents and abilities in action.

It is implied that Marianne will become the leader of New New York, and there are two sequels, 1983's Worlds Apart and 1992's Worlds Enough and Time; maybe they follow her career as chief executive of New New York, and in them we will see Marianne use her intelligence to save her society or something.  I own Worlds Apart and will read it soon, while Worlds is still fresh in my mind, and find out.

1976 Frights by Brian Lumley, Joe Haldeman, and William F. Nolan

Let's read more from Kirby McAuley's Frights, a 1976 anthology of horror stories devoted to contemporary terrors.  In the last two blog posts we read the contributions of Psycho scribe Robert Bloch, SF Grandmaster Poul Anderson and his wife Karen, unique wordsmith and critical favorite R. A. Lafferty, and military SF icon David Drake.  Today, it's stories by the author of Necroscope, Brian Lumley, the author of The Forever War, Joe Haldeman, and the co-author of Logan's Run, William F. Nolan.  I am reading a scan of the US hardcover first edition that is available at the internet archive, that indispensable website for the impecunious student of 20th-century culture.

"The Whisperer" by Brian Lumley

"The Whisperer" would go on to be the title story of a 2001 Lumley collection and was also anthologized by Dennis Etchison and Eric Protter, so I think we have a right to expect this will be a story representative of Lumley at his best.

Lumley's work, I have found, is uneven, but I am happy to report that "The Whisperer" is pretty good.

Benton, a British office clerk, is terrorized by a hunchbacked dwarf, a hideous creature who wears a floppy black hat and smells powerfully of the sewer.  First, the bowler-clad office worker encounters this apparition on the commuter train--the monster uses its hypnotic power to make the train conductor direct Benton to a less comfortable train car.  Then, a few months later, the dwarf is in a pub Benton visits for lunch, and the creep uses his powers to steal Benton's beer!  When Benton later asks the train conductor and the barman about the little weirdo, they profess to have never seen the apparition!

Benton becomes obsessed with this haunt, his habits and character taking a turn for the worse as he spends his time searching for the malodorous dwarf.  A few months after the episode in the pub comes a horrendous turn of events--Benton returns home to find the dwarf having sex with his wife!  Benton drives the monster off, and then confronts, and strikes, his wife, who claims she has no idea what Benton is talking about!  Benton's wife leaves him and Benton begins searching for the dwarf even more fervently, armed with a knife, intent on slaying his tormentor.  Who will live and who will die when the final showdown comes?

This story is well-written and well-paced, and actually disturbing.  Maybe, for reasons of class resentment, we are supposed to find the crimes inflicted on Benton amusing, but I did not find them amusing--I identified with the victim and his hopeless quest for vengeance and for answers.  Because Benton's quest is hopeless--he ends the story dead in a gutter, and we are never afforded any clues as to what the monster is and why he chose to harass and destroy Benton.

Unless we are expected to observe the torture, cuckolding and murder of a member of the bourgeoisie with the glee of a malicious working-class brute or a supercilious Marxist university professor, I interpret this story as a reminder that ordinary people are essentially helpless when confronted by crime, that justice and safety are impossible to secure, that everything we have--our property, our families and our lives--can easily be taken from us by anybody who is strong enough and brazen enough to do so.

Thumbs up for this black nightmare of a story.

"Armaja Das" by Joe Haldeman

"Armaja Das" has been anthologized by Gardner Dozois, Thomas F. Monteleone, and Margaret Weis, so here we have a piece that has been embraced by the speculative fiction community!

"Armanja das," the story tells us, is Romani for "we curse you"--this is a story about Gypsies!

John Zold is a rich man, a talented mathematician who left academia to make a pile of money in private industry as a computer programmer--he has designed a piece of software that gives computers the ability to mimic human feeling and talk to a computer user as if it is his or her sympathetic friend.

