1967 stories by C Kapp, R Zelazny, A Offutt and B Aldiss

Over the last five blog posts we've been reading from paperback anthologies I own.  Well, now we are six.  On the anthologies shelf of the MPorcius Library we find a copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series, a 1970 reprint of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968 edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr.  Back in 2020 I read four stories from the book, Samuel R. Delany's "Driftglass," Thomas Disch's "The Number You Have Reached," and R. A. Lafferty's "The Man Who Never Was" and "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," and earlier this year we read the included story by Larry Niven, "Handicap."  Let's read four more of the book's 16 stories today, those by Colin Kapp, Roger Zelazny, Andrew Offutt and Brian Aldiss.  

"Ambassador to Verdammt" by Colin Kapp   

In 2016 we blogged about Kapp's "The Cloudbuilders" and his novel Patterns of Chaos, and just last year we read his story "Enigma."  I don't actually remember anything about those three works, but I didn't condemn them in my blog posts about them so Kapp is still in my good books and hopefully today's engagement with a Kapp story won't do anything to change that.

In "Ambassador to Verdammt" we have a traditional SF story that I can mildly recommend, a tale that tries to give you that ol' sense of wonder, details super futuristic technology, valorizes the engineer and the scientist (including the psychologist!), describes crazy aliens and offers a sense of hope--conquering the stars will be tough and entail serious risks, and people don't always get along, but mankind us equal to the task and it is a task well worth accomplishing.  (If you read my last blog post you know this is the sort of thing I have kind of been looking for, and I guess it is no surprise I found it in Analog before I found it in Galaxy.)

A space naval officer, an engineer, is dispatched with a bunch of subordinates and many tons of equipment to a planet he thought had no native intelligent life with the job of setting up all the extensive and expensive apparatus to allow a hyperspace ship to land on the planet.  He is skeptical of the diplomats and scientists on the planet, thinking these civilians may have distracted the space navy from its real work in corrupt pursuit of their own personal benefit.  The "landing grid" he is in charge of erecting is to catch the ship carrying the new formal Ambassador, who is the son of the current head of administration of the tiny research station on the planet--if there are no intelligent aliens on the planet, why do they need an Ambassador?  Is the staff here just securing a plum no-show government job for the administrator's flesh and blood?

The administrator and the station's top head shrinker try to explain to the engineer that among the local life are intelligent beings whose physical make up and way of thinking are so alien that their existence at first went unrecognized.  Even now humans are totally incapable of comprehending these natives, and just trying to communicate with them runs the risk of driving you insane.  The shrink suspects the natives are having the same experience as the human visitors, trying and failing to understand the humans.  

The engineer hears the strange noises made by the aliens, sees the evidence that they are able to perform apparently impossible physical feats, and when he tries to look at them he can't even get a handle on what he is seeing.  A brave and determined guy, he plunges into the jungle in an effort to figure the natives out himself and almost goes insane.  Luckily the shrink brings him back from the brink of madness so he is able to finish the landing grid.  When the Ambassador arrives the engineer learns this is no Hunter Biden situation--the administrator's son is a mere infant, and is being brought to the planet on the theory that a baby who grows up in proximity to the natives will be able to fathom their ways, its brain not set in its ways like that of an adult human who was raised among only humans.  The natives have similarly left at the research station what looks like a crystal that seems to shift as you watch it and grows at  measurable rate--presumably this is a baby native who, like the administrator's son, will serve as a liaison between human and native, having come to maturity with a foot in both cultures.

After its debut in Analog its appearance in the many editions of World's Best Science Fiction: 1968, "Ambassador to Verdammt" had to wait until 2013 to appear again in print in the Kapp collection The Cloudbuilders and Other Marvels.   

(NB: I read "Ambassador to Verdammt" in a scan of the applicable issue of Analog because I don't want to wreck my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series, which is in quite good condition.)

In Germany, Wollheim and Carr's 1968 anthology was split into multiple volumes;
"Ambassador to Verdammt" was included in Science Fiction Stories 33.

"The Man Who Loved the Faioli" by Roger Zelazny

Back in 2014 I acquired a withdrawn library copy of a 2001 edition of the Zelazny collection The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth with a cool Lebbeus Woods cover and I actually started reading it and put up three blog posts about it, uno, dos, tres, but I didn't get to "The Man Who Loved the Faioli," which is in the second half of the book.  So I own this oft-reprinted story in multiple books, and will read it in that 2001 volume, which is already in questionable condition.  "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" debuted in an issue of Galaxy with a fun Gray Morrow cover that is quite similar in spirit to, and shares some individual components with, Morrow's cover for Neil R. Jones' The Sunless World, another 1967 production.

"The Man Who Loved the Faioli" (pronounced like "ravioli"?...I love ravioli...) is written in a semi-poetical fairy-tale or fable-with-a-moral style and is set in a future of technology so advanced it is almost indistinguishable from magic to us poor 20th-century goofenheimers.  Here's a sample of the text that puts on full display the repetition, nature similes, and obvious romantic naming conventions that are giving me that fairyland vibe:

"I said 'hello, and don't cry,'" he said, and her voice was like the breezes he had forgotten through all the trees he had forgotten, with their moisture and their odors and their colors all brought back to him thus, "From where do you come, man?  You were not here a moment ago."

"From the Canyon of the Dead," he said.

"Let me touch your face," and he did, and she did.

"It is strange that I did not feel you approach."

"This is a strange world," he replied.

