Universe 2: H Ellison, E Pangborn, G R Dozois, R Silverberg & W Rotsler

Earlier this month we read Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," a story that debuted in Terry Carr's 1972 anthology of all-new stories Universe 2 and which bewildered me.  Let's take a gander at some more stories from this book, though we'll be reading versions that appear in later publications because I'm not having any luck getting my dirty mitts on a scan of Universe 2.  After I've read the Universe 2 stories by Harlan Ellison, Edgar Pangborn, Gardner R. Dozois, Robert Silverberg and William Rotsler and drafted my thoughts about them, I'll take a look at Joachim Boaz's 2016 blog post about the anthology and we'll find out to what extent we agree, disagree, or just look at the stories from different perspectives.

"On the Downhill Side" by Harlan Ellison

We start with SF's bad boy, Harlan Ellison--that's Harlan Ellison® to you!  "On the Downhill Side" has been reprinted in a number of books, among them Deathbird Stories, which is where I am reading it.  I have secured access to a scan of a 1983 Bluejay Special Edition of Deathbird Stories, which includes a claim on the very first page that this edition is the first version of the book to present Ellison's approved text.  So rest assured that, like a hiker drinking from a sparkling mountain spring, far from the pollution of the city, I am imbibing the pure unadulterated word of Harlan!  I mean Harlan®!

I guess a theme of Deathbird Stories is irreverence towards religion and gods in particular, and in this collection, "On the Downhill Side" is preceded by an epigraph in which your old pal Harlan jokes that he wonders if "the god of love" uses vaginal spray and underarm deodorant.  Oy, this is like a 13-year-old's idea of a humor.

"On the Downhill Side," we readers find, is a story with a relatively simple plot for which Ellison comes up with his own kooky mythology of the afterlife and the supernatural.  Ellison also manages to make his simple enough story very long and tedious by including lots of extraneous detail about the setting (New Orleans, or as you say it, "NAW-lins"), sleep-inducing psychedelic and surreal scenes, and melodramatic episodes from the lives of its over-the-top (I suppose archetypal) characters.  Thumbs down!

Our initial narrator, Paul, is walking around The Big Easy at night with his unicorn.  He meets an attractive woman, Lizette, and they start talking, telling each other stories of their earlier, tragic loves.  Paul has had three wives, and (it appears) drove at least one insane and drove the other two away.  Lizette married a guy for money or something like that.  We eventually realize Paul and Lizette are ghosts--Paul a suicide.  The God of Love (capitalized in the story, though not in the little epigraph) is punishing them, keeping them in the middle region between life and the afterlife because Paul loved too much and Lizette never loved at all.  The God of Love gave the unicorn to Paul to be his companion and helper.  The God of Love, after decades of punishment as ghosts, has also granted to Paul and Lizette a chance to earn a way to the afterlife--if they can love each other in a healthy way, they can proceed to the afterlife.

(I may have monkeyed up some of the above details--this story is so boring my mind was wandering as I read it.)

At first if looks like Lizette is blowing their chance, and she ends up naked on an altar about to be sacrificed to monsters, like something out of a Conan story.  But then the unicorn takes Lizette's place and Lizette embraces Paul.  Paul and Lizette's souls are united, which Ellison indicates by having her voice take over some of the first-person narration as they watch the monsters kill the self-sacrificing unicorn.  Ellison spends two pages describing in brain-melting detail the sight of the unicorn being destroyed and Paul and Lizette's reaction to this event.  Here's a sample:

Colors surged across my unicorn's body, as if by becoming more intense the chill touch of the claimers could be beaten off.  Pulsing weaves of rainbow color that lived in his hide for moments, then dimmed, brightened again and were bled off.  Then the colors leaked away, one by one, chroma weakening: purple-blue, manganese violet, discord, cobalt blue, doubt, affection, chrome green, chrome yellow, raw sienna, contemplation, alizarin crimson, irony, silver, severity, compassion, cadmium red, white. 

After this long passage we learn that Paul and Lizette will be reincarnated in the single body--"man or woman we did not know which"--of a person who will be lucky in love.

Boring and self-indulgent, ludicrously overwritten and absolutely lacking any sort of interest or excitement.  Why it is has been so popular with editors, with Carr judging it one of the best stories to ever appear in the Universe volumes and David G. Hartwell proclaiming it a masterpiece, we can perhaps chalk up to their belief that Ellison's name sold books.  Maybe "On the Downhill Side" represents an effort on the part of the five-times-married Ellison to work through his guilt over his treatment of women, to rationalize his misbehavior or glamorize his mistakes with respect to women--there is a clue suggesting that the wife who went insane did so because Paul kept asking her to be quiet so he could draw (Paul was an architect) and it is easy to imagine Ellison telling wives and girlfriends to be quiet so he could pen his masterpieces.  It is also easy to imagine the egotistical and self-important Ellison seeing himself as a man whose problems are a result of "loving too much."             

Carr's The Best from Universe also includes Edgar Pangborn's "The Night Wind,"
Fritz Leiber's "A Rite of Spring" and Howard Waldrop's "The Ugly Chickens,"
stories we have already read here at MPorcius Fiction Log

"Tiger Boy" by Edgar Pangborn

This is a long one--over 30 pages!  Luckily, it is pretty good; "Tiger Boy" is well-written and paced, with a decent plot and well-wrought and believable characters who have realistic and even touching relationships.  Though better than Ellison's goofy contribution to Universe 2 in every way, "Tiger Boy" has not been anthologized in English.  As the story suggests, we are not living in a world characterized by justice!  I read the story in a scan of the Pangborn collection Still I Persist in Wondering.  This same collection, in German translation, takes "Tiger Boy" as its title story.   

It is a few centuries from now, the feudal postapocalyptic future in which the lord and the church own most of the land and people ride horses around and hunt and fight with bows and spears.  (This is the setting of much of Pangborn's work, including the famous Davy.)  Rumors abound, spreading from village to village, of a boy who travels with a tiger and plays the flute--his music attracts people into the woods, and these people are never seen again.  Except for children, who return and say the Tiger Boy treated them kindly.  (Is all this jazz based on Dionysius?)  

In the village at the center of the story lives Bruno, a sixteen-year-old bastard and orphan.  Bruno, apprenticed to the blacksmith, is a likable sort and a hard worker who never skips work or shows up late, but he is something of an outsider because he is functionally mute.  He can in fact whisper, but keeps this from others, whispering only to himself.  Nobody has bothered to teach him to read, but he loves words and composes poems in his head and whispers them to himself when alone.

Bruno hears the flute music and joins Tiger Boy, who is excited to have a poet accompany him on his travels.  For his art, Bruno is thrilled to have a friend to whom he can talk and with whom he can share his poetry.  When Bruno doesn't show up for work, the blacksmith and the priest who is, secretly, Bruno's father, are worried about him and strive to get a search party going.  The local lord and the religious hierarchy want to hunt down the Tiger Boy and his tiger, assuming they are a menace to the people and/or represent some kind of rival religion.

The blacksmith, who realizes he loves Bruno more than he heretofore was aware, goes into the forest alone to find the boy and dies of a heart attack after getting lost.  The lord and Bruno's father, along with some hunting dogs and a soldier, catch up to Tiger Boy and Bruno.  The tiger is slain by the priest and the lord, and the soldier kills Tiger Boy.  Then the hunting dogs go berserk and kill poor Bruno before the priest can stop them.  This story is a real tragedy!