Zold works in Manhattan, lives in Dobbs Ferry.  His Romani parents fled Europe during the Nazi era, but were murdered in America, leaving him an orphan.  John became totally assimilated to English-speaking American culture and, as a wealthy man in his late thirties, has been financing a charity that encourages other young Gypsies to assimilate.  Many Gypsies in America resent this charitable effort, considering that Zold is "stealing their children," and Zold receives threatening letters in the mail featuring that phrase, "armanja das."  Early in the story an ancient little Romani woman sneaks into his building in Dobbs Ferry and casts a spell on him.  Of course, Zold doesn't believe in magic, but immediately after the curse is put on him he is unable to perform in the bedroom and he develops carbuncles on the back of his neck.

Conventional medical professionals prove unable to cure Zold's impotence or his skin problems, which get worse, much worse, and, suffering a severe fever and covered head to tow in hideous boils, he seeks out help from a Gypsy herbal  healer or "white witch."   However, the evil witch who cursed Zold in the first place has deep ties within the Gypsy community and no healers will tend to him!  Desperate, Zold turns to the computer personality that he designed himself!  The computer, with access to libraries all over the world, comes up with a Gypsy spell that will transfer the deadly curse to somebody else and guides Zold in performing the ritual!

Unfortunately, the curse does not transfer to the witch, as Zold hoped, but to his computer.  The curse then spreads to almost every computer in the world, making them "impotent"--this causes havoc because, for example, all electricity in New York City is handled by a computer, so the curse brings the greatest city in the world to a standstill.  The only computers that are immune are the computers managing the Soviet and American nuclear arsenals--when they sense that the world's computers are out of commission they interpret that as a vulnerability amongst the enemy's ranks and both computers launch nuclear strikes.  Civilization is almost wiped out, and the Gypsies, who hadn't come to rely on machines as did all other cultures, are now on top of the heap!

The first half or two-thirds of this "Armaja Das" I took to be a serious piece on assimilation and alienation and psychosomatic illness, and I suppose it is, but the end feels like a nonsensical joke story, undermining much of what I liked about it.  Perhaps we should admire the story for the way it mixes high technology and traditional superstitious beliefs, a reflection of our real 21st-century lives, in which book store browsers will find that there are more shelves for books on ghosts, witchcraft and the tarot than there are for computer programs. 

Acceptable.

"Dead Call" by William F. Nolan

Like the Lumley and the Haldeman story we are looking at today, William F. Nolan's "Dead Call" has been widely anthologized.

This story is very short, and a little gimmicky.  The narrator answers the phone, and it is his friend Len, dead for four weeks, on the line!  Len says that death is nice--peaceful, with no pressure!  Len reveals that his car accident was no accident, that he committed suicide, and is glad he did!  I guess dead people have ways of knowing things, because he tells the narrator that his wife is cheating, his daughter is a junkie who hates him, and his boss is about to fire him.  Len suggests that, seeing how things are going, that the narrator also commit suicide, and the narrator takes his advice.   

In the last few lines of this story the narrator addresses the reader directly, suggesting that, seeing how things are going, we join him in death.

Acceptable.

**********

Maybe we should see these three stories as reflecting particular 1970s concerns about increases in crime rates and divorce rates.  Maybe this is something I should keep in mind when I read three more stories from Frights in the next exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.   

Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, July 1973

Our look through the August 1972 issue of Fantastic was so worthwhile I decided to similarly examine another issue in my collection, that from July 1973.  If you don't have a copy, and don't feel like spending ten or twenty bucks on ebay for one, you can read along at the internet archive.  No shame!

The cover featuring the mustachioed Conan, King of Aquilonia, by Harry Roland, while not terrific, isn't bad.  Swords and shields, dinosaur skeletons, human skulls, a grim muscleman, these are things we've all seen a billion times but which never lose their appeal.  The first thing we find in the magazine after an ad for the Rosicrucians and the Table of Contents is editor Ted White's editorial.  Ted uses three pages of his editorial to describe in detail the recent vote for the 1972 Hugo for Best Professional SF Magazine at LACon.  The somewhat complicated Australian ballot was used to pick the winner, and F&SF was awarded the Hugo, even though more voters picked Analog as their favorite mag.  (Fantastic came in fifth place out of five nominees, behind F&SF, Analog, Amazing and Galaxy.  Ouch!)