Anyway, the plot consists of John Auden (a reference to W. H. Auden?) encountering the most beautiful woman he has ever met and having sex with her.  Over the course of the brief story we learn the nature of both John Auden and the beautiful woman.  The Faioli are alien creatures I guess a little like vampires, though Zelazny doesn't use that word.  They can fly through space on their wings of light, and they come to men in the form of impossibly beautiful women.  They cannot see dead bodies, only living people.  A Faioli will spend a month with a man, giving him the best possible sexual experiences, and also serving as a dutiful spouse, cooking and massaging and so forth, then on the 31st day of the affair will suck his life out, killing him.  John Auden is the first ever man to have the upper hand over a Faioli, as he is, more or less, already dead.  You see, in this high tech future, almost nobody suffers diseases, but John Auden unluckily caught some malady nobody knew how to cure.  He didn't want to be put into suspended animation to wait for a cure, so instead died but technology allowed him to maintain consciousness and mobility, I guess as a sort of cyborg.  He took the job of caretaker of the planet to which are brought all the bodies of people, human and alien, who die throughout the galaxy by robots who dump them in the "Valley of Bones."

When the Faioli arrives she can't see John Auden and starts crying because she came to this planet for nothing.  John Auden, who has heard about the Faioli, sees how hot she is and decides he wants to have sex with her, so he pushes a button under his armpit that brings him back to life.  (This story doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense; it's just one arbitrary romantic thing after another.)  So they have sex and play house for 31 days, and when the time comes for the Faioli to suck his life out he explains to her his odd condition.  John Auden is willing to die, now that he has spent a month enjoying the best possible sexual relationship, but the Faioli has the curiosity this story attributes to women and she pushes his armpit button and he dies again, becoming invisible to her.  Once dead, John Auden has lost his interest in dying, and so doesn't bring himself back to life.  The Faioli cries, then flies off.  Zelazny ends the story with a cryptic moral: "life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it."

Gender studies people may find a lot in "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" for them to put their hammers and tongs to work on; seeing as it is a story about women who suck your life out in exchange for sexual favors, a story that employs phrases like "...having taken the form of woman, or perhaps being woman all along, the Faioli who was called Sythia was curious..." and a story which offers a portrayal of the platonic ideal of a perfect marriage.  As for me, maybe I am in a cynical mood today, but the numerous nonsensical elements of the story and its fairy-tale or folk-tale style put me off, had me rolling my eyes.  I'll call this one barely acceptable instead of bad because its lack of appeal to me is more a matter of it not being my kind of thing than of Zelazny failing to achieve his goals--maybe "The Man Who Loved the Faioli" is a stellar example of what it Zelazny intended it to be?

"Population Implosion" by Andrew Offutt 

This is an idea story, with little by way of plot or character, written in a smart-alecky jocular style.  Our narrator is a doctor and one of the first people to figure out the alarming development facing the human race in the second half of the 20th century.  This is also one of the many SF stories that addresses the issue of overpopulation.

Old people start dying mysteriously, just all of a sudden keeling over without evidence of injury or illness.  Our narrator and an actuary realize the scope and evolving nature of the problem and our narrator is put on the team trying to figure out why these geezers are dying.  It seems that people that reach a certain advanced age all die spontaneously, and that age is getting lower all the time, so that there are no more 75-year-olds in the world, then no more 74-year-olds, etc.  Eventually it is realized that the human race is limited to approximately 5 billion people at a time, and, when a baby is born who tips the world pop over the edge, the oldest person in the world dies instantly.  There are worldwide efforts to limit birth, but the duplicitous Chinese Communist Party secretly initiates a crash breeding program, forcing people to have sex like crazy with the idea that they can thus increase China's already high percentage of world population and dominate the Earth, but the Westerners catch on and the West and USSR ally and then nuke China into oblivion.  

This mass death event only delays the problem briefly, and soon the maximum age is creeping down again.  As the story ends there is no hope in sight and the narrator proposes the theory that the being who created the universe made five billion souls at its start and that is why there can never be more than five billion people alive at any one time.

We'll call "Population Implosion" acceptable.  The satirical elements, largely aimed at politicians and government and other bureaucratic institutions, aren't actually funny but also are not offensively lame.  The story is a smooth read, thanks to the style and to the mystery--the reader is kept curious about what will happen next, what the explanation and solution will be--but those questions are not really resolved so "Population Implosion" isn't what I would call a particularly satisfying read.  We might think of the story as a wish-fulfilment fantasy that absolves readers from the need to worry about overpopulation and eases fear of death by telling you your soul is immortal.

"Population Implosion" debuted in an issue of If featuring an editorial by Frederik Pohl about the New Wave (he diplomatically praises people on either side of the supposed divide between Old and New Wavers) and illustrations by Vaughn Bode--comics fans may also be interested to see an ad for Wallace Wood's Witzend featuring a kid in a space suit.  (I read Offutt's story in a scan of the magazine.)  "Population Implosion" would go on to be included in a 1974 textbook meant to be inflicted on high school kids, As Tomorrow Becomes Today.  

As noted above, German readers were exposed to World's Best Science Fiction: 1968
in dribs and drabs, sections of the book appearing in translation across
multiple entries of the series  Science Fiction Stories; "The Man Who Loved the
Fialoni" and "Population Implosion" appeared in number 35

"Full Sun" by Brian Aldiss 

This story debuted in Damon Knight's Orbit  2 and would be reprinted in various books including Terry Carr's Creatures from Beyond and Bill Pronzini's Werewolf!  At time of writing I can't access any of these books at the internet archive so I am putting at risk the spine of my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series by reading "Full Sun" in there.  Please pray for that beautiful green wraparound Jack Gaughan cover, readers of faith!

Luckily, the risk incurred by reading this story in a physical book I bought with real money is commensurate to how good the story is--thumbs up for "Full Sun," a well-written story full of wild SF ideas and a plot that is one surprise after another.

It is millions of years in the future!  Mankind's relationship to machines and city life is such that almost no human ever leaves the cities, and so the space between the cities--each a paradise of pleasure for men and women--is uninhabited wilderness.  A tiny number of men do leave the cities, and our story concerns three such men.  We've got our main character, a man who, accompanied by a robot, is hunting a werewolf!  Werewolves are, the machines say, mankind's terrible enemies.  On the trail of one such monster, our hero meets another man, a sort of park ranger or forest conservator guy.  This guy lives outside the cities all the time, and has some harsh things ("social criticism") to say about the machines who have been running human life for millennia.  Our protagonist, who still admires the machines, isn't pleased to hear such politically incorrect talk.

