Protostars (1971): A Laurance, R E Margroff, A J Offutt & P Wyal

Alright, here it is, the final installment of our exhaustive treatment of Protostars, the 1971 anthology of sixteen all-new SF stories edited by David Gerrold, author of Deathbeast and Space Skimmer, and Stephen Goldin, author of A World Called Solitude and Assault on the Gods.

"Chances Are" by Alice Laurance

Gerrold's introduction to "Chances Are" is a long discussion of the New Wave and how New Wave stories differ from "traditional" stories.  In brief, "old wave" SF stories (says Gerrold) are optimistic adventure tales that focus on story-telling and creating characters in which a hero triumphs over obstacles, in which he masters the environment, while a New Wave story is pessimistic and "arty," focusing on technique rather than plot or character, and shows how individuals cannot change the environment in which they find themselves.  Gerrold whips out his Hegel and suggests that the old SF is the thesis and the New Wave the antithesis, and wonders what the soon to come synthesis will look like, and suggests it may look like Don Quixote. 

Alice Laurence's "Chances Are" is about the afterlife.  A twenty-something woman has just died, and is standing on a road between unscalable sand dunes.  As she follows the road, and chooses which way to go at intersections, she reminisces about her life and wonders if God is real and if people have free will.  She was a musician who lacked the talent or drive to make a living as a performer or composer, and when she tried to become a mother her child died in the womb.  At the end of the story she comes to a door; there is no way to pass around the door, so she opens it, triggering the total loss of her identity and the rebirth of her soul as that of a baby boy.

Each individual sentence and paragraph of "Chances Are" is fine, but the story as a whole is a big nothing.  The passages about God and free will are inconclusive things we've heard before.  The character makes no decisions (when she chooses between paths she does so at random, as there are no clues as to what lies beyond the next sand dune, no evidence on which to base a rational choice between one fork or another.)  Laurance doesn't seem to be trying to make any interesting point with this story (maybe she's saying that you should be decisive but if you aren't you'll be given a chance to try again?), and doesn't engage the reader's emotions.

I'm giving this story a thumbs down, but it only just slips below the "barely acceptable" category; "Chances Are" is not offensively bad, but it accomplishes nothing.

A Belgian publisher would reprint "Chances Are" in French in a 1973 anthology that also includes Pamela Sargent's "Oasis" and Stephen Goldin's "The Last Ghost," and in 1975 Laurance's story would appear in a McGraw-Hill anthology, Heaven and Hell, again alongside Goldin's "The Last Ghost."

"The Naked and the Unashamed" by Robert E. Margroff

In his intro to this one, Gerrold says that Margroff has figured out college campus riots, and come up with a way of preventing them.

"The Naked and the Unashamed" is a series of childish jokes, I guess a satire of the vacuousness of the political protests in which middle-class young people engage--college kids protest because it is a fun social activity that brings excitement and (an illusory) meaning to their easy lives, not because they have any deeply felt or carefully considered views about the way the world works.

In the future, there is no war or crime.  And college kids protest the lack of these exciting events--they have been denied the chance to participate in, or at least witness, essential aspects of human life.  When they start throwing dirt and shit at the college dean, the police break up the riot by spraying the kids with an aphrodisiac; the horde of protestors fall to the ground and engage in an enthusiastic orgy.  Some of the cops and journalists covering the event participate in the fucking.

Thumbs down for this waste of time.

"The Naked and the Unashamed" was reprinted in three different European anthologies.  I'll keep this in mind when somebody tells me how sophisticated Europeans are.

"My Country, Right or Wrong" by Andrew J. Offutt

Here at MPoricus Fiction Log we generally think of Andrew Offutt as the guy who writes sword and sorcery novels, sword and planet novels, and planetary romances with covers by Boris Vallejo, Rowena Morrill, and Jeff Jones.  But there is a pretentious Andrew Offutt who insists his name be spelled without capital letters, and it this incarnation of Offutt, I mean offutt, who contributes to Protostars.  In his introduction to "My Country, Right or Wrong," Gerrold says great stories all have an element of truth, and that he thinks offutt's tale here has that element of truth.

Despite the eye-grabbing absence of uppercase letters, this story is not particularly pretentious or groundbreaking.  In fact, "My Country, Right or Wrong," is a traditional sort of SF story that speculates about the future, engages in alternate history speculations, illustrates the law of unintended consequences, advocates limited government and denounces ethnic chauvinism.

Jeff Bellamy is a guy in 1978, a patriot who loves America but thinks the government is too oppressive, too many taxes and so on.  He sneaks into a time machine some other guy built and finds himself in 2078.  2078 is a kind of libertarian utopia, with limited government and high technology and all that.  But Jeff is shocked and disgusted when he learns how this world of freedom came to pass.  You see, in 1980, the Soviet Union conquered the United States!  But eventually the shortcomings of socialism became so obvious that reforms were instituted that lead to the current regime which is more capitalistic and democratic than that of America in 1978.