Ted then discusses the recent publication by Manor Books of The Best from Amazing Stories and the forthcoming release by the same publisher of The Best from Fantastic, and we learn that bringing these anthologies to market is a process fraught with peril!  Ted grouses that Manor's typesetting is poor and that they left out the introduction he wrote for The Best from Amazing Stories, and hopes they will do a better job on The Best from Fantastic.  He then spends half a page explaining the relationship of a magazine's cover date with when it will be appearing on newsstands.

Ted finishes up this editorial with some good news: the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which like this issue contained a Conan story by de Camp and Lin Carter, was a very big seller.  Ted muses that the Conan brand sells magazines, and that fantasy, which for decades has been outsold by science fiction, may be expanding its market share!  This leads Ted to voice what sounds like a mission statement!

...it is my conviction that, under Conan's herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function--indeed, the duty--of this magazine to join forces with the times.

Let's see what the herald of the fantasy renaissance of the early 1970s is up to!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

King Conan of Aquilonia has just lead his army to victory over an unexpected foreign invasion force.  Conan wonders why the leader of this foreign army would suddenly be so reckless as to attack wealthy Aquilonia and its famously warlike monarch, and his suspicions are confirmed by a white druid who comes by to tell Conan that the attack was inspired by the evil wizard Thoth-Amon.  So Conan leads his army to Stygia, a land of sand dunes and palm trees and the ruined city of Nebthu, which the druid informs Conan is Thoth-Amon's current base of operations.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" begins a year or so after the events depicted in "Witch of the Mists," the Conan story I talked about in my last blog post.  That tale featured the four greatest evil wizards in the world, including, besides Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, a huge muscular black jungle shaman, Pra-Eun, an effeminate little Oriental, and the witch of the title, Louhi, a woman in charge of a death cult of skinny mask-wearing weirdos.  Maybe the three diversity wizards were offensive stereotypes, but each of them at least brings an interesting image to mind--Thoth-Amon is totally boring, just some guy.  Why did de Camp and Carter choose to make bland Thoth-Amon the lead villain of this story instead of one of the other, more interesting, sorcerers?  (Maybe I should be asking why de Camp and Carter didn't spend more time making Thoth-Amon more interesting.  And don't tell me Thoth-Amon is really cool in some earlier story, so de Camp and Carter don't need to expend ink making him compelling here--each story should be able to stand on its own!)

The Aquilonian army camps in the desert near Nebthu and a sphinx that looks like a hyena-headed monster.  At night a spy is spotted, and Conan, accompanied by his son and the white druid, shadow the dimly-seen enemy agent into the sphinx and underground, walking right into a trap!  In a huge circular room with seating on its perimeter, like a senate chamber or an arena, await Thoth-Amon and hundreds of evil wizards.  (When I read Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon's The Eyes of Sarsis I wondered how the economy of Tiana's world could support so many pirates, who, like government workers, don't produce wealth, just consume it, and now I'm wondering how the economy of Conan's world can support so many evil magicians, who presumably are not farming, hunting, fishing, mining, or doing anything else productive.) 

Thoth-Amon gives a speech in which he lists all the times Conan has defeated him (it's practically an ad for the Lancer line of Conan paperbacks) and then he and his battalion of wizards try to wipe out Conan's party with green rays, but the white druid ("the greatest white magician alive on Earth in our age") repels all their spells and then shatters their minds, leaving only their leader standing.  Thoth-Amon flees, but not before summoning the monster that serves as the model for the sphinx, the "ghoul-hyena of Chaos!"  This quadruped is "huge as half a hundred lions!"  The ghoul-hyena chases Conan and his friends out of the sphinx, but then the monster is distracted by the Stygian army (which is taking a break from beleaguering the Aquilonian army) and wipes them out.  The sun rises, and the sun-hating ghoul-hyena retreats to its lair before it can molest the Aquilonians.