Thumbs up for "Tiger Boy," which I think I enjoyed more than any of the other Pangborn fiction I have read. 

Italian publications that include "Tiger Boy" 

"The Man Who Waved Hello" by Gardner R. Dozois

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is set in one of those socialistic futures in which, presumably because of overpopulation pressures and concern for the environment (or as my father still calls it, and this story does as well, "ecology"), the government controls the economy, deciding where you can live and how you can decorate your tiny apartment and providing food and all other legal goods.  Dozois' story is about how this life drives people insane.

The main character of the story, a member of the middle-class and an inhabitant of a skyscraper in the forest of identical skyscrapers that spreads uninterrupted from Washington to Baltigore to Gotham to Beantown, uses hallucinatory drugs to get by.  But the drugs are hard to obtain, and so he has another means of obtaining the small measure of satisfaction that keeps him from committing suicide.  If he sees an attractive woman on the street or in the elevator or wherever he follows her, figures out where she lives, and then uses the videophone to call her up and expose his genitals to her.

"The Man Who Waved Hello" is well-written and just as long as it needs to be; Dozois skillfully paints images and transmits tone to the reader.  The setting and character are convincing and compelling.  Good work.

Besides Universe 2, "The Man Who Waved Hello" has only reappeared in the Dozois collection The Visible Man.  Dozois is one of the many writers I should read more often; I liked "Horse of Air" and "Flash Point," both of which appear in The Visible Man, as well as the rare Dozois story "Conditioned Reflex" and Dozois' collaboration with Jack Dann, "Down Among the Dead Men."  There are more stories I want to read than I have time to read them, alas.

German and British editions of Universe 2

"When We Went to See the End of the World" by Robert Silverberg 

This is a story satirizing middle-class strivers, how they are selfish and always competing with each other for attention, how they have abandoned traditional morality and try to fill up their empty lives with such activities as drug use and adulterous affairs.  I guess you'd have to call it a joke story.

At a party a bunch of these educated wealthy couples talk about their recent expensive vacations--paying a company to take them on a day trip to see the end of the world.  The first couple to tell their story doesn't realize any of the other couples has already taken such a trip, and think being the first in their set will add to their prestige--they are pretty disappointed to find many others have taken similar trips.  Each of the many couples has a different story of how the world ends; one couple witnessed the sun go nova, another couple saw a world covered in ice, another saw an Earth entirely covered in water, etc.  (The first couple's experience seems to be based on a scene from H. G. Wells' Time Machine.)  Could the time machine company be pulling some kind of scam?

Besides their time travel vacations, people talk about the news.  I guess Silverberg's joke is that these people are actually living through what amounts to the end of the world but essentially ignoring, or blithely accepting, it.  The last few Presidents have been murdered, peace activists blew up a factory, labor unions blew up Detroit with an atomic bomb, crime is rampant, there are a multitude of plagues ravaging the country, a nuclear weapons test caused an earthquake in California, etc.

I gotta give "When We Went to See the End of the World" a thumbs down.  It is not as aggressively, offensively bad as Ellison's "On the Downhill Side," but it is a waste of time.  We'll say Silverberg's story here is marginally bad.

I guess I am not on the same wavelength as the professional SF community--many editors have seen fit to reprint "When We Went to See the End of the World" in their "Best of" anthologies (I read this thing in a scan of Lester del Rey's second Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year) and it also appears in many themed anthologies as well as The Best of Robert Silverberg: Volume 2.  Because I am going against the grain here, maybe I have to spell out exactly why I think it is bad.  Here goes: in "When We Went to See the End of the World" we find no characters, no plot, and no human feeling--it is just a list of theoretical end-of-the-world scenarios the same joke (we are blasé about some disaster) again and again.  Why do editors like it?  Because they want to endorse Silverberg's contempt for middle-class keep-up-with-the-Joneses types who are (Silverberg and the editors might argue) fiddling while Rome burns?  Well, the world is littered with attacks on the status-seeking politically apathetic bourgeoisie.  Because it dramatizes 1970s pessimism?  Well, Dozois, here in the same book, offers a story that embodies Seventies pessimism but has real psychological insight as well as striking images and it does not feel like a repetitive gag--those editors should have reprinted that story.

"Patron of the Arts" by William Rotsler

I mostly know Rotsler as a draughtsman whose cartoons appear in great profusion in small periodicals, but he has a story in Universe 2 that was reprinted by del Rey in Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, where del Rey really talks up Rotsler's abilities as a writer, so let's check out this 25-page story that was later expanded into a novel.

Alright, "Patron of the Arts" is a competent mainstream story about the art world with a conventional plot and conventional themes--it is only a SF story because it is set in the future.  A story almost identical to it could have been set in any time between the World Wars or after 1945.  We'll grade it acceptable.

Our narrator Brian is an extremely wealthy businessman who knows all about art and buys and sells and donates major art works and supports many artists, especially young up-and-coming artists.  The story is about his relationships with one of the greatest artists in history, Mike, and with the most beautiful and fascinating woman in the world, Madelon.  As a rich guy, Brian has banged a lot of women, but he is also a man with exquisite taste, and Madelon is the first woman who is so deep, so mysterious, so full of life, that he can never tire of her.  Mike is a pioneer in crafting art with the new technology of the sensatron cube.  The cube is a transparent box that holds a super realistic 3D image, generally a life-size image of a person, but the cube also presents a 360-degree background--when you face the image of the person in the cube you see what is behind her, and when you walk around the cube to look at the woman's back you can also see what she is facing.  The cube also influences your emotions directly by projecting "pulses" that "work on your alpha waves" and "sonics."

Brian convinces Madelon to marry him, and they have a happy open marriage.  Mike specializes in cubes depicting nude women that project a powerful erotic charge, and Brian wants Mike to do a cube of Madelon.  Mike and Madelon spend months together, Mike having to get to know his subject before he can construct a masterpiece cube of her.  The cube, when finished, is the greatest work of art Brian knows of, but after it is finished, Madelon leaves him for Mike.  It is almost like Brian bought the world's greatest work of art and the price was handing over the hottest woman in the world.

Rotsler pads this banal piece of work with scenes depicting the lifestyle of rich people in the future, lots of references to famous artists, art philosophy--stuff like:

"...Would you do my portrait, or use me as a subject?"  She was perceptive enough to know that there was a more than subtle difference.

and 

"All art began as science and all science began as art." 

--and with presumptively deep thoughts about people and life of the type you'd perhaps expect from an artist:

She owned herself.  Few people do.  So many are mere reflections of others....

At the bottom level are people who are "interesting" or "different."  Those below that should not be allowed to waste your time.  On the next step above is Unique.  Then the Originals, and finally those rare Legends.

"Women are never the same moment to moment."

"Patron of the Arts" is not bad, but it just kind of sits there, a specimen of mundane fiction about people who should be interesting because they are superlatives, the very top examples of what they are, like Michelangelo or Shakespeare or something, but whom are not actually that interesting.  I can't imagine how this thing was expanded into a 200-page novel--it already feels too long, what with the lists of artists, lists of vacation spots, lists of what a rich guys does (buying companies, selling companies, buying art, selling art, blah blah blah.)  [UPDATE APRIL 15, 2025: Check out the comments where someone who has read the novel Patron of the Arts describes the additions Rotsler made to the story's plot and helpfully places it in the context of the time in which it was published.]    