Instead of accepting that everything has turned out alright in the end, Jeff, who thinks America would arrive at this libertarian utopia without suffering the indignity of being conquered by the USSR, goes back in time to murder a young Lenin.  But history is very complicated, and somehow killing Lenin causes the Nazis to conquer America, so Jeff goes back in time again, this time to kill Hitler, but this causes a Czarist Russia to take over America.  Jeff eventually figures it all out, though it entails time paradoxes and some heavy personal sacrifice.

This story is OK, no big deal.  Offutt includes lots of details about life in the future, like what clothes people wear and the way social mores have evolved, as well as political discussions, that are probably superfluous, but they aren't that terribly annoying.  Perhaps lefties will find Offutt's championing of the market society and slagging of socialism irritating, as I found David Bunch's broad satire of our market society in "Holdholtzer's Box" tiresome.

Like so many stories in Protostars, "My Country Right or Wrong" has never been printed again.  

"Side Effect" by Pg Wyal

We approach the end of our journey.   But we've still got a big push ahead of us--"Side Effect" is over 30 pages long!  In his intro, Gerrold tells us this is one of the best stories in Protostars.  Well, let's see if I agree.

I do not agree!  "Side Effect," which has a subtitle that appears in parentheses, "(the monster that devoured Los Angeles)," is a ridiculous farce, a rapid-fire barrage of obvious jokes--many of them ethnic jokes and many of them sex jokes--as well as a satire of SF, though more a satire of the SF of the silver screen, like King Kong, the Godzilla films, and 1950s B-movies, than SF literature.  Jokes are made about greedy clannish Jews and predatory homosexuals and how women smell like dead fish, but also about Ronald Reagan and anti-communists, and the story, which gets crazier and crazier as it proceeds, eventually evolves into a bizarre attack on white racism, so maybe the politically correct will cut Wyal some slack?

Art Noone ("Side Effect" is full of joke names for people and places, like "Judge Glans" and "Cunnilingus City") is a 35-year-old law clerk.  When he reads in the paper that an immortality drug is being tested, he is eager to be an early adopter and calls up his Jewish doctor who pulls some strings and acquires a dose.  The injection makes Art feels like he is 18 again, and he quits his job and hitchhikes across this great land of ours to Los Angeles.  Along the way Wyal makes obvious jokes about what we now call "flyover country" and Art runs afoul of the law and is imprisoned but escapes.

In La La Land, Art finds that he is growing.  As he grows, his skin gets darker.  Eventually he is like 18 feet tall and his enemies take to calling him "N-word Noone;" well, they don't actually say "N-word," they say the "N-word"--you know what I mean.  Art becomes violent, and in the long climax of the story Art leads the black residents of Los Angeles in an attempted revolution against the white establishment.  The racist mayor of L.A. transforms himself into a giant monster, and leads the resistance to the revolution and the counterattack of the white military.  The black rebels are almost entirely wiped out, and N-word Noone and the mayor climb to the top of City Hall for a final showdown.  The mayor is slain by Art, but then aircraft kill N-word Noone.

As I was reading the first 25 or so pages of "Side Effect," I was thinking I would judge it "barely acceptable."  But the ending fight is so long and repetitive and the jokes so broad and silly (e. g., the Los Angeles Police Department has a squadron of World War II Messerschmitts) that the story slipped down into "Thumbs down" territory.

Like quite a number of stories lately that I have been telling you are not very good, "Side Effect" may have value as an historical document that provides insight into the concerns and attitudes of people alive when it was written.  It was yet another story from Protostars to be included in the French Univers series of anthologies, the only place you will find it besides Protostars.

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And so our exploration of Protostars comes to a close.  Sixteen stories have appeared under the pitiless MPorcius microscope, and I've already told you which stories I think are good, acceptable and bad; now I'll go out on a limb, and, below, make a preliminary stab at the sterile and quixotic exercise of ranking them within those three categories.  I'm already regretting doing this, as I feel like I graded Bradfield and Goldin on a curve, offering unwarranted charity to the former and punishing the latter unfairly because his second story is in an inappropriate venue, but I'm not going to work on this any more, and I am also not going to just erase the list after spending so much time on it.  

Before we sign off, I should point out that several of David Gerrold's introductions to the stories are useful to the student of late 1960s/early 1970s SF because they offer the informed opinions of Gerrold, a successful novelist, editor, and screenwriter in the SF field, about the New Wave and about the working lives and psychologies of people with careers in the SF world in that period.

