1965 stories by John Baxter, E. C. Tubb, Ernest Hill, and John T. Phillifent

The rumors are true!  The staff of MPorcius Fiction Log have dragged themselves away from Space Hulk: Ascension and tiny jars of chocolate pudding long enough to read four more SF stories from 1965, the year Canada (you, like painter and novelist Wyndham Lewis, may know that country as "the hideous icebox") adopted its current flag.  These four tales constitute the remainder of New Writings in SF 6, which we started dissecting in our last offering to the interwebs.  As noted in that post, Joachim Boaz has already analyzed this artifact of the British Commonwealth's contribution to speculative fiction, and you can make your own judgments of its contents free of charge and without delay by reading one of its four editions at the internet archive.

"The Hands" by John Baxter

Baxter was born in Australia but has lived much of his life in Europe and America, producing a body of film criticism and several biographies of Hollywood figures like George Lucas, Woody Allen and Robert De Niro as well as a number of SF stories.  "The Hands" was reprinted in 2016 in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer's The Big Book of Science Fiction, a 1200-page book that seems to be designed for use by college professors as it appears to try to include a writer from every possible identity group while leaving out authors who might offend the sensibilities of an academic.  Maybe they needed an Australian and thought A. Bertram Chandler was too politically incorrect?

"The Hands" is a pretty good horror story about an alien invasion.  In a future in which the cities, after expanding, were then abandoned for the countryside, seven astronauts return to Earth from an exploratory mission to planet Huxley (perhaps named after Thomas Henry Huxley, "Darwin's Bulldog" and an expert anatomist.)  The natives of Huxley used their hypnotic powers to dominate the Earthmen and alter them in a shocking way--each astronaut has grown extra body parts.  One guy has a second head, one has a pair of hands sticking out of his chest, another has a bulging stomach where an additional set of intestines is growing, etc.  The punch line of this brief story is that the extra parts are going to achieve independence and wrest themselves from their Earthman hosts and then combine together to form a whole alien being, one which will, we are led to believe, commit dastardly deeds.

I liked it, but "The Hands" is really just an entertaining trifle.

"The Seekers" by E. C. Tubb

I quite like that prolific writer of adventure stories, E. C. Tubb, even if I haven't read much by him lately.  (Sadly, I have far too little time to read all the things I want to read.)  So I have been looking forward to this one.  Somehow or other Ann and Jeff Vandermeer overlooked the wordsmith behind the epic saga of Earl Dumarest, interstellar gladiator, when making selections for The Big Book of Science Fiction, but another Englishman left out of the Vandermeers' "Ultimate Collection," Brian Aldiss, saw fit to include "The Seekers" in a 1978 hardcover anthology called Perilous Planets, which appeared in paperback in 1980 with a garish and baroque wraparound cover by Alex Ebel.  Knowing it was endorsed by so august a critic and historian of SF as Aldiss has me looking forward to "The Seekers" even more fervently!

"The Seekers" is a competent, perhaps pedestrian, little story about the perils faced by those who cross the void between the stars, exploring the galaxy.  Tubb introduces us in turn to the five men crewing a spaceship, showing them engaged in their pastimes so we know each man's passion--one is an artist, one an engineer fascinated by machinery, another immerses himself in sex and violence escapist virtual reality dream games, a fourth an intellectual who wants to understand the workings of the universe.  Then there's the captain, who commits suicide and leaves the other four men without leadership so they devolve from a team into an undisciplined party of individuals who neglect the proscribed precautions and procedures.

The four astronauts land on a planet to investigate an intriguing alien building, but fall into its booby-trap, a defense mechanism which presents each man the beguiling illusion of the thing he most desires, a perfect work of art, for example, or a detailed model of the universe.  The explorers are mesmerized and forget all about the alien building and their own spaceship; presumably they will starve to death as they can't tear themselves away from contemplation of what, for each of them, is Heaven.

An acceptable entertainment with a conservative bent, stressing the importance of discipline and authority and the weaknesses of democracy and individualism.

"Atrophy" by Ernest Hill

Hill has three novels and 16 stories listed at isfdb.  His primary occupation was as advertising manager of Consulting Engineer, a technical journal.