"Patron of the Arts" was reprinted in the very first issue of Vertex and in a few anthologies.

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Alright, so I now have strong opinions about six stories in Universe 2.  Let's stroll on over to Joachim Boaz's blog, which is approximately 300 times as successful as mine, and see what he thought of those six stories.

Gene Wolfe's "The Headless Man," which I didn't understand, Joachim praises as one of the best four stories in the book, but doesn't offer me any help in understanding it.  He considers Ellison's "On the Downhill Side" "saccharine" and "awkward" and dismisses it as a "dud."  Pangborn's "Tiger Boy" and Dozois' "The Man Who Waved Hello" he calls "good."  Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" Joachim doesn't mention.

Leaving aside the Wolfe, which maybe I would love myself if I knew what was going on in it, our only substantial disagreement is over Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World."  I think we agree on what Silverberg is doing with the story, but whereas I found it a lame waste of time, just one more snooty denunciation of middle-class strivers to toss on the mountainous pile of such stories, Joachim "highly recommends" Silverberg's story as the best thing in Universe 2, praising it as an "outright masterpiece" that is "devastating in its implications."  Hmm.   

**********

I enjoyed the Pangborn and the Dozois, the Rotsler is a curiosity, and familiarity with the work of towering figures Ellison and Silverberg is valuable, so this foray into reprints of material that debuted in Universe 2 has been a profitable expedition.  I'd like to read the R. A. Lafferty and Bob Shaw stories in Universe 2, but they are not that easy to find.  Maybe someday I'll come across a cheap copy of the anthology in a brick and mortar store (online copies are over ten bucks!) and engage with some more of its contents--according to Joachim, Gerard Conway's "Funeral Service" is "fantastic," the second best story in the book, and he plot sounds like something right up my alley.

Stay tuned for more SF short stories and (probably) idiosyncratic opinion here at MPorcius Fiction Log.

More 1974 "Dazzlers": J J Russ, E Pangborn, S Goldin

In the last exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from the fifth volume of Terry Carr's critically acclaimed Universe series of all-new anthologies, those from Fritz Leiber, George Alec Effinger and F. M. Busby.  We weren't too happy with those three tales, but there are twelve stories in the 1974 book (we own the 1975 paperback with a surreal feline and statuary focused cover) and maybe some of them really are "dazzling"?  Let's give Terry Carr a chance to win us back and try three more, those by J. J. Russ, Edgar Pangborn and Stephen Goldin.

(I forgot to mention last time that Universe 5 also includes a Kris Neville story we read some years ago, "Survival Problems.")

"M is for the Many" by J. J. Russ

As Carr tells us in his little intro to this piece, J. J. Russ is not Joanna Russ but Jon Russ, California psychiatrist.  We read Russ's "The Interview" back in 2014, and his "Aurelia" in 2015, and I found both to be acceptable.  Gazing at Russ the shrink's page at isfdb, we see he has six credits and that it looks like "M is for the Many" has never been reprinted.  

"M is for the Many" takes place in one of those overcrowded socialistic futures where the government assigns you living space and decides who can and can't reproduce.  Every couple can have only two kids, and the government seizes your kid on his or her fifth birthday.  People stay in their apartments all day; kids watch TV, but if you are five or older you are supplied a big "bag" that hangs from the ceiling like a hammock--you zip yourself in, the bag fills with goop, wires connect to your noggin, and you have wonderful dreams all day.  If you ever tire of the bag, maybe want some social interaction, you can make friends via what we might call the internet in holographic chat rooms.

Some people, it appears, don't take to the bag--at all.  Nyta is one of these--she has nightmares in the bag, so can't stay in it all day like her husband.  What Nyta enjoys is being pregnant and raising her children.  Most of the text of "M is for Many" is about how she tries to deal with the fact that her child, Lery, whom she dotes on, is approaching his fifth birthday and will soon be taken out the door to the apartment--the door hasn't opened since Nyta's first child was taken away years and years ago.  Nyta keeps thinking back on that first child.  Nyta calls up the government robot on the video phone to beg it to allow her to keep Lery or to have another child after Lery is dragged off.  Nyta tries to get Lery to pay attention to her, to say sweet things to her, like he did when he was two and three, but he just wants to watch TV and talk about how much he is looking forward to leaving mom  and getting his own dream bag.  Nyta buys pet animals but they don't fulfill her needs.  (The interactions between women desperately seeking an outlet for their maternal feelings and the various weird animals they buy are blackly comic.)  Nyta tries to use the bag to live out her fantasies of having another baby, but she just has nightmares.

The chilling twist ending.  You are permitted up to two children, and if your child dies before its fifth birthday, it doesn't count.  It is also permissible to throw your child into the disposal chute--this is termed abortion.  Nyta throws Lery down the chute and her husband programs his bag to start collecting his ejaculate during his sex dreams so it Nyta can be impregnated yet again--Lery is her third abortion.

This is a good story that really makes you feel for Nyta and then shocks you with her murderous behavior, though that behavior is foreshadowed and, on reflection, sympathy perhaps returns, as Nyta's homicidal tendencies are perhaps entirely the result of tyrannical government policy (which the government says is necessary because of overpopulation.)  Russ's descriptions of this future world are economical and effective.  The treatment of infanticide and abortion, of what amount to virtual reality entertainment and internet relationships, of pets as surrogate children, of men's preference for imaginary women over real women, of women's desires to be mothers, and of violence committed by women, make "M is for the Many" very thought-provoking for a 21st-century audience.  Thumbs up!

"The Night Wind" by Edgar Pangborn

Carr in  his little intro tells us that "The Night Wind" is set in the same post-apocalyptic world as Pangborn's famous Davy, which I read ten years ago and don't really remember much of.  

"The Night Wind" is a somewhat ponderous and pretentious story that tells you religion is a scam and celebrates teenage homosexual sex.  The fifteen-year-old narrator is caught having sex with a younger boy and it looks like he might be stoned to death by the religious villagers--homosexuality is a sin and gays are treated similarly to mutants in this post-apocalyptic world--so he runs away.  He comes upon a wolf, some kind of monster mutant wolf, I suppose, eating a dead man.  The narrator recognizes the victim, a sort of craftsman who lived with his invalided female lover, a fallen aristocratic lady, at a remote homestead, and goes to the homestead to give the woman the bad news.  The woman endorses the narrator's sex life and gives him a pile of dough she has stashed, and then dies of a broken heart.  This little memoir, which is full of nature imagery (leaves blowing in the wind, domesticated animals having sex, hawks circling high above, lots of talk about the sound of the wind) and what I guess we can call countercultural anything-goes and if-it-feels-good-do-it wisdom (e.g., "any manner of love is good if there's kindness in it" and "I've just lain here wondering what goodness is, and if anybody knows") was written by our protagonist as he sat in the neat and tidy house of the dead couple.  Now he will head to the big city to look for one of his earlier gay lovers, an older boy whose family moved out of the village a while ago.