Our hero finds reason to change his attitude, however.  He watches the TV news on his wrist phone; there's a new story about the machines' efforts to communicate with the machines who will rule the world of the far future, when the sun is a weak dwarf star.  Our hero realizes that no human beings seem to be alive in this dimly lit future.  Then he finds the timber officer has been killed, and a clue suggests he was killed by the robot and the robot tried to make it look like the werewolf slew him!  Are the werewolves the menace the machines have been claiming, or just rebels against the machine tyranny?  Our hero ends up in a desperate chase, the robot hunting him.  (One of the interesting changes in the story is how when it starts we are led to believe that the robot is a mere tool of the hunter, but later realize that the robot is the master capable of initiative and deception.)  As the story ends, the werewolf watches the cat and mouse game of robot and ordinary man--the werewolf is confident that his kind, the superhumans, will defeat the machines and inherit the Earth long after the machines have eliminated mundane humanity.

I like it.  

**********

A decent batch of stories, can't really complain.  Maybe we'll read more from World's Best Science Fiction: Fourth Series as we continue reading anthologies here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

1977 Sword and Sorcery stories by R Campbell, M W Wellman and A J Offutt

On my current road trip I stopped at The Book Rack in the Quad Cities and bought three paperbacks that I thought looked worthwhile.  Let's crack open one of them today, 1977's Swords Against Darkness II, edited by Andrew J. Offutt, an anthology of eight "original novelets."  Offutt pens intros to the book and to individual stories; the book intro is cheerful and enthusiastic about fantasy fiction of the Conan style, which he wants to call "heroic fantasy" and abbreviate as "hf."  I don't think "hf" caught on; I find people are much more likely to say "sword and sorcery."  

We've already read Tanith Lee's contribution to Swords Against Darkness II, "Odds Against the Gods" in a different book.  Let's check out the stories in the volume by famous British horror writer Ramsey Campbell, Weird Tales stalwart and scholar of the Old South Manly Wade Wellman, and Offutt himself.

"The Changer of Names" by Ramsey Campbell

"The Changer of Names" is one of Campbell's stories of Ryre, a mercenary swordsman.  Our friend tarbandu praised the Ryre stories in a late 2021 blogpost and suggested "The Changer of Names" was one of the best horror tales of the Me Decade, so let's check it out and see if tarbandu and I are on the same page.

Ryre lives in a world in which people have a passionate and superstitious attachment to names and reputations.

In his youth, like most men, he'd [Ryre] roamed seeking others whom fate and their parents had given his name, to challenge them to fight for it.  But now he and his name were one, secure in the deeds they'd shared; he had no need to defend it.

In this story, Ryre arrives at a depressed port town (its economy is going downhill due to competition from a newer port) and a maniac appears who claims his name is Ryre and even takes credit for some of Ryre's heroic exploits, killing a famous pirate, for example.  This loonie assaults Ryre, and is quickly slain.  Ryre learns that a "name-changer" called Lith is in this port town selling the names of heroes like Ryre himself, and Ryre goes out to deal with this Lith.  There follow good horror images and decent fight scenes, elevated by Campbell's name theme--men who steal another man's name via Lith's sorcery gain some of that man's strength, at the expense of the original of that name; similarly, if the reputation of a name is blackened with lies, the bearers of the name are weakened.

This whole name-changing business feels fresh and original, and Campbell does a good job with various metaphors (e. g., unhappy tavern patrons "seemed pinned to the benches by a lifetime of burdens") and other literary tactics, presenting striking images and effectively building a bleak and depressing atmosphere, so this is a good dark sword and sorcery story.  Thumbs up!

"The Changer of Names" has been reprinted in several anthologies like Lin Carter's The Year's Best Fantasy Stories:4 and E. L. de Marigny and Jaime Martijn's Nirwana.  The Ryre stories were collected in a book of Campbell's sword and sorcery (or as perhaps you have taken to calling it, hf) tales called Far Away and Never that was first published by Necronomicon Press in 1996; DMR Books reissued Far Away and Never in a expanded form in 2021--it was this recent edition tarbandu reviewed at the link above.

"The Dweller in the Temple" by Manly Wade Wellman

"The Dweller in the Temple" is one of Wellman's tales of Kardios, a man whose name sounds like that of a superhero heart surgeon but who is in fact a swordsman and musician and probably the sole survivor of the sinking of Atlantis.  The story has been reprinted in one of those Isaac Asimov, Martin H. Greenberg and Charles Waugh anthologies, the one in question called Atlantis, and in a 2019 DMR Books anthology, Heroes of Atlantis and Lemuria that reprints four Kardios tales, as well as stories by one of our faves Leigh Brackett and a guy I know nothing about, Frederic Arnold Kummer, Jr.

For his story, Ramsey Campbell developed a grim and oppressive sort of atmosphere, but Wellman's tale is light-hearted, jocular and jovial.  Wellman's most famous character is probably John the Balladeer, a guy who wanders about the 20th century American South playing a guitar, and like John, Kardios is an enthusiastic singer and "The Dweller in the Temple" is full of Kardios's sunny and optimistic lyrics.  There are little anachronistic jokes, like a reference to the Shakespearean saw about brevity being the soul of wit--the brevity under consideration being that of the attire of harem girls.

Kardios arrives at a city where they have a curious custom--they choose their king from among strangers who happen by, and Kardios is duly crowned and given a feast and access to a harem of gorgeous girls.  Instead of sporting with the harem girls, Kardios charms and has sex with--and even composes and performs love songs about!--a servant girl.  She reveals the thing we all have been expecting, that the town chooses its king from among strangers because it must regularly appease the local monster god by feeding a king to it.  Kardios slays the god with his sword and installs the servant girl on the throne and then leaves.       

A pleasant sort of diversion that lacks chills and thrills but is entertaining none the less.