This is one of those stories about how super-efficient production and high tech entertainment has resulted in people falling into decadence.  We follow a few weeks in the life of Elvin, who spends much of his time lying in bed watching TV or at the "Sensories," a cinema where you watch films and vis electronic devices can feel the oars in your hands and the water on your body as the hero is rowing a boat and feel the lips of the love interest on your own as she kisses the hero.  There is so little productive work needed, and so much seductive electronic entertainment, that the government has to take steps to keep people from "atrophying"--lapsing into a boredom-induced coma.  These steps include make-work jobs that exercise the mind (talking to a computer that awards you money if your conversation is logical) and compulsory sex sessions with your spouse at regular intervals (announced by a bell) that, it is hoped, will maintain some vestige of physical and emotional connection between live human beings.

The plot of "Atrophy" concerns Elvin's career and marriage; Elvin is a mere Worker, and his wife leaves him for a Thinker, which causes Elvin to feel real genuine emotions for the first time in a long time.  The shock of this personal tragedy actually pulls him away from the brink of atrophy and sets his mind in motion to actual creative thought!

Then, at the nuclear reactor where Elvin monitors sensors six hours a day, three days a week, there is a malfunction.  The Thinker in charge of his department is currently incapacitated by atrophy, so  Elvin shows initiative and steps into the breach, becoming a hero and getting a promotion from Worker to Thinker!  When his wife hears the news she returns to him, so entranced by the new Elvin that she is even willing to have sex before the bell has rung!

The point of the story, of course, is that facing real life challenges and dealing with real life people provides personal satisfaction and yields social rewards that cannot be matched by the mere passive consumption of entertainment.

Not bad.  It looks like "Atrophy" has never appeared elsewhere, however.

"Advantage" by John T. Phillifent (as by Arthur Rackham)

Way back in 2015 I read John T. Phillifent's Genius Unlimited and then shared my pain upon doing so with the SF community via this blog.  So I have not in any way been looking forward to reading "Advantage."  Genius Unlimited was so bad that I find Phillifent's career, which saw the publication of over 25 novels and over 50 stories, inexplicable.  They can't all be as bad as Genius Unlimited if  they kept selling, can they?  Maybe Phil was sick when he wrote Genius Unlimited?  Maybe Genius Unlimited was a manuscript written by his brother-in-law and Phillifent sent it in under his own name as a favor?  Well, here's our chance to give Phil another chance.  I actually own at least two more books by Phil, the Ace Double editions of Life With Lancelot (stabled with William Barton's philo-Semitic Hunting on Kunderer) and Treasure of Tau Ceti (printed dos-a-dos with Barry Malzberg's Final War and Other Fantasies.)  Is there any chance that "Advantage" is going to be so good that I am going to eagerly pull those volumes from the back of my shelves to devour the Phillifent contributions?

From the first page of the 1971
printing of
New Writings in SF 6

It is the future, and the human race is colonizing the galaxy.  Once a planet has been cleared for colonization, the settlers are preceded by specialist quasi-military units which prepare the settlement, building housing and roads and hospitals and so forth.  The commander of the finest of these units, the winner of awards for seven previous missions, is Colonel Jack Barclay.

What is the secret to the Colonel's success, you ask?  It's his assistant, Rikki Caddas!  Caddas, you see, is a psyker who can predict efficiency-sapping accidents at the work site, predict them early enough that they can be prevented and valuable lives, material and time saved.  And Caddas predicts these accidents the hard way, by experiencing the agony of those who will be injured if the accident is not prevented!  Because his crew has fewer injuries and accidents, Barclay's unit is the most efficient outfit in the service and Barclay is looking forward to a big promotion!  Barclay keeps Caddas's powers a secret, lest doctors or scientists cart the savant away for treatment or research.

I didn't expect it, but Phillifent here has produced a good story that actually feels fresh, and it is a story about human beings and human relationships as much as it is about colonies on alien worlds and psychic powers.  The ambitious Barclay; the slovenly and hypochondriacal Caddas; Barclay's second-in-command Major Dannard, who is jealous of the apparently useless Caddas's close relationship with the leader he admires; and Dahlia Honey, a former investigative journalist now working for the government who comes to the planet to inspect Barclay's unit, all have satisfying personalities and relationships with each other.  Oy, this may be my favorite story in this book!