Maybe a story denouncing religion and celebrating teenagers having gay sex seemed shocking in 1974, but in today's world the story is pretty ho hum--Christianity has been in terminal decline my entire life and everywhere I go there are flags celebrating homosexuality; affirming the dignity and beauty of gay sex is one of the rituals you have to perform to maintain a respectable position in mainstream life.  Maybe the way "The Night Wind" suggests homosexuality and aristocracy go hand in hand and are inevitably set against religion and the close-mindedness of village life is sort of interesting?  We'll call "The Night Wind" barely acceptable--it is a competent wish-fulfillment fantasy for the LGBetc community.  Genre fiction is full of wish-fulfillment fantasies, and there is no reason gay people shouldn't get their share.

Terry Carr thought "The Night Wind" one of the best stories to appear in the first dozen or so Universe anthologies and reprinted it in the 1984 volume The Best from Universe.  You can also find it in a few Pangborn collections and the anthology Kindred Spirits.

"But as a Soldier, For His Country" by Stephen Goldin

This is a pretty good military SF story with lots of action scenes and talk of weapons and equipment.  The plot and character interactions and the twist ending are not bad.  Mild recommendation for "But as a Soldier, For His Country."

Our protagonist and a friend, veteran soldiers, have no steady girlfriends or families or anything, and so volunteer for a new high tech military program.  The government freezes you and thaws you out in the future when they need experienced soldiers.  Our guys go through this a few times, fighting in wars in various hot spots.  Each time they are thawed, technology has advanced.  Pretty soon the government doesn't freeze and thaw you--they just record your mind and, when they need you, they build a new body to download your mind into.  Human civilization extends to the Moon and then to other planets and stars, and war goes with it, so our protagonists--or new iterations of their consciousnesses, at least--get to fight against and alongside aliens all over the galaxy.  The twists in the story involve the fact that our guy ends up fighting copies of his friend and even of himself.  I guess this symbolizes the self-destructive nature of war.

Entertaining.  "But as a Soldier, For His Country" has reappeared in the Stephen Goldin collection The Last Ghost and Other Stories and in anthologies of military SF.

**********

With two good stories and one acceptable one, this batch of tales from Universe 5 is far better than the first batch we sampled.  Maybe we'll read more from this assembly of alleged dazzlers, but first we'll be returning to the 1950s, so darn your bobby socks and get your grey flannel suit pressed.

Alpha 4: T Disch, E Pangborn, and T Carr

In Omaha in 2015 I purchased, along with a stack of other paperbacks, Alpha 4, a 1973 anthology of "superb" stories that are "important to the genre."  The potential problem with reprinting old stories widely considered "excellent" and "important" is that serious SF fans will have already read them in other venues, so the back cover of Alpha 4 tries to appeal to new fans of SF, people who may be familiar with the Big Three of Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein and with mainstream breakout success Ray Bradbury, but not yet with people like Thomas M. Disch, Damon Knight, Philip Jose Farmer and Brian W. Aldiss.  There were nine Alpha volumes in total, so maybe the pitch worked.

At this here blog we have already addressed a few of the stories that make an appearance in Alpha 4: "Dio," AKA "The Dying Man," by Damon Knight, "Judas Danced" by Brian Aldiss, and "All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty.  Today we'll assail three more of these allegedly excellent and important works, one each by Thomas Disch, Edgar Pangborn, and Terry Carr.

"Casablanca" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

This is one of those stories I own in multiple books, it appearing in the 1971 hardcover Disch collection Fun with Your New Head--I own a 1972 paperback printing of that-- and the 1980 paperback Disch collection Fundamental Disch, a copy of which sits right there on the shelves of the MPorcius Library.  It kind of looks like "Casablanca" first saw print in the anthology Alfred Hitchcock Presents: Stories that Scared Even Me, which seems a little odd, all the other stories in that book being reprints.  In 1968 "Casablanca" would appear in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, the famously influential and famously unprofitable flagship of the New Wave--the magazine's survival was only possible through subsidies from the British taxpayer and Moorcock himself, who sank into it cash he raised through the rapid composition and sale of paperback fantasy novels.

Thomas Disch is a smart guy and a good writer but also a bitter and snobbish sort of character and "Casablanca" is a derisive and even vindicative attack on the American people, in particular the Midwesterners among whom Disch was born.  The title is presumably an ironic reference to the famous film, which, like The Godfather, is one of those cultural icons I have never actually watched but which I feel like I know because people never stop talking about it.  Anyway, in the Bogart-Bergman movie, Americans in North Africa during a world war act admirably and achieve some kind of nobility, while in Disch's story Americans in North Africa during a world war act crassly and get totally humiliated.

An older married couple are on vacation in Morocco and Disch pokes fun at them for being unable to speak French, for trying to save money, for enjoying sugary treats, for being patriotic about the US of A and for being hostile to communism, exactly the kind of criticisms of provincial Yanks we'd expect from a New Yorker who spent a lot of time in England hobnobbing with other sophisticated smarty smarts.  While they are there in North Africa, the United States is destroyed by a nuclear attack and the couple is repeatedly humiliated by the locals because their travelers' checks and American money are no longer worth much of anything.  Eventually the wife disappears and the husband is robbed of his only means of getting out of Morocco; his incompetent efforts to find his wife prove fruitless and he is beaten up by a mob and robbed again following a tussle with a young thief.

(I don't know if people are still talking about "punching down," but "Casablanca" could be the subject of an entire discourse on the concept.  Is smart and educated Disch punching down at the ignorant tourists, or is he a homosexual punching up at breeders?  Are the Arab mobs punching down at a lone woman and a lone old man, or punching up at the white imperialist bourgeoisie?) 

Obviously you are going to enjoy this story if you hate America and relish the spectacle of seeing Americans humiliated by third worlders.  Silverberg in his little intro to "Casablanca" here in Alpha 4 bills the story as "comic and terrifying both at once, like most true nightmares," I guess trying to sell it not as a leftist wish fulfillment fantasy but as a horror story.  In some horror stories, horrible things happen to sympathetic people and you feel bad for them; in others, horrible things happen to people who have misbehaved and you feel justice has been served.  Disch in his story here seems to be conducting a sort of literary exercise in which directs the reader to feel the United States deserves to be annihilated and its expatriates laid low for their sins but leaves enough room for readers who don't share his snobbish anti-American opinions to be tricked into sympathizing with the tourists.  I can't say I am on the same page as Disch is here, but the story is thought-provoking and cleverly put together so I guess I have to admit it is good.

(A double-plus-super-anti-subversive subversive hot take on "Casablanca" might be that Disch is laying a trap for his fellow alienated sophisticates, seeing if he can get them to side with mass-murdering communists and Arab thieves against innocuous and ineffectual ordinary Americans.)

"Angel's Egg" by Edgar Pangborn (1951)

Here we have an at times tedious story that feels long and reminds me of the work of Theodore Sturgeon: the themes of love and of collective consciousness; the alien utopia that serves as a foil for our crummy human society; the argument that the cognitive elite should mold society for its own good regardless of the will of the plebians.    

"Angel's Egg" is almost 40 pages long here in Alpha 4 and comes to us as a series of documents in a file in the near future of a one-world government.  The wife of Cleveland McCarran, the "martyred first president" of that world government, donated these documents to some institution in 1994, and one component of the file is a letter sent to McCarran in 1951 when he was working at the FBI by a state police captain regarding an investigation of a Dr. David Bannerman, a biologist and school teacher.  ("Angel's Egg" is one of those stories that romanticizes teachers.)  The lion's share of the file consists of annotated excerpts from Bannerman's journal; these were attached to the 1951 letter and describe in sleep-inducing detail Bannerman's relationship with an alien who looks like a six-inch-tall woman covered in down and is equipped with dragonfly wings; Bannerman calls this doll-sized creature an "angel."