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PROTOSTARS: RANKING THE STORIES

Good 

1.  "In a Sky of Daemons" by L. Yep
2.  "Oasis" by Pamela Sargent
3.  "And Watch the Smog Roll In..." by Barry Weissman
4.  "The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin

Acceptable

5.  "Eyes of Onyx" by Edward Bryant
6.  "My Country, Right or Wrong" by andrew j. offutt
7.  "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" by James Tiptree, Jr.   
8.  "Holdholtzer's Box" by David R. Bunch
9.  "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" by Scott Bradfield

Bad

10. "Chances Are" by Alice Laurance 

11. "The World Where Wishes Worked" by Stephen Goldin
12.  "Side Effect" by Pg Wyal
13.  "Cold, the Fire of the Phoenix" by Leo P. Kelley
14.  "The Naked and the Unashamed" by Robert E. Margroff
15.  "Afternoon With a Dead Bus" by David Gerrold
16.  "The Five-Dimensional Sugar Cube" by Roger Deeley    

1970 stories by Liz Hufford, Robert F. Young, Robert Margoff & Andrew Offutt and Carol Carr

Let's continue our exploration of Orbit 8, the 1970 anthology of all new stories edited by Damon Knight.  I have a quite worn copy of the 1971 paperback edition published by Berkley, for which I paid 50 cents at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.

"Sonya, Crane Wessleman, and Kittee" by Gene Wolfe

I read this in 2015 in the Wolfe collection Storeys from the Old Hotel and really liked it.  Joachim Boaz also read it in 2015, when he read Orbit 8, and he liked it.  I read it again today (it is only six pages) and I have to say it is a great science fiction story (it speculates on how the technology and politics of the future will affect human lives) and a great horror story (it is sad and disturbing.)  It is unanimous--you should read this story.

"Tablets of Stone" by Liz Hufford

Hufford has only three credits at isfdb; this is the first.

A spaceship has to land for emergency repairs on a planet with an overpopulation problem.  Because of the overpopulation problem, sex and pregnancy on this planet are taboo.  But one of the lonely space crew members manages to win the heart of the pretty girl who is the ship's liaison at the spaceport--they fall in love and she stows away on the ship so they can be be married and live happily ever after.

In its last paragraphs this five-page tale is revealed to be a gimmicky horror story.  The woman, who looks human, never told the spaceman that the females of her planet give birth to dozens of children at once, and that they mature at a very rapid rate.  When she produces a brood of approximately fifty infants the ship's captain realizes that this additional population will overtax the life support systems of the ship and kill everybody on board.  The young lovers commit suicide and the space crew have to hunt down the fifty babies and exterminate them.

Acceptable.  It looks like "Tablets of Stone" was never reprinted anywhere.

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" by Robert F. Young

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" is a New Wavey title, and the story is written in the present tense and includes lots of odd symbols, but Young offers a strong plot and writes in an economical style and addresses themes that are more or less traditional--weird aliens, travel through space and time, and the way so many men must choose between family life and freedom.  Here Knight offers us another quite good story; like Dozois's "Horse of Air" and Wolfe's "Sonya, Crane Wesselman, and Kittee" it is readable but has an edge, offering controversial content and surprises.

Some centuries in the future mankind has colonized the galaxy and encountered huge creatures who live in space, the asteroid-like spacewhales.  These creatures can travel not only through space but through time.  Their strong exoskeletons make perfect hulls for space craft, and so hunters called Jonahs invade the whales and blow up their brains so that their internal organs can be removed and replaced with cargo holds, crew quarters, electronic equipment, etc.

The conversion of dead spacewhale corpses into space ships takes place in orbit over Altair IV.  Over the centuries the human colonists of Altair IV have evolved in such a way that the planet is now some kind of matriarchy, as the women are much longer lived and substantially more intelligent than the men.  Women on Altair IV are also very beautiful and subject to voracious sexual appetites--they take many lovers or administer drugs to a single husband so he can perform sexually again and again in a single day. 

The protagonist of the story is John Starfinder, a former Jonah who now works on converting the dead whales.  He is also one of the few men on the planet who has one of the gorgeous Altair IV women all to himself, which can be looked upon as a blessing or as a burden.  When Starfinder starts receiving psychic messages from the whale he is helping to convert into a spaceship--it is still alive because it has a second brain which was only damaged, not destroyed, its captor failed to discover it--our hero (?) has a big decision to make.  He can kill the whale and stay on Altair IV, where for the rest of his life he will be dominated by a woman who will long outlive him, or he can make a deal with the whale, healing its brain, liberating it and partnering with it in an exploration of the universe and history.  Starfinder is a history and literature buff (his interest in the liberal arts is appropriately/ironically the result of a disastrous run-in with a spacewhale early in his career) and he relishes the idea of travelling back in time to witness first hand the glory that was Rome.