Foreshadowing the next Conan story, the druid uses his powers to divine that Thoth-Amon is travelling south, to the jungle, so maybe we'll be seeing Nenaunir next time!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is certainly better than "Witch of the Mists;" it feels larger and more momentous, and I like all the military stuff, the battle scenes between the Aquilonian force and the Stygian force and seeing how Conan leads his army on its march.   The Egyptian-type setting is also better than the boring woods and swamp of the earlier story.  Of course, the structure of the climax is pretty similar to "Witch of the Mists," with Conan blundering into traps and getting saved from a magic spell by one of his friends.  I'll judge this one on the high end of "acceptable," maybe "marginally good."

A British edition of
Conan of Aquilonia

One of the things about "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" I didn't really like was the implication that Conan's wild career was the result of the "Lords of Creation" impelling Conan "out of wintry Cimmeria...to crush evil in the world's West."  I like to think of Conan as a strong-willed individual, a self-made man, who does whatever he wants in an amoral universe in which the gods are indifferent or parochial or simply selfish; embedding Conan in a Good vs Evil narrative and portraying him as a champion or a pawn of the Lords of Light doesn't seem, to me, like a very good idea.  A Conan who bends the world to his will and, if he does the right thing, does it because he chooses to do so, is more interesting than a Conan who is the obedient servant or cat's paw of some establishment or set of principles.  (I'm not at all opposed to stories about champions of good fighting agents of evil or stories about people manipulated by gods or establishments, I just don't remember the Conan of the Howard stories being that sort of character--my image of Conan is as an icon of rugged individualism and self-reliance who pursues his own course, seizing life with gusto and the hell with everybody else and their rules.)

Another gripe I have with this story as well as "Witch of the Mists" is that the magic is boring.  The stories feature the four top black magicians in the world and the top white magician in the world, but all they do is obvious stuff like shoot rays at each other and teleport.  Offutt and Lyon filled their Tiana books with much stranger and creative magic.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" would reappear in 1977's Conan of Aquilonia.   Here in Fantastic it is accompanied by an unspecific and embarrassingly silly illustration by Billy Graham.  Graham doesn't even include Conan's mustache!

"Iron Mountain" by Gordon Eklund

It has been years since I read anything by Gordon Eklund, and a glance at old blog posts that mention him indicates I was not very impressed with his work.  Well, here's your chance to get me on your side, Gordon!

Chou Lun Chu served in Manchuria in World War II, made his way to Hong Kong, and then, ten years ago when he was 70, to San Francisco.  Since then San Francisco has been evacuated, but Chou decided to stay and is currently living the life of a scavenger!  Life for a single (the Japs killed his wife 50 years ago!) 80-year-old scavenger in a city full of smog and murderous gangs is no picnic, but Chou has no interest in moving to the countryside.

When he can't find any more canned goods in his residential hotel, Chou ventures out into the abandoned streets for the first time in a month.  He meets a young white woman, who befriends him and shares her food and water with him.  She also shares with him her little pleasures, like "shopping" in an abandoned clothing store, and explains to him (and we readers) why the city was evacuated.

This is a "literary" or "New Wave" story, more a psychological character study and collection of striking images than a plot-driven narrative.  Nothing is clearly resolved, though I guess we are supposed to think that Chou and his new friend are going to die a few hours after they meet and share a beautiful moment.  I thought the explanation of why San Francisco had been evacuated was a little silly, more like something out of a fable than a realistic story, but otherwise the tone is good and Eklund's style is good, and Chou and the young blonde are actually interesting characters.  Thumbs up for this one!   

It seems that "Iron Mountain" has never been reprinted, though the good people at Ramble House are producing a series of collections of Eklund's stories, so maybe it will eventually be back in print. 

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack C. Haldeman II is the brother of Joe Haldeman, who wrote the classic Forever War and has won a stack of awards.  Jack was a biologist who wrote quite a few SF stories and novels, many co-written with people like his brother, Jack Dann, Harry Harrison and Andrew Offutt.  Jack also won a Phoenix award from the people who put together the DeepSouthCons; this is an award I have to admit I never heard of before, a sort of lifetime achievement award given to those SF professionals who "have done a great deal for Southern fandom."

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is one of Jack's earliest published stories, and its title has got me worried it is a sophomoric joke.  The story is accompanied by a graphic design style illustration by Don Jones which I like, however.  This is Don Jones' sole credit at isfdb, so who knows what the hell his story is.