The angels hail from a planet ten light years away and their society is wise because it is 70 million years old.  In this oh-so-wise civilization the most honored of all professions is teacher (of course!) and these long-lived aliens spend many years being educated.  When the aliens sent an expedition to Earth it was only natural that one of their number hook up with a kindly Terran schoolteacher--Bannerman--whose goodness was confirmed by reading his brain--like so many aliens in SF stories of all types, from space opera to this kind of sappy utopianism, the angels are telepathic.  

Besides descriptions of how the little angel makes a little bed in a shoe box and having her around makes him the happiest man in the world, Bannerman fills his journal with summaries of his telepathic conversations with the alien, much of them about how her people's utopian society operates.  They no longer experience fear.  They no longer experience hate.  They have beautiful and intelligent cats who have outgrown the desire to torture their prey.  They have the capability to travel to every planet in the galaxy but are humble and have thus far kept themselves aloof and a secret from other life forms.  

The angel aliens have finally decided to help other intelligent species, and we humans are to be the beneficiaries of their wisdom--it is implied they will secretly program the minds of influential people so they will behave along the lines the angels think best.  (There is a scene in which Bannerman plays chess and the angel programs his mind to play a better game and Bannerman thinks he is coming up with these genius moves himself.)  But to provide us Earthers this help they must know as much about us as possible.  They can erase your brain and absorb the info themselves, but this process, which takes some considerable time, ends in death of the mind donor.  Bannerman, reflecting that the human race of 1951 appears to be on the brink of destroying the world, agrees to donate his mind to the angels for the good of his people.  Bannerman starts reliving his life, remembering every moment in detail, and then forgetting it; the process takes like a month, and then he dies.  

The file contains, and our story concludes with, a brief statement from the self-sacrificing Bannerman's  chess partner, a doctor, that provides clues that make it clear that Bannerman's journal tells the absolute truth, and that Bannerman's dead body shows no signs of distress, only contentment--it is the most well-ordered dead body the doc has ever seen.  ("Angel's Egg" is a story bubbling over with superlatives--doc also says Bannerman was the most stable human being he ever met.)  It is not quite as clear, but I guess we are supposed to think that McCarann's presidency and the world government are signs the angels are manipulating us to have a better society.  "Angel's Egg" is one of those SF stories like Arthur C Clarke's Childhood's End, Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing and the overrated film The Day the Earth Stood Still that expects us to welcome alien imperialism.  

(I often talk about how genre fiction is wish fulfillment fantasy, and maybe we should also consider this story as the wish fulfillment fantasy of a childless man who likes the idea of having a smart beautiful daughter.  Did Pangborn have children?  A skim of Wikipedia and The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction hasn't yielded any info on his family life.)

I found the first half or two-thirds of "Angel's Egg" pretty boring and annoying but by the final third or so, after the sappy preliminaries are done with and the chess partner is introduced into the story, I guess I fell into its groove and it got a little more interesting.  I guess we'll call it acceptable.

"Angel's Egg" debuted in Galaxy and appears to be Pangborn's first published SF tale.  Many of the prominent SF editors--Damon Knight, Groff Conklin, Martin H. Greenberg, Jack Dann, Gardner Dozois, and Edmund Crispin--have seen fit to serve up this slab of sentimentality to their readers.

"In His Image" by Terry Carr (1971)

Here is another of those stories in which robots who admire humans inherit the Earth and we readers are offered reason to believe humans are not in fact admirable.  There are a lot of these stories out there; I associate this theme with Clifford Simak, but we recently read just such a story by beloved bad boy Harlan Ellison.  Fortunately, Terry Carr here in "In His Image" takes a nuanced view on the matter of whether human beings are worthy of admiration.

It is like three centuries in the future.  In the period between the Nixon Administration and the time in which this story is set the human race developed human-like robots, built abstract sculptures the size of mountains, polluted the air severely, and then retreated into domed cities to escape the pollution that corroded the mountain sculptures and made the air almost unbreathable.  This story relates the search conducted by our narrator, a human-like robot, of the tallest building in a domed city for the last surviving human being!  Our narrator makes clear he admires humans because they are always striving to climb higher, both literally and metaphorically.  When he finds the last human being the man turns out to be a drunk who hates robots--when he isn't vomiting he is calling the robots mere machines no better than staplers or typewriters.  The faith of our narrator is not shaken--in fact, after the medical robots take off the last living human our narrator decides to emulate the human race, to embody our ambition, by figuring out how to climb one of the mountain sculptures.  His computer brain doesn't have enough data to mathematically calculate the probability of success in scaling the sculpture without falling, and this is one way in which he is able to emulate his creators, going on a dangerous adventure without any certainty of how it will turn out!

Of today's three stories this is the most conventional and comfortable, the easiest to read and the one with the least irritating (to me) message or theme.  I like it.

"In His Image" was the cover story of an issue of Amazing published in the year of my birth; the story is titled "In Man's Image" on the magazine's interior pages.  "In His Image" hasn't been reprinted nearly as often as "Casablanca" and "Angel's Egg," but, speak of the devil, it did appear in the third volume in the Harlan Ellison Discovery Series, the Carr collection The Light at the End of the Universe.  As I was copyediting this blog post I learned that the internet archive, world's greatest website, was back in action, and I was able to read Carr's intro to "In His Image" in The Light at the End of the Universe; Carr relates how Amazing editor Ted White acquired the Mike Hinge painting and asked Carr to write a story based around it and the result is this story

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If you were inclined to think SF fans were misanthropic and pessimistic self-important snobs who hold normies in contempt and expect them to destroy themselves and maybe the world unless some elite group were to seize the reins from them, these stories would not disabuse you of this notion.  I'm not on board with a lot of what these stories have to say, but none of them are actually bad, though at times Pangborn's "Angel's Egg" comes close.  I am, however, skeptical that "In His Image," while a good story worthy of inclusion in an anthology, is "important."

Stay tuned for more short stories here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  

Tomorrows from 1973 by R Silverberg, B N Malzberg, L M Janifer & E Pangborn

I've bought many SF anthologies over the years, and sometimes I take that extra step and actually read them.  Next on the firing line: Ten Tomorrows, an anthology of brand new stories from 1973 edited by Roger Elwood.  Back in 2017 I read and blogged about Elwood's anthology Tomorrow and talked a little about his controversial career, and in 2015 I covered his anthology Future Corruption.  It seems that many people have a low opinion of Elwood's anthologies, but I thought Tomorrow and Future Corruption were alright.  Hopefully I'll have a similarly positive experience with Ten Tomorrows.  Let's start with the first four tales in the 224-page volume, those by Robert Silverberg, Barry N. Malzberg, Laurence M. Janifer and Edgar Pangborn, which will bring us to page 66.

"Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" by Robert Silverberg

This is a New Wave thing, a story that knows it is a story, with a protagonist who knows he isn't real, sometimes acts as the narrator and directly speaks to the reader.  "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" is full of topical early '70s references--e. g., the My Lai massacre, IRA terrorism, Kennedy assassinations--and name dropping--e. g., Che Guevara, Angela Davis, Fidel Castro, Mao Tse-tung, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, Richard Nixon.  Various unconventional narrative devices are employed--there are lots of what appear to be transcriptions of real life newspaper clippings, for example, and lists, like a list of Native American tribes and a list of famous assassins.