"Last Quest" by Andrew J. Offutt

In his introduction to his own story, editor Offutt describes his life and career in a sort of self-deprecating woe-is-me imposter-syndrome tone.  He also tells us that he worked harder on "Last Quest" than any of his previous productions; unfortunately, his industry seems not to have been rewarded, as this story is pretty lame.  The style is bad, with odd word choices and many characters having irritating accents and pseudo-medieval vocabulary.  The pacing and structure are bad, with long expository digressions about the past exploits of the many characters, who all have needlessly complicated relationships.  It is as if Offutt outlined a large cast of characters, each with complexly interwoven life histories, for an epic novel of three or four hundred pages, and then, for whatever reason, crammed them all into this story, which is less than 35 pages long, so way too much of the text is just background stuff.  As for the actual action scenes, they feel slow because Offutt overexplains and overdescribes instead of conveying excitement or tension.  

As for plot and theme, the plot is pretty conventional, and the pervasive motif (not surprising when we recall that much of Offutt's career output consists of pornography) is difficult or coercive sexual relationships, often with the woman being the villain (women in the story suffer as well as men, and there are brave women as well as brave men, but it would be easy to argue that this story is essentially misogynistic.)  Offutt's ostensible theme is how Love and Chance rule our lives, driving us hither and yon to unescapable fates; in particular, love will lead you to a terrible doom.  Offutt's chosen plot and themes could certainly serve as the basis of a successful story, but in his execution he fails to make them entertaining or interesting.

Twenty or so years ago the Emperor married the daughter of a wizard--this woman dominates him and is the real power in the Empire.  The wizard has just kidnapped his granddaughter, Shariya, and taken the girl to his keep in a hideous swamp inhabited by monsters.  The Emperor and Empress want their daughter Shariya back, as does Shariya's fiancé, an adventurer named Haj.  Haj, it seems, has rescued Shariya from various perils in the past, including an attempted rape by some king.  The Empress, who in the past tried to seduce Haj, gives Haj a whistle with which to enlist the aid of monsters and half-humans, and Haj and his friends go off to rescue Shariya.  These friends include a Prince to whom Shariya was betrothed before she was affianced to Haj--this prince fell in love with an amazon on an earlier adventure and had no objections to breaking off his engagement to Shariya; on this same adventure Haj was held captive and forced to have sex with many amazons, and then captured by a tribe of "lovemen," whom it is hinted are homosexual rapists.    

On the way to the swamp our heroes fight some giant lizards.  Then Haj uses the whistle to summon some winged men to fly himself and two friends--another adventurer and the adventurer's girlfriend, who insisted on going on the mission despite being told many times it was too dangerous--the rest of the way to the swamp.  The Prince stays behind, making the reader wonder why the Prince is in the story at all.  The bird men fly the three warriors to the swamp, and then at the edge of the swamp Haj uses the whistle to summon some giant spiders to carry the heroes through the trees to the wizard's keep.  

On the way the three spider-riders encounter a female giant spider.  This creature has an hypnotic sexuality that makes it irresistible to male spider and male human alike!  Haj's friend and his girlfriend are killed in the fracas that ensues; the she-spider mates with and paralyzes one of the he-spiders--she will soon lay her eggs in the still-living but motionless body.  The she-spider then turns off her allure magic, allowing Haj and his mount to proceed.  

At the keep Haj finds the old wizard dead; Shariya has taken his place.  Haj implores her to join him and return to civilization, but she explains that a wizard (or wizardress!) must reign in the swamp keep, or the various monsters and beast men that inhabit the Empire--giant spiders, flying men, giant lizards, et al--will be totally unrestrained and exterminate the human race.  When Haj persists in trying to win her back anyway, it turns out that she now has the same magic as the female spiders, and we are lead to believe she kills or imprisons Haj forever in the keep. 

I am a fan of the traditional quest theme and of femme fatale stories in which guys make dumb decisions because of lust or love and get destroyed, but Offutt fails to cultivate anything valuable out of this fertile ground.  Thumbs down!  

Unsurprisingly, it looks like "Last Quest" has never been reprinted.

**********

There are four pages of ads at the back of Swords Against Darkness II.  The first page is for Zebra's editions of books of Robert E. Howard stories and pastiches.  I have seen some of these in real life and they are pretty awesome; The Sowers of the Thunder, for example, has a Jeff Jones cover and interior illustrations by Roy Krenkel.   I'm a thousand miles from my bookshelves and my scanner, but I am pretty sure I own The Sword of the Gael, written by Offutt and with a wraparound Jones cover.  

The next page is an ad for books about the occult and paranormal, like one on the Bermuda Triangle, one about the Loch Ness Monster, and one about the secret powers of pyramids.  A page of ads for sensationalist books about the murder of JFK, the finances of John D. Rockefeller, and the trial of Charles Manson follows.  The fourth and final page touts two more Kennedy assassination books, but if that's not your kind of meat it starts out with an ad for a book of peanut recipes.  Who wouldn't want to try Peanut Baked Flounder?  My research on ebay indicates this book is actually shaped like a peanut and has as its subtitle "From Carver to Carter," which is pretty hilarious.

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.

**********

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.

**********

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!

Slave Planet by Laurence M. Janifer

"Marvor," he said, "do you question the masters?"...

"I question all," he said soberly.  "It is good to question all."

Ever since I first saw its spectacular cover by Jack Gaughan (probably at internet science fiction superstar Joachim Boaz's blog), with its lizardmen and explosions and rifle fire, I have wanted to read Laurence Janifer's 1963 novel Slave Planet.  But I never spotted it at my usual haunts--used books stores, thrift stores, flea markets, library sales.  But all things come to those who wait!  As part of a campaign of downsizing, the generous Mr. Boaz sent me a box (weight: 21 pounds!) of science fiction books, and the first one I'm cracking open is Slave Planet.

(If you don't feel like waiting, it looks like you can read the novel at gutenberg.org.)

