Infinity, Feb '56: K Bulmer, D Knight and F Pohl & C M Kornbluth

In the last exciting episode of MPFL I looked at three stories from the February 1956 issue of Infinity and let it be known I didn't like them.  Today, however, I hope to praise this issue of Larry Shaw's magazine.  Well, I can start by lauding Ed Emshwiller's two illustrations for Kenneth Bulmer's contribution, "Quarry," one of which appears on the cover, while the other takes up an entire page on the inside.  But can I say anything nice about Bulmer's story?  And what about the included story by famed critic and editor Damon Knight?  And that by the "famous science fiction team" of C. M. Kornbluth and Frederick Pohl?  Well, let's dig in and find out.

"Quarry" by Ken Bulmer

I want to like Bulmer's work because he writes adventure stories and I like adventure stories, at least when they are good.  As you know, I love Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard, and I have praised plenty of adventure capers by people like Edmond Hamilton and E. C. Tubb.  But I have often found Bulmer's work wanting.  Check out my blog posts about Bulmer's novels Cycle of Nemesis, The Diamond Contessa, and Kandar, for the sad details.  It has been like seven years since I have read anything by Bulmer, but today--in the spirit of a new year and new beginnings!--we are going to let bygones be bygones and read "Quarry," which the aforementioned Mr. Tubb reprinted in Authentic Science Fiction when he was serving as editor of that periodical and Francophonic Englishman Maxim Jakubowski included in a 1963 anthology for the French market.

"Quarry" is "The Most Dangerous Game" yet again. People in SF are aways getting thrown into the arena to fight to the death.  Luckily, Bulmer takes the scenario seriously and tries to generate real human emotion and suspense, and as a result "Quarry" is pretty entertaining.

It is the space faring future; mankind has colonized the solar system.  Unfortunately, before we could reach the stars, the extrasolar Rachen arrived and took over; we are at their mercy, second-class citizens on Earth, Mars, and the other heavenly bodies we have spent so much time and effort cultivating.  Patriotic humans are living in poverty--bodies skinny, clothes threadbare, lungs pink because they can't even afford cigarettes--while collaborators with the alien regime, those whom our protagonist calls "Rachentoads" and "Rachen-lovers" are living large!  Our hero is Dirk Gilmore, a man with big emotions and a quick temper, a hardened tough guy who has a racist hatred of the Rachen--when he sees them he wishes he could squash them like bugs!  This isn't nice, but it feels real.  

Gilmore has decided to make a terrible sacrifice to get some money for the kid he has with his faithless wife--Dirk has volunteered to be the prey in a Rachen hunting sport organized by a big fat human Rachen-lover!

The first hunt Gilmore gets involved in is a special one.  A Rachen prince, heir apparent to the throne of Mars, wants to hunt in an Earth city, one whose ten million human inhabitants have been forced to vacate so the metropolis can serve as a play ground for the snooty aliens.  The streets are deserted, but the robot trams and robot taxis and elevators and motion-activated fluorescent lights of the city still operate just fine.  The prince wants to hunt a woman, and Gilmore is paired with a girl--they are not allowed to split up during the hunt, and have devices strapped to their wrists that cause horrible pain if they get more than ten feet apart.  Bulmer here in "Quarry" uses all the most obvious devices to manipulate the reader, and the same way the human collaborator is a grossly obese and Gilmore starts the story dressed in rags and broken shoes, this woman, Trina, is beautiful, with a terrific body and clear eyes and so forth.    

The Rachen aristo and his cronies, armed with bolt-action rifles, have 24 hours to catch Dirk and Trina after the pair use their 15-minute head start to take public transit to get deep into the city.  Mysteriously, one of Fatso's lackeys gives Dirk a small pistol.  Is there a human resistance movement on Earth?  Is someone plotting to use Dirk to murder the prince so some other joker from beyond the solar system can become King of Mars?

Bulmer does a decent job with the development of the Dirk and Trina relationship, and with the action chase stuff in the city--running here, running there, laying traps, throwing a knife at a guy, outwitting the blob monsters that are the Rachen's bloodhounds, etc.  The chasing and shooting in the city does eventually feel a little moot, though, after we learn that the Prince's lackeys won't kill Dirk and Trina, just terrorize them, leaving them for the Prince himself, and, even worse, that the hunt doesn't automatically end at 24 hours if Dirk and Trina aren't killed--rather, at 24 hours, a gate in the electric fence surrounding the city is deactivated for 15 minutes.  Dirk and Trina are only safe if they can leave the city via this gate during that window, but since the Prince and his party know where the gate is and when it will be open, the hunters have no practical reason to hunt for D & T for 23 hours, they can just ambush them at the gate.  Oh, well.

Who will live?  Who will die?  I couldn't be sure until the end, which is good.  I'm giving "Quarry" a moderate recommendation; it is action-adventure filler, but performed competently.  Maybe I need to read more of Bulmer's short work, maybe that is where he shines.

"A Likely Story" by Damon Knight

Over the years, I have banged out on the keys of a succession of computers many hostile reviews of stories by Damon Knight, as well as attacks on the man himself.  But today, let's accentuate the positive.  I liked "Man in the Jar."  I liked "Masks."  I liked "I See You."  I liked "The Enemy." I called "The Beach Where Time Began" acceptable.  I like some of Knight's 1940s work as an illustrator.  I was cheering Knight on when he called Judith Merril's The Tomorrow People an overly feminine "shambles" full of science mistakes.  So, in the same way I reject the label of "Harlan Ellison hater" and consider myself an Ellison skeptic, I believe I give Knight a fair shake and am more than willing to praise him when his work aligns with my own taste and interests; I am just not one of the Knight groupies.        

Accentuating the positive is a worthy goal to reach for, but one which is sometimes beyond human grasp.  "A Likely Story" is a humor story about the SF community.  Ugh.  There are feeble and obvious jokes; for example, we are told that the association of pro SF writers in the story holds three kinds of meetings--meetings devoted to club politics, meetings devoted to drinking, and meetings devoted to lots of drinking.  Ha ha.  Also, the joke every person who has spent time in New York City makes, that it is very hot in the summer and very cold in the winter.  Oh, brother.  There are also smart guy jokes; a guy named Duchamp is smoking a pipe, for example; and more-or-less affectionate caricatures of a few prominent members of the SF community, plus a multitude of groan inducing puns on SF writer's names; "Preacher Flatt," for example.  

Three or four pages of these empty calories would have been enough for me; "A Likely Story" here in Infinity is sixteen god-damned pages.  Interminable and unforgivable. 

The plot.  Our narrator attends the yearly party of the professional SF writer association.  Strange phenomena occur, mostly banal slapstick, like Asa Akimosov's pants falling down to his knees or an unnamed woman's skirt rising up to show her legs, people dropping glasses or tripping and falling, but also inexplicable events like a joke from infallible funny man Bill Plass (I guess a stand in for Bob Bloch) falling flat.  Is this the work of a poltergeist?  No, the answer seems to be that somebody has figured out how to mess with probability, has the ability to make unlikely events occur.  The narrator and another writer try to figure out which of the SF writers is the culprit.  When they do, the man with the improbability device, the bespectacled "Harry Er-Ah," escapes by flying to Mars.

Just dreadful.

This soul-deadening lump of tedium was reprinted in Knight collections like Turning On and The Best of Damon Knight.

"The Engineer" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Let's check in on "The Most Famous SF Duo Ever."  Way way back, in 2014, I read Kornbluth's famous Hall-of-Fame story "The Marching Morons," and voiced many criticisms of it.  More recently, I called Kornbluth's collaboration with Donald Wollheim "Go Fast on Interplane" "competent filler" and his collab with Fred Pohl "Mute Inglorious Tam" "an acceptable sort of gimmick piece."  As for Pohl and Kornbluth's "Gift of Garigolli," I owned to actually hating it and described it as a "half-baked dish of garbage."  I have had nicer things to say about some Pohl solo works like "Survival Kit" and "To See Another Mountain," but long time readers of MPorcius Fiction Log will know much of his output has met a lukewarm reception here and others denunciations.

Well, let's see what "The Engineer," which was reprinted in the various English, German and Italian editions of The Wonder Effect as well as in the "Best of" Kornbluth and Pohl collection, Our Best, is all about.

Our protagonist, Muhlenhoff, began his career as a geologist and worker for an oil extraction company of the future, but found he had a talent for politics and leadership and worked his way up in the company until today he is a big wig in racist big business, managing a drilling facility 1800 meters below sea level off the coast of Mexico!  We learn this backstory after seeing Muhlenhoff in action in a meeting room and then in his office 1.118 miles down, responding to some kind of pressure leak that threatens to flood the submarine facility and kill everybody and lose the company a lot of money and give the Mexicans access to the oil.

The third part of the seven-page story has Muhlenhoff taking a break from work to read from a history book.  I had naively thought "The Engineer" a serious story about using science and psychology to resolve a crisis until this wacky joke--a facility manager taking a break during a life-threatening emergency--hit me over the head with the fact that the story was a satire.

By quoting and paraphrasing the book Pohl and Kornbluth tell us the history of the United States between the Second World War and the dawn of the 21st century.  The land of the free and the home of the brave led the defeat of the Warsaw Pact (Pohl and Kornbluth use the term "Cominform" which is one I don't see very often) but then early in the 2000s the US lost a war to Mexico!  The Mexicans, somehow, in the late 20th century developed technology and military tactics and training superior to that of the United States and conquered Texas, Oklahoma and the western states!  (A horror scenario for some, maybe wish-fulfillment for Pohl and Kornbluth?)  The history book suggests that the US lost the war because the US military was subjected to political pressure from many constituencies and its decisions before and during the war were focused on appeasing politicians, journalists, voters and lobbyists instead of defeating the Mexicans.

The final section of the story makes clear that Muhlenhoff and the underwater facility he manages are going to be destroyed because Muhlenhoff has been paying too much attention to career and political considerations and not enough to the science of keeping the facility safe.  

Pretty poor, but not abysmal; let's be generous and call "The Engineer" barely acceptable.

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Three pretty slight stories, though at least the Bulmer is a competent specimen of its type; the Knight is a particularly "cringe" example of an already questionable genre (the humorous SF story about a gathering of SF figures) and the Pohl and Kornbluth is a weak satire.

So we bid adieu to the second issue of Infinity.  Our next foray into the 1950s SF world will see us reading stories from a magazine with greater prestige than Infinity.

Frederik Pohl, '74: "We Purchased People" and, w/ C M Kornbluth, "The Gift of Garigolli," and "Mute Inglorious Tam"

I recently unleashed upon the interwebs a blog post casting aspersions on some stories from the 1970s by Grand Master Frederik Pohl.  Today we'll address the same topic, Pohl's 1970s work, but with a little guidance from SF readers who suggested in the comments to that post that Pohl's better work includes the particular story "We Purchased People" and as well as collaborations with fellow Futurian C. M. Kornbluth.  "We Purchased People" was first published in 1974, and in that exciting year, the year of the resignations of Richard Nixon, Golda Meir, and Willy Brandt, the year your humble blogger turned three years old, Pohl also published two collabs with Kornbluth, who died in 1958.  Let's check these 1974 stories out!

(There's some juicy gossip out there about the relationship between Pohl and Kornbluth, and Pohl and Mrs. Kornbluth after her husband's early death, that I won't go into here, but I mention it briefly in a blog post from earlier this year in which a book edited by Mary Kornbluth figures; at that post are links to material written by Pohl about the Kornbluths and some evidence that Mrs. Kornbluth resented Pohl.)

"We Purchased People" by Frederik Pohl

People really like this story; after its debut in Final Stage, an anthology of "ultimate" SF stories edited by Edward Ferman and our hero Barry N. Malzberg but famously mangled in its first edition by a woman at the publisher, "We Purchased People" has been reprinted numerous times, including in Terry Carr's Best Science Fiction of the Year #4, Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann's Aliens!, David Hartwell's Foundations of Fear, and a bunch of foreign anthologies.  Having read it now, in my copy of the restored paperback edition of Final Stage, I have to report that the  hype is fully justified--"We Purchased People" is a great science fiction story that speculates about Earth's possible relationship with space aliens, a great human story about abnormal psychology and people's psychological responses to an abnormal situation, and a great horror story full of gruesome and evil deeds with a cunningly developed plot; with perfect pacing, Pohl skillfully builds a foundation of mountingly disturbing revelations that leads very convincingly to the final nightmare twist.  Thumbs up!

The Earth some years ago was contacted by aliens from a distant star system.  The aliens have a sort of radio that can send messages, much faster than the speed of light, straight into people's brains.  In fact, if a person has the right equipment connected to his noggin, the aliens can control him like a puppet!  (Cf. Robert Silverberg's 1968 "Passengers.")  The governments of Earth were quite willing to sell to the aliens heinous criminals for use as puppets, and through the puppets the aliens can learn all about Earth and make business deals with Earth people.  The aliens sell to the Earth technology of tremendous value to us--such technology has prevented war, for example.  From us the aliens buy art treasures and specimens of plants and uniquely Earthly stuff like that, even though the rockets that carry these items will take many centuries to reach their new owners.  Numerous alien races contact the Earth, and they each have their peculiar idiosyncrasies; this being a horror story, these idiosyncrasies are designed to make the reader uneasy.

Like half or so of the text of "We Purchased People" is a first-person narrative in the voice of a white American criminal who has been purchased by some particularly disgusting aliens.  Pohl does a good job of describing what day-to-day life is like for this guy as a slave of the aliens, and of building up sympathy for this guy in the reader while at the same time stoking our suspicions of him.  We start out feeling pity for this joker and hostility to the aliens and the human authorities for the way they treat him, but then we realize how monstrously this guy behaves if left to his own devices we have a moral dilemma on our hands.  The narrator is so dangerous, his crimes so shocking and outrageous, that we are left little reason to feel bad for him, especially since trade with the aliens has done so much to enhance human peace and prosperity.  Maybe the crime against his liberty, maybe the existence of slavery in 20th or 21st century America, is justified by all the benefits of interstellar trade?  And then at the end of the story Pohl has the aliens do something so horrible to him that maybe we feel bad for him again--or maybe not, as it is his own foul nature that, in only a slightly oblique way, leads to the mind-shattering horror to which he is subjected.

You'll remember that the mainstream-like story by Pohl we read recently, "I Remember the Winter," seemed to deny that human beings had agency and could be blamed for any regrettable results of their behavior.  "We Purchased People" has a much more interesting and challenging take on human agency and responsibility.  On the one hand, one might argue that the main character is not really morally responsible for murdering little girls because he is mentally ill, and, of course, the whole story depicts people under the ruthless control of more powerful people--a leftist can read "We Purchased People" as an allegory of how under the market economy we are all slaves whipped or robots programmed by "capital" or merchants or the decadent rich or bourgeois liberal governments rabidly pursuing GDP.  Even for non-leftists, the story raises the question of how much infringement on individual freedom we are willing to accept in exchange for safety, order and wealth.  (We might also point out that Pohl hints that the communist rulers in Moscow and Peking, and Third World dictators, are even more eager to sell undesirables to the aliens than is the US government.)

But, at the same time it depicts people who are under the control of mental illness and the rich and powerful, Pohl's story also portrays a main character who does seem responsible for his black fate, who does exercise free will.  For one thing, we see him carefully calculate all his moves during periods when the aliens temporarily relinquish their control over him--he clearly demonstrates agency, the ability of the individual to assess risk and allocate resources in pursuit of the personal goals he has selected.  And the mind-blowing horror the protagonist suffers in the end of the story is an outgrowth of his own murderous fetish--is Pohl arguing that people really are the authors of their own fates, even in a largely or apparently deterministic world?  

"We Purchased People" works as emotion-triggering entertainment as it generates suspense and horror with all that creepy sex and horrendous violence, and works as thought-provoking science fiction with its depictions of both free will-oriented and deterministic views of human life, and the possible character of interstellar trade.  Very good--highly recommended to horror fans and to fans of SF that makes you think about the realities of human-alien interactions and the nature of human agency.

"The Gift of Garigolli" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Oy, here we have a long and tedious domestic comedy with a little SF content and bland satire of the business world tacked on to it.  The structure and some of the themes of the story reminded me of those old black and white comedies like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse, what with the hapless middle-class husband, his troublemaking wife, and the deus ex machina resolution of the plot.  In the Pohl/Kornbluth collection Our Best: The Best of Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, Pohl seems to hint he knows "The Gift of Garigolli" is bad (and seems to be trying to blame Kornbluth for the story's inadequacy), and compares the story to I Love Lucy.  Mr. Blandings Builds His Dreamhouse is tolerable because Cary Grant and Myrna Loy are quite likable, and I Love Lucy is lovable because Lucille Ball, Desi Arnaz, and William Frawley ably portray characters easy to identify with, and "The Gift of Garigolli" utterly lacks any corresponding virtues.  The story's characters are ciphers whose motivations are difficult to discern and it drags aimlessly along at a snail's pace for like 20 pages, alternately lulling the reader to sleep and irritating him.  Bad.

Dupoir (a joke name for DuPont?) is a suburbanite commuter who works in PR for the plastics industry, trying to inspire in the populace good feelings about plastic.  He writes scripts for radio spots and works with a guy in his office with what I assume is a joke name, Jack Denny, who draws sexy girls for the weekly plastics newsletter.  Environmental activists are one of his headaches.  But he's got a bigger headache.  When his brother-law-law, an addict, checked himself into a rehab center, Dupoir's wife co-signed the papers.  Brother-in-law bugged out to the coast to try to get into movies without settling his bill, and now Dupoir is on the hook for the rehab center's fee--over 14,000 simoleons!  Dupoir can't afford it and he is being sued by the rehab center and fears he will lose his house.

Much of the story is a first-person narrative in the voice of Dupoir, and much of the story's comedy and SF content consists of Dupoir doing a pastiche of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as if he is Tarzan; for example, he describes his competing for a seat on public transit the way ERB might describe Lord Greystoke struggling against some African beast.  Dupoir's Tarzan fixation, the stuff about plastic, and the space aliens, are like elements from three different stories just jammed together--each has no connection to the other.

Yes, space aliens.  The rest of the humor and SF content consists of the fact that Dupoir is under surveillance by teeny tiny airborne E.T.s.  These aliens are follow Dupoir around--he thinks they are fruit flies that are inexplicably attracted to him.  Sections of the text of "The Gift of Garigolli" are communiques from the leader of these alien observers back to HQ, discussing the various directives that serve as the guiderails for how the aliens are to interact with natives.  The aliens are supposed to help the natives, and when they perceive that Dupoir is in need of cash they try to create some gold for him through manipulation of molecules.  This does not work.   

Dupoir goes to a bar to drown his troubles, and meets another man trying to drown his troubles.  It turns out this guy is owner of the rehab center, depressed because he is owed 14,000 bucks.  The two get drunk and end up in the man's office at the rehab center, but nothing happens there and we readers wonder why the authors saw fit for them to go there.  In the morning these guys are both at Dupoir's house, where the tiny flying aliens have devised a process that turns plastic into alcohol.  This self-sustaining process enables Dupoir to pay his debts and also solves the problem of plastic litter, getting the environmental activists off the back of the plastics industry.

This story is horrible.  The plot is a total mess, the jokes are lame, and as I have suggested, I don't even feel as if the characters' motivations make sense, though maybe I missed the explanations of why they were doing what they were doing because the story was so boring my eyes were glazing over during the explanations.   

Thumbs down!

I may have hated "The Gift of Garigolli," but the world welcomed it with open arms!  Inexplicable!  You can find this half-baked dish of garbage in Donald Wollheim's The 1975 Annual World's Best SF and multiple Galaxy retrospectives.  Were editors buying this story in an effort to help Kornbluth's widow?  I don't get it.              

"Mute Inglorious Tam" by Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth

Here we have another posthumous collaboration between Pohl and his toothpaste averse friend that won accolades.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" debuted in a special anniversary issue of F&SF and Lester del Rey included it in his annual "Best of" anthology.  In 1977 Edward Ferman put it in the twenty-second of the Best of F&SF volumes.  In 1992 Mike Resnick included it in an anthology of recursive or meta SF stories.  Well, let's try to read "Mute Inglorious Tam" with an open mind, leaving behind any resentment resulting from our reading of "The Gift of Garigolli" and refusing to be swayed by the spirit of contrariness that whispers "just because del Rey and Ferman and Resnick like it doesn't mean you have to like it," true though that may be.

Sometimes you'll encounter people who think life in medieval Europe had a lot going for it, that peasants didn't work as many hours as do today's suburbanite commuters, that religion and the clearly defined social order gave life meaning and structure, that the food wasn't giving people diabetes and the air wasn't giving people cancer, etc.  And of course you'll encounter people who will suggest life in medieval Europe was a nightmarish hell where everybody was impoverished and the man who lived to see his 30th birthday was a true rara avis.  "Mute Inglorious Tam" takes the latter tack, depicting medieval Sussex as a sort of racist police state, the Normans lording it over the Saxons, everyone living in poverty and discomfort, people getting the death penalty for thought crimes against the lord or the priests.  

"Mute Inglorious Tam" is more like a tendentious history lesson full of questionable recreations (like the recreations on true crime and history TV shows, where instead of just interviewing a cop about the bank robber he nabbed or a historian about the president whose biography he penned, the TV producers hire some clown to slap on a balaclava or a tricorn and prance around, pretending to be a bandit or the father of our country for the supposed benefit of viewers) than an actual story with a plot and everything.  Lots of time is spent on the geography and economics of the Sussex village at the center of the story.  As for the recreations, our protagonist, Tam, gets himself mixed up in plenty of domestic violence.

Tam isn't just a peasant who knocks down and then kicks his wife when she neglects to brew his beer.  Tam is a dreamer!  Working the fields, he dreams of corn that is more fecund.  Guiding a wagon, he dreams of a self-propelled cart.  Looking at his dirty village, he dreams of a village that is clean.  As Pohl tells us explicitly in the intros to "Mute Inglorious Tam" in F&SF and in Our Best, Tam, in a future milieu, would be a science fiction writer.

This story is competently written on a sentence by sentence basis--the descriptions of the setting and of the domestic violence are engaging--and I find the debate over how bad life really was in the Middle Ages interesting, so we can call "Mute Inglorious Tam" an acceptable sort of gimmick piece aimed directly at the niche market of SF readers committed to the idea of progress.

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It's been a day of extremes here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  In "We Purchased People" we have something of a classic, a top notch piece of work.  And in "The Gift of Garigolli" we have something I am a little surprised was even published in this state, it is so poor.  That's the power of a bankable name, I guess.  

Thanks to my commenters for guiding me to these stories, all of which are challenging in their own ways.  In  our next episode we'll read a novel by an even more bankable name than Fred Pohl's.

Merril-approved 1958 stories by D Knight and C M Kornbluth

As you know, we here at MPorcius Fiction Log are cherry picking stories from the alphabetical Honorable Mentions list at the back of Judith Merril's 1959 anthology SF: The Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy: 4th Annual Volume.  In our last episode we started the "K"s and today we finish them with two big names, Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth.  I have mixed feelings about Knight, who of course is very important as an editor and penned some good stories like "I See You" and "Masks" but who can also come off as a snobby self-important jerk and produce some overrated lame stories like "To Serve Man" and garbage joke stories like "God's Nose." and "Maid to Measure."  As for Kornbluth, I tend to avoid him because I wasn't crazy about his celebrated story "The Marching Morons" and I always assume his stories are going to be over-the-top left-wing satires of business and a twenty-year career as a subaltern in academia has exposed me to a lifetime's worth of leftist dogma and would-be anti-capitalist humor.  

But, in a spirit of adventure, today I read two stories by both of these SF icons, confident that no matter how irritating or downright bad they might be, they will contribute something to the haphazard syllabus of my life-long SF education.

"The Enemy" by Damon Knight

A. E. van Vogt's many detractors love to talk about how a hostile review by Knight of our favorite Canadian's work allegedly ruined van Vogt's career, so in my mind Knight and van Vogt are inextricably linked.  So when I read "The Enemy" I kept thinking of some of van Vogt's best stories, the original magazine versions of "The Rull" and "Black Destroyer," with which "The Enemy" bears many similarities.       

I may sometimes say crappy things about Knight and his work, but not this time; "The Enemy" is a very good classic science fiction story with space suits and other futuristic technology, hostile aliens, danger and violence, and sense of wonder elements including an ambiguous ending that leaves you unsure what wonderful or horrible fate awaits mankind.  I can enthusiastically endorse this one.

It is the future and the Solar System has been colonized--many people even live their whole lives in space stations, it seems.  Our protagonist is a sixteen-year-old girl, a member of what seems to be a marginalized religious or ethnic group who have had to live separate from the rest of humanity, maybe meant to remind you of the Jews or the Roma or Mormons or something.  These people have become resourceful in their struggle to survive, and as the story begins the girl is left alone on a planetoid, charged with the task of surveying it and mining it of the metal her people require.

Knight does a great job describing the planetoid and the equipment and techniques the girl uses to accomplish her mission, bringing everything vividly to life with economy so readers can visualize what is going on and share the girl's emotions without having to process or wade through a lot of trivia or unnecessary dialogue and exposition.  For example, Knight lets us know in an understated way that the human race has again and again uncovered evidence that the Solar System thousands of years ago was inhabited by intelligent spacefaring beings--Knight doesn't have to tell us how awesome this is or even emphasize that it is mind-blowing because it is essentially awesome, and going on and on about it would only cheapen it.

The girl makes first contact with one of the ancient aliens--or one of their self-motivated life-like artifacts--which has been in hibernation on this planetoid for millennia.  The creature gives off an aura of absolute evil, and our heroine feels dutybound to warn the human race about it and to try to prevent its escape from the planetoid.  But circumstances arise such that human and ancient monster can only survive if they cooperate!  Knight does just a good a job describing the alien and its and the human teen's struggles against each other and against the environment as he did describing the earlier mining and exploring scenes, and keeps the reader in suspense the whole time.  Can these two products of radically different civilizations really work together, or will one double cross the other?  Who will live and who will die?  Is the very future of humanity in peril?

Thumbs up for "The Enemy," a great piece of science fiction.  "The Enemy" first appeared in Venture (that is where I read it) and in 1961 was included in the French edition of F&SF (Venture was a sister publication of F&SF) and has been reprinted in the many editions of the Knight collections Far Out and The Best of Damon Knight.

Both Fiction #88 and the British 1978 edition of Far Out feature illustrations 
inspired by "The Enemy" on their covers

"Idiot Stick" by Damon Knight

"Idiot Stick" debuted in the fourth volume of Frederik Pohl's famous anthology series, Star Science Fiction.  I'm reading it from a scan of the aforementioned collection Far Out.

This story is mediocre; I guess it is a parable about European imperialism and Cold War foreign policy or something, but long stretches of it are boring and as a whole it is neither particularly interesting nor exciting.  Knight doesn't bother to build characters or suspense or offer any other literary or entertainment values, and the most crucial component of the plot happens off screen; "Idiot Stick" is sort of like a bland history article from the near future.  Though I guess the message of the story, that it takes guts and self-sacrifice for a society to succeed, is not a bad one.

An alien space ship lands in the greatest state in the union.  Its occupants are apparently friendly (and able to neutralize all our weapons) and pay native labor in drugs so addictive that even rich people are soon clamoring to join the aliens' work crews.  The aliens issue tools to their drug-addicted workforce that, through inexplicable instrumentalities, move earth or erect walls or whatever; these tools resemble rods or sticks and what feat a given tool performs at any given moment is determined by what tab has been inserted in its butt.  By changing tabs, a tool's function can be changed, and while the E.T.s hand out the tools liberally and don't seem to care that many are stolen, they are more discriminating about the tabs.

At the direction of the aliens, who don't like to get their hands dirty, the human labor force constructs a huge building and then assembles from an array of parts a lot of mysterious machinery within it.  (Knight describes this construction in some detail, and these passages are sort of tedious; Knight's speculative technology in "The Enemy" is comprehensible and believable, but the point of the advanced technology in "Idiot Stick" is that it is so beyond human experience that it is practically magic, so it is boring.)  What is the purpose of this building?  One of the aliens gets drunk and the truth slips out--E.T. is here to blow up our home!  The aliens have a galaxy-spanning empire, and fear attack from extragalactic aliens.  Blowing up the Earth will create a cloud of dust that will serve as a sort of fortification or obstacle to extragalactic attack, forcing potential invaders to fly more slowly through this region of space.  

The alien authorities deny the story, and the human race is divided on whether or not they believe it; fewer people show up to work on the aliens' construction site but the aliens just increase their rate of pay and the ranks of the alien-employed swell again.

Some humans want to attack the aliens, who after all are not very numerous, but of course our weapons don't work on them--the aliens' own tools can probably be used as a weapon with the correct tab, but whenever a human scientist has tried to alter a tab and insert it into a tool, the tool has exploded, blowing up an area the size of twenty or thirty city blocks.

You might consider it a plot hole that no human thinks of suicide bombing the alien ship and construction site thusly.  Knight comes up with a different way for human guts and a willingness to sacrifice the self for the community to save the day.  Thousands of heroic volunteers around the world risk jamming altered tabs into tool butts--and explode--until one of the tabs, at random, turns out to be safe and to turn the tool into a powerful weapon.  This sort of tab is duplicated and then a human assault squad attacks the aliens and wipes them out, preventing Earth's demolition.

A story that casts the people of Earth in a role analogous to that of African or Asian natives manipulated as pawns in wars between European powers from the Age of Discovery up through World War II, or between the liberal West and Communist East in the Cold War era, is not a bad idea, and neither is a story about how the human race triumphs over adversity thanks to the self sacrifice of a small group of heroes.  (I guess we might see "Idiot Stick" as a sort of leftist wish fulfillment fantasy in which non-Westerners kill off Western interlopers by turning their superior technology against them.  Hopefully this story isn't foreshadowing the detonation of an Iranian atomic bomb in Tel Aviv, London or New York.)  But this story does not succeed as a piece of entertainment.  We'll call "Idiot Stick" barely acceptable filler.  The tale has been reprinted in anthologies like Lee Harding's Beyond Tomorrow and Invaders!, edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois.

"Theory of Rocketry" by C. M. Kornbluth

Merril lists the source of "Theory of Rocketry" as The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction: 8th Series so I am reading it there.  Kornbluth, who wasn't known for taking care of his health (e. g., his pal Fred Pohl alleges he never brushed his teeth) had recently died at the age of 34 and the story in BF&SF8 is preceded by a page-long encomium in which F&SF editor Anthony Boucher tells us Kornbluth's work was "a perfect fusion" of "rousing adventurous storytelling," "scientific and sociological extrapolation, perceptive character study [and] highly literate prose."  If you say so, friend.

"Theory of Rocketry" has a satiric setting, depicting a near future United States characterized by conformism, hypocritical religiosity, militarism and television-watching.  Our main character is Edel, a high-school English teacher (Kornbluth flings lots of literary references at readers in this story, in particular references to Shakespeare's Henry V) who instructs classes of 70-odd students by reading to them from the Bible and turning on the television for them.  The students are all obedient empty-headed dolts, save one student, Foster, a hard-working genius who is determined to get excellent grades and actually understand the material--not just memorize so he can get a pass--so he can fulfill his dream of becoming a space man.  He sometimes talks about his father, giving the impression that Dad is a hero, an engineer who just narrowly missed becoming an astronaut himself.  When the genius kid is the first student in years to request a special college-level one-on-one course with our protagonist, Edel envisions himself as an Aristotle tutoring an Alexander, suffering the grand delusion that if Foster becomes the first man to conquer the moons of Jupiter it will be in part because he was molded by classic English literature wielded in the expert hands of Edel. 

Edel's grandiose dreams of being the teacher who helps mankind conquer outer space are disappointed.  For one thing, Foster's paper analyzing Henry V doesn't consider the play as a work of literature but rather as a work of propaganda, a device for maintaining order in Elizabeth's England, and Foster fully approves of this cold practical application of the arts.

For another: "Theory of Rocketry"'s theme of (false, hypocritical) conformity is put across early in the story when one of Edel's fellow teachers loses his job because he fills out his regular psychological survey honestly, exposing his true feelings, instead of checking all the boxes next to the approved, socially-acceptable, answers.  Edel has been corresponding with this poor sap, who is now working as an assistant tech at a factory.  Foster, to curry favor with the powers that be who can help him get into the space academy, swipes one of these letters, which exposes that Edel himself lies on the psychology surveys, and shows it to the authorities.  Edel is thus doomed to lose his job; however, his discovery that Foster's father is no hero engineer but a former bus driver living on disability who drinks and hits his genius son leavens the teacher's bitterness towards his single-minded and treacherous student.

The foundation and decorative facade of this story are sneering contempt for the American people, religious belief and economic life in a market society.  But the core of "Theory of Rocketry" is a well-structured and ably-written tale of human ambitions, relationships, and disappointments in which the characters all behave realistically and sympathetically, so I guess I have to admit it is good.  If even I think "Theory of Rocketry" is good, Kornbluth's cronies and fellow commies like Judith Merril must love it.  

"Theory of Rocketry" has been reprinted in Kornbluth collections and in Laurence M. Janifer's 1966 Masters' Choice, an anthology the contents of which were based on the answers of twenty SF professionals whom Janifer asked to list the five best SF stories of all time.  (At the back of the book Janifer lists all the stories that got votes and adds up how many votes each writer got--Heinlein got the most, Sturgeon and Lieber tie for second, and Kuttner and Moore tie for third; this is a pretty cool resource and maybe someday I'll use it the way I have been using these Merril Honorable Mention lists, to guide my reading and inspire me to read a little outside my comfort zone.)

"Reap the Dark Tide" AKA "Shark Ship" by C. M. Kornbluth

Merril cites the Kornbluth collection A Mile Beyond the Moon as the source of this story, so I am reading it there, even though in that collection it is titled "Shark Ship."  The story bears the title "Reap the Dark Tide" in the magazine Vanguard, in an issue with a surprisingly gruesome Ed Emshwiller cover.  Under whatever title, the story has been reprinted many times, including in Robert Silverberg's anthology Dark Stars.

It is the future!  In response to overpopulation, millions of people live on huge ships of metal that have no electricity, are driven by huge sails, and get all of their food and oil by capturing ton after ton of brit (swarms of tiny little fish and crustaceans) in huge nets.  (The future will be huge!)  Our story begins among a convoy of such ships which launched over a century ago, a convoy of seventy-five vessels with a collective population of 1.25 million--yes, each ship has close to 20,000 people aboard.  (I said "huge," didn't I?)

The crews of these ships pay obeisance weekly to a brief charter that exhorts them to never set foot on land; most of the crewmembers consider this an inviolable divine command.  So the ships have no access to new metal; as a result, women of the ships ceaselessly search for any slight spot of rust or tarnish, and if a ship loses the metal net with which it collects the essential brit, that ship and everybody on it is doomed.  (There is absolutely no slack in these ships' economies, so other ships in the convoy can't take on new passengers or sell net components or anything.)

The ship of which our main character is captain loses its net in a storm, apocalyptic news for the 20K people aboard.  But an attractive woman who has some book-learnin' offers hope!  She's an archivist and a former sex partner of the captain (officers aren't allowed to have wives or children, to prevent nepotism.)  She reports that in the oldest records of the ship she has found evidence that the the crew ignored the charter and did in fact send expeditions ashore!  This, I guess, gives the people who run the ship psychological permission to break the charter themselves.  So the captain, the woman archivist, and four other people who represent their demographics take a boat to Manhattan, which they find apparently deserted.  They uncover evidence that a stifling racist and overly religious society lived on the mainland and then collapsed.

Kornbluth abandons his characters and main narrative to deliver a history lesson on what happened to America after the convoy left, indulging in a broad satire that not only tells you ordinary people are stupid and religion is stupid but pointing out a thing you have already heard people point out a million times--popular literature, the cinema and TV are full of depictions of violence but people don't complain about that and instead try to suppress sexual expression.

This digression describes how an anti-sex and anti-natalist activist made money selling BDSM photos (no nudity) via mail and then began publication of DEATH magazine--the magazine was a hit and under this guy's influence America became a sex-hating death cult and almost everybody was murdered or committed suicide, depopulating the continent.

The narrative returns to the present and the six people from the ship are attacked by one of the few surviving bands of land people.  These people are fanatically devoted to the anti-sex BDSM death cult, and the archivist scares them off by stripping naked--so anti-sex are they that the sight of an attractive woman's bare body routs them.  The captain decides to lead his 20,000 people in an effort to colonize the land.  The End.

Kornbluth does an OK job developing a speculative alternate society of people who live at sea with no electricity, their entire economy based on catching tiny aquatic creatures.  But otherwise this story is a failure.  The plot is not great, just kind of droning on and lacking a climax.  The human elements of the story--the characters and their relationships--are weak.  The main action scene (the storm) feels long and is boring.  The satirical history lesson is lame (parodying LIFE magazine by coming up with DEATH magazine is the kind of joke a child makes.)  Kornbluth's points about religion (it is stupid, survival lies in disobeying its tenets, and all religious people are hypocrites) and the media (too violent and too restrictive of sexual content) are banal and one-dimensional.  Gotta give "Shark Ship" AKA "Reap the Dark Tide" a thumbs down, but I guess readers angry at religion who hate the American people might enjoy it.  

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As followers of my twitter feed are aware, this recent weekend I went to the DC Big Flea in Chantilly, Virginia, a big antiques and collectibles show.  At a table of art books I picked up a volume on Alphonse Mucha, and the owner came over to sing the book's virtues in an effort to convince me to buy it.  I was  already a fan of Mucha and I already liked the book, and so this guy's earnest but hollow and even misleading pitches got on my nerves, actually making me feel worse about buying it than I had before he opened his yap, like I would be a sap if I actually bought the book.  (I did actually purchase it, after all.)  Similarly, I am an atheist, but the anti-religious arguments, if you can call them that, I find in SF stories are often so lame and mean-spirited that they make me feel more sympathetic to religious people than before I read them, and I am feeling some of that from Kornbluth today.

Still, these stories are better than I expected them to be, so this stretch of our tour of 1958 with Judith Merril as our guide has not been a bad one.

We'll get cracking on the 1958 "L"s soon enough, but I think we'll be visiting the World War II years for a few blog posts before we return to Merril and her Honorable Mentions list.

Dynamic Science Fiction, June 1953: R Z Gallun, R E Banks and C M Kornbluth & D A Wollheim

Bopping hither and tither at isfdb and the internet archive, one will often discover little gems.  My latest uncovered treasure is the June 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes' Dynamic Science Fiction.  The issue has a terrific red cover, a montage of classic SF elements like a man in a spacesuit, a satellite, a rocket ship ready for launch, an atomic bomb blowing up your town...and a naked woman in chains!  Wow!   

Inside, we find the magazine is full of beautiful little sex and violence spot illustrations and chapter headings that probably have nothing to do with the stories in which they appear.  There's a naked woman expressing dismay with heavy machinery, a naked woman reclining high in the atmosphere, multiple crashed rockets (stop texting while driving, guys!), a man in a space helmet brandishing his ray pistol, a woman using her pistol to disintegrate a man (you've come a long way, baby!), a variety of futuristic artillery and armored vehicles, and on and on.

So this magazine looks gorgeous.  But anybody can just look at an old magazine.  Not everybody will actually read a 70-year-old magazine!  Now, I'm not suggesting that I myself am going to read this magazine from cover to cover, either, but I will read three stories and skim the editorial by Lowndes and letters from Robert Silverberg and James Blish.

Both Lowndes in his editorial and Silberberg in his letter talk at some length about the labels affixed to pieces of magazine fiction to indicate their length; the general idea is that, for advertising purposes, texts bearing such appellations as "novellas," "novelets" and "novels" are getting shorter and shorter, so that what might have been labelled a "short story" back in the Thirties might today be called a "novella" or "novelet."  Silverberg is excited that Dynamic is going to have trimmed edges, complains at length about the typeface on the cover of the last issue of the magazine, and indicates that he hates present-tense narration.  Blish in his letter says he is glad that the covers of Dynamic have been portraying "situations from science-fiction, rather than the burlesque runway" (I wonder what he thought of this June cover) and then complains about the practice of editors commissioning stories from authors based on cover paintings; he suggests Judith Merril once wrote a story based on a cover illustration and instead of writing up a scene based on the painting just had the painting appear in the story as a canvas on a wall--Lowndes corrects him, suggesting the mention of the painting was added to the story after it was written.  (Is that better?)  Dynamic is a new magazine, this June issue being the third, and Blish offers a long list of advice for going forward, including getting rid of the spot illos I was just praising, and by all means keeping Dynamic's pages free of cartoons ("seldom funny, usually painful"), a personals section, gossip, and reviews of fanzines.      

Alright, now the stories, tales by Raymond Z. Gallun, Raymond E. Banks, and C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim writing under the pen name "Wallace Baird Halleck."

"Double Identity" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

If isfdb is to be believed, this story, Dynamic's cover story, was reprinted in an Australian magazine in 1954, and then faded into oblivion, never to be printed again.  I tend to like Gallun's work (most recently "Bluff Play," "Brother Worlds" and "Saturn's Ringmaster" in Thrilling Wonder) so I am not going to let that discourage me.

Unfortunately, "Double Identity" is not very well written, with clunky dialogue and somewhat intrusive exposition.  The plot and themes are OK, but not particularly fresh.

The Verden brothers are young self-educated intelligent farmers in rural Missouri.  One of them is affianced to Mary Koven, the daughter of the farmer whose property abuts theirs.  The brothers have always been interested in astronomy and space travel, avidly watching via the newspapers the career of rich businessman and adventurer Frank Cramm, who is on the brink of launching private space ships to the moon.  So, when a meteor lands near the farm, the three countryfolk go investigate it, only to find it is a small missile from the moon!

Contact with the missile starts changing the nearby landscape, turning Earth plants into the kind of plants that live in a valley on the far side of Luna, a deep valley which has retained an atmosphere and still supports life.  The Verdens and Mary Koven also start changing, growing fur and undergoing many other changes that make them look like monsters!  Eventually their very minds begin to change--they develop memories, and see visions, of a lunar landscape, even a lunar civilization!  

Just as some ignorant locals are hunting them down because they are scary, the consciousnesses of the three farmers shift into the bodies of moon people strapped onto operating tables in the lab of a lunar scientist.  The rest of the plot consists of the three Earthlings trying to act as ambassadors between the human race of Earth and the dying race of lunar people, who have technology superior to our own but number only three hundred.  The big theme of "Double Identity" is that people suffer a fear of the unknown and an inability to identify with what we now call "the other."  In theory, Earth peeps and loonies could through friendship help each other tremendously, but in practice each finds the other scary and is likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and for much of the story it looks like Frank Cramm's space ships, working in coordination with the USAF, are going to nuke the hidden valley.  The Verdens wonder if the natural aggression of the human race towards aliens, which is probably shared by other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, means that space travel will inevitably mean war and imperialism, that peaceful relations between civilizations are impossible.  But the three farmers, and the lunar scientist, through trickery and bold action, manage to forestall a Terra-Luna war and convince Frank Cramm to deal peaceably with the loonies.  So we have a happy ending in which it is proven that different civilizations can peacefully coexist and undertake mutually beneficial relations.

The ending gets even happier when it becomes clear that in a year or so the Verdens and Mary Koven's lunar bodies are going to change into human bodies under the influence of their human consciousnesses.  This, I thought, was sort of a cop out--if the three farmers had to live the rest of their lives in alien bodies it would have better suited the story's themes of getting along with "the other," that beauty is only skin deep, and space exploration is a risky plunge into the unknown but ultimately worthwhile.  It would also be easier to swallow scientifically.

For much of "Double Identity"'s twenty five pages I expected to give it a thumbs down because the writing was irritatingly poor, but either I got used to it or the later parts of the story aren't so bad, so having read the whole thing I guess it deserves a grade of barely acceptable.       

"Never Trust an Intellectual" by Raymond E. Banks

We just read Banks's story about a guild of robot programmers who took extreme measures to defend their monopoly, "The Instigators."  It looks like "Never Trust an Intellectual" was Banks's first science fiction story sale (Lowndes tells us that Banks has already been published in Esquire and has also written a stage drama and radio-plays) and has never been reprinted.  Not a good sign, especially since I couldn't bring myself to recommend "The Instigators."  But let's give it a chance!

"Never Trust an Intellectual" is a joke story about a future in which reading books is frowned upon--everybody gets information and entertainment from electronic devices, and private individuals don't own books--those who like to read go to "bookbars" where the licensed proprietor has permitted books up on a shelf for you to rent on the premises by the hour.  We are subjected to dopey jokes that liken reading to drinking alcohol--the narrator brags he can read anybody "under the table," there is talk of people being "bookdrunk," a college kid who sits at the bar reading a comic book is said to be "underage" and so on.  

This is the "Era of Happiness," the time of the new morality of sexual licentiousness and government-imposed limits to access to information that might make you sad or anxious.  "...reading books is anti-social.  It leads to withdrawal, conflicting ideas and permanent memories."  People are strongly discouraged from reading (signs don't even have words on them, menus have pictures of bills and coins to denote prices instead of numerals) and from refusing sexual advances.  People who follow the old morality of sexual modesty or monogamy are suspected of being intellectuals who read books.    

Our narrator edits a video magazine, a little metal box that can fit in your pocket; you plug it in and it projects TV shows on the wall--no text, just video and narration.  (The sample story from his magazine, Listeners' Digest, that we learn about is a saccharine report on a community which banded together to help a blind canine.)  Our hero is also a bootlegger of books.  A pretty woman catches him trying to move 1,500 copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; is she one of the Happiness Police, or a rival seller of illegal books trying to crush a competitor?  We get lame humorous chase scenes and fight scenes as another woman, the head of the Anti-Book squad of the local Happiness Police, enters the fray, and then the story ends abruptly without what I would consider a proper climax.         

"Never Trust an Intellectual" has a lot in common with "The Instigators," in that both take a facet from history--in "The Instigators" the fight of guilds and unions against progress, here the battle of bootleggers against revenuers--and use it as the basis for a future conflict.  Also, neither is very good.  "Never Trust an Intellectual" is the worse of the two, lacking a satisfying build up and conclusion--it is more of an idea upon which are hung some jokes than a narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle and end.

If we are being generous we might say Banks's story prefigures our own era of trigger warnings, cancel culture and political correctness, in which there are social and even legal sanctions for using words that might allegedly hurt other people's feelings, words like that H-bomb of words, the "n-word," or strings like "Bruce Jenner is a man."  But Ray Bradbury had already trod this ground by the time "Never Trust an Intellectual" appeared.

Thumbs down!

"Go Fast on Interplane" by C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim 

I generally avoid Kornbluth because I have a patience for left-wing satires in which ad execs or insurance salesmen or whoever take over the world that was never great and has severely diminished over the years (as you've seen, I don't even have much patience for satires attacking guilds and censorship, even though I am against guilds and censorship.  As a kid I enjoyed irony and parody and satire, but I have had it up to here with that stuff and now seek authenticity and sincerity.)  But I find Wollheim an interesting figure and thought this blog post should probably address three stories as well as slobber over pictures of naked girls and space tanks like I was still thirteen.

"Go Fast on Interplane" is a competent filler story.  The plot is totally ordinary, but the style of the prose is actually good, and the pacing and structure are good, making it superior to today's questionable Gallun and Banks pieces.

A guy who loves to drive and has a top-of-the-line automobile discovers a highway that leads to other dimensions, parallel Earths.  He talks to the natives, who welcome him as a foreign tourist, eats lunch.  Then he returns to our Earth.  When he tries to get back to the alternate world he finds the road he took there has been dismantled.  Following the newspapers, he discovers clues that suggest a power struggle among our nation's elite--some want to have a relationship with the alternate Earths, others do not.  He wants to further explore the alternate worlds, and when he stumbles upon an indication that access may again be possible, he hastens to seek the right highway.

Acceptable.

Translated into Italian, "Go Fast on Interplane" would appear in the 1965 anthology of SF about cars Il grande Dio Auto.  isfdb has a note about Il grande Dio Auto, but no entry for it; those interested can see a contents list at goodreads.com.  Under the title "Interplane Express," "Go Fast on Interplane" would be reprinted in the 1988 Wollheim collection Up There and Other Strange Directions.   

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Not a brill selection, but we gotta take the rough with the smooth in the reading old magazines at random game.  Our selection will be a little less random next time, when we read stories recommended by Kornbluth and Wollheim's comrade Judith Merril.      

Six 1970s stories from Barry Malzberg

I recently was thrilled to discover, at Karen Wickliff Books here in Columbus, Ohio, a copy of Pocket Books' 1976 paperback, The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  This book is huge, over 400 pages, and I love the nude idealized Everyman cover.  It's time to crack open this baby and try to grok the first third or so!

The introduction to the volume, dated "February 1974 : New Jersey" (MPorcius's home state!) is full of interesting info on the publishing industry and the life of the professional literary man in the 1960s and '70s.  Some will find Malzberg's bragging that he is the most prolific (70 novels written in 9 years, over 200 short stories in seven years) and best ("there are a few contemporaries in my field who are better novelists than I....but none to whom I will defer as a short-story writer") living writer and editor ("I set records that old-timers still talk about...twenty-two short stories rejected in a morning!") off-putting, but I find this kind of extravagance amusing, and Malzberg leavens his boasting with a big dollop of self-deprecation and a heavy sauce of tragedy.  The most important thing to take from the intro, I believe, is that Malzberg thinks of himself as a literary writer (he hints that Philip Roth was a kind of model for his young self) but, as the literary market had dried up and literary people are envious jerks, his only way of realizing a career as a working writer was to cater to the genre market, especially the science fiction market.  (Don't forget the sleaze market, though!)

"A Reckoning" (1973)

Malzberg writes an intro to each of the 38 stories in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.  In the intro to "A Reckoning" he gushes about how much he loves Cyril Kornbluth's work.  (Malzberg says in the introduction to this volume that "ninety percent" of science fiction writers are "hacks" and that few SF writers can "write at all;" nevertheless I often find him extravagantly praising individual SF writers, including ones like Mack Reynolds whom I think are pretty mediocre.)  Malzberg picks out "The Marching Morons" for praise.  I am a Kornbluth skeptic, and in particular thought "Marching Morons" was bad, and I'm not the only one!  Well let's see what "A Reckoning," which Malzberg tells us is "a pastiche" of the work of Kornbluth, whom he calls "a brother," is all about.

"A Reckoning"'s seven pages are a preliminary report, a sort of summary or prospectus of a much larger report, from a researcher who is finishing up a study of an astronaut, Antonio Smith, who has been lost while penetrating the atmosphere of Jupiter.  The researcher declares that Smith was insane, but it is clear to the reader that the researcher himself is also likely insane.  He claims that he has documents that rival investigators have no access to, has put an explosive booby trap on the documents to dissuade other researchers from getting them, and, furthermore, is in psychic contact with the lost spaceman.  I liked how, like one of the Samuel Johnson's numerous early biographers, the narrator is rushing to get his work published before that of his rivals, whom he calls a bunch of liars.

Malzberg writes again and again about astronauts who are insane, and much of his work takes up the theme that the space program is somehow doomed, either a total waste or literally a threat to humanity.  "A Reckoning" is in this vein; we learn (should the researcher and/or Smith be believed) that Jupiter is inhabited and the visit from Antonio Smith is going to trigger the conquest of Earth by these Jovians.

"A Reckoning" is exactly what we expect from Malzberg; I haven't read The Falling Astronauts or "Out From Ganymede" in years, but "A Reckoning" feels like a condensed version of elements from both of them.  (I'm going to admit I have no idea how this story has anything more in common with a Kornbluth story than does any other Malzberg story.)  It would be easy to criticize Malzberg for doing the same thing again, but I liked seeing its various classic Malzbergian ideas in this concentrated form, so "A Reckoning" gets a thumbs up from me.

("A Reckoning" first appeared in New Dimensions 3 under the title "Notes Leading Down to the Conquest."  Tricky!)

"Letting It All Hang Out" (1974)

In his intro to "Letting It All Hang Out" our man Barry describes how much trouble he had getting this one sold.  It finally appeared in an issue of Fantastic as "Hanging," and, Barry tells us, appears in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg slightly revised.  He also tells us it could have been written by Stanley Elkin. Elkin is one of those important literary writers I know nothing about.

"Letting It All Hang Out," six pages, is a satirical fantasy that suggests that contemporary cliches like "freak out" and "give me five" are actually composed by a guy sitting in an office somewhere.  Every day a messenger comes by to collect the "eight to ten typewritten pages" of new cliches, reminding me of the messenger boys who would come to whatever tavern or rich guy's house at which Samuel Johnson was hanging out to collect copy for the latest issue of The Rambler just before deadline.  The plot of the story concerns the messenger telling the cliche writer that he is being laid off.

I like it.

Introduction to "The Man in the Pocket"

I'm skipping the next story, the sixty page "The Man in the Pocket," because it was integrated into the novel, The Men Inside, which I read and wrote about in 2011. Malzberg's introduction to the story is interesting; he considers that The Men Inside is one of the least read of his novels because it is "not precisely upbeat."  Well, Joachim Boaz and I read it with some care, so, Barry, consider that all your labor on it was worth it!

"Pater Familias" (1972)

This is a collaboration with Kris Neville, and in his intro to the story Malzberg gushes about how great Neville is.  He recommends in particular Neville's "Ballenger's People," which I read in February of 2015, "Cold War," which I read in January of 2015, and "The Price of Simeryl," which I own (in The Far-Out People) but haven't read yet.  "Pater Familias," which Barry informs us is a failed story of his which Neville heavily revised, first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.

In the late 1990s a machine will be available for sale that lets you summon your parents from the past for just a few minutes. Why just your parents? Why just a few minutes? This story feels pretty contrived, but is self aware of how contrived it is.

Anyway, the story's narrator, who had a very bad relationship with his father, buys one of these devices and summons his dead father a few times for a chat. Their conversations go so poorly that the narrator's father whips out a knife (he carries it with him to protect himself from the draft rioters endemic to 1988) and kills himself. The next time the narrator summons his father, his rotting corpse appears.  Soon after, the government outlaws the machine.  (I was instantly reminded of that Carter Scholz story I just read--is 1970s SF chockablock with calls for greater government regulation of time travel?)

When I read it I thought this four-page story a little slight, but now that I am reliving "Pater Familias," so to speak, as I write about it, I am laughing, so, thumbs up.

"Going Down" (1975)

Years ago Joachim Boaz and I both read the Malzberg stories from Future City, including the dystopian "Culture Lock," in which the government forces everybody to participate in homosexual orgies.  (At the link is Joachim's blog post on Future City, where we both air our opinions and theories about "Culture Lock," as well as a good Lafferty story, "The World as Will and Wallpaper;" my contributions appear in the comments.)  Well, here is another dystopian Malzberg piece with homosexuality as a theme.  "Going Down" first appeared in the anthology Dystopian Visions, and would later be included in the 1984 anthology Kindred Spirits: An Anthology of Gay and Lesbian Science Fiction. 

You might call "Going Down" a character study. Our narrator (who suffers from dissociative disorder and sometimes talks about himself in the third person) was born on November 22, 1963, the day JFK was murdered, and strongly identifies with the young monarch of America's Camelot, even indulging in the fantasy that Kennedy's soul passed into his infant body on that fateful day.  As he grows older the narrator is disappointed in his life; he sees JFK as a man who fulfilled all of his desires, while he himself is a failure, a stifled man who works at a government welfare agency where he deals with violent and grasping public assistance cases who browbeat him.

The 1980s and '90s depicted in the story include some crazy elements; for example, the Kennedy clan is worshipped by the masses--on "Kennedy Day" government employees are required to attend a weird ceremony in which dancers reenact the Dallas assassination and a giant image of JFK's face ("sixteen feet high") is hoisted into the air.  (I thought Malzberg was trying to construct parallels between the fall of the Roman Republic and the JFK assassination, with JFK as a Julius Caesar figure; it is implied that JFK's brothers and/or son become president, forming a dynasty, or at least that American presidents take the name of "Kennedy" the way the Roman emperors took the name "Caesar.")

In hopes of becoming the man he would like to be, the narrator pays a considerable sum of money for therapy at an "Institute."  Several of the short chapters of this at times fragmented and oblique 22-page story are internal correspondence penned by Institute personnel.  The narrator receives a sort of hypnotic dream therapy which allows him to experience, as if they really happened, his desires to have anal sex with young boys, adult men, and animals.  The good people at the Institute also throw murder and incest into the mix; this story is full of violent gay sex.  There are also characters who may be real, may merely by products of the therapy or the narrator's insanity, or metaphorical representations of portions of the narrator's psyche, or some combination thereof.  Does the therapy work?  I guess that depends on your perspective; the narrator does not achieve his dreams of being "satisfied in every orifice," like his hero JFK, but the therapy does seem to calm him down ("He feels nothing.")  Something like a lobotomy or a neutering, perhaps?

Crazy and potentially offensive in any number of ways (it seems to both render conventional and to pathologize homosexuality), "Going Down" is absorbing, and I think better than most of the Kennedy-related Malzberg stories I have read.  I also appreciated how it had a recognizable plot arc, actual characters, and memorable images, things we don't always get from our wild and crazy buddy Barry.
   
"Those Wonderful Years" (1973)

This is a pretty mainstream literary story on the theme of how the past can serve as a stable foundation but also as an albatross that can hold you back if you become too attached to it.  The narrator is an insurance claims investigator who is not only obsessed with old pop music ("golden oldies"), but actually lives his life with a deliberate effort to create memories for which he can be nostalgic in the future.  His relationship with his girlfriend, who thinks the nostalgia craze is a government plot to distract people from the problems of the present, collapses when she insists he make a serious commitment to her and start "living in the now."  Malzberg suggests that the girlfriend is like one of the accident victims whose claims he has been able to deny by scrupulous investigation of the facts and following of the rules, that the narrator's commitment to his values has lead him to lack compassion and charity and fail to support others when he might have.  Is it possible that this man who is obsessed with happy memories is actually piling up a bunch of regrets?

Not bad.  "Those Wonderful Years" was first published in Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives, the cover of which depicts a naked girl in an egg with a giant frog.  (You may recall that I own a copy of Frontiers 2: The New Mind, the cover of which depicts a naked man with his arm chopped off.)   

"On Ice" (1973)

In his intro to the story Malzberg says "On Ice" is probably the most controversial story ever published in Amazing.  "Letters were violent for months afterward," he relates, and admits that it "pains" even him to reread it!

"On Ice" uses the same conceit as "Going Down," which would appear two years later. (Maybe I should have read these stories in chronological order?  Well, in the intro to the volume Malzberg warns us that some took years to sell, so publication order doesn't match the order in which they were composed, so probably it doesn't matter.)  There is an Institute where you can get hypnotherapy which gives you the experience of having sex with whoever you want, including your parents.  The first paragraph of the six-page tale is a graphic depiction of a guy having sex with his mother! (You have to retch or laugh, or both, at lines like "'Give it to me, son!' she shrieks....")

The use of the therapy in this story parallels the issue of drugs in real life, and seems also to be some kind of lament about money and how it (according to Malzberg) corrupts people and society.  The therapy, of course, is supposed to be used sparingly to cure the patient of psychological problems, but the narrator uses it as recreation.  A doctor warns him that he may become addicted, but the narrator, accurately, asserts that the Institute will keep giving him his fix as long as he pays, that they care more about money than actually helping people.  I detected a possible caricature of libertarian ideology in the story, as the narrator repeatedly talks about how he is "free," thanks to his wealth and society's technological developments, to do whatever he wants as long as he isn't hurting anyone.  In the last therapy session in the story the narrator eagerly indulges in a scenario in which he rapes and tortures the ineffectual doctor who tried to get between him and his pleasure.

This is a graphic, shocking piece of work, and it is easy to see why it would be controversial.  But I don't think it is gratuitous; it is economical, has a provocative point of view, and is effective.

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I don't want to sound like a fanboy, but I have to admit that all six of these stories, and all the introductory material, are good.  I'm even more pleased than before to have got my hands on a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg; this is a must for all Malzberg fans and for those interested in literary SF from the '60s and '70s.  And I still have over 250 pages to go!