I found the climax and resolution of the story surprising, even shocking, in a way that was satisfying--Young does not pull his punches, but follows his themes to their utmost conclusions.  Joachim didn't care for "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams;" maybe because its treatment of male-female relations, and its shocking climax, offended his feminist sensibilities?  Personally, I found "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams" to be compelling.  Not only does Young fill it with good SF ideas, surprises, and the kind of difficult sexual relationships I always find fascinating, but includes many direct and indirect allusions to the Bible and to Moby Dick.  Thumbs up!

"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," I see, is one in a series of stories about John Starfinder and his relationship with spacewhales; it would later appear under the title "The Spacewhale Graveyard" in a 1980 collection of the Starfinder stories called, appropriately enough, Starfinder.

"The Book" by Robert E. Margroff and Andrew J. Offutt

Offutt is a famously odd character, the subject of a great New York Times article by his son Chris; Chris Offutt has also written an entire book on his father which I have not yet read.  I have read several things by Andrew Offutt and opined about them here at the blog; in general I have found them full of problems but somehow have enjoyed them anyway.  I am not very familiar with Margroff, though I know I read one of his collaborations with Piers Anthony, The Ring, back in the 1980s.

"The Book"'s protagonist is a cave man living in a milieu that is characterized by loneliness, abuse, murder, cannibalism, and, I fear, incest--men live alone and the strong steal weaker men's wives and children and sometimes eat their own children and (it is hinted) have sex with their own children.  Men who are old or ill kill their own wives so that the wife will keep them company in the afterlife.

Our hero (?) is different than other men.  When young, he was the strongest of men and dominated all the other men in the vicinity.  More importantly, he has in his cave an artifact of ancient or alien origin in the form of a book.  The book projects ideas and even desires into his mind, guiding his actions, often in ways that contravene his inclinations.  The book seems to be trying to civilize the cave man and his race, for example, informing him of more efficient hunting methods, nudging him to get other cave people to look at the book, and convincing him to put an end to that whole "kill your wife to bring her to the next world" business.

One odd element in the story is that the high tech book seems to want people to eat each other's brains.  Probably this is Margroff and Offutt invoking those famous planarian maze experiments that seemed to suggest (erroneously, it has turned out) that some creatures can gain the memories of those animals that they eat.

I kind of like this one, because it is so crazy and you have to try to figure it out (and it is not too hard to figure out.)  As with "Starscape with Frieze of Dreams," Joachim and I disagree over this one and I again wonder if maybe it is because of the story's depiction of male-female relationships--in this story women are stuck in subordinate roles and defined by their relationships with men and with children.

It looks like "The Book" has only ever appeared in Orbit 8.  Offut produced quite a few short stories, but it doesn't seem that any collections of his short fiction have ever been published.         

"Inside" by Carol Carr

Carol Carr is the wife of Terry Carr, the famous editor.  She has six fiction credits at isfdb.  "Inside" would reappear in an anthology edited by Terry Carr, as well as one edited by Robert Silverberg.

This is one of those stories that has a vague, dreamlike, hallucinatory feel, a story full of mysteries that are perhaps impossible to figure out.

A girl wakes up in a bedroom--out the windows can be seen mist, and when she opens the door she is confronted with empty blackness.  She sleeps, and wakes up to find a corridor leading from her door has been added to the house.  Every morning, for a month or so, new rooms and furniture, and eventually inhabitants--servants and people who eat in the dining room and act like they are at a restaurant--are added to the house.  The servants badger the girl but ignore her responses; the girl assiduously avoids the diners, but their conversations provide us readers clues that suggest that our nameless protagonist was an insane and/or depressed married woman who committed suicide.  Maybe she is now a ghost or in the afterlife or something like that, or maybe this is all just the fantasy or delusion of an unhappy and/or mentally ill individual, a reflection of her hopes for solitude and fears of and disappointments with her family and friends.  On the last page of the five-page tale the servants and diners disappear, and the story ends on a faint note of triumph--the girl/woman has successfully closed herself off from the world and from other people.

At first I was going to judge this one "acceptable," but while copyediting this blogpost I found myself again trying to figure "Inside" out; this is one of those stories that, the more you think about it, the better it seems, so I guess I'll call it marginally or moderately good.  Maybe it is just a psychological story of a troubled individual who rejects the world, or maybe it (also) is a feminist thing, an allegory of the lives of women who inhabit a world they didn't create and to whom nobody listens when decisions are to be made.  This allegory seems a little shaky, as in my own life experience it is wives and mothers who control how a house is furnished and decorated, but I guess that is just anecdotal evidence.

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Taken as a group, these four stories are pretty good; I certainly liked most of them more than did Joachim.  (Am I becoming a softie?)  Orbit 8 is looking like a strong anthology, and we still have six stories to go, including pieces by MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty.  Fifty cents well spent!