I have to admit I am already pleased with the volume, even before I've read a line of the text!  The back cover, with its additional illustrations, a cast of characters, and an ad for a book by Robert Bloch, is almost as cool as the front cover!  And then there is the dedication, to skeptic Philip Klass [UPDATE September 9, 2018: or, more likely, science fiction author William Tenn]:

This self-important and self-pitying dedication is followed by two long epigraphs.  The first is a quote from Boswell's Life of Johnson, a famous passage about the value of learning that records a conversation on July 30, 1763.  The second is a quote from H. D. Abel, a guy I've never heard of and whom I suspect is a fictional character invented by Janifer; Abel controverts the conventional wisdom that slavery is inefficient and has no utility in the modern industrial world and suggests that slavery may make a comeback in the future.

I like when publishers go the extra mile to produce an attractive book by including additional illustrations and fun fonts as Pyramid does in Slave Planet, and Janifer's portentous dedication and epigraphs suggest he is aiming to produce here not a pulpy adventure but a philosophical work.  Well, Janifer and Pyramid have got me on their side with all this additional apparatus; let's get to the heart of the matter, the actual text, and hope that this isn't one of those lipstick on a pig scenarios.

For a century the planets of the Terran Confederation have been receiving shipments of essential metals from Fruyling's World.  But the citizens of the Confederation know almost nothing about what goes on at that colony.  Why do the colonists keep them in the dark?  Because if the citizens knew what they were up to, they wouldn't like it!  They really wouldn't like it!  The culture of the Confederation prizes freedom and equality before the law, you see, and to extract and process all that metal the human colonists on Fruyling's World work the primitive natives as slave labor!

Slave Planet is a novel of 142 pages.  There are 22 numbered and untitled narrative chapters which follow the exploits of the characters listed on the back cover, all of them inhabitants of Fruyling's World, plus seven satirical chapters headed "Public Opinion One", "Public Opinion Two," etc., that are interspersed throughout the book. Twenty-nine total chapters, each of which starts a third of the way down a new page, means short chapters with lots of negative space between them and, ultimately, a short book.

Human Johnny Dodd does not find life on Fruyling's World salubrious, and has doubts that it is right for humans to treat the stone age natives, four-foot tall bipedal herbivorous alligators called Alberts (after the character from Pogo), as second class citizens, even if the natives are dim-witted (it seems that most of them can't even count to five, though they speak a simple English) and live longer and safer lives under human control.  His friend tries to cheer him up, telling him the Alberts need human guidance and taking him to a forbidden sex and booze party in Psych Division, where he meets a young woman, Greta Forzane.  The next day, after his shift training some Alberts for work pushing buttons in a remotely-controlled smelting plant, he has a nervous breakdown and is comforted by this same Greta.

Meanwhile, one of the more clever Alberts at the plant, Marvor, has heard that there are wild Alberts living in the jungle without masters, and he plots a rebellion and tries to recruit two other natives, female Dara and male Cadnan, to participate in the dangerous scheme.

In real life, psychology may be an essentially bogus science, but it is de rigueur in SF to present sciences of all types as astoundingly, amazingly, fantastically, effective, and in Slave Planet we are presented with a master practitioner in the psychological arts in the head of Psych Division, the domineering little old lady who goes by the name of Dr. Anna Haenlingen.  Over 100 years old, Haemlingen has been on Fruyling's World a long time.  She has been both covertly promoting and publicly forbidding the sex and booze parties, in order to provide the young colonial workers a safe way to rebel; their skepticism about slavery inspires a need to rebel, and participating in the ostensibly verboten drunken orgies satisfies that need without threatening the system of slavery that keeps the interstellar economy afloat.  Haenlingen's expertise in psychology has also enabled her to intuit from clues that the existence of a system of slavery on Fruyling's World has been leaked to the Confederation public and that soon a Confederation battle fleet will be arriving to liberate the Alberts.

Some of the most critically successful SF writers may be committed Christians (I'm thinking of Ray Bradbury, R. A. Lafferty and Gene Wolfe here, though if you told me that those three were more like "writers of the fantastic" than actual science fiction writers, I would be hard pressed to disagree), but in general in SF, religion is ignored or exposed as a scam, and Janifer here works in that tradition.  In the second half of Slave Planet we learn that Anna Haenlingen, that genius manipulator, has created a whole religion with which to snooker the Alberts into docility; some of the smarter Alberts are co-opted by appointing them priests who memorize a catechism about how humans must be obeyed--if the Alberts don't "break the chain of obedience" in some unspecified future Albert and human will be equals.  Dodd learns this from Norma Fredericks, Anna Haenlingen's assistant, with whomhe has fallen in love (for some reason, Greta drops out of the narrative--if I was Janifer's editor I would have told him to combine the characters of Greta and Norma.)  When Dodd expresses his doubts about slavery, Norma defends the colony's policies, telling him that only force and authority keep society together.  "Did you ever hear of a child who went to school, regularly, eagerly, without some sort of force being applied, physical, mental or moral?"

Cadnan is selected to be one of the priests, and he tries to convert Marvor, who of course is trying to get Cadnan to join the rebellion.  In the end it is the sex drive that determines who wins the debate: female lizardperson Dara, to whom Cadnan is attracted even though there is some kind of incest taboo prohibiting their coupling (they are "from the same tree at the same time") reluctantly joins Marvor and Dara in their flight to the jungle.  (As our pals Ted Sturgeon and Robert Heinlein would tell us, it makes sense to question all orthodoxies, including sexual ones.)  We actually get a weird alien sex scene featuring Cadnan and Dara and the tree they spread their sperm and ova on.

Cadnan's escape is facilitated by the surprise bombardment from the Confederation space navy that signals the start of the Confederation-Fruyling's World War.  Dodd participates in the fighting, though he is wracked by guilt and even a death wish because he is fighting on the pro-slavery side.  (The psychological toll of being a slave master is a major theme of Janifer's novel--at one point he even says "slavery has traditionally been harder on the master than the slave," the kind of thing that could put your career at risk if you said it today!)  In the final narrative chapter Dodd goes insane and shoots down Norma, who represents the slave system.