The plot of "Advantage" concerns how the actions of Dannard and Honey threaten to separate Caddas from Barclay, and what this will mean for Barclay's career and the colonization effort.

Surprisingly good, I quite enjoyed it.  I really am going to have to reevaluate what I think of Phillifent now!  (Despite my satisfaction with it, "Advantage" has never been reprinted outside of New Writings in SF 6.)

But wait!  There's more!

As previously noted, Joachim Boaz gifted this book to me, and wrote about it himself in November of 2017.  Joachim and I have a severe disagreement about Phillifent's "Advantage," which he dismisses as "Bad" and awards 2.5 out of 5 possible stars.  Joachim's primary complaint seems to be that the story is about an unhealthy person (Caddas) being exploited (by Barclay) and that it has a female villain (Honey.)  Beyond saying that I think a story can be good even if it ain't "woke," I have a few points to make in defense of "Advantage" from Joachim's criticisms:

1) Phillifent is not celebrating without reservation Barclay's benefiting from Caddas's powers; in fact, Barclay is presented as a selfish careerist and he is defeated by Honey and Dannard in the end when Caddas leaves the planet with Honey.  You could argue that the story subtly portrays the protagonist as the villain and Honey, the antagonist, as the good guy.  One of the strengths of the story is that Phillifent draws nuanced characters who feel real and have both strengths and weaknesses.

2) Joachim seems to think Caddas is a minor, but in fact Caddas is an adult who just acts like a child (he is ineffectual, self-absorbed, prone to whining and eating sugary foods) and is thus treated like a child by people like Honey.  

3) While Barclay is certainly benefiting from his relationship with Caddas, he is employing Caddas's powers to save people's lives and protect the taxpayers' investment in the space colonization project-- to contribute to society.  The physically weak and emotionally immature Caddas seems unlikely to contribute to society without Barclay's guidance--you could argue that Barclay is enabling Caddas to lead a productive life while Honey is just infantilizing him.

**********

Not a bad anthology.  Another volume from the Joachim Boaz wing of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

Vengeance of Quark/3: Dangerous Visions from Sallis, Saxton, and Hill

Back in June I read Quark/3, a 1971 anthology full of challenging speculative fiction by writers I had limited familiarity with.  This week I opened up my 1972 hardcover of Again, Dangerous Visions, to sample a second time the work of three Quark/3 contributors: poet and crime writer James Sallis, feminist and committed gardener Josephine Saxton, and journalist and novelist Richard Hill.

"Tissue" by James Sallis

On this here blog I called Sallis's story in Quark/3, "Field," a "prose poem" that was "not good."  Of the 13 pieces of fiction in Quark/3 I ranked it 11th, and declared it a "certifiable disaster."  Ouch.

Harlan Ellison, editor of Again, Dangerous Visions, includes a five page introduction to "Tissue" in the anthology.  Sallis, we learn, "is clearly one of the most important writers produced by our genre in some time," and Ellison compares him to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Edgar Allen Poe and Fyodor Dostoevsky, suggesting Sallis is a genius with an unstable, even self-destructive, mentality.  Fun fact: like my wife and I, and Thomas Disch, Sallis has lived in both Iowa and in New York.

"Tissue" is in fact two stories, whose titles are not capitalized.  These tales have been reprinted separately in Sallis collections in 1995 and 2000.  The first is "at the fitting shop."  This story, four pages, consists entirely of dialogue and includes no quotation marks.  It is an extended joke about how easy it is to get lost in a large department store.  (In my head the characters had the voices of Jack Benny and Frank Nelson.)  The punchline of the joke is that this is an alternate universe in which at puberty young men go to a store's plumbing department to buy a penis.  There are various models to choose from, each with evocative names, like "Polish Sausage" or "Mandrake Special."  I guess this is a satire of American consumerism and morality (to purchase a penis you are legally required to produce a note from your minister, priest or rabbi.)