Ugh, this thing is so tedious that while reading it I began to feel an urge to go wash the dishes and file our 2017 Columbus, OH local income taxes.  (Yes, residents of Columbus, OH are expected to pay a 2.5% income tax to the city above their federal and state income taxes.)  "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is a first-person, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness narrative of a guy's dream in which he gets attacked in the shower of his hotel room, then watches a kid vomit after eating cigarette butts, then meets a giant wolverine in a movie theater.  Maybe I am supposed to appreciate this plotless mess as an indictment of U. S. intervention in the Vietnam War and of American TV and cinema, which have scrambled the narrator's mind?  The story is also full of leaden jokes.  Take a gander:

If we look at "Iron Mountain" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that works, I think we can see "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling.  Quite bad.

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" has not been republished anyplace.

**********

I'm skipping Part Two of Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca.  If you are curious about it, check out tarbandu's review of the Panshin's novel; he read it in its book form, which bore the title Earth Magic.  Jeff Jones contributes a fine illustration to its appearance here in Fantastic, July 1973, a male figure.  (I tweeted the picture on Jones' birthday back in 2017.)

In the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, editor Ted White explained to a reader that, if the magazine staff finds they don't have enough material to fill up an issue, the publisher (without consulting Ted) will make up the shortage by reprinting a "portfolio" of old art.  After Part Two of The Son of Black Morca we find just such a portfolio, eight pages dedicated to Wesso's illustrations for the 1932 appearance in Amazing of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Invaders From the Infinite.  Some years ago I read the 1961 version of Invaders From the Infinite and wrote a negative review of the novel on Amazon.  These Wesso illos, however, are charming.  (What's not to like about a picture of a single space warship incinerating an entire modern city?)

Next up is the Panshins' SF in Dimension column.  This is the final installment of SF in Dimension to appear in Fantastic, and takes as its topic the period 1968-1972, which the Panshins see as a period of "imbalance and stagnation."  The authors dismiss Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds as failed efforts to break out of SF's current doldrums, but are more impressed by recent "introspective" works like R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, Robert Silverberg's Time of Changes and Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died.  The Panshins in this column get psychological and philosophical, even mystical, suggesting SF's problem is like that of an adolescent faced with the crisis of having to mature into adulthood, a problem for which the experiences of his or her earlier life offer no solution.  "These crises, these critical moments of impasse, continue to occur all throughout a lifetime.  They can only be solved by growth, by rebirth as a larger person.....It is these critical moments of impasse that are symbolized in fiction."  As examples of this symbolism the Panshins present long quotes and analyses of passages from Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.  The authors finish up on an optimistic note, predicting that this period of stagnation in SF will end in 1973 and that the "speculative fantasy of the next years will be a great literature;" they even suggest that SF of the 1970s might guide our entire society in a much-needed process of rebirth!   

In his book review column, Fritz Leiber looks at an anthology of horror stories about cats, Michael Perry's Beware of the Cat, and a novel by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.  Fritz comments on each of the cat stories in Perry's volume, praising most but judging Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" "by far the best in this book."  In the review of The Phoenix and the Mirror Fritz asserts that the best fantasies are those that are "based on stuff that is half history" that strive for a sort of realism and are "fortified by a deep knowledge of the human condition." He lauds Davidson and his novel for meeting these criteria and presenting many unforgettable scenes.

Then come the letters.  There are two pages on which a postal worker, Ted, a reader, and even a U. S. senator opine on the United States Postal Service in response to an increase (of 100%!) in the cost to publishers of shipping magazines.  I was surprised to learn that the Post Office charges were not determined simply by weight and distance, but in large part based on how much advertising a magazine had; shipping a page of advertising cost almost three times what it cost to ship a page of fiction.  (The postal worker says about 6% of an issue of Amazing is devoted to ads, while Playboy hits 80%.)

