Orbit 9: K Neville, R Thurston, J Sallis, V Vinge & R A Lafferty

Let's take another paperback off the SF anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  Today: Orbit 9, edited by Damon Knight and first published in 1971.  (My paperback was printed in 1972.)  I've already read a couple of stories from Orbit 9, and blogged about one of them, Joanna Russ's "Gleepsite."  (I called it an "insoluble puzzle.")  Let's attack six stories today--I know, six is a lot, but it looks like they are short!

"Dominant Species" by Kris Neville 

This story has never been reprinted in English, but our friends over in the Netherlands have had two cracks at it, in 1977 and 1992.  Maybe the subtle and sophisticated Dutch saw something in "Dominant Species" that our gross Anglophonic minds are unable to grasp!  

To my crude American sensibilities this seems like a gimmicky trifle.  A creature much like a duck--maybe it is a duck--thinks itself a god that controls the universe, willing the appearance of food, controlling the weather, etc.  When what we have to assume is a spaceship lands nearby he takes credit for its appearance.  When the beings that emerge from the cylinder capture him he assures himself he has willed this to happen.  Anyway, eventually the aliens (or humans) dissect the duck (or duck-like alien) or whatever it is and we know the bird was suffering delusions of grandeur.  

At four and a half pages, barely acceptable. 

"Stop Me Before I Tell More" by Robert Thurston

Even the Dutch took a pass on this baby!  "Stop Me Before I Tell More" has never been reprinted.  I have good feelings about Thurston, though; I really liked his 1978 novel Alicia II, which I read twice before I started this blog, and also enjoyed 1985's Q Colony.  So maybe I'll be able to tell you "Stop Me Before I Tell More" is some kind of lost classic with a straight face.

"Stop Me Before I Tell More" is an extrapolation or elaboration of a travelling salesman joke.  All through the story's nineteen pages a single line in italics (e. g., "--There was this travelling salesman, see--") is followed by a paragraph or three expanding on it (in our example, describing the salesman's appearance, psychology, and career.)  

The salesman stays the night at a farmer's house after his car breaks down.  The farmer has sexy twin daughters.  One sneaks into the salesman's bed and they have sex.  He can't tell which of the two women she is, and in the morning the girls refuse to reveal the truth.  He stops by this house every year, and each time one of the daughters joins him in bed and he tries to figure out which it is, unsuccessfully.  This is a shaggy dog story, and he and we never learn which twin has been having sex with him.  The punchline of the story, made clear in the italicized lines, is that the joketeller has forgotten the punchline of the travelling salesman joke.    

    

Waste of time.

"Binaries" by James Sallis

Knight would include this one in The Best from Orbit Volumes 1-10 in 1976; otherwise, it has not been reprinted.

"Binaries" is a series of surreal images and paradoxical passages, ten and a half pages, I guess about a writer and his career, his relationships with women and his father, and his trips between and within France, England, and the United States.  One woman has breasts that are different sizes, one woman has a slim torso but big hips and thighs, the guy thinks of himself as a European but stays in America because he feels he belongs in America, this kind of thing.  Sallis presents a self-important and stereotypical view of the writer's life--smoking lots of cigarettes, name-dropping French writers and painters, suffering paranoia. 

Waste of time.

"Only the Words Are Different" by James Sallis

Sallis has two stories in Orbit 9.  "Only the Words Are Different" would be reprinted in Sallis's 1995 collection, Limits of the Sensible World.  It is yet more surreal images of the lives of writers who smoke many cigarettes, but is more coherent, more anchored in reality.

Five vignettes that collectively take up six and a half pages.  1: A writer looks out the window and sees a guy has fallen from the scaffolding to his death far below--the blood is the color of strawberries.  The writer figures this guy was climbing the scaffolding to express his love to the writer.  2: A college professor and his wife are driving home from a party; the wife cries because she thinks her husband is having an affair with one of the female students.  3: A writer discovers a petition signed by millions of people, a petition demanding that poetry abolished.  It is suggested that the people who know poets want poetry abolished because the poets' obsession with poetry is an obstruction to the progress of love lives, profitable enterprises, etc. 4: An American woman wants to have her English boyfriend's child, but he always uses a condom.  He moves to New York to be with her but their relationship collapses and he leaves her.  Then he mails her a condom full of his jizz.  5: In a future (I guess) town where the population is in decline because people don't have any interest in having kids, the Mayor tries to unite the depressed citizenry and shake them out of their ennui by declaring war on roaches.  One woman fights hand-to-hand with the police when they come to destroy her pet roach, a creature she feeds cigarette butts.

Acceptable.

"The Science Fair" by Vernor Vinge

Vinge is an actual math professor who often writes stories about science and technology, and this story actually has "science" in its title, so maybe Vinge can get us out of our New Wave doldrums.    

"The Science Fair" is a first-person narrative delivered by a private eye--a spy for hire living on an alien world of people with hooves who can see into the infrared spectrum.  He is hired to protect a famous scientist who is giving a speech at the upcoming once-in-a-generation science fair.  There is an action scene in which the private dick shoots it out with assassins.  Then comes the fair.  The scientist reveals that a star is approaching their planet and will likely destroy their civilization in eight generations!  He calls for the scientists of the world to stop working as individuals seeking profit and to work together to create a technological and industrial base capable of preventing the coming cataclysm.  People are thrown into an uproar by these revolutionary statements.  

"The Science Fair" feels like the first chapter of a novel--its last line is a clue that, I believe, suggests the approaching star has a planet orbiting it that is home to another intelligent race.  

I like it; Vinge does a good economical job of sketching out an interesting setting for his story; these aliens live in an environment and have a society I would have read much more about.  "The Science Fair" would reappear in 2001's The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge as well as two European Vinge collections published in 2006.  Look how sad 21st-century book covers are; it is like nobody is even trying any more.

"When All the Lands Pour Out Again" by R. A. Lafferty

This one is a little hard to grok, but I'm going to throw some interpretation out there: "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" is a satire or spoof of man's restless nature, his desire for change, any change, no matter how risky; also, it is a satire of man's solipsism, his hubris and overconfidence, his belief that he can master the world, can know its nature and even control it (this applies especially to academics, politicians and would-be revolutionaries.)  The story may also be a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ or just an assertion of God's power that echoes the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At the start of the fourteen-page story we meet three academics; Lafferty here gently spoofs academic self-importance and highlights how little academics really know and how little they agree with each other.  These three geniuses think that a major, cataclysmic change is in the offing, that everybody and everything is about to change, and they actually welcome rather than fear the change, though millions will die.

Sure enough, people, animals, even geographic features begin mass migrations, and they do it with joy.  People eagerly blow up their homes and places of work and begin long journeys they know not where, surrounded by earthquakes, lava flows, the arrival of space aliens, the sudden reappearance from under the earth of Native American tribesmen and from under the sea of the lost continent of Lyonesse.  The leaders of all the governments of the world escape danger via airplanes and then convene on Lyonesse, Lafferty joking that far away from everybody else maybe they won't cause so much trouble.

Near the end of the story we meet three revolutionaries, men bearing the appellations the red lion, the red tiger, and the red wolf.  Lafferty hints they are satanic; for example, they get their power from below in the form of lava.  These revolutionaries are angry that the radical changes taking place are not under their control; they try, without success, to reassert control, and the whole world laughs at their failure.

In the last paragraph of the story the three academics from the beginning, the men who predicted and welcomed the cataclysm, are described as "three wise men" and depicted wearing sandals and carrying staves and lanterns.    

As usual, Lafferty provides strange images and charming turns of phrase, lots of allusions and thought-provoking mysteries.  I like it.  "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" would be reprinted in a French collection of Lafferty stories and in Lafferty in Orbit.

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In an article in the May 12, 1956 issue of The Saturday Review, John W. Campbell, Jr., one of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, informed readers that "science-fiction's fundamental purpose is to make accurate, loose prophecies of general trends" and that it is written by, about, and for "technically-minded people."  When Barry Malzberg met Campbell in 1969, Campbell, as Malzberg tells it in the 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," told him that "Mainstream literature is about failure...a literature of defeat...Science fiction is challenge and discovery," and that "science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out."

To what extent Campbell's definitions of science fiction are merely prescriptive, and to what extent they are accurately descriptive, is up for debate.  Either way, the stories we read today from 1971's Orbit 9 show that much of the science fiction promoted by important figures in the SF world of that year either ignored or deliberately sought to refute Campbell's strictures.  While Vinge's story fits into Campbell's definitions, being about science and technology and offering a hopeful view of the efforts of people to learn about the universe and master it, Neville's, Lafferty's and Thurston's stories suggest man's ability to comprehend and control the universe are illusory; Thurston's in particular is a pure literary piece, relying for its effects entirely on literary technique and containing no science or speculations of any kind.  The fifth of Sallis's vignettes in "Only the Words Are Different" contains some speculation about society and government, but otherwise his contributions to Orbit 9 are like a caricature of mainstream literature: they consist of surreal and fragmented episodes that offer impressionistic glimpses into the disordered psychologies and disastrous relationships of chain-smoking writers, artists and academics.

Thanks for embarking on this brief foray into the New Wave era with me.  In our next episode we'll again be exploring 1970 fiction, this time with one of our favorite women writers.  

1965 stories by Larry Niven, Vernor Vinge, Clifford Simak and James Schmitz

I was lucky enough to find a bunch of exciting SF paperbacks for a dollar each on a recent visit to a central Ohio Half Price Books.  Let's get started on the stack with Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr's World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series, the paperback version of World's Best Science Fiction: 1966.  Today, four stories, all from 1965 SF magazines, by some pretty big names in the SF biz.

"Becalmed in Hell" by Larry Niven

The narrator and his comrade Eric spent four months flying to Venus, and are now exploring its dense 600 degree atmosphere from within their space ship.  Eric, I should note, is a disembodied human brain whose nerves are connected to cameras and the rockets and so forth so he can control the ship like it's his own body.  But then, trouble.  Eric can't feel the ramjets, so the narrator has to go out into the deadly Venerean atmosphere to conduct repairs.  But is the problem mechanical, or psychological?

This is a good example of the type of hard SF that seriously tries to figure out what an alien planet might be like and how NASA might try to explore it, a story full of science and engineering. Niven also includes lighthearted references to less realistic SF stories about adventures on Venus and movies about disembodied brains.

Good.

"Becalmed in Hell" first appeared in F&SF and has been widely anthologized; it actually appears in another book I own, Damon Knight's A Science Fiction Argosy, from which we read "Lewis Padgett's" "The Cure" back in 2015.

We read Bayley's "The Ship
of Disaster" in September of last year,
remember?

"Apartness" by Vernor Vinge

I think this may be Vinge's first published story; it appeared originally in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds.  Back in 2015, I praised another early Vinge tale, 1968's "Grimm's Story;" like that story, "Apartness" involves ships, which is fine by me--I can't swim, but I love stories about the sea and one of the things I miss about New York is looking at the ocean and all the ships and boats on the river and in the harbor.  "Apartness" is also a lament about racism and intolerance and man's propensity for war.

It is the post-apocalyptic future!  A nuclear/biological/chemical war has obliterated the Northern Hemisphere; South Africa and South America have somewhat stable, somewhat autocratic, societies with an 18th or 19th century level of technology (muskets, sailing ships--one elite guy has a revolver.)  Australia still has modern technology, but they aren't sharing it, feeling humanity is not ready for it yet.

The narrative follows a South American scientist (he studied in Australia) and his team; they are on board a ship of the South American Empire, on the quixotic mission of searching for Coney Island, which most of the superstitious Latin Americans of the dark future think is a floating island which travels the world (alright! a New York-centric joke!)  The scientists know better, but keep mum--it is not healthy to cross the astrologers who surround the Emperor.  Anyway, the expedition investigates a primitive settlement in Antarctica.  After some tense scenes reminiscent of accounts of Cook's voyages and scenes in which clues are discovered, the scientists learn that these Antarctic villagers are descendants of the few white people who escaped South Africa alive after the blacks won the race war there which followed the cataclysmic war in the North.  In the final scene a South African diplomat expresses the desire to observe the Antarctic tribe and gloat over the fact that South African blacks are now more advanced than the whites who oppressed them generations ago, while the protagonist worries that another apocalyptic war, this one between the African and South American empires, may be inevitable.

This story is well put together, but I've been exposed to so much anti-racism and anti-war material in my life that the story's "meaning" feels a little banal.  People nowadays might accuse the story itself of being racist: the white Australians still have all the knowledge and technology of the 20th century but refuse to share it with the Hispanics and blacks, the Hispanics are ruled by a dictator and a superstitious aristocracy ignorant enough to not know what Coney Island was, and the blacks have an empire which Vinge suggests is animated by vengeful hate.

Moderately good.

"Over the River and Through the Woods" by Clifford D. Simak

"Pastoral" is the word often used to describe Simak's work, and, sure enough, the first scene of this story features a woman in a farmhouse kitchen canning apples.  Two children come to her door, claiming to be her grandchildren.  As we readers realize at once, and the farmer's wife realizes after looking into their bags, these kids are refugees from the future, when aliens are about to take over the Earth.  The kids have brought anti-cancer drugs, which will presumably extend the life of (great-great-) Grandma, whom future records indicate will die of cancer in 1904, just eight years from the present.  Will all this alter history?  Simak raises the question but leaves the answer up in the air.  

Simak often writes these sentimental things suggesting simple farm life is better than urban modern life, and I guess if aliens were killing everybody in the 21st century, the 19th century would look pretty good.  Otherwise, I'm not really on board with his attitude.  It looks like "Over the River and Through the Woods" has come to be seen as representative of Simak's entire body of work.  Ursula K. LeGuin included it in her anthology designed for use on college students, 1993's Norton Book of Science Fiction, and it is the title story of a 1996 collection of Simak stories.  It first saw light of day in Amazing.  

Acceptable.  I can recommend it more strongly to people who enjoy scenes in which people are astounded by zippers and confused by talk of airplanes and rockets.  ("They talked of plains....and rockets--as if there were rockets every day and not just on the Fourth.")

"Planet of Forgetting" by James H. Schmitz

The last time we met James H. Schmitz he was regaling us with stories about female intelligence operatives of the far future. "Planet of Forgetting," first seen in Galaxy, is in the same vein. (Schmitz is one of those writers whom the cognoscenti tell us we should like because he includes strong female characters, and those of us who don't need to spend any more of our brief lives sitting through tendentious preaching are fortunate in that Schmitz's stories--in my experience at least--aren't satires or lectures but straightforward outer space thrillers with a woman slotted into the super spy role.)

Earth intelligence operative Major Wade Colgrave wakes up on an alien planet with amnesia--how did he get here?  As the story's thirty-odd pages unfold we switch back and forth between Colgrave trying to survive on the planet, which is full of weird animals, and flashbacks to the mission that landed him here.  You see, the evil space empire of Rala was preparing to invade the territory of the Lorn Worlds, an ally of Earth, and Colgrave was carrying to Earth the secret dossier on Rala prepared by the Lorneans when his ship was captured by Ralans.  Instead of just imprisoning or murdering him, the Ralans tried to coax him into becoming a double agent, giving him the opportunity to escape in a lifeboat, dossier in hand.  The Ralans catch up to Colgrave and, with the fortuitous aid of the local fauna, he foils their pursuit.

This is an entertaining Flash Gordon/Star Wars type of thing--Colgrave shoots lots of people with his energy pistol, puts on an enemy uniform as a disguise, is menaced by monsters, that kind of stuff.  We've all seen this sort of thing a hundred times, but some of us (including me) still enjoy it if it is done well.  Schmitz also includes fun gadgets in addition to the various types of futuristic guns, like a space suit that can fly in the atmosphere and a sort of man-hunting drone.  The explanation of how Colgrave lost his memory and the implications of this phenomenon are also good.

A solid adventure/espionage story.  (By the way, Colgrave may be a man, but the lead Ralan agent in the story turns out to be a beautiful woman!)

**********

So far World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series is shaping up to be a great collection.  More from its pages in our next episode.

**********

Thank heavens, no, Mr. Cerf.

Because I have an abiding hatred of everything from the 21st century, when my wife wants to hang out and watch TV I usually insist we watch TV shows that are 20 years old, at a minimum.  One of the individuals prominent in the middle of the 20th century with whom we have become familiar thanks to my idiosyncratic viewing proclivities is Bennett Cerf, an important publisher who was a regular panelist on What's My Line? (Libertarian types might find Cerf's memoir of his relationship with Ayn Rand interesting.)  Cerf had a reputation as a humor writer, and actually published numerous books of jokes.  My wife and I find his renown as a funny man incomprehensible, as his jokes on What's My Line are universally terrible, and the stories in the one of his joke books which we picked up at an antiques mall are practically anti-jokes, anecdotes lacking any punchline, like something out of Jim's Journal.

Anyway, it was a cause of great surprise and hilarity in the MPorcius household when I opened my copy of World's Best Science Fiction: Second Series to find Cerf's face smiling up at me from an advertisement for the "Famous Writers School" of Westport, Connecticut.  Whether this ad was included in the book by Ace, or was just used as a bookmark by a previous owner, I don't know, but the ad does include some points of interest to all you SF fans.  For one thing, Rod Serling (whom my wife, a better comedian than Cerf, always calls "Rod the Bod") is one of Cerf's partners in crime at the Famous Writers School, and secondly, a SF author I never heard of before, who nonetheless has a long list of publication credits at isfdb, Robert Lory, credits Famous Writers School with getting his career going.

Submitted for your consideration....

Click the scan below to grok the bright image of Famous Writers School presented to the world by Cerf and his cronies, and then read the Wikipedia article on the school to get a look at the shadowy truth behind the glamour.

Orbit 4 stories by Harlan Ellison, R. A. Lafferty, and Vernor Vinge

On Labor Day I stopped in at Half Price Books to take advantage of the 20% off sale, and one of my finds was a copy of 1968's Orbit 4, edited by Damon Knight.  I like the cool green cover, with its resonant hints of alien planets, electricity, electronics, and the ocean deep.

There's no actual intro to the book as a whole, though on the first page there is a blurb from Publishers' Weekly that, without saying "new wave," comes across as celebrating that vaguely-defined phenomenon and Orbit's role in it: "Most of the stories typify the emerging new domain of science fiction, with its emphasis less on the 'out-there' than on the 'right-here, right-now.''  In the next sentence they give their prime example, the included Harlan Ellison story.

"Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" by Harlan Ellison

My man tarbandu has made mention of this story a few times at The PorPor Books Blog, and I was glad to have a chance to read it myself.  "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" has appeared in numerous other venues, including The Illustrated Harlan Ellison, where William Stout (I love Stout's dinosaur illustrations!) gave it the comic book treatment.

Rudy, a recently discharged soldier, comes to a decrepit gothic house looking for his former fiancé, Kris, whom he still loves and wants to marry, even though he hasn't seen her in eight months.  The house is full of hippies, and Kris, like the rest of them, spends most of her time out of her mind on drugs.  Rudy moves in, and helps to support the hippies by running errands, bringing in money, and serving as a presentable public face for the hippie colony, things which none of these perennially stoned goofballs can really do.  Significantly, because "love" is so much a part of the hippy "brand," Ellison shows that the druggies have lost the ability to love or care for each other--their sexual needs are like those of animals.

Ellison describes the house the way you would describe a haunted house, all weird noises and shadows, and goes beyond showing that drug use has turned the hippies into useless, filthy decadents: in an oft-foreshadowed final dream sequence/metaphor, the hippies appear as vampires, werewolves and other monsters.  Drug addiction has turned them into parasites, cannibals, who infect others with their evil: Rudy eventually succumbs and starts taking drugs himself, leaving behind his productive life (before his time in the service he had a job as a mechanic) and his sincere and human love for Kris.

This story is pretty good; it is certainly vividly and economically written, with each sentence serving the story's purpose and being worth reading with care.  As an attack on the drug culture and a warning to stay off drugs, I suppose many people would dismiss it as a sort of SF version of Reefer Madness.  Though I am sympathetic to Ellison's message here (I'm as square as they come and never drink or use drugs), and Ellison's writing is far better, "Shattered Like a Glass Goblin" did remind me a little of that over-the-top anti-gun story by Davis Grubb, "The Baby-Sitter." Both stories employ horror fiction conventions to issue a heavy-handed condemnation of what their authors consider a social evil, in the process exaggerating the seductive power of the vice that has inspired their ire, and diminishing the agency of individuals.

Mild to moderate recommendation.

"One At a Time" by R. A. Lafferty

It has been a while since I read any R. A. Lafferty, so I eagerly took this chance to do so.  Lafferty is sui generis.  When you read a SF story in which a guy is swinging a sword at some other guys, it is easy to say "this story is an attempt to emulate Burroughs" or Howard, or Tolkein, and to assess the story's success by comparing it to those beloved classics.  But what can you compare a Lafferty story to?  Damon Knight, in his intro to the story, suggests "One At a Time" is like an "ethnic" tale, Irish most probably, but also argues that Lafferty's stories are probably best described as "tales unlike other tales."

Sour John, a rowdy hard-drinking type who hangs around in bars in port cities, "collects odd ones."  So when he hears an "odd one" is hanging around Barnaby's Barn, he hurries over to the tavern to meet him.  The odd one is McSkee, who eats tremendous quantities of food and drinks vast volumes of booze--he's breaking all the local records!  Sour John spends the evening with McSkee, wandering the city, fighting and whoring, living it up--for Sour John and McSkee it is such hearty, simple pleasures that make life worth living, and McSkee can handle more of such pleasures than any man alive.  Sour John tries to figure out McSkee's secret, and McSkee is quite open about it: he has learned how to put himself into a kind of hibernation, to slow down his body and literally die, and then wake up again, years or decades later. McSkee has lived for ages, but only one day at a time, each day separated by many years.

This is a fun story, and you have to suspect Lafferty is somehow referring to such central elements of Christian thought as Jesus of Nazareth's death and resurrection and the immortality of the human soul, as well as exhorting all of us to live every day to its fullest.  The story perhaps contains hidden depths.

"One At a Time" would later appear in the 1970 collection Nine Hundred Grandmothers, which I own, but which is currently in storage along with most of my books.

"Grimm's Story" by Vernor Vinge

In a time that feels long ago, I guess early 2003, when I either had money or was behaving as if I had money, the wife (then my girlfriend) and I took a trip to Western Europe, staying in a hotel in London, with a friend of hers in Denmark, and with a friend of mine in Portugal.  On planes and trains I read Vernor Vinge's Deepness in the Sky.  It was the first science fiction novel I had read in a long time, and I rather liked it.  With its interest in human freedom and technological and social change, it reminded me of SF I had read in my youth.  Some time later I read The Peace War, but thought it was just OK; I remember thinking it addressed the same issues and had the same tone as a bunch of other SF work, including Deepness in the Sky, and being disappointed because I had been hoping for something new.

It had been approximately a decade since I'd read any Vinge when I bought Orbit 4, so I decided to check out the longish (over 50 pages) Vinge contribution, "Grimm's Story."  Isfdb told me that "Grimm's Story" is a component of a fix up novel called Grimm's World, which was later retitled Tatja Grimm's World.  If the cover illustrations of this novel were any guide, the story was about a sexy girl who has a battleship--that part of MPorcius's mind which is still 13 years old thought that sounded pretty good.

"Grimm's Story" is a traditional type of hard SF story.  In this category of story, which presumably has a name that I don't know, the author imagines a planet or planet-like environment which has some physical difference(s) from the Earth--the gravity or temperature or chemical composition or whatever are significantly different.  The author speculates on how civilization and/or the ecosystem would evolve and adapt in such an environment.  This alien world is then used as a setting for an adventure story in which the protagonists must journey from point A to point B and accomplish some mission; this journey provides the author opportunity to describe different facets of the world he has designed.  Hal Clement's Mission of Gravity is sort of the archetype for this type of story, but I think Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer and Larry Niven's Ringworld and Integral Trees books, and even Arthur C. Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama, John Varley's Titan and Bob Shaw's Orbitsville qualify.

The planet in this story is a vast ocean with lots of little islands, inhabited by humans who are descended from Earth colonists who lost their high technology ages ago.  The planet is severely lacking in metal deposits; iron and aluminum are very rare, and as a result technological development has been slow.

Hard science fiction stories often glamorize scientists, engineers and merchants, and show contempt for religion and government, and Vinge delivers on these expectations.  Our heroes are an astronomer and the crew of a publishing enterprise that makes money by putting out girlie magazines and a journal of science articles and science fiction stories.  (Remember how, in his alternate world in Ada or Ardor, Vladimir Nabokov called science fiction "physics fiction?"  In "Grimm's Story" the people call science fiction "contrivance fiction" or "c.f.")  These businesspeople make their own paper and print the magazines on a huge ship that travels around the planet, delivering the periodicals.  Vinge describes the chemical and mechanical processes by which this is done, which will no doubt thrill some readers and bore others.

The astronomer, Svir Hedrigs (I just realized that when you say it out loud in the German or Scandinavian accent it seems to demand it sounds like "severe headaches") is sitting in a bar with his little pet monster that has psychic powers (hard SF is ostensibly based on real science, and yet somehow often includes characters with psychic powers, just like extravagant action-based space fