"Recruiting Station" and "The Chronicler" by A. E. van Vogt

Late in February I read Richard C. Meredith's 1970 story "Earthcoming" and thought it might be an homage to A. E. van Vogt.  Exploring this theory, I reread van Vogt's story 1942 tale "Asylum," which first appeared in Astounding.  I enjoyed "Asylum" so much I have decided to reread two other van Vogt stories from 1940s issues of Astounding, "Recruiting Station" and "The Chronicler."  These stories have been reprinted again and again, under various titles, but I will be taking advantage of the internet archive to read the very same texts SF fans read back during the reign of FDR and his successor Harry S. Truman.

Check out Isaac Walwyn's fun and informative website on van Vogt for more information on the crazy publishing histories of "Recruiting Station" and "The Chronicler" and any other production of our favorite Canadian; Walwyn's site has helped me time and again over the years as I have explored van Vogt's perplexing body of work.

"Recruiting Station" (1942)

Rogers's cover illo depicts the beastmen
securing Jack Garson in the cockpit
of a swift little war machine of
20,000 years in the future

I believe I first read this story in a library copy of the 2003 collection Transfinite: The Essential A. E. van Vogt, back in my Manhattan days.  "Recruiting Station," which takes up almost 70 pages of Transfinite, has appeared in book form, presented as a novel, multiple times under the titles Masters of Time and Earth's Last Fortress.  For its appearance in Astounding it was adorned with some respectable drawings by Hubert Rogers.

Ten years ago social science college student Norma Matheson rejected physicist Jack Garner's proposal of marriage so she could focus on her career.  Things haven't worked out so well, and tonight she stands in a dark city park, before a river, considering suicide!  She turns away from this drastic expedient, sits on a park bench, and is approached by a strange figure--a mysterious man, his face in shadow, who somehow already knows her name and her sad history, offers her a cushy job and a decent apartment!  She accepts the offer, and starts work at a recruiting center where American men can volunteer to fight for Calonia, a sympathetic country that is the victim of some kind of aggression (presumably van Vogt is trying to evoke from the reader feelings about the Spanish Civil War; George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia was published in England in 1938.)  Norma realizes at her first day at work that the volunteers she sends into a back room, ostensibly for a medical exam, are being transported via a huge machine to fight in some dreadful war in the future!  She tries to contact the police, but the  head of the recruiting office Doctor Lell, he who hired her and an individual who in light of day is revealed to be of obscure ethnic background (he has dark skin like an African's, eyes like an East Asian's, a nose like a European's, etc.) has irresistible powers of surveillance, punishment and reward, rendering her his slave!  Among Lell's powers are the ability to read Norma's mind, and to adjust her biological age: if she follows orders he can make her as healthy as she was at twenty, but if she shirks he can transform her into a feeble old crone!  "We are the masters of time!" he brags, and in return for Norma's service offers her "eternal youth!"

Norma is no dunce, and neither is she a pushover, so she tests the limits of Dr. Lell's mind reading, writing a letter to her old beau, Jack, telling him of her unbelievable predicament.  When Jack comes to rescue her (this guy is a real softie, coming to the aid of the girl who shot him down a decade ago and is apparently bonkers!) he unwillingly ends up as one of Dr. Lell's recruits!

The narrative shifts from Norma to Jack, and we watch as Dr. Lell gives him a lecture and a little tour of the Earth of 20,000 years in the future.  In 200 centuries this big blue marble of ours will be ruled by the Glorious, a few million aristocrats who hold sway over countless numbers of slaves, beast-like people biologically and psychologically engineered to be strong, dim, and obedient.  These brutes live in vast cities of thousands of identical unadorned buildings.  Again referring to issues salient to 1940s readers, Jack compares this severely hierarchical society and its rigidly planned economy to that of the Nazis and Communists, even suggesting the ugliness of the culturally barren city is another example of the inevitable failure of all planned societies--Dr. Lell bridles at the comparison.

Humankind has colonized the solar system, and the Glorious are at war with the nation states that have grown up on the other planets; this alliance is called the Planetarians.  (The war was precipitated by disagreements over how to deal with overpopulation of the Solar System.)  The Planetarians are winning the war, having landed troops on Earth and surrounded the very city Norma lives in (in the far future this city is called Delpa.)  Every day the hulking Planetarian war machines advance forty feet deeper into the city, pushing back the Glorious "time energy barrier," a sort of force field powered by time (or something... one of the story's themes is how time is "the only reality" and "a titanic energy" that can be directed and exploited, I guess like a superior version of atomic power.)  Running low on brutes, the Glorious are recruiting human soldiers from every period of Earth history to die by the hundreds every day buying precious time for their scientists; Delpa is the site of the laboratory where the Glorious are developing a still more effective time energy barrier, one which will make them invulnerable and enable them to snatch victory from the very jaws of defeat!

As the story progresses it gets more and more complicated and confusing as Jack and Martha meet new people, learn new things, and so many of these people turn out to be liars or just mistaken, and so many things learned turn out to be untrue or incomplete versions of the truth.  Van Vogt keeps us off balance, switching gears and defying our expectations at every turn.  When we get this passage describing Jack's confusion:

Garson sighed wearily.  He felt suddenly genuinely exhausted, mentally and physically, by the twisting course of events.

we readers sympathize with him!

Along with the rest of the day's complement of men shanghaied from throughout human history, Jack is put into a "depersonalization machine" to be brainwashed; the others emerge as automatons willing to sacrifice their lives for the Glorious war effort,  but the machine fails to work on Jack.  In addition, the physicist receives a mysterious mental message, telling him that if the Glorious super time-energy barrier is activated it will destroy the entire universe, and so he must warn the Planetarians of this fact!  Once pushed out onto the battlefield Jack endeavors to get to the Planetarian lines.  Hit by a "paralyzer," he wakes up to find himself a captive aboard a Venus-bound Planetarian space ship--while he was in his coma the other captives have launched a mutiny and taken over half the ship.  The mutiny seems to be led by a character named Dra Derrel, a big wig among the people known as The Wizards of Lin, a civilization which purportedly invented the first space ship thousands of years before the rise of the Glorious.  Wizards of Lin?  Are these the same people referred to in the Clane/Empire of the Atom stories?  Or just our man Van, an early adopter of today's cult of reusing and recycling, using a cool-sounding name twice?  Zoinks, is this an indication I have to reread another van Vogt production I read some ten or more years ago?*  Anyway, Derrel claims to be the source of that mental message Jack received, but Jack isn't so sure, and the goings on he participates in on the ship provide reasons for him to suspect that neither the Wizards nor the Planetarians are all they are cracked up to be.

Interspersed with Jack's adventures in the far future are Norma's back in the 20th century--for three years she works for Dr. Lell, who shuttles back and forth between the war in his time and his job managing the recruiting center in the 1940s.  Norma figures out the means by which Dr. Lell manipulates her biological age, and herself receives mental messages about the dangers of the Glorious time-energy barrier.  Like so many van Vogt characters, she develops tremendous mental powers (we later learn these are called "Insel mind powers"--write your own joke!) and these powers enable her to travel instantly through time and space and to telekinetically fight the robots and computers Dr. Lell sends against her.

Norma and Jack's plot threads join together again when Norma, in the midst of a battle with Glorious robots near where she earlier contemplated suicide, uses her newfound powers to teleport him from the Planetarian spaceship back to the 1940s to aid her.  During his time in the far future Jack has figured some things out, and at his suggestion Norma summons the "mysterious manipulators of the universe," man's ultimate evolutionary form, who live at the end of time and have been sending her and Jack those mental messages.  In the last two pages of the tale these beings resolve some of the mysteries Norma and Jack (and we readers) have been confronted with heretofore and also explain their complex method of saving the universe (it entails creating new universes in which to quarantine malignant elements so that this universe is the best of all possible universes...I think.)  But their power is not unlimited, and they need Norma's help to prevent the Glorious time-energy barrier's construction, just as they needed her help to get to the 20th century.  Norma transports herself back to the very moment when she first met Dr. Lell, to live again her three years of service to him, but this time she knows all his tricks and has those Insel mind powers, and can with ease sabotage the development of the Glorious universe-threatening barrier (and build a happy marriage with Jack.)

"Recruiting Station" is full of wild SF ideas--a woman's  experience of her thirty-year-old body transformed into a more vigorous and beautiful twenty-year-old one, and into a feeble and wretched seventy-year old one; a totalitarian society of supermen who lord it over masses of beastmen; a man suspended in nothingness for millions of years when his girlfriend tries to use her newfound mental powers to teleport him to her from the future and he gets stuck in a "time emptiness" near the time-energy barrier around Delpa--and more!  Van Vogt doesn't necessarily explore these ideas deeply; sometimes he just addresses them briefly or throws them at you, leaving you to puzzle over their ramifications or simply allow them to wash over you in a tide of perplexity as he continues his story at a breakneck pace.  The Canadian mastermind's object is not to do detailed and exacting "world-building," but to generate a mood of strangeness and excitement, a sense of wonder at the dizzying possibilities of nearly unimaginable periods of time and inconceivable amounts of power.

Van Vogt is not known for having a good writing style, but some passages of "Recruiting Station" are actually quite effective.  The opening scenes in which Norma comes close to killing herself and her first few days of work for Dr Lell, in which she learns the extent of his powers, are good, and I liked the description of the starkly uniform city of the Glorious and of the battle at the periphery of the force field.  The fighting in Delpa, in which Jack Garson and the other Glorious soldiers pilot little one-man "torpedo-shaped craft" in a desperate attack on the Planetarian land battleships. reminded me a lot of a battle in Jack Vance's Durdane books, which I read in my New York days and then gave away to a friend so I can't consult them now.  Where I felt things sagged a little was in the scenes on the Planetarian spaceship with the Wizard of Lin; this section of the novel is less vivid and interesting, and felt less connected to the overall plot.

This is a fun story, though I had to make some effort to really "get" some of it (I essentially read the story twice in a short period) and of course it lacks some of the things I routinely praise in stories, like complex characters and human emotion--the characters and tone are essentially flat, van Vogt hitting the same notes again and again, though I guess you could say he hits them harder and harder as he moves the story relentlessly forward, one crazy idea or twist after another until we arrive at the end, Van having taken us full circle and deposited us back at the beginning.  To appreciate "Recruiting Station" you have to enjoy the work of figuring it out, the occasional powerful images, and the recurring surprises and general feeling of confusion and amazement it generates.  ("Dream-like" is a phrase often used to describe his work.)

In my opinion, "Recruiting Station" is a good example of what van Vogt is all about.  It is also interesting as a product of its time, as I have suggested, and feminist readers might find noteworthy its depiction of a college-educated professional woman who is given the responsibility of saving the universe but who at the same time has a man at the center of her psychological life, a man whose help she needs to succeed in her awful mission and to achieve personal happiness.  Students of van Vogt's long career may find his descriptions of the soldiers in the story as lusty, adventurous men unafraid of death, to be of a piece with his interest in "the violent male."  "Recruiting Station" gets a big thumbs up from this van Vogt aficionado.

*After I drafted this line but before I copyedited and uploaded this post I purchased a paperback edition of Wizard of Linn at the maze-like D.C. bookstore Capitol Hill Books.

"The Chronicler" (1946)

Life on the streets of Naze: Vampiric muggers
drink the blood of their victim

I think I first read this one in my copy of the collection M33 in Andromeda, where it bears the poetical title "Siege of the Unseen" and takes up nearly 80 pages.  Later appearances of the story carry the title "The Three Eyes of Evil."  The story was serialized over two issues of Astounding, where it features illustrations by Walter Swenson which, as a group, exhibit both a simple modern design sensibility and a sort of woodcut look.

Stock broker and married man Michael Slade is slightly injured in a car accident.  A strip of skin is torn from his forehead, revealing a third eye!  His wife wants him to have this third eye covered up again via plastic surgery, and when he decides to keep it exposed and see if he can train it to work in concert with his other two eyes, she divorces him!

"The Chronicler" is mostly related in the third person omniscient, with press clippings and court documents providing plot elements and "color."  These "primary documents" also inform us from page one that Slade has been found dead--on page three we learn he was "crushed"--which renders the main text as a sort of flashback.  (Again I am reminded of 1950's Sunset Boulevard, which I just mentioned a month ago; that film starts with us aware that the protagonist has died under gruesome circumstances, and proceeds to explain how the main character came to this pass.)  This way of structuring the story makes "The Chronicler," somewhat like "Recruiting Station," a circle--we both start and end the story with Slade's (spoiler!--supposed) death.

Our man Van is interested in questionable alternative theories of medicine--for example, he was deeply involved in L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics.  In "The Chronicler" Michael Slade trains his three eyes using odd methods that include exposing the eye to direct sunlight, the kind of thing I have been told all my life is akin to eye suicide.  In his brief reviews of the Ace publication of Siege of the Unseen and the Simon and Schuster edition of War Against the Rull in If (as you know, all issues of If are available at the internet archive), Frederick Pohl points out that the methods used by Slade are those of discredited weirdo William Horatio Bates.  Van Vogt describes the methods in detail, but never uses Bates's name, which is a little odd.

Slade briefly gets his third eye operating at full capacity, and sees into a parallel universe of cave men and a naked woman with three eyes!  But then his interdimensional vision fails him, perhaps because of something that woman does.  Slade leaves the city to spend time at his childhood home on a farm, and there is able to transport himself bodily to that other plane of existence.  This alternate world is parallel to ours (the lay of the land, hills and valleys and so forth, are recognizable, but trees and buildings are different) and, exploring a little, he comes upon a landed spaceship in a field.  Aboard the ship he meets the same three-eyed woman, and again his third eye is stripped of its power in short order, and he is returned to our Earth.

A month later Slade heads back to the city where finds that the three-eyed lady (sing it!), has been to his home, leaving with his servant a note signed "Leear" and a self-destructing phonograph record so he can learn the language of the city of Naze!  According to the note, when he can speak the language, he is to make a midnight rendezvous with her at a specified spot out in the country.  When he makes the rendezvous, he doesn't see Leear, just hears her voice a moment before she teleports him to that other dimension, within the walls of the ancient and decrepit city of spires and vampires known as Naze!

Like Delpa in "Recruiting Station," Naze in "The Chronicler" is a city under siege, protected by a force field.  The inhabitants who crowd its streets during the day are decadent and depraved, with no work and no ambition other than to drink human blood!  (To this end everybody carries a syringe and a metal cup!)  At night the most vigorous vampires ambush those foolish enough to walk the streets past sunset, and during the day the weak beg the strong for a few drops of blood the way throngs of people beg me for a dollar every time I go into D.C. to visit the art museums and bookstores!  (In Naze you can whip beggars who importune you, but I don't think I'd get the approval of the authorities if I started tolchocking the impecunious citizens of "the District" with my umbrella.)  Leear has sent Slade to Naze to assist in its destruction, and, seeing the place, Slade is so appalled by it that he agrees that it should be destroyed by the spaceship that for centuries has hovered over the city, menacing the abominable metropolis...but is he sure he really wants to get mixed up with all these crazy people, to actually risk his life for them?  After all, Leear is found to be a master of deceit who has no qualms about sacrificing people to achieve her goal of destroying the city, and even the fifth columnists Slade meets in Naze are so addicted to human blood that they strap Slade down when he is unawares and steal some of his precious bodily fluid!

The people at isfdb warn that this edition is likely
abridged.

Leear's powers only keep Slade in Naze for 36 hours or so, and back on Earth Slade tries to put all this Naze insanity behind him and renew his marriage and relationships--to put an ordinary life back together he even tells his ex-wife he's willing to cover up his third eye.  But wifey and former friends want nothing to do with the three-eyed freak!  So Slade gathers together weapons and equipment, trains his third eye with determination, and transports himself to the other dimension under his own steam!

Slade makes sure he appears on the other side not in the city of Naze, but among those three-eyed cave people. This tribe turns out to not be primitives at all, but sophisticated moderns who have chosen to live the simple life!  (Is Van pulling a Chad Oliver on us?)  The tribespeeps have total control of their nervous systems (down to the molecule!) and begin training Slade in achieving control of his own body.  ("The Chronicler" is all about the importance of training.)  The most important thing they have to teach him is the ability to relax--all our bodily and psychological problems come from tension, and, to be happy and healthy, what you have to do is relax! 

After a month of training to relax, Slade's relaxation is ruined when it comes out that the tribe is training him to control his body so he can help Leear in her war on Naze--she thinks that only Slade can kill the cruel ruler of Naze, a man named Geean.  Leear is not one of the tribe, but the tribe is working with her because the mere existence of Naze limits them--if Naze is destroyed, they can master control of their bodies beyond the molecular level to the very electron level and thus achieve immortality!  Slade storms off into the wilderness, only to be captured by airborne Naze troops!

Back in the diabolical city, Slade meets Geean himself atop the city's central spire.  Slade is astonished to find he has already met Geean among the tribesmen--was the tribe working for Geean under duress and only lying about working with Leear?  Leear appears, and these two competing immortals explain the history of how the hi-tech city of Naze degenerated and why Leear and Geean have been at war for a thousand years.  Ten centuries ago, the human race on this plane was falling into decadence and ennui because they had achieved immortality via machinery.  A vote was held, and it was ordered that everybody destroy his immortality belt so they all could learn how to achieve immortality via the newly discovered relaxation method--as long as any considerable mechanical construction remained it would be impossible to achieve the electron level of relaxation, so all the cities would have to be torn down.

Two people were permitted to temporarily retain their immortality belts, Leear and a companion, who were to observe the transition from the space ship (Leear is the "chronicler" of the title.)  A small number of rebels who opposed this transition struck just after the belts were destroyed--Geean was their leader.  In the fighting every other city in the world was blow up with nuclear weapons, and Geean killed Leear's companion and took his belt and made himself dictator of Naze.  Leear managed to get the space ship airborne before Geean could activate his force field, and she destroyed the immortality belt manufacturing facilities from the air, rendering it impossible to return to a fully immortal society via mechanical means--everybody Leear and Geean had known for thousands of years died while they continued on, immortal, his city and her ship locked in a stalemate.

Slade is able to kill Geean because he is from another plane, and can send Geean to our plane; as they are all in a skyscraper, and there is no parallel skyscraper back in our world, when Slade does so the tyrant falls to his death (his immortality device will not work in a different plane, which Van foreshadowed by demonstrating that the gunpowder in Slade's pistols didn't work on the Naze plane.)  The authorities back on Earth misidentify Geean's crushed body as Slade's--to the two-eyed, I guess all (crushed) three-eyed dudes look the same!

Slade learns that Leear genetically engineered him to have a third eye and manipulated his life on our Earth so he could serve as her cat's paw in her war to liberate mankind on her plane from mortality.  Slade is willing to overlook this (and the ten thousand year age difference), and it is clear as the story ends that Slade and Leear will become husband and wife and live happily forever after.

Though there are plenty of people using disguises and lying, and plenty of people who are misled and spread misinformation, "The Chronicler" is more straightforward and easier to understand than "Recruiting Station."  The story is also less economical, with passages I would consider fat.  For example, the long scenes about the (curiously unnamed) Bates method.  There is also an explanation that "Naze," even though it looks like "Nazi" on the page, is not meant to make the reader think of the German National Socialist party.  Wouldn't it have been easier to just make up a name for the city that didn't look almost exactly like the colloquial name for one of the most famous and provocative organizations in history?  A strange artistic choice on the part of the author.

 I like it, but our man Van has done better.

**********

Two entertaining SF capers about cities under siege, people striving for immortality, individuals manipulated by superior beings, and men and women who ride a rocky road to marital bliss.  More van Vogt in our future!

Dwellers of the Deep by Barry N. Malzberg (plus The Day of the Burning)

"You don't say?" Stuart says.  "That's very interesting.  That's one I never heard of before.  Must be very tough for you, hey, Izzie? Aliens!  Seizing your mind!  Imagine that."

"It's pretty tough," Fox says.  "There's no question about it."

"He's bearing up very well," Susan says.  "But he needs help and I thought the Solarians could give it to him."

Do I love Barry Malzberg?  Of course I do. But that love does not blind me to those of his idiosyncrasies which might fairly be considered faults.  One such fault?  Our man Barry, resident of the great state of New Jersey lo these many years, former employee of the New York City government, has produced a prodigious volume of salable writing, but one strategy that has made his tremendous output possible has been the recycling of plots and themes.  For example, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we have read numerous stories by Malzberg that feature hypnotherapy that allows the patient to experience socially unacceptable sexual liaisons and acts of violence.  Another plot Malzberg has reused has been the one about an astronaut who goes crazy and kills his comrades or bombs the Earth or both.  And those aren't the only plots Malzberg has used more than once.

Back in 2011 I read Malzberg's 1974 novel The Day of the Burning, in which an employee of the New York City government thought he was being contacted by aliens and believed that the fate of the world lay in his hands.  Just last year I reread Malzberg's 1973 story "Closed Sicilian," in which a chess player thinks he is in contact with aliens and the fate of the world rests in his hands.  Today, as part of our continuing series looking at Ace Doubles resident here in the MPorcius library, we are talking about Dwellers of the Deep, which appeared in Ace Double 27400 in 1970 under Malzberg's transparent K. M. O'Donnell pseudonym.  It is not exactly surprising that Dwellers of the Deep is about a former employee of the New York City government who thinks he is being contacted by aliens and believes that the fate of the world rests in his hands.

In the 1990s there were some rumblings among temporarily ascendant dissident factions of the New York City government that there might be some reforms made to CUNY.  CUNY professors and administrators, including those in my office, sprang into action to prevent any such reforms, and I did some work on a research project which consisted of calling up and interviewing people who had dropped out of CUNY without earning a degree.  No matter what these people said (many told me that CUNY had been just like high school, with nobody taking classes seriously), in our report they played the role of grateful alums asserting that the CUNY experience had wrought a vast improvement in their lives, even though they had not graduated from CUNY, and thus no reforms were necessary.  Of course, their names didn't appear in the report and there were no recordings of the interviews, so our report was about as verifiable as an urban legend related via a friend of a friend, or as my little anecdote here.

Dwellers of the Deep also appears in 1979's
Malzberg at Large...

Dwellers of the Deep takes place in the summer of 1951.  Our hero, 23-year-old Izzinius Fox, like an alternate reality MPorcius, a few months ago quit his city job conducting fraudulent interviews of "dispossessed or evicted welfare recipients...."  Why did he quit?  To collect unemployment compensation ("it would last at least twenty-six and possibly fifty-two weeks" and "cover his rent and food nicely") and devote himself full-time to collecting science-fiction magazines!

Malzberg seems to have chosen 1951 as the setting for his novel because this was a time of ferment in the science-fiction community. In this novel the leading SF magazine, Tremendous Stories, is being challenged by Thoughtful Stories and Thrilling Stories, periodicals which have more "prestige" than Tremendous and have stolen most of Tremendous' famous contributors.  The SF world is also embroiled in a dispute about the theories of SF writer Cupboard, who has recently published non-fiction articles with titles like "A New Engineering of the Mind."  You probably already realize this is all a parody of the once dominant Astounding facing competition from Galaxy and F&SF and of L. Ron Hubbard's Dianetics articles.

Fox fears he may be going insane, and well he might: periodically his consciousness is transported as if by magic to a space ship where aliens who claim to be minor civil servants of a galactic union demand he hand over a copy of the aforementioned article, "A New Engineering of the Mind."  If he does so, he is told, the aliens will bring peace and prosperity to Earth via membership in the Galactic Federation, but Fox does not trust them and refuses to cooperate, causing the aliens to threaten to resort to coercive measures.  These "Interceptions," as Fox calls them, last a maximum of ten minutes, but when he is returned to his body on Earth he finds no time has passed.  In fact, one Interception takes place while Fox, a virgin, is in the arms of Susan Forsythe, a bespectacled and large-breasted SF fan who is always trying to get Fox to join her fan group, the Solarians, and she doesn't even notice his disappearance and return!  Shaken by this Interception, Fox puts his makeout session with Susan on hold so he can describe to her his incredible problem.

With the single-mindedness we sometimes see in women trying to change men, Susan doesn't dismiss Fox's experiences as delusions, but instead uses them as a lever to get him to come to tonight's meeting of the Solarians!  She thinks "Izzie" should tell the Solarians his story, that maybe they can provide him useful advice!  The Solarian meeting, however, collapses in rancorous internecine warfare before Fox can relate to them his incredible tale.  (Presumably the passionate disputes among SF fans in Dwellers of the Deep are a satire of the famous strife in New York City SF fan circles in the 1930s, when Marxist SF fans like Donald Wollheim broke with Sam Moskowitz's Greater New York Science Fiction Club to form the Futurians, whose members included Communist Party member Fred Pohl and Trotskyist Judith Merrill.)

...and 1994's The Passage of the Light

After the Solarian fiasco, Susan takes Fox to see the leader of the splinter group which has broken off from the Solarians, a Miles Graffanatis.   In the story's climax, Fox learns, or has the delusion that, Graffanatis, along with Susan, is a collaborator with the aliens. Graffanatis, a four-hundred pound chain smoker, tells Fox that the aliens have stolen the Cupboard article from Fox's apartment, making both the aliens' efforts to convince him to voluntarily hand over the article, and his resistance, pointless.  This sort of undermines the whole plot, and I can't deny that the novel peters out limply here in the last dozen pages or so.  The real climax of Dwellers of the Deep is the wild meeting of the Solarians, or the section that follows the meeting, Malzberg's satire of Dianetics and Astounding editor John W. Campbell, Jr.'s support of Dianetics. Cupboard's "A New Engineering of the Mind" argues that all of society's problems are the result of obsessions with sex, and calls for extreme measures to suppress the sex drive. I am guessing this is a jocular reference to the views expressed by top SF writers like Robert Heinlein and especially Theodore Sturgeon, who felt that society's problems were caused by sex taboos and repression of sexual desire.    

Despite its somewhat weak ending, Dwellers of the Deep is a fun book, full of fun little jokes and funny characters, most of whom I haven't mentioned (let's mention some of them: Susan and Izzie's insane landlord; Fox's overbearing mother; a fantasy version of Fox's deceased father who is obsessed with the roller derby; and Stuart Wiseman, a bookseller who always tries to overcharge Fox.)  Fox himself is a fun character, a decent enough and smart enough chap but a weak-willed loser from a line of losers who is manipulated by women and businessmen and government bureaucrats, a protagonist more interesting, more believable and more deeply realized than a lot of those we find in Malzberg's body of work.  Of course, any story set in beautiful New York City, where people live in little apartments and ride the subway, tugs at my exile's heart.  Fans of classic SF will perhaps enjoy trying to spot Malzberg expressing his own opinions, roman a clef style, about Golden Age SF; for example, when Fox says "Damon Tyson's" "Parking Ticket" is "lousy," is this SF critic and historian Malzberg hinting that he thinks Damon Knight's famous "To Serve Man" is overrated?  Besides Hubbard, Campbell, and Knight, Malzberg makes veiled references to Isaac Asimov and MPorcius faves A. E. van Vogt and the Kuttners, and no doubt others I didn't grok.

**********

In case something ever happens to Amazon, I am preserving here my 2011 review of The Day of the Burning.  Don't ask me what I am doing in case something ever happens to Google.

In 1974's The Day of the Burning Barry Malzberg uses a gimmick we have all seen on a hundred TV shows - George Mercer has a "friend" whom only he can see or hear, a sort of demon called Lucas. Lucas hangs around George, invisible to everyone else, yakking away and distracting George while George tries to complete his work at the office or complete the sex act with Delores, a fellow office worker. Of course, everyone suspects George is insane because he is always talking to himself.

Lucas eventually reveals that he is the emissary of the Galactic Overlords, and George has been selected to represent the human race to these Overlords, and must take a high stakes test. If he passes the test, the Earth will be admitted to the Galactic Empire; if George fails the test, the human race will be exterminated.

In The Day of the Burning Malzberg endeavors to subvert SF conventions, and, apparently, commonly held notions about government. George is obviously mentally ill - Lucas is a delusion and the idea of Galactic Overlords some sort of fantasy. The test these Galactic Overlords set for George is not any kind of quest or adventure or duel, but rather that he complete one of his office tasks. Malzberg slips into the novel some sarcastic complaints about his editors and readers - we are told that the Galactic Overlords (the novel is ostensibly a report written by George to these Overlords) dislike first person narratives, non-linear chronology and use of the present tense, the very literary techniques Malzberg customarily employs, and prefer the straightforward plotting and action scenes that almost never appear in Malzberg's work.

The narrative is sprinkled with passages related to a subplot about failed space missions to Mars and Venus (the futility of the space program is a recurring theme in Malzberg's writing) and widespread riots and terrorism in U.S. cities. A general theme of the book is the inability of the government and its bureaucracy to accomplish much of anything, be it quell terrorism, send astronauts to other planets, or administer welfare benefits efficiently (George works in the New York City welfare department). The government's incompetence is matched by George's own lack of ability to accomplish anything in his career or his social and erotic life.

I appreciate what Malzberg is trying to do in The Day of the Burning, and he is certainly effective in generating an atmosphere of hopelessness, but the book is a little long and some sections seem to drag and bored me. I guess I can recommend it to Malzberg fans.

I read the 1974 paperback from Ace with the full color ads for Kent cigarettes bound in the center and ten pages of ads for more famous SF writers than Malzberg at the end. This edition seemed to have lots of typos.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

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

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

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

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

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

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

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

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

I can't recommend this, either.

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

***********

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

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

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

No Blade of Grass by John Christopher

"I didn't like the way those bastards down there treated us, but I have to admit they had the right idea.  It's force that counts now."

Around ten years ago, I guess, I read library copies of John Christopher's first three Tripods books, and enjoyed them.  More recently, I read Christopher's The Long Winter and thought it was pretty good.  Back in November of last year I got, for almost nothing at the Salvation Army, a hardcover Book Club Edition of No Blade of Grass, the US retitling of Christopher's 1956 novel The Death of Grass.  Joachim Boaz on twitter and his blog has suggested that No Blade of Grass is somewhat hard to find and expensive, and the jacket, with its unusual come-on ("this jacket description has made no attempt to give you any idea of the plot"), is certainly intriguing.  I guess my acquisition of the novel was something of a coup; let's see if the text lives up to the hype.

At the start of the novel it is the late 1950s; we meet several nice English people: John the engineer; his brother David who owns a farm in a somewhat secluded valley; John's old Army buddy Roger, the cynical government PR flack; the wives and kids.  David and Roger are perfectly positioned to provide John (and us readers) insight on the current world crisis: the virus which is killing crops in Asia and causing mass starvation, and which threatens to get to England any moment!

The virus kills grasses (rice and wheat, as you foodies and botanists already know, are grasses) so when it hits the U.K. the British people will have to live on potatoes and beets!  Her Majesty's Government calculates that such a diet can only support 33% of the British population, so it is decided to euthanize two-thirds of the people...with nuclear bombs!  These bombs will be targeted at the cities, leaving all potential potato fields intact.  Roger gets wind of this secret plan and he and John flee London with their families for David's isolated valley--to make it out of London they have to assassinate soldiers at a roadblock.

The country devolves into anarchy in a matter of hours, and Roger and John have to battle it out with rapists and bandits.  Their cars are seized by what amounts to a robber baron (the medieval kind, not what your high school teacher called Andrew Carnegie) and the band has to march dozens of miles on foot.  Along the way they become murderous bandits themselves, and, in need of firepower to deal with all the other groups of brigands, John recruits followers from among other people on the road, becoming a sort of feudal chief!      

The main theme of the novel is decent 20th century people quickly abandoning all modern morality in a crisis, and taking up medieval or ancient pagan morality, a morality which justifies any act which protects one's family and maintains honor in the eyes of one's fellows and followers.  John is repeatedly directly compared to a medieval baron, who is owed allegiance from, and in turn owes protection to, his followers.  At the end of the story poor John has to decide between loyalty to his followers and to his family; David's valley is already full of refugees by the time John gets there, and can support no more, so John has to storm his own brother's property!

Christopher keeps ambiguous to what extent he feels the utter ruthlessness of the British government, and of John himself, is justified.  This ambiguity is symbolized in Pirrie, a cold and efficient killer who joins John's band early on and whose cleverness and marksmanship make the journey possible.  All through the book Pirrie does dreadful things, but also keeps the party alive, leading John and his family (and the reader) constantly wondering how to feel about, and how to deal with, him.

John's journey, and the moral ambiguity of the things he does to get his people to a new home, is reminiscent of the Aeneid.  There are also plenty of explicit Biblical allusions.  

No Blade of Grass contains several elements that might be of special interest to a 21st century audience.  First, gender issues.  The male characters, for the most part, treat the female characters as second class citizens, either protecting them or taking advantage of the lack of law and order to rape them.  Christopher develops the numerous women characters about as conscientiously as he does the men, and we see how they react to the new and horrible circumstances of post-apocalyptic life, how their values and behavior change.  Nowadays, his portrayal of them might be considered sexist-- there aren't any kung fu girls or female snipers or anything like that; women don't do any of the fighting or leading, though they participate in the debates around the many ethical dilemmas John and his people face.

There is also a lot of talk of the characteristics of different ethnicities and nationalities--the extent to which this is Christopher criticizing British attitudes about other cultures, I'm not sure, though a theme of the novel seems to be that English people see themselves as particularly civilized and disciplined, but in fact will devolve into savagery as fast as anybody.  A fat Jewish businessman appears briefly; he makes a ruckus when separated from his office by the military road block.  Cold and merciless Pirrie is half-French, says that Arabs love to steal and that the English "are sluggish in logic as well as imagination."  Our main characters are all middle-class Londoners, but there are portrayals of country people and working class people as well.  Perhaps The Death of Grass is a useful text for figuring out mid-century British beliefs about the character of both British and non-British peoples.

You could say that No Blade of Grass is an ecological or environmentalist story, but, to be honest, I think the grass-killing-virus premise is there simply to provide the opportunity for society to collapse and for Christopher to get to his violent adventure and little debates about morality and leadership.  For this I was grateful; I don't fancy reading science lectures or green propaganda, I like adventure and human drama.

From a purely literary/entertainment point of view, the novel is a success, and I recommend it; fans of post-apocalyptic and end-of-the-world type of books in particular should give it a read.  The pace is fast, and Christopher's style is lean, smooth and highly readable; there are lots of actions scenes, and the debates I have referred to are tense and quick, not long philosophical discussions or speeches like you might find in a Heinlein novel.  Students of SF history will perhaps want to compare No Blade of Grass to L. Ron Hubbard's 1940 Final Blackout, another novel in which a ruthless guy revives feudal rule in a post-apocalyptic England, but which lacks the ambiguity and literary craft Christopher puts into this book.   

Man of Earth by Algis Budrys

Sibley's face burned.  But soon, he knew, with a sudden joy, that would never happen again.  Soon he would be a man.

The central ideas behind Algis Budrys's famous Rogue Moon (lunar death maze, teleportation, the question of what constitutes a man) are great, but as I wrote back in 2007 the execution did not impress me.  It has taken me almost eight years to give another Budrys novel a chance, but this week I read Man of Earth, a 1958 paperback from Ballantine (number 243) which literally fell to pieces as I read it, and I am glad I did.

An earlier version of Man of Earth appeared in Satellite Science Fiction.  The isfdb is leading me to believe that Man of Earth has been published in physical book form in English only once, but that our friends in Italy have put out three different editions, in '62, '72 and '80.  Here is my chance to gauge the taste of the Italian SF community; maybe they appreciate something about Man of Earth that American SF fans missed!

Man of Earth starts out like one of those postwar books or movies about how stressful and corrupt the modern business world is and how our consumer society is devouring our souls.  It's New York, the year 2197!  Allen Sibley is a genius broker who can tell instinctively what stocks to buy and sell, and his firm is one of the most successful in the finance game!  But he feels like something is missing in his life: he has no family or friends; he is a bust with women; he recalls how he used to make model airplanes as a child and, now in his late forties, wishes he could leave his mark on the world with his hands, not staring at a screen and buying and selling shares.  He is naturally shy and nervous, and suffers terrific anxiety because he knows his whole life can collapse all around him if government regulators or business rivals expose some of the corners he's cut and shady deals he's made.  Then a guy from the mysterious firm of Doncaster Industrial Linens tells him our whole society is prone to collapse because we are using too many resources and soon Mother Earth will run out!

When it looks like Uncle Sam is about to fall on Sibley like a ton of bricks he hires the services of the secretive Doncaster corporation.  In exchange for over 90% of his assets the Doncaster people replace Sibley's eyes and skin so he is no longer identifiable, tinker with his hormones and glands so he will be strong and brave instead of weak and cowardly, provide him forged papers (Sibley is now "John L. Sullivan," a joke I would never have got without google), and then ship him off to the colony on Pluto to start a new life!  Tricky, tricky--until he woke up on the spaceship, Sibley thought he was going to start his new life in the Big Apple, not that barren rock beyond Uranus!

"Sullivan" lands on Pluto 47 pages into the 144 page novel.  Man of Earth is one of those SF stories in which people can walk around on Pluto and breathe the air just fine; there are H2O rivers and the soil can support Earth plants. The Pluto colony has about 20,000 inhabitants, and the place is run along totalitarian lines, with the government assigning people jobs.  Because he doesn't want to blow his cover by admitting he is a business and math whiz Sullivan tells them he has no skills and so they stick him in the army. Why does Pluto need an army?  The people of Pluto feel like the Earth has abandoned them, and the reader is lead to suspect that the Pluto army is going to conquer the Earth Franco-style!  

Sullivan tries to be a good soldier, and with his superior physique and intelligence he soon becomes the best private in the Plutonian army.  He also tries to make friends among his fellow enlisted men, but he has no social skills and is taken advantage of by a conniving bully, leaving him alienated from his comrades.

In the last pages of the book Budrys ties the whole plot together.  Doncaster gave the lonely Sibley a superior body to match his superior mind and sent him to Pluto for military training in order to groom him to be the leader of the first interstellar colonization effort!  Pluto is secretly run by Doncaster, and the army is not going to attack Earth; just about everybody on the planet is going to be leaving the solar system to found a galactic empire, and Sibley/Sullivan is going to be in charge of this heroic adventure!

Man of Earth is pretty good; I certainly liked it more than Rogue Moon.  The style was good, the plot included surprises, the book felt streamlined, and it addresses interesting issues.

While Man of Earth includes all kinds of traditional SF elements (futuristic gadgets like space ships, mass-marketed jet packs for commuters, and pocket typewriters; a morally ambiguous and far-reaching conspiracy; and a sense-of-wonder/paradigm-shift ending) most of the text, and most of the energy, of the novel is devoted to the main character's psychology and relationships, and I think Budrys did a good job with this material. Sibley/Sullivan is a sympathetic and interesting character, and the early scenes which show him as a bundle of nerves, and then the scenes on Pluto, where he blunderingly tries to win friends and earn respect among the working class volunteer soldiers and lower class conscripts, are effective.

Like Rogue Moon, Man of Earth is largely about what it means to be a man.  Sibley wants to be a man, and, thinks he has failed to be one as a weak, cowardly, and lonely, though highly successful, broker.  As Sullivan, the strong and courageous soldier, he tries his damnedest to be a man, but it is not easy.  His life in the Pluto army is as lonely as his life back on Wall Street, and even though he is now too tough to be intimidated by people, he is vulnerable to manipulation by the unscrupulous.

That Sibley/Sullivan is selected to be the leader of the greatest adventure in human history suggests that Budrys thinks that a "real" man is doomed to loneliness, to be (to quote Virgil) "a man apart."  I think Budrys's praise of L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout, a novel about a tough, self-sacrificing, autocratic leader in a postapocalyptic world, is significant here.  Aeneas-like figures seem to be close to Budrys's heart, and he appears to share with Hubbard a level of skepticism about our middle-class democratic and capitalistic institutions.

I'm happy to recommend Man of Earth, an economical, entertaining novel which has a good balance of human drama and SF elements.  With its preoccupation with manhood and manliness, it might be an especially interesting read for someone interested in gender roles in SF.

Future Glitter by A. E. Van Vogt

"Comrades, workers, supporters of the New Economic System.  I imagine that you were all surprised this morning when you saw my image on one or another wall in your house."

We are told that one reason for Damon Knight's famous hostility to A. E. Van Vogt is the latter's apparent sympathy for autocracy and skepticism of democracy.  There is plenty of evidence for Van Vogt's opinions on these matters; he devotes one of Earth Factor X's short chapters to pointing out how the people of Earth "needed somebody to look after them...definitely needed somebody to tell them what to do," for example. Between the covers of Future Glitter we find additional evidence of Van Vogt's political beliefs.

I read the Ace 1973 printing of Future Glitter, which I believe is the book's first edition.  I like the colors on the cover painting by Bart Forbes (I'm guessing it's a watercolor) and the woman with the long neck.  Unfortunately, the text is full of typos. Shame on you, Ace!  If you really thought this was Van Vogt's greatest novel, you would have assigned a proofreader to the project, wouldn't you?

This cover is nice, but has nothing
to do with the story

I also like the British hardcover edition's cover. UK paperbacks of Future Glitter were retitled Tyrannopolis, and given less abstract, more dramatic covers.

In the three and a half pages of the introduction to Future Glitter Van Vogt brags that he is an expert on communism and the People's Republic of China, having "read and reread approximately 100 books on China and Communism" while writing his 1962 novel The Violent Man.  Van Vogt assures us he is a "middle liberal" (a phrase I don't think I've ever encountered before and which, because Van Vogt doesn't provide any context, could mean a number of different things) and then tells us "We must remember that dictators can often solve problems by fiat." Van Vogt provides examples of problems in Peking that a Communist Party official, in the US in 1971 on a UN mission, told him were solved thanks to Party policy.  But Van Vogt warns that some may not like the price to be paid for solving problems via such methods.

I was pleased to find that Future Glitter, published within a year of Earth Factor X, was better written, had a better plot, and included images considerably more arresting and characters much more compelling and sympathetic than that novel.

In the clever first section of the novel, 30 or so of its 200 pages, we meet the elderly Dr. Dun Higenroth, one of the top scientists of the 23rd century, a time when the Earth is ruled by a collectivist dictatorship.  Thanks to the dictator, Martin Lilgin, the world has been spared hunger, war, disease, and pollution for over a century.  On the other hand, there is no private property, the government periodically subjects everyone to invasive psychological testing, and also has absolute control over where you can live, who you can marry, and whether you can reproduce.  The paranoid Lilgin, over the course of his 200 years as ruler, has executed a billion people, based on whims or for such infractions as "questioning the Official Religion."

Nota Bene: There actually is no scene in
 the novel in which people fight in the arena

Higenroth has developed a technique that allows the precise control of "fields" and electricity.  ("When Higenroth discovered that electricity can be made to move from one location in space to another in a simpler way than in nature, many problems in spatial relations became resolvable.") These techniques, generally called "The Pervasive System," provide their user tremendous power, the ability to teleport oneself or others, for example. Higenroth comes up with a way to use his new technique to record and transmit images; by a mere act of will he can cast a field around Lilgin and cause live moving images of the dictator to be projected on the plastic walls of every residence on the Earth.  Higenroth hopes that thus exposing the dictator will undermine his rule.  (This idea hearkens back to the spy rays used by the Weapon Shops to expose the corruption and cruelty of the Empress Innelda in Van Vogt's famous Isher tales.)

His dissident ideas having come to the attention of the authorities, Higenroth is sentenced to public decapitation.  One of my favorite elements of the novel is how the dictatorship's propaganda has convinced the populace that when it beheads intellectuals (apparently a common occurrence) it is not a punishment, but an honor, and a way of immortalizing the man so honored: Higenroth's students divvy up parts of their mentor's brain, and believe that upon his death portions of Higenroth's vast store of knowledge will be transmitted to their own minds.

One of the themes of the novel is how Lilgin uses sex to manipulate important men, like bureaucrats and scientists, whose help he needs but whom he also fears.  The dictator's agents scoured the world to find the prettiest teenage girl on the planet, and married her off to Higenroth two years ago.  This young woman has refused to have sex with her aged husband since their marriage.

In order to keep Higenroth from trying to escape, his wife is instructed to occupy his attention by surrendering her body to him for the very first time.  After finally consummating their marriage, Higenroth acts to preserve his scientific breakthrough for the future: he uses a device upon his sleeping wife that embeds the critical knowledge in the cells of the zygote of their child!

The lion's share of the novel concerns Higenroth's son, who is spirited away from his mother immediately after birth and raised by foster parents he believes are his own. The dictator knows the boy, named Orlo, has the secret of the Pervasive System hidden in his cells, and, hoping to acquire this knowledge, keeps a close eye on him. At the age of twenty Orlo is brought to the dictator's palace and put in charge of a colony of scientists who live in what amounts to a prison (Van Vogt tells us in the intro that he got this idea from reading Solzhenitsyn.)  Lilgin wants Orlo to be close at hand and under government control when the potentially world-shattering knowledge he unwittingly carries bursts forth.

You'll be happy to learn that this cover illo
does actually represent a scene in the novel

Like in a lot of Van Vogt stories we follow the protagonist as he learns the reality of his own life and his world, develops amazing mental powers, and then causes a paradigm shift. Psychological and political theories are also presented.  Like Hedrock in the Isher books, who refuses to depose the House of Isher but instead hopes to moderate it and limit its excesses, Orlo decides that it would be pointless to overthrow the Lilgin dictatorship; his project will be to reform its policies and provide a little more freedom to the human race.  Echoing the cynicism of Earth Factor X, when the knowledge lurking in Orlo's cells is activated and all the world can watch the tyrant's every move, 24/7, this only briefly discomfits the canny dictator.  The charismatic Lilgin directly addresses the common people, and a mob five million strong rushes to his aid and preserves his dictatorship!

Here and in the Weapon Shop books Van Vogt argues that firm rule is preferable to anarchy and war, though he also advocates for checks on that rule--not necessarily democratic or republican checks, mind you, like elections or referenda, but the moderating power of an additional, confrontational, elite.  (To be fair, there are sections of The Weapon Makers which stress the importance of constitutionalism, portraying the fact that the Weapon Shop council is not, or should not be, above its own laws.)  I have already pointed out how in Earth Factor X Van Vogt suggests that ordinary people crave authority and want to be told what to do, and he does that in Future Glitter as well.

Van Vogt is hardly alone in his (apparent) beliefs; in fact, a contempt for the common people and acceptance of undemocratic elite rule are sentiments we see often in the work of Golden Age SF writers.  L. Ron Hubbard's Final Blackout depicts how the rule of a single superior man brings peace and stability after a long destructive war.  In "Slow Sculpture" Theodore Sturgeon calls for an elite to prune and mold humanity like a gardener would a tree.  Cyril Kornbluth's "Marching Morons" has a sympathetic elite manipulating the masses, who are too stupid to look out for their own interests.  I haven't read any of Isaac Asimov's fiction since I started this blog, but aren't those Foundation books about how a small intellectual elite should be manipulating the rest of us for our own good?

I'd like to see a larger
image of this intriguing cover

The Golden Age writers we think of as libertarians also exhibit some of these attitudes. Many stories by Robert Heinlein stress the importance of respecting the authority of the captain of a ship.  In his The Moon is a Harsh Mistress the common run of humanity isn't interested in and won't pursue freedom, and our heroes deceive and manipulate them in order to achieve their goals.  Poul Anderson seems skeptical of authority and government power, but in "Master Key" we see his adventurous merchant character, Van Rijn, express contempt for the people whom he sees as the majority, those who would rather enjoy government-provided security than take responsibility for running their own lives.

I think it is fair to say that there is an element of snobbery to SF; this is something that I am not always comfortable with.

Van Vogt fans should definitely seek out Future Glitter, but, unlike House That Stood Still or Earth Factor X, I am also willing to recommend it to general SF fans: there are plenty of surreal images, speculations about politics and psychology, and characters who made some kind of emotional impact on me.  I think basing a book on his readings of Chinese and Russian history (instead of just his dreams and psychological theories as it seems he sometimes did) paid off for Van Vogt and for his readers.

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A side-note: The phrase "politically correct" appears to be in the news again, so it was a weird bit of synchronicity finding Van Vogt use the phrase in this 1973 novel: "A politically correct statement spoken with the tiniest lapse from correct tone of voice--Lilgin heard the lapse.  That man was not allowed near him again."

Stories from 1973 by C. S. Claremont, Geo. Alec Effinger and David Drake

In the past I have mentioned that I often am not sure what to read, and will allow myself to be guided by the Fates.  Recently, in an Iowa antique mall, I came upon a copy of the April 1973 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  I was charmed when I saw that a previous owner of the periodical had read and graded each piece of fiction therein.  I willingly parted with two bucks and brought the issue home with me.  This artifact provided me not only the chance to pass judgement on the work of science fiction writers, but the opportunity to pass judgement on the judgement of an unnamed stranger!

This week I read this individual's favorite story from the issue, "Psimed" by C. S. Claremont, his or her least favorite tale, Geo. Alec Effinger's "The City on the Sand," and a story which received the modal grade (look, I'm using math words), David Drake's "Arclight."   Of the eight novelets and short stories in the issue, five, including the Drake piece, received "g"s.  Let's see if MPorcius Fiction Log is on the same page with the SF fan we can know only as "Previous Owner."