In an amusing letter a guy denounces "Witch of the Mists" as "abominable drivel" and even more ferociously slags illustrator Henry Roland, whom he claims plagiarized his illos for that story!.  Given a chance to respond, Roland resorts to ad hominem, saying that the poison that drips from his detractor's pen surely indicates he is a "very unhappy person."  Then Ted gets in an argument with a guy who didn't like Ted's and Harlan Ellison's chapters in All in Color for a Dime, a book of essays about Golden Age comic books.  This guy says Ted and Harlan's writing is "subliterate," and Ted wittily responds by saying that, no, it is your writing that is sub-literate!  The fireworks continue with an underhanded attack on Star Trek from a guy who writes in to share sarcastic plot ideas for the show in the event it is revived.  Then we get a nice helping of SF snobbery, as a letter writer and Ted goof on the TV show UFO and agree that SF is not very popular because normies are scaredy cats--the reader says people are scared of technology and the future, and Ted asserts that "science fiction scares most people--its very precepts scare them."

Lester G. Boutillier, apparently some kind of superfan who attends many SF gatherings, contributes a letter that takes up two and a half pages.  He addresses a number of topics, including the whole postage increase issue (his father works for the USPS), but he is at his most entertaining when criticizing Poul Anderson (whom he admits seemed "a very nice man" when he met him at an Apollo launch party) for including too much "far right" politics in his writing, calling Anderson the "William Buckley (or perhaps I should say Ayn Rand) of science fiction," and complaining that there is too much nudity at SF convention costume events.  (A pinko and a prude?  This guy sounds like a real piece of work!)

Someone writes in to tell Ted that he was tricked into printing as new in the October 1972 Fantastic a story by Eric Frank Russell, "Vampire From the Void," that had already been published back in 1939 in the British magazine Fantasy.  Ted says he hasn't read the '39 story, but he doesn't think Russell would do such a thing.  (The wikipedia article on Fantasy actually addresses this issue, blaming Russell's agent for deceiving our long-suffering Ted.)  Ted finishes the letters with a page-long letter from somebody who thinks Ted has greatly improved the magazine over the last two years, and who likes both Poul Anderson's and Henry Roland's work.  So there, haters!

On the last page of Fantastic of July 1973, in the classifieds, we have some ads from New York witches, no doubt worthy rivals to the Missouri witches from our last blog post, and an ad for a book by the astrologer Solastro that will teach you how to win at the race track--you need merely conduct a simple numerological and alphabetical analysis of each horse's number and name to identify the winning horse 67% of the time!  Read more about Solastro and his system at this website, then get your ass to the Aqueduct and rake in the Benjamins!

There is also a mysterious ad for Richard E. Geis' fanzine Science Fiction Review which draws you in by announcing it is "adult," "outrageous," "uncensored" and "shocking," but doesn't tell you the periodical's title!  (It seems that Geis' zine went through periodic name changes.)  A quick look at isfdb entries on Science Fiction Review certainly makes it look attractive--besides all the great cover illustrations by Stephen Fabian there are many letters from and interviews with famous SF writers.

Shocking and uncensored covers of Richard Geis' Science Fiction Review
by Stephen Fabian--don't show these to Lester Boutillier!

A fun issue.  More Conan and more problems for poor Ted in our next Fantastic episode!

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.

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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.         

Planet of the Voles by Charles Platt

Here we have another inmate from Joachim Boaz's Wall of Shame.  As you may recall, Joachim and I traded some SF paperbacks recently, he sending me some SF books he thought among "the worst ever written."  (More details of the trade, and discussion of one of the other Wall of Shame titles, which I actually liked, here.)  Since Joachim and I have somewhat different tastes, I was not reluctant to give Charles Platt's Planet of the Voles a spin.

Planet of the Voles first appeared in hard cover, adorned with a cool Paul Lehr cover, in 1971, the year of my birth.  Joachim sent me the 1972 Berkeley paperback; the painting is the same, but the cover text obscures the image a bit.  Some kind of color ad was bound between pages 96 and 97 originally (these old paperbacks often have ads for the Science Fiction Book Club or cigarettes) but a previous owner tore out the ad, leaving mere fragments behind. 