The seven "Public Opinion" chapters are presented as primary documents--speeches, spoken or epistolary dialogues, an excerpt from a children's text book--that touch upon the issue of the Alberts, whether they should be liberated and what the effect of their liberation might be.  These chapters don't add to the plot, but simply illustrate at length themes indicated briefly in the actual narrative--the argument that servants might prefer a life of service to independence, the idea that citizens of democratic polities choose their policy preferences in a short-sighted way without first ascertaining the facts, the assertion that businesspeople are greedy, etc.  The first four "Public Opinion" chapters are supposed to be funny; one of the busybody Terran  housewives who participates in the "liberate the Alberts" letter-writing campaign is named "Fellacia," and one of the memo-penning businessmen is called "Offutt," which is such an unusual name it makes me think it is a jocular nod to SF writer Andrew Offutt. (One of Offutt's corespondents is a Harrison; "Harrison," of course, is a pretty common name, but maybe this is a reference to Harry Harrison?)

The sixth Public Opinion chapter is a postwar debate between Cadnan and Marvor--Cadnan is unhappy with his new freedom, arguing that the new masters from the Confederation are no better than the old colonial masters--in particular, he finds that classes in the school the new masters force him to attend are more onerous than his work pushing buttons in the smelting plant back in the pre-war days.  "Public Opinion Seven" is an extract from Anna Haenlingen's speech before the High Court back on Earth, in which she says (echoing Norma's assertion about children and school) that advanced civilizations must wield authority over primitive ones, force them to learn in order to raise their cultural level.  Appended to this is an unenumerated eighth primary document, a report from the new Confederation authority on Fruyling's World which indicates that the ending of slavery there is damaging the interstellar economy.

Slave Planet is ambitious; it is admirable that Janifer tries to get into the heads of slaves and slave masters and abolitionists without giving us a simple good vs evil narrative, and his ambiguous attitude towards freedom, slavery, and the role of elite authority in our lives is provocative.  (If you asked me to pin Janifer down, I would suggest that Janifer believes that, while it may be tragic, it is an inevitable necessity that superior people tell ordinary people what to do, because ordinary people don't know what is good for them--ordinary people cannot handle freedom, and Americans prattle on too much about freedom and democracy.  Janifer thinks that primitive tribes, children, and just ordinary plebeians should all be manipulated by their betters.  This is not an attitude that the staff of MPorcius Fiction Log can endorse!)  However, the book has little to raise it above the level of mere acceptability--it is not exciting, it doesn't tug the old heart strings, the jokes aren't funny, the style isn't charming.  I can't condemn this one, but I can only give Slave Planet a mild recommendation.  I would definitely give Janifer another try--The Wonder War looks like it is about human spies or commandos on an alien world, which could be very fun, and You Sane Men / Bloodworld  might be an effective horror story full of creepy sex.  I saw a paperback copy of Final Fear in a Carolina bookstore once, and it interested me, but it was too expensive to buy.  So I'll be looking at the "J"s in used bookstores in hopes of finding these titles at an affordable price.

In our next episode: another volume from the Joachim Boaz Wing of the MPorcius Library!

1975 stories from Fantastic: L. Sprague de Camp & Lin Carter and Juanita Coulson

I don't own a copy of the February 1975 issue of Fantastic Science Fiction and Fantasy Stories, but after reading the first three installments in L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter's Conan of Aquilonia series and liking each one more than the one before it, I could hardly fail to read the final episode!  So it was off to internet archive to witness Conan's final confrontation with Thoth-Amon!

I'm a fan of Stephen Fabian's work, but I have to say the cover he provides here is kind of weak; I don't like the colors, I don't like the composition (the relationships between the figures is unclear and there is a lot of negative space), the poses of the figures are strange, etc.  They can't all be winners, I guess.

In his editorial, editor Ted White talks about the 1974 World Science Fiction Convention.  He says he has no complaints about the event, and then proceeds to enumerate his complaints.  For example, he points out that the hotel food was bad and overpriced.  More interesting to us SF gossip hounds, he relates that the toastmaster at the Awards Banquet was terrible: his "rambling monologues lacked either wit or punchlines  and seemed to go on forever..." until Harlan Ellison reined him in. Ted doesn't name this long-winded individual, but wikipedia informs us that the toastmaster was none other than Andrew J. Offutt!  Another facet in the portrait of that unusual character!  Hmmm... did Offutt ever appear in Fantastic or Amazing?  I don't think he did...maybe Ted didn't like Offutt's work or didn't like him as a person; whatever the case he is not shy here about alienating a potential contributor to his magazines.

Ted is also unhappy that Kelly Freas keeps winning the Hugo for best artist, that his having "sewn up" the award reduces the award's meaning.  He also suggests that the Hugo voting may have more to do with name recognition and ability to get exposure than with serious assessments of the quality of a writer or artist's work.  Is Ted one of those snobs who has contempt for the voting masses?  And wasn't this "problem" with the Hugos "solved" back in in the 1960s with the introduction of the Nebulas, which are awarded by professional writers? 

Ted apologizes because he has been unable to produce a promised in-depth review of Marvel Comics' Conan comics.  He describes the many obstacles he faced in writing this review; one of the cool things about Ted's editorials and his responses to people's letters is the insight it gives you into the actual life of a person making his living in the pop culture industry.

Ted finishes up the editorial by expressing his outrage at Gerald Ford's pardoning of Richard Nixon,  suggesting that his outrage is shared by such a significant number of the people that something terrible may happen.

"Shadows in the Skull" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

"Shadows in the Skull," the conclusion to the Conan of Aquilonia sequence, is the first story in the magazine.  It is accompanied by a trippy illustration by Michael Nally that seems better suited to a story about pot-smoking bikers at a strip bar than a story about a usurper king hunting down an evil wizard.  When I saw it, the first thing I thought of was Alex and his droogs at the Korova Milk Bar!  A bizarre choice by Ted or the publisher or whoever was responsible.  (Ron Miller, all is forgiven!)

"Shadows in the Skull" picks up not long after where "Red Moon of Zimbabwei" left off.  With Conan's help, Mbega has abolished the Zimbabwean tradition of having priest-elected twins serve as co-kings and founded a unitary monarchy, with himself as monarch.  Conan is eager to go after Thoth-Amon, and one of Mbega's soothsayers goes into a trance and tells the Cimmerian where to find the evil sorcerer.  The Aquilonian army is depleted and fatigued from the fighting and jungle illnesses, so Mbega assigns some of his spearmen and some of his wyvern-riders to serve Conan on his mission.  They are joined by a company of black Amazons from a nearby tribe who were visiting to celebrate Mbega's coronation.  It is suggested that the leader of these Amazons, Princess Nzinga, is Conan's daughter (years ago he spent some quality time with the Queen of that tribe.)

Here's an edition of Conan of
Aquilonia from our escargot-eating
friends that I should have used
to illustrate my blog post on
"Black Sphinx of Nebthu"

King Conan and Prince Conn lead the force south for weeks, the infantry marching through the difficult terrain, the leaders scouting ahead on the wyverns.  When the airborne troops spot the place the soothsayer described--a mountain that looks like a skull--the wyverns suddenly get sick and the adventurers are forced to land.  Down on the surface they find the barren skull mountain is gone, replaced by an elaborate palace surrounded by flowers!  Conan realizes that an illusion is at work, but which was the illusion, the desolate skull mountain or this sophisticated and beautiful estate?  When a bunch of beautiful women emerge from the palace Conan, and all his comrades, put the matter aside and embark on three days of relaxation and partying!  (This is the subject of Nally's illo.)

Conn, when he is just about to have sex with a dancing girl, sees her reflection, which shows her true form--she, like all the women in the illusory palace, is a snake person!  The skull mountain is the last redoubt of the  reptile race that ruled the Earth before the rise of mankind!  With Thoth-Amon's help they hope to reconquer the Earth!

At the same time Conn narrowly escapes death, Conan, drunk and asleep, has a narrow escape of his own; the queen of the snake people is about to stab him while he is helpless when suddenly daughter Nzinga appears and kills the snake queen with a thrown spear.

While the battle between the blacks and the snake people consumes Skull Mountain, Thoth-Amon, using some kind of invisibility spell, drags off the unconscious Conan unseen, to a beach where he plans to sacrifice him to Set.  The Cimmerian wakes up and he and Thoth-Amon engage in a mystical battle of wills--Thoth-Amon calls upon all his magical power and it looks like Conan is going to lose the psychic battle, but then Conn arrives and stabs Thoth-Amon to death.

"Shadows in the Skull" is disappointing; it uses the same structure and devices we just saw in the last three stories.  Conan falls into a trap (and this trap is the goofiest yet,) like he has in all of these stories.  Conan's army appears just in time to pull his fat out of the fire, as it did in two of the other stories.  In "Red Moon over Zambabwei" Conan was in a battle of wills with Set, and was about to expire just when Conn stabbed the wizard who had summoned Set, and almost the same thing happens here.  I've got to grade this one as merely acceptable.

I recognize that de Camp and Carter had busy careers, but it feels like they were just phoning in these Conan of Aquilonia stories.  In their defense, de Camp and Carter do try to bring something new to the Conan game by portraying Conan as a parent; I think all four stories include scenes in which Conan embraces his son Conn, and there is a lot of talk of Conan worrying about Conn and considering the best ways to raise him to be a good king when he takes Conan's place on the throne and so forth, but is Conan: Family Man really what we want when we pick up a Conan story?

The Conan of Aquilonia stories are not terrible, but they are not very good, either, a pedestrian addition to the sword and sorcery canon.

"The Dragon of Tor-Nali" by Juanita Coulson

The February 1975 issue of Fantastic seems to have a high proportion of surreal stories and joke stories (“The Return of Captain Nucleus” is apparently a parody of Edmond Hamilton-style adventure capers that was inspired by a joke in a reader’s letter), so I’m skipping most of the fiction in this issue. But I’m still in a sword and sorcery mood so I’ve decided to give Juanita Coulson, whose work I have never read before, a try.

Immediately, I was impressed by Coulson’s writing style and her efforts to get into the psychology and personality of her main character, and the way she integrated a description of his people's culture with a sort of stream of consciousness narrative, showing how much a product of that culture he was and giving us some exposition in an organic, unobtrusive way.  This is a marked contrast to de Camp and Carter's style, which is quite unambitious and just barely serviceable.  "The Dragon of Tor-Nali" may be vulnerable to the charge that it is overwritten for a story about violence in a fantasy world of sword-fighting pirates, vengeful witches, and fearsome deities, that the style slows down the pace of action scenes and the progression of the plot, but Coulson’s story is about human relationships as much as it is about bloody battles and perilous journeys.

The plot: Two veteran soldiers, the noble officer Branra and a scout from what I took to be a fantasy version of Plains Indians, Danaer, are among the fighting men on a transport ship, on their way to yet another battle in a long war against invaders from across the ocean, when it sinks in a storm. They are rescued by a pirate ship captained by a man named Nadil-Zaa who doesn't give a damn about the war. Another pirate ship is spotted—this one captained by a beautiful woman, Ama. The pirate ships eagerly join battle against each other, and Branra and Danear snatch up swords and fight alongside Nadil-Zaa's crew.  Nadil-Zaa’s men are triumphant, and the pirate captain disarms Ama and rapes her in front of everybody, then has her chained up on his vessel.

In the second half of the story we learn that Nadil-Zaa and Ama were once lovers, and Nadil-Zaa would like to rekindle their relationship.  We also discover that since their breakup Ama has made some sort of pact with wizards—the very foreign wizards Branra and Danaer’s army has been at war with.  In the climax, Ama vengefully summons a monstrous sea dragon (calling it her child) to attack the ship; the dragon threatens to sink them but flees when Nadil-Zaa kills Ama.  As the story ends Nadil-Zaa weeps over Ama's body and we are lead to believe that the pirate will now vengefully join the war on the foreign wizards who, at least as he sees it, took his love from him.

"The Dragon of Tor-Nali" is ripe for some kind of feminist analysis, and not only because of Ama's Medea-like story arc.  Danaer makes repeated references to his people’s goddess and thinks often about his wife (or girlfriend?) back home and a contrast is drawn between religion and sexual relationships among his people and the people he has found himself among.  Coulson includes still more female characters, crew and captives on Nadil-Zaa's ship of different social classes, and charts their reactions to Ama and that witch's radical actions and dreadful fate.  The wisdom and morality of every character in the story is ambiguous, open to interpretation by the reader.

A good story, better than any of the Conan of Aquilonia stories I’ve been reading; it shares the same kind of setting and plot elements used by de Camp and Carter, but Coulson does something more complex and more human with them, and she has a much better writing style.  "The Dragon of Tor-Nali" doesn't seem to have ever been printed elsewhere.

*********

Charles Moll's cover for The Return of
Kavin includes a "quote" from Alphonse
Mucha's poster for Lorenzaccio

In his book review column Fritz Leiber heaps praise on four books.  First he gushes over Poul Anderson's Hrolf Kraki's Saga (take that Lester G. Boutillier!)  Then Andre Norton's The Crystal Gryphone.  Then, to my surprise, The Return of Kavin, by David Mason.  This is the sequel to Kavin's World, which I read in 2016 and declared "merely adequate."  Fritz reviewed Kavin's World back in 1970, and I found that review and read it--Fritz asserts that Kavin's World is "a damn good sword-and-sorcery story."  Fritz is a softie!  In this 1975 review, Fritz mostly talks about David Mason the person, his many unusual life experiences, rather than the book.  And he spent half the 1970 review of Kavin's World quoting some other guy's poem.  (In contrast, when he talks about the Anderson and Norton books he discusses their style and content with great specificity.  I have a feeling Fritz is being kind to his friend Mason in putting out these positive but content-lite reviews of his acceptable but unspectacular novels.)

Finally, Fritz discusses Ursula K. LeGuin's essay "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," apparently an examination of style in fantasy writing.  It sounds like LeGuin's main point is that the language a fantasy story is written in should sound like the language of a fantasy world, not like the language of the 20th century.  LeGuin praises Tolkien, E. R. Eddison, and a writer I'm not familiar with, Kenneth Morris, and denounces people Leiber does not name, but a little googling indicates Katherine Kurtz was one prominent target.  Leiber calls "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie" "the best essay I know of on the language of modern fantasy" and uses the opportunity it presents to talk about writers like Robert Graves and Lord Dunsany, as well as Tolkien and Eddison.

In a sort of postscript, Leiber recommends strongly the small press Lovecraftian magazine Whispers.

Ted knows it, I know it, and you know it: sometimes the most fun part of Fantastic is the letters, and the February '75 issue produces a fertile crop of correspondence!

The writer of the first letter offers a long list of criticisms and suggestions for Fantastic and Amazing.  Most humorous criticism: Brian Aldiss's highly praised Frankenstein Unbound is a "rancid little bit of trivia...hastily written in a vein that smacks of A. E. Van Vogt at his least logical."  Ouch!  Most humorous suggestion: if "Conan" in huge type on the cover increases sales, why not include Lovecraftian material and put "Cthulhu" in huge type on the cover?  Ted ignores both of these chestnuts in his response, but does manage to work in a quote from Barry Malzberg praising Fantastic as "the best s-f magazine today."

Writer Darrell Schweitzer (remember we liked his novel The Shattered Goddess?) writes in to talk about the fiction of William Morris, one of the towering cultural figures of the Victorian era (my wife and I love his wallpaper designs.)  This is a response to an article in Fantastic about Morris by L. Sprague de Camp.  Another SF writer, R. Faraday Nelson, writes in to criticize some aspects of de Camp's essay, namely his characterization of the Pre-Raphaelites (I love the Pre-Raphaelites) and of Morris's socialism (well, here's something I don't love.)  Nelson wisely points out that one of the reasons that creative types are attracted to socialism is that they see the people's lives as a medium, just like their canvases and brushes, and society as an appropriate subject to be molded in the hands of the self-appointed superior intellect.

William Morris's wreath wallpaper and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's Veronica Veronese

(R. A. Lafferty memorably satirized Morris's socialism in his 1973 story, "The World as Will and Wallpaper."  Joachim Boaz and I wrote about it with love in our hearts at his blog in 2011, and the inimitable tarbandu in 2013 compared it to Thomas Pynchon and dismissed it as "contrived."  Spurred by the William Morris talk in Fantastic, I reread "The World as Will and Wallpaper" today and fell in love all over again!  Five out of five severed heads!)

A woman writes in who agrees with me that M. John Harrison's The Pastel City is overrated, and who (like me) likes Jack Vance, but I have to part ways with her when she says she doesn't like Barry Malzberg!  (Sigh...we almost had a love connection there!)  The letters wrap up with still more Star Trek letters, these about the cartoon version of the voyages of the USS Enterprise.  Somebody calls Ted the "founding member of STING--Star Trek Is No Good."

The last page is the classifieds, with an offer all of you aspiring writers will find irresistible!

Specify type of story!

Well, that's four blog posts about Fantastic and nine posts about sword and sorcery stories.  The MPorcius Fiction Log staff is demanding a break from square-cut manes, flashing swords and the iron grip of massive thews, so no Fantastic and no sword and sorcery for a little while.  But don't think we are done with Ted White!  We'll be reading a piece of White's fiction in our next episode!