"at the fitting shop" is alright; it gets my coveted "acceptable" rating.

The second story is the four page "53rd american dream."  This is a surreal story about a monstrous family; the children (Tom, Tim and Jim) regularly murder and devour the maid, the father (Bruce) has sharp teeth and detachable facial features, the mother (who I guess is some kind of huge arachnid or insect) can be disassembled alive--her cast off limbs are capable of independent movement.  The joke is that the mother and father try to be good parents, following advice from a book on parenting; part of this advice is to not make a mystery of their sex life, and so the kids get to watch and cheer on dad as he flagellates their mother until she achieves orgasm.  The story is full of brand names like Brillo, Beautyrest, and Neiman Marcus, I suppose some kind of reference to American consumerism.  Maybe we are supposed to see the family as representative of rich WASPs (Neiman Marcus is upscale, isn't it?) who exploit poor ethnics (the murdered maids have names like Olga and Griselda.)

"53rd american dream" is OK; the more surreal passages are a little hard to visualize, which makes the story seem long.  I think I prefer the snappier "at the fitting shop."

Both tales are much better than "Field," a pleasant surprise.

Emshwiller's illustration for "at the fitting shop"

"Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon" by Josephine Saxton

I liked "Nature Boy," Saxton's story in Quark/3, and rated it the #4 story in that anthology.

After a page and a half of Ellison's jokes we get Saxton's page and a half autobiography.  She never watches TV, she loves to cook, swim, read, write, garden and paint and she is fascinated by religion, psychology and the occult.

The story itself is 13 pages.  Elouise is a healthy young woman on a planet where everybody, by law, is required to have some kind of disease or birth defect.  Elouise is dragged onto a stage to be examined by a legion of doctors--Saxton presents us with a scene which all you gynecology students out there may enjoy.  Then a mob of people even less healthy than the average citizen of Pergamon storm into the theater and demand Eloise; do they want to worship her, or sacrifice her?  Elouise manages to escape, in the process killing almost everybody in the building (over a hundred people) with poison.

The writing is fine, but the story feels long.  We learn on the second page that on Pergamon people are required to be ill and Elouise is healthy; there isn't any subtle buildup to this bizarre fact, and it isn't sprung on us as a surprise.  The illnesses of the many incidental characters are described in lengthy detail; I wasn't sure if this was supposed to be funny or disgusting or both.  (The whole story has a jocular tone, with jokes about how the doctors love to play golf, for example.)  I'm afraid I was neither disgusted nor amused.  Saxton's focus is, perhaps, Elouise's own psychology; she wants to be among people like herself, and alternately wishes she was on a planet of healthy people, or was ill like her fellow Pergamonians.  Unfortunately I didn't find Elouise's psychology very compelling. 

In the Afterword to the story Saxton tells us that "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon" is about the struggle for freedom and how politics is not a means to achieve freedom, the dangers of identifying with people in the mass, the importance of accepting yourself, and the fact that nothing gained at the expense of others is legitimate.  All that sounds more interesting than the actual story, which didn't do anything for me; it wasn't bad, but didn't excite any pleasure or admiration either.

A little disappointing; inferior to "Nature Boy."  

Emshwiller's illustration for "Elouise and the Doctors of the Planet Pergamon"

"Moth Race" by Richard Hill 

When I read Quark/3 I thought Hill's "Brave Salt," a bizarre farce, was even worse than Sallis's "Field."  So I didn't start this story with much enthusiasm.  I was relieved to find "Moth Race" was a traditional story with a plot, images, and emotion.

In the future the world is run by a mysterious totalitarian government that enforces order and material equality.  Everybody has to take pills that dampen aggression (as well as racial prejudice.)  Intelligence test results guide the government in assigning people jobs; a small number of people who do well on the tests are permitted to travel and/or have children.  Everyone is provided (bland) food and health care, and government-provided TV transmits not only sound and images, but taste and physical sensations, such as having sex with a famous actress or eating lobster, to liven up everybody's drab constricted life.