Planet of the Voles is an action adventure in which people shoot ray guns at each other and machete their way through jungles inhabited by giant reptiles and predatory birds, but it also takes a stab at being philosophical.  Unfortunately, Platt doesn't quite make the thing work; the two elements (space opera and philosophy) actually undermine each other, and he also makes irritating mistakes that diminish the entire effort.

It is the future, and man has colonized many planets.  Centuries of peace have led man to forget the arts of war and have bred out of him many of his aggressive instincts.  So, when the mysterious Volvanians start conquering human planets, the Earth has to genetically engineer fighting men and mass produce them in huge vats!

Tomas and Jan are just such men, crewmen of a space battleship on its way to liberate a planet the Volvanians have occupied.  Tomas and Jan are on the support staff, and don't fight on the front line.  Tomas was genetically engineered to be an artist; his job is to decorate the ship with murals and photographs, design insignia and medals, that sort of thing.  Jan was created to clean the narrow tube that runs the length of the ship and is essential to the hyperdrive; he's only five feet tall, and can't reach the controls of a suit of battle armor.

A Volvanian ship sneaks up on Tomas and Jan's ship during transit through hyperspace and attacks with a sort of poison gas weapon.  The ship itself suffers little damage, but the gas drives the servicemen insane so that they fight among themselves and open the airlocks, jettisoning all air and fuel.  Apparently by chance, T & J are the only survivors of the entire thousand man crew.  Now T & J, the least war-like of the ship's complement, have to get the ship, which comes out of hyperspace in orbit over the planet they came to liberate, working again.

T & J take a troop carrier to the surface, and have various adventures, rescuing the humans on the planet, infiltrating a Volvanian fortification, that sort of thing.  Then they lead the attack on the alien base, defeating the aliens and learning their strange secret!

During the attack in hyperspace that killed all of his comrades, Tomas got a glimpse of the commander of the Volvanian ship, a beautiful woman he later learned is known as Galvina.  He became obsessed with her, irrationally certain he had met her before and that somehow Galvina could reveal secrets about himself.  In the climax of the book Tomas confronts her, and learns about the Volvanians' psychic powers.  Using these powers, over twenty years ago Galvina tinkered with the vat in which Tomas was created, trying to make of him a Volvanian spy.  She made sure he survived the attack in hyperspace, hoping to meet him face to face and recruit him for behind-the-lines missions.

Tomas refuses to betray humankind, and Galvina escapes.  Tomas, feeling he doesn't really fit in with the humans, decides to strike out on his own rather than return to Earth.  In the last three pages of the book Tomas, no doubt to the chagrin of the taxpayers of Earth, steals the 500 meter long space battleship and he and Jon set out to explore the universe and maybe confront Galvina a second time.

isfdb image of hardcover edition

There are some interesting ideas and passable action scenes in Planet of the Voles that reminded me of space operas like E. E. Smith's Spacehounds of IPC or A. E. van Vogt's Rull stories.  The Volvanians enslave the humans on the planet by destroying all their food and then planting a bush which bears fruit that is nutritious, but turns people into almost mindless zombies.  The Volvanians then use the zombies' empty minds as amplifiers for their psychic powers.  In those Smith and Van Vogt stories the key to human victory is often scientific ingenuity, and that is true on the Volvanian-occupied planet; one of the humans on the planet is a biochemist, and is able to synthesize yeast to provide food for the resistance movement that links up with Tomas and Jon.

Another cool space opera gadget Platt includes in the novel is a small device that the Earth servicemen employ to control animals.  A little black box with prongs, you imbed it in the skull of a beast and then you are able to direct the beast.  T & J use these boxes to ride around on giant birds.

Unfortunately, for every fun idea like those, Platt commits a distracting error.  Sometimes he uses metric measurements, sometimes English measurements (the battleship is 500 meters long, the troop carrier is 30 feet long.)  The space battleship and the planet are never given names; the omniscient third-person narrator and the characters all just call them "the mother ship" and "the planet."  This feels sloppy.  The style is also bland, Platt failing to convey the kind of urgency, or fear, or thrill we hope to feel when guys are in firefights, or chases, or hacking their way through a jungle on an alien planet.

Another disappointment is the relationship between Tomas and Jon.  You get the feeling that Platt wanted to portray these two men developing a deep friendship based on the fact that they are outsiders, but in the end he just tells you they have developed a bond rather than demonstrating it.  I also expected more to happen between Tomas and Galvina, that they would fall in love and end the war, or fight to the death, or something.     

Then we have the philosophical aspects of the book.  The idea Platt is peddling is a sort of yin-yang thing, that a person and a society need to embrace both strength and beauty, aggression and reflection, muscle and mind, male and female, etc and etc, to flourish.  Tomas, our hero, is such a success because he is a well-rounded person, part human and part Volvanian, both artist and fighting man.  (Maybe Platt could have used the relationship between Tomas and Jon to demonstrate his yin-yang idea, by having each possess skills which complemented the others', but in fact Jon and Tomas have few scenes alone together and Jon mostly tags along while Tomas does almost everything that matters.)

The humans in the book are all male, and represent power and aggression; the Volvanians (the people of the vulva?) are ruled by females, and represent beauty and (I guess) the intellect, including subtlety, deception, and manipulation.  The Earth people have better force fields and energy guns, and the Volvanians compete by launching sneak attacks, using a surface fortress to act as a decoy when their real base is underground, and by using chemicals and psionics to mess with the Earthlings' minds.  

The way the two races represent the two sexes leads to what is probably the most memorable scene in the book, the embarrassing assault on the secret Volvanian base.  The Earth battleship, a long cylinder, penetrates the oval-shaped hanger doors of the alien base, which lies in a valley, and then from the nose of the battleship spew forth the Earth troops.  Platt leaves no doubt that this is supposed to represent the sex act when he tells us the interior of the Volvanian base has red walls that are moist!

It was a wide, deep shaft, almost as wide as the mother ship that had pushed into it.  The shaft led into the earth, curving slightly.  Its walls were moist with condensation, and a gentle red color.            

Besides causing embarrassing scenes like that, the philosophy of the book weakens the adventure story aspects of the book.  Over the course of the story the Volvanians kill hundreds of humans and enslave hundreds more by turning them into zombies.  We are also explicitly told that the Volvanians are the aggressors in the war and that for centuries humans have not made war on each other.  So it makes sense that the reader feel that the Volvanians are the villains.  But, because the ideology of the book requires some level of moral equivalency between the humans and aliens, we get disconcerting scenes in which we are expected to deplore how bloodthirsty the humans are.  We are also supposed to consider that the human buildings on the planet are more beautiful after the Volvanians' ray guns have melted their dull-colored vertical walls into brightly colored curves.  This undermines the gung ho fun often provided by military action adventures, and prevents the catharsis you find in stories in which, at the end, the villains are brought to justice.  And since Platt does not go as far as a book like The Forever War, in which the humans are the villains and the aliens innocent victims, Planet of the Voles ends up provoking mixed and muted feelings in the reader.

Planet of the Voles has many problems.  While it was disappointing and at times embarrassing, I didn't find reading it a painful experience, and I don't regret reading it.  The beginning is an OK adventure story, the end interesting in a bizarre way.  So, a sort of borderline case.

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After finishing Planet of the Voles and drafting the above blog post, I read Joachim's review, from July 2012.  Joachim proclaims the book terrible, awarding it one out of five stars.

Besides the fact that I am more forgiving to adventure stories and pulp than Joachim, I think the big difference between our views is our assessments of what Platt's "point" is.  I think the book is more or less sincere as an adventure story and as advocacy of a well-rounded individual and society.  Joachim suggests that Platt is claiming conflict between the sexes is inevitable and perhaps criticizing feminism, and/or that the book is a satire of space opera, a weak version of something Norman Spinrad might do.

The case for Planet of the Voles being a spoof space opera is pretty strong, but it is something that did not occur to me; the adventure elements felt totally sincere to me for some 170 of the book's 192 pages, and even the final attack on the base felt, to me, like overblown symbolism rather than a spoof of the space battles one finds in E. E. Smith.  Well, maybe the joke's on me this time.