The threadbare plot of this story, which somebody who liked it in 1973 might have called "a freewheeling phantasmagoria that speaks to today's concerns," upon which the lists and newspaper clippings and various flights of fancy are hung, is about a college student who wishes he had the technology to travel through time, to hypnotize people, to levitate, to travel underground, etc., so that he could change history and the world by, for example (these are the flights of fancy), giving American Indians a nuclear weapon so they can achieve revenge on the white man, destroying the Pentagon, saving Abraham Lincoln from John Wilkes Booth, brainwashing President Nixon, and making it legal for homosexuals to get married.  One of the student's fantasies, which I guess enables the others, is that he is a student from the future who has travelled to the 1970s as part of his dissertation research.  

In the last paragraph of the story the college student upbraids the reader for enjoying these escapist fantasies (P.S.: I was not enjoying them) instead of actually getting out there and working for the Revolution (P.S.: I'm still not inclined to get out there and set fire to a police station or loot a department store.)

I guess this story is interesting as an historical artifact, a document that offers the 21st-century reader a catalog of stuff lefties in 1973 had on their minds, even if it is unclear to what extent Silverberg is expressing sympathy for those who would radically change our society through brainwashing and other forms of violence and to what extent he is lampooning people who indulge in such sterile and/or self-destructive fantasies.  Obviously, if we judge "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" on traditional criteria, like pacing, character development, plot, or style, it is quite bad--the piece is long and tedious and offers not the least shred of entertainment.  In some ways it resembles a Malzberg story, but it is lengthy and explicit and disjointed, with lots of extraneous material, while a Malzberg story on similar themes would be brief and allusive, and is not at all funny, the way the better Malzberg stories can be quite funny.  

"Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" would reappear in a bunch of Silverberg collections, and Elwood would include it in another of his anthologies--yet another with "tomorrow" in the title!--three years after it appeared here in Ten Tomorrows. 

"Yahrzeit" by Barry N. Malzberg     

Speak of the devil!  Here's a two-page story from the sage of Teaneck himself.  

For some reason, I guess overpopulation, in the early 1980s it is legal to assassinate strangers on the street!  In fact, the government will give you a reward for sneaking up on people and killing them!  But only certain kinds of people, like old people, known as "jerrys."  The narrator is a guy who loves slaying people.  He's a little bored with killing jerrys, and would like to put a child to death, but that is not permissible--yet!  Today is the anniversary of the death of one of the narrator's friends, a fellow bloodthirsty killer who had the balls to murder a little boy, but was caught and thrown in prison.  The narrator hunts down a jerry and kills him, and dedicates the kill to his dead friend, even forgoing the government reward for his good deed in honor of his friend!

This story is a great contrast with Silverberg's.  Whereas "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine" is eighteen pages of tired and obvious leftist boilerplate you've heard a hundred times already that makes your eyes glaze over and inspires thoughts about those dishes that are sitting in the sink and should probably be washed before it's time to make dinner, "Yahrzeit" is two pages of surprise and mystery, a story that grips you, makes you laugh, makes you feel.

Thumbs up!

"Yahrzeit" would later be included in the Malzberg collection The Man Who Loved the Midnight Lady.  

"A Few Minutes" by Laurence M. Janifer

"A Few Minutes" is written in the second person--like in a Fighting Fantasy Gamebook, YOU are the star of the story!  

You are a white scientist with a black wife, with whom you have an adult son.  You have created a machine that can look at the future and display to the operator the results of major decisions that change history.  (It won't warn you if that second helping of pancakes is going to give you indigestion, but it will warn you if that invasion of Ukraine you have your heart set on isn't going to wrap itself up in three or four days after all.)  The machine gives the human race the ability to avoid nuclear war and other cataclysms.  It took a long time to get the machine built and accepted by the government, but thanks to the machine, today there is a world government, no fear of nuclear war, and no racism.  Today you and your son await the Committee that is going to give you an award or something, and you will have to give a speech.  In conversation with your son we readers learn that there was a house fire early in the development of the machine, and your son saved the machine from the fire.

"A Few Minutes" has a sad twist ending that I have to admit I'm not quite sure I really understand.  You and your wife initially didn't want to have a son, because you feared you couldn't afford a child and worried how the racist world would treat a mixed race person; in the event, of course, it has been great having a son--he's handsome and strong and smart and you have a great relationship with him full of intellectual discussions and shared jokes and all that; and of course he saved the machine from that fire.  But the last two pages of the story seem to suggest that the first six pages, which depict life with a son, are a day dream or a machine-generated vision of an alternate future that didn't come to pass, that the machine, on its first test run, advised you to not have a son, because a son will distract you and delay the completion and adoption of the machine.  The reason the story is in the second person is that the voice in which the story is written is that of the son who will not exist, or maybe just what the scientist imagines such a son's voice would be like.  At least I think that is what is going on; it is a little opaque.  

Acceptable.         

"A Few Minutes" has only ever appeared in Ten Tomorrows.  Perhaps even worse, the people at Fawcett spelled Janifer's name wrong on both the front and back covers of Ten Tomorrows.  Sad!

"The Freshman Angle" by Edgar Pangborn    

More college students!  The characters in "The Freshman Angle" are attending university 800 years from now.  Pangborn's story consists of their conversations about the 20th century--one of these kids is a history student and has to write an essay on the 1900s--and the point of the story is the contrast between the 20th century and the world of the 28th century, which I guess Pangborn is offering up as some kind of utopia.  The 20th century is presented as the period in which all the natural resources were practically used up and which ended with a nuclear war and worldwide flooding, cataclysms which were soon followed by a worldwide plague; as a result, the students of the future burn wood for heat and candles for light and write with dip pens; metal is in short supply and the use of fossil fuels is strictly regulated.  Theirs is a communal society; the students were raised in communes and they are all obliged to do physical labor at the university, raising and cooking the food, for example.  People walk around naked, are apparently all bisexual, and their seasonal holidays are sex orgies.  

This story, about thirty pages, is boring and irritating; the surfeit of banalities about 20th-century pollution and warfare, and the advocacy of abandoning monogamy and heterosexuality are lame enough, but even worse is all the cute and erudite flirting among the main characters, which I guess is supposed to show that if you regulate fossil fuels and raise kids in a commune everybody we'll become a race of lovey dovey geniuses, is even more pointless and silly.  Like Silverberg in "Ms. Found in an Abandoned Time Machine," Pangborn presents arguments you've heard a hundred times before and uses like ten times as many pages as he needs to make them.

Thumbs down!

"The Freshman Angle" takes place in the same universe as Davy, which I read and blogged about seven years ago.  Unlike the quite popular Davy, I don't think "The Freshman Angle" has ever been reprinted.

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To sum up, Silverberg and Pangborn offer tedious tendentious polemics, Silverberg abandoning traditional ideas about plot and character to unleash all kinds of New Wave gimmicks on us, while Pangborn tries, with little success, to do the traditional SF thing of presenting a utopia from the inside by developing likable characters (who vocalize their belief that our world sucks) and an attractive setting (which is supposed to make our world look like it sucks by comparison.)  Janifer complains about nuclear weapons and racism, but instead of just lecturing us, tries to integrate his trite points with a story of human feeling, and does a passable job of it.  The big winner today, however, is Malzberg, who with admirable economy brings to life a totally crazy world and a totally crazy character, both of which are convincing, surprising and entertaining.

Three more tomorrows in our next episode, those contributed by Anne McCaffrey, Pamela Sargent, and Larry Niven.

Mid '60s stories from Edgar Pangborn, Algis Budrys & Philip Latham

Let's take a look at Terry Carr's 1970 anthology On Our Way to the Future, Ace 62940.  The little bio at the start of the book tells us Carr lived in Brooklyn with his wife Carol, also a writer in and out of the SF field, and reminds us of his collaborative work with Donald Wollheim.  Oh yeah, and that he and Carol had two cats, Gilgamesh and George.  Meow!

We've already read the story by Kris Neville in On Our Way to the Future, as well as James Schmitz's contribution, "Goblin Night;" today let's look at the included pieces by Edgar Pangborn, Algis Budrys and Philip Latham (the pen name of professional astronomer Robert S. Richardson.)

"A Better Mousehole" by Edgar Pangborn (1965)

No doubt you remember when we read Pangborn's novels Davy and West of the Sun. Let's see what he does in a shorter format.

"A Better Mousehole," which first appeared in a special issue of Fred Pohl's Galaxy, is written in the voice of the uneducated bartender of a little hick town.  He speaks in a kind of redneck dialect ("The back room gets lively Saturday nights, and I ain't been sweeping up too good, last couple-three weeks"), saying "desecrator" for "decorator" and "thermostack" for "thermostat" and misattributing cliches to the Bible and that sort of thing.  Through the medium of his garbled text we learn all about the various wacky characters in this little town and their strained relationships with each other.  We also learn the plot of the story, somewhat obliquely.  One of the town's inhabitants is a wealthy intellectual who will leave his decaying mansion for months at a time to explore unpopulated corners of the world.  From his most recent trip he brought back to the little town a basketball-sized blue sphere which turns out to be the vehicle of tiny alien invaders!

These aliens, whom our narrator calls "blue bugs," are sort of interesting.  Those they bite have wonderful dreams; being bitten also seems to improve a  victim's mood.  It is hinted that the "bugs" might be able to make the world a better place by rendering people more mellow... but there are also clues that suggest being bitten drives some to insanity, murder, even death.  I compared Pangborn's novels to the work of Theodore Sturgeon, and the possibility that alien invaders might improve human society, as well as references to love and sex in "A Better Mousehole," also brought Sturgeon to mind.  [UPDATE 12/6/2016: In the comments ukjarry sheds light on the Sturgeon-Pangborn connection!]

The plot of "A Better Mousehole" is basically straightforward traditional SF stuff, but Pangborn gussies the story up by having it told via an idiosyncratic and unreliable narrator and by not telling the story in strict chronological order.  I found it entertaining.

"Be Merry" by Algis Budrys (1966)

When it first appeared in If, "Be Merry" was billed as a "complete novel" and it takes up like 50 pages of On Our Way to the Future.

This is one of those post-apocalyptic jobs, but has elements of hope as well as descriptions of ruins and sickly people and depictions of the ruthlessness of people who have been pushed to extremes.  And it takes place in my home state of New Jersey, with a description of a typical Jersey Shore town and references to Route 46, with which I am very familiar, and WOR, one of the radio stations I listened to during my four years of driving between home and Rutgers and then three years driving between home and the kind of job my RU history degree had prepared me for, earning minimum wage at a bookstore.

The background: Space alien lifeboats crash landed on Earth in the 1960s; the aliens were friendly, but carried diseases that killed most of mankind.  The aliens themselves were in turn made ill by Earth germs.  Human society collapsed, but the survivors have been slowly rebuilding a tolerant multi-species society.

The plot: Evidence reaches a center of the fledgling new society that there is a New Jersey town which is surprisingly healthy (of all the outposts of survivors, it is the only one which isn't always requesting drugs and medical supplies.)  Our narrator, a human, and his partner, an alien, are sent to investigate this mysterious town.  What they find could lead to their deaths, or the kind of paradigm shift we often see in classic SF stories, the solution to the problems plaguing the new civilization!

I have been very hard on Algis Budrys' famous novel Rogue Moon, but I liked his novel Man of Earth and I also like "Be Merry."  The writing style is good, there are engaging ideas, and all of the numerous characters play a role in the plot and feel "real:" they are interesting, have believable motivations and act in a logical manner, and the reader can identify with them; none are incredibly virtuous or cartoonishly evil.  Budrys actually had me wondering how the story was going to turn out, and actually caring how it turned out.  

Quite good.

"Under the Dragon's Tail" by Philip Latham (1966)

This is a humor story about an astronomer who is an arrogant jerk.  He works at a county planetarium near Los Angeles and is sick and tired of having to be nice to the taxpayers who pay his salary and having to listen to all the dolts and cranks who call him and write him with their dumb questions and crazy theories.  Most of the story's fifteen pages is this kind of comedy material.  When he is not complaining or running the projector, the astronomer finds time to do lots of calculations about an asteroid.  His calculations indicate that the asteroid is going to strike Los Angeles and cause "more devastation" than would a strike by "many thermonuclear weapons."  Instead of getting upset and calling Washington or other scientists for confirmation of this terrible news, he treasures the discovery to himself!  He's gone mad!

"Under the Dragon's Tail," first published in Analog, is not bad.  I guess it is sort of funny, and the author includes classical references, Shakespeare references, and plenty of stuff about astronomy and the operation of a planetarium, so it keeps the reader's interest, while the question of whether we should identify with the protagonist or deplore him provides a little ambiguity and tension.

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These three stories were all worth my time; Carr made decent selections here.  There are several more stories in On Our Way to the Future by writers I care about, so it is very likely we will return to it in the future.

West of the Sun by Edgar Pangborn

"You're proposing," Dorothy said, "to take a chance on love?"

Wright was tranquil, watching the meadow.  "Whenever men put their chips on the other thing they always lost, didn't they?"

One of the few of my 386 SF paperbacks that is not currently packed up in a cardboard box is my Dell edition (#9442) of Edgar Pangborn's West of the Sun, a novel that first appeared in 1953.  My copy was printed in 1966; I purchased it at Second Story Books in Washington D.C., a cool place to buy old prints (I got a Kenyon Cox print) and tribal masks (these are outside the MPorcius budget) as well as 50 cent paperbacks of obscure SF novels.

I was afraid to guess what the blue thing was... could it be a plesiosaur fin?  Is that you, Nessie?

The collage on the cover by Hoot von Zitzewitz is pretty insane; from left to right we've got an orangutan with a (I guess) spear that our man Hoot helpfully drew in, some kind of sea anemone, young lovers running on the beach (we all remember that scene with Elke Sommer in 1962's Douce Violence don't we?) a tree (on fire?) and a hand drawing a bow.  Are these images emblematic of what takes place in West of the Sun?  Sounds like readers can look forward to the sex and violence we all crave in our genre literature.  Looking through Hoot's body of work via google, I was a little surprised to see that Dell used the same cover on its British edition of critical darling Judith Merril's ninth Annual of the Year's Best S-F anthology.  Maybe there was hope that the orangutan would join the rocket and the robot as iconic SF images suitable for any SF paperback's cover.

Internet SF gadfly Joachim Boaz told me (via twitter and in a comment on my post about Pangborn's Davy) that West of the Sun was so weak that he couldn't finish it, but I had just read Nicholas Thomas's book on James Cook's voyages so I was all revved up to explore new territory, no matter how forbidding!

Our cast of characters, and
Second Story's 50 cent stamp

The year is 2056.  The Earth is divided into two unhappy camps, a technocratic and technophilic socialist West ("the Federation") and a despotic East ("Jenga's empire.")  Human freedom has taken a hit, but the Federation has made major technological advances, and as the novel opens the multi-ethnic crew of the Federation's first star ship is about to land on Lucifer, a "red-green" planet named for the "son of the morning."  We get a serving of one of the novel's themes (the potential for all people, and all things, to do both good and evil) right there on the third page of text, when the mission's intellectual leader, Doc Wright, tells his comrades, "Lucifer was an angel....Devils and angels have a way of turning out to be the same organism."

Due to a fault in the construction of the star ship (perhaps an indication that the technology-obsessed Federation isn't even good at what it professes to be its primary focus) the six astronauts who lived to see Lucifer are shipwrecked on the red-green planet.  They quickly meet and befriend a member of an over-sized hairy race of territorial individualists; this character is depicted in all his glory, battling a serpentine reptile, on the Italian edition of the novel, and, I suppose, is represented by our man Hoot with that stock image of an orangutan.  Soon after, contact is made with a society of war-like Stone Age (Pangborn uses the word "Neolithic") pygmy villagers. As Harry Harrison would do with the reptile people in his Eden series in the 1980s, Pangborn flips gender roles with these belligerent shorties; among them the females are big and strong and form the ruling and military class, while the small and weak males are sensitive and raise the kids and form a parasitic priestly class.

The second of the book's three sections takes place a year after the arrival of the humans.  Doc Wright and his crew have tried to convince the queen of the pygmies to stop enslaving people and breeding them for the dinner table, but the pygmies are reluctant to change their ways, and, besides, are busy with a war against another, much larger, empire of pygmies.  Much of this second part of the book is taken up with a blow by blow account of the climactic battle of this war between pygmy empires; the humans with their firearms and a cadre of the hairy giants lead the smaller group of pygmies in battle.  The tone of the war chapters is tragic--the human led side is defeated, and we get lots of scenes of minor characters dying, Iliad-style.

The novel's final section takes place ten years after the Earthlings' landing. The handful of humans, giants and pygmies who survived the war have founded a peaceful city on an island. The pygmies have given up cannibalism, slavery, religion, and their antipathy to the giants.  While Doc Wright was building a libertarian utopia, Ed Spearman, the human most closely associated with the socialists back on Earth, struck out on his own to make himself ruler of yet another empire of pygmy villagers.  (One of Doc Wright's catchphrases is "No one is expendable," which reminded me of Ayn Rand's exhortations that every man "is an end in himself, not a means to the ends of others"--Spearman's oft-repeated catchphrase is "you can't make an omelette without breaking some eggs," a cliche associated with Stalinism and warfare.)  When Doc Wright and friends meet Spearman for the first time in years he is a paranoid dictator of a crumbling city.

Minutes after the meeting with Spearman, in one of those coincidences books are filled with, Earth's second star ship lands nearby.  The four members of this ship's crew are individualist small-government types, like Doc, so when everybody is sitting around drinking wine and talking about how Marx and Lenin suck, Spearman steals the new ship and flies off.  The last dozen pages of the novel are a transcription of a conversation in which Doc and his buddies describe the philosophy and practice of the utopia they have built on Lucifer.
     
When I talked about Davy, Pangborn's celebrated 1964 novel, I suggested it had a lot in common with the works of big name SF writers Robert Heinlein and Theodore Sturgeon, and the same can be said for West of the Sun.  Like in so many Heinlein stories we get a strong dose of individualism (the likable Earth characters are dismissive of socialism, democracy, collectivism, and the state in general) as well as a discussions of the nature of freedom.  As in both Heinlein's and Sturgeon's work there is a hostility to religion, conspicuous anti-racism, and a stress on the importance of love (e. g., Doc Wright preaches to the natives that "we are all one flesh").

We even get scenes of nudism, another Heinlein/Sturgeon interest, one of those relationships in which an adult man marries a woman he knew as a prepubescent girl (like in Heinlein's Time for the Stars and Door into Summer), and group marriages.  The character of Dorothy, a young black woman, embodies much of the novel's ideology.  She was assigned to the mission as a little girl, straight from the government orphanage (it took eleven years to get to Lucifer.)  (I don't know why the government would use up any of the seven crew slots on its first interstellar mission on somebody with no college degree and no work experience, but there it is.)  Once on Lucifer she takes the lead in diplomatic relations with the pygmies, stripping off her top to demonstrate she has no weapons, and so the leaders of the matriarchal natives (who have four boobs) will be able to tell she is a fellow woman (though two boobs short.)  Dorothy married Paul Mason during the space trip, but when Wright looks to him to see if he approves of sending his wife on this perilous diplomatic mission, Dorothy strikes a blow for individualism and feminism, insisting that whether she will take this risk is her decision to make.  Later in the novel Dorothy bears not only Paul's children but another man's.

I mentioned above that I just read 400 pages about Captain Cook's three voyages to the Pacific in the 1760s and 1770s, and things in West of the Sun kept reminding me of stuff that happened to Cook and his compatriots.  The pygmies, for example, share attributes with some of the various Pacific and South American people Cook encountered: they practice cannibalism, wear tattoos and a smelly oil, worship giant idols, and their culture is characterized by tension between a priestly class and a warrior class.  Maybe Pangborn was influenced by accounts of Cook's explorations?

Click and squint to read Kim Stanley
Robinson's fulsome praise of Pangborn

West of the Sun also brought to mind Virgil and Horace.  Like those Latin poets and their readers, the human characters in the novel are preoccupied with memories of a recent civil war back on Earth.  Like the Trojans in the Aeneid, the humans and the pygmies in the novel flee trouble at home to found a new and better civilization.

I found West of the Sun interesting because of all these connections I was able to detect (or concoct) to other books I've read, and I am sympathetic to its ideology, but is it entertaining?  When it comes to style and pacing, it is just pedestrian, and the characters are not particularly well drawn or memorable. One of my issues with the novel is that there are very many characters, too many to really keep track of: eleven humans, ten or so pygmies, a bunch of giants, and a bunch of riding animals that are given precious names like "Miss Ponsonby" and "Susie."  (My apologies to all the Ponsonbies and Susies in the audience--your name is just too adorable!)  Another of my gripes is how the most interesting human characters, Dorothy and Spearman, disappear from the narrative for long stretches.  Paul is the main character for long periods, and he is just not compelling.

In the end, I have to give West of the Sun my overused "acceptable" rating.  Not bad, but not thrilling or special.  I can't decide whether I like it more or less than Davy... Davy has a better style and is more ambitious, but I think West of the Sun is better structured and more even.

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My copy of West of the Sun has five pages of ads in the back.  None are for SF books, though some are for books that would perhaps be of interest to the SF community, like Arthur C. Clarke's novel about World War II flight technology, a pile of anthologies with Alfred Hitchcock's name on them, and the source material for one of the iconic manly man's films.