Once a year comes The Race, a day on which people do not need to take the "easypills."  Brave people volunteer to ride in a car on a track; if someone can survive two laps around the track, he or she becomes the Champion, and will be permitted to eat luxury food and travel the world.  (It is the Champion's erotic and culinary experiences that are transmitted to the populace via TV.)  The Race, however, is no test of skill: the car goes at a set speed, and traps appear so unpredictably and so quickly that it is impossible to dodge them.  The Race is either totally random, or rigged, and only one person of the multitude of volunteers has ever survived The Race to become Champion.

In the story the Champion, perhaps bored with life or fed up with societal corruption, volunteers to ride The Race again, and is killed.  We are invited to speculate as to the long term effects of this action; will it destabilize the static dictatorial society?

There have been lots of science fiction stories with this kind of setting and plot, but "Moth Race" is well-written and has a slightly different point of view: the main character is a spectator at The Race, (not the Champion, whose motives remain a mystery), and The Race is a refutation of ideas of free will and merit, not a vehicle for an adventure story.  So I enjoyed "Moth Race," and think it a worthwhile read.  Like Sallis's contribution to Again, Dangerous Visions, Hill's story is a pleasant surprise.

******************

I was a little disappointed with the Saxton, but revisiting these three writers has been a good experience.  I'd be willing to read shorts by all of them again.

I should also note that one of the nice things about Again, Dangerous Visions is Ed Emshwiller's illustrations for each story; many of them are quite good. 

Quark/3 (Part 2): Sallis, Dorman, Wilhelm, Hill, Saxton and Kidd

For some reason (dementia?) I decided to forgo my usual practice of reading one or two stories from an anthology and then consigning the book to the inaccessible recesses of my overstuffed bookcase; instead I am reading every page of Quark Slash Three, the early 1971 issue of a quarterly devoted to experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Unsurprisingly, R. A. Lafferty was the star of the first leg of my journey into Quark/3, though editor Samuel Delany put in a creditable performance as well. I thought Gordon Eklund's contribution was conventionally bad, while college professor Joanna Russ managed to find a special way to inflict a bad story on me.  Who will be today's standouts as I read the second third of Quark/3?

"Field" by James Sallis

James Sallis mostly seems to write crime stories, as well as books about American music (his bio at the end of Quark Stroke Three indicates he was working on a book on country and western music.) I've never read anything by Sallis before.

"Field" is, I guess, a series of prose poems.  First off we get a bunch of bizarre images and sentence fragments in both first and second person.  On the first page we get "Where this morning the charred bodies of all the women I've loved come floating down the stream outside our window," a line I heard in my mind in the voice of poet Jason Irwin.  This flight of fancy made me laugh, but most of the sections aren't that funny, alas.

One paragraph is a "to do" list with most of the items crossed out, another is the instructions of how to convert your snowmobile into a lawnmower ("Tighten bolts 1-8. (See Diagram 3.)")  There are vignettes about sophisticated writers who live in cramped apartments and can't pay their bills and can't stay true to their lovers.

Not good.

"Vanishing Points" by Sonya Dorman

This is a two page poem about the world being destroyed in a nuclear war: "the world winds up into a cloud...into one massive atom / O man of fire."  At least that is what I think it is about.  There's also a lot about fish and animals, the stars, etc.
  
This poem is listed as "Vanishing Point" on the table of contents, but the title is plural in the actual text. 

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" by Kate Wilhelm 

Years ago I read Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, one of those books in which aliens who share the author's politics force evil humanity to behave, putting an end to our racism, imperialism and strip mining.  I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read more Wilhelm; this must be the first short story I have ever read by her.

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" is a series of brief scenes from a dystopic future, with Wilhelm covering all the typical boring complaints like overpopulation, pollution, TV, consumerism, urban terrorism, international war, etc.  The plot is presented to us out of chronological order, and is a little ambiguous, but I think I have pieced it together.

The world is in turmoil, and little Billy's father, a scientist, testifies to Congress that because of overpopulation, humanity will go extinct unless the government kills half the population ASAP.  His plan is rejected by an influential Southern senator, so Billy's dad conspires to poison the water supply (or something of that nature) to prune the population without the government's OK.  Dad gets caught and imprisoned and lobotomized (or something; Wilhelm keeps everything vague.)  Billy grows up and gets a job at a consumer products firm, while things gets worse around the world, with increasing violent crime, war, and overcrowding.  Billy's father is released from prison and moves in with his son, and, before long, hangs himself.  There is also a subplot I didn't quite get about how Bill is hallucinating that he can shift himself to a world without other people.  I'm also not sure if the sections about Billy as a kid caught up in a riot and the parts about Bill leading a pop band are depicting alternate realities or just different periods of Bill's life. 

Not very good, but better than the Eklund, the Sallis and the Russ.

"Brave Salt" by Richard Hill

I've never even heard of Richard Hill before.  A gander at Hill's file at isfdb suggests that he retired from writing SF after he had a story accepted by Harlan Ellison for Again, Dangerous Visions.

This story is a surrealistic farce in twelve chapters (that's right, 12 chapters in ten pages) about a low-IQ hotel pool lifeguard who participates in a sort of Bay of Pigs style attack on Haiti.  It almost reads like Hill made it up as he went along, or perhaps used the surrealist technique of "automatic writing."  "Brave Salt" is full of references to pop culture figures like Jim Backus, Charlton Heston, and Merv Griffin, and feeble jokes about sex and drugs.  The most memorable joke: members of a band are having anal sex on stage while singing "I've Got You Babe," and then somebody bumps into their amplification equipment and the band is electrocuted to death.

Craziest of all, in the intro to his story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Hill floats the idea of expanding "Brave Salt" into a full length novel!

Suddenly Joanna Russ's story isn't looking so bad.

"Nature Boy" by Josephine Saxton

I've read Saxton's odd contribution to The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but this is the first fiction I have read by her.

This is a story about a mentally ill 40-year-old man who lives with his wealthy mother on a country estate.  He suffers delusions and unbidden, obsessive "daydreams," and feels driven to make "sacrifices" to woodland deities. We learn that he murdered a little girl some years ago in the woods; the tension in the story comes when he takes a walk into these very woods and meets another little girl--will he murder her as well?  The theme of the story seems to be human callousness and cruelty; the little girl and the mental case both kill small animals.

This is a moderately good mainstream crime or realistic horror story; the fact that the murderer believes in spirits, including the spirit of the girl he murdered, perhaps counts as SF content.     



Advertisement for The Science Fiction Book Club

Bound in the center of the book is an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club, highlighting the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, but also offering a dozen other books at low low prices.  One wonders how many of these books would pass the Delany/Hacker test of "meaningfully addressing crises" and "being politically dangerous."  (I have a feeling my man ERB wouldn't be passing this test.)

"Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside" by Virginia Kidd

Kidd is a very important literary agent, but I never have read any of her fiction.   

"Balls" is the biography of a successful Hollywood screenwriter who is obsessed with Walt Disney and Disney productions.  I guess this is a satire of American culture and society, perhaps in particular of Hollywood; at one point the protagonist declares, "I'm a real American success."  It feels tired and tedious, long and boring.  As you expect in a story about a Hollywood habitue the screenwriter has numerous divorces and sees a shrink.  Maybe Kidd is trying to tell us that Americans live in a fantasy world and are disconnected from the real world, that they care more about TV and celebrities than flesh and blood people they know.  Also maybe Americans are obsessed with success and happiness, but work too hard to really enjoy success and achieve happiness.

The SF content consists of the writer having the delusion that the universe is sending him (essentially useless) messages or signals via everyday sounds or hallucinatory images.  For example, the writer tells himself he should be happy, as he has "got it made," and then he sees a vision of a topless girl; this is a "tit maid."  A phone rings unexpectedly in the therapist's office and the doctor answers it, "Hello." Our hero figures this is a message in reverse, that the universe is saying to him, "Oh, Hell."

Weak.

*************

Cripes, doesn't look so hot, does it?  The Saxton story is marginally good, the Wilhelm is OK, the rest are poor or bad.

Well, there are several more selections in Quark/3, maybe in the third and final leg of my journey the anthology will make a comeback.