"Psimed" by C. S. Claremont

If you look at Previous Owner's handwritten note, I believe we can gain an insight into his or her thought process.  It looks like Previous Owner was going to give "Psimed" a score of "VG," but then realized he/she was shortchanging Claremont, and upgraded "Psimed" to "Excellent."  (I am disregarding the possibility that Previous Owner's grade is the neologism "vexcellent," meaning "having the ability to cause a high degree of vexation.")            

I've never read anything by Claremont before--in fact, I had to do some research to find out if Claremont was a man or a woman.  As people reading this probably already know, Claremont usually goes by "Chris Claremont," and is staggeringly famous for writing about Marvel's X-Men and collaborating with George Lucas on some fantasy novels.  I'm learning every day!

My man tarbandu has written a little about Claremont's comic book work and I think it is fair to say that tarbandu would not use words like "excellent" to describe it.  Torn between the disparate opinions of tarbandu and Previous Owner, I tried to go into "Psimed" with an open mind.

"Psimed" is the story of Petra Hamlyn, a female doctor in a future high tech New York.  I get the impression that Claremont often writes female protagonists.  Hamlyn is a showy individualist, wearing jewelry and short skirts in a society in which fashions are androgynous and conservative.  Male characters stare at her legs, female characters think she looks like a prostitute.  When a new colleague calls her "Doctor," she corrects him: "My name's Petra.  I'm afraid I despise formality...."

The child of a wealthy man collapses of a rare disease, and Hamlyn's team of doctors try to save the kid.  Hamlyn and the kid are both psychics, and, in this universe of Claremont's, psychics tend to lose their powers and get all angsty and then commit suicide.  There is some melodrama as the kid goes berserk upon learning he has lost his psi powers and when Hamlyn has a painful flashback to when she lost her powers while terrorists tortured and murdered her husband.  Hamlyn also has sex with the new colleague.  The story ends when the kid dies, and another one of Hamlyn's colleagues, a psychic who has melded his mind with the kid in an effort to save him, also dies.

I'm no expert on the X-Men, but it seems like the themes of this long, boring, and histrionic story about a small elite of angst-ridden people with special powers who are expected to use those powers to help society, have something in common with the themes of those X-Men comics.

So, what did Previous Owner like about this story?  I guess lots of people are into medical dramas, and into stories about people with special powers who suffer angst and alienation.  I don't find medical stuff interesting, and while I sometimes like the whole alienated mutant thing (I just gave Kuttner and Moore's "The Piper's Son" a positive review), I didn't think this was a good example.

Previous Owner Grade: Excellent

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Not good

"The City on the Sand" by Geo. Alec Effinger

I've already encountered Effinger and his short stories during the course of this blog's life.  My feelings have been mixed.  Let's see if "The City on the Sand" tips the scales one way or the other.  SF blogger extraordinaire Joachim Boaz thinks highly of Effinger, so again we see a blogger I admire at odds with the mysterious Previous Owner, who was at a loss for words to describe his or her unhappiness with "The City on the Sand."  Who will I side with?

"The City on the Sand" is a consciously literary and subtly amusing story about decadence and a life wasted.  It takes place in an alternate early 20th century world (they have electric lights and radios) in which Western Europe is so decadent that its people have not bothered to conquer or even explore the New World or Sub-Saharan Africa.  The main character, Ernst Weinraub, is a would be poet and novelist who has traveled Europe, but found no place truly congenial.  So he has settled in the one city of North Africa, where he sits at an outdoor cafe all day, drinking and watching people walk by.  He has an outline for a trilogy of novels but has made no progress on the novels in years.  When it rains he doesn't even have the energy to move inside or lower the awning.

Weinraub has done nothing with his life, he has no friends, no wife or children.  He doesn't make an effort to get his poetry published; he just hopes some tastemaker will spot him sitting in the cafe and "discover" him.  When people try to develop a relationship with Weinraub or enlist him in their projects (a Polish political activist is trying to raise a volunteer army to free slaves or something like that) he just waves them away.

I have to disagree with Previous Owner again.  Effinger's style here is good, and the setting and tone of the story are good.  I can see why someone wouldn't care for "The City on the Sand," though-- there's not much plot and certainly no action or sex.  This is a literary mood piece, but it is a good one and I quite like it.  My opinion of Effinger has just gone up.

Previous Owner Grade: ugh

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good

"Arclight" by David Drake

In my youth I read and enjoyed Killer, which is about a space alien murdering people in ancient Rome, and was written by David Drake and Karl Edward Wagner.  I read a couple of Drake's Hammer's Slammers stories, and they just made me shrug.  I quite liked Drake's short story "The Barrow Troll," and in late 2010 I read his novel The Voyage and wrote a three star review of it on Amazon in which I focused on the fact that the protagonists are a bunch of amoral jerks.

So, that is a brief history of my relationship with David Drake, who seems like a competent writer but whose isn't always ideally suited to my temperament.  I was curious to see how I would respond to "Arclight."

Well, for once I am on the same page as Previous Owner; this is a good story.

Drake served with the U.S. Army in Vietnam and Cambodia, and this story draws on his experiences.  A cavalry unit (the main characters operate ACAVs, M113 armored personnel carriers equipped with additional machine guns and armor) accidentally uncovers an ancient Cambodian temple.  There is a hideous idol in the temple which the troops damage in the course of investigating the ruin.  Over the succeeding nights the soldiers dream of this monstrous statue, and some of them are mysteriously killed, their bodies horribly mangled.  Was it communist guerrillas who killed them?  A ravenous tiger?  We readers know it was an invisible demon!  The demon's campaign of vengeance ends when the U. S. Air Force bombs the temple into oblivion, demolishing the idol.

This is a solid entertaining horror story.  We've all probably read lots of stories about monsters from ruins terrorizing people, but Drake's story really benefits from its setting among American soldiers in South East Asia.  For example, I found the military stuff interesting (I was not familiar with the terms "ACAV" and "arclight" before.)  So, thumbs up for this one.

Previous Owner Grade: g

MPorcius Fiction Log Grade: Good.

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Even if Previous Owner and I have different tastes, I enjoyed my exploration of his or her old magazine, which gave me an opportunity to learn more about three authors I have only had a limited exposure to.

The April 1973 F&SF also has a bunch of interesting ads.  On the first page of my copy (which I suspect is in fact the third page--I think the first sheet of my copy was lost) we have an ad for an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Hubba hubba!  Also, an ad for a novel about what would happen if some guy figured out astrology was real.  I'd be curious to read some of the sex stories (despite the embarrassingly dumb font they use in the ad for the title), but the astrology book sounds horrible.

In the back of the mag (we cool people call magazines "mags," you know, to save time) we have the "Market Place," which is full of fun classifieds.  I had no idea there was a town in California called "Brubank."  Not only is there such a town, but the people there love dinosaurs!  There's an ad for Dianetics; these were the days before the Elronners had that John Travolta and Kirstie Alley money and could afford those TV ads we all remember.  A guy in Hawaii is willing to teach you telepathy.  You can mail three questions to a psychic in Illinois and for only ten bucks he will use his powers to answer them.  And if you don't have ten dollars and live in South West Canada, a guy will teach you how to pan for gold right in your own neighborhood!  Awesome!  

Click to read about all the bargains I missed in 1973 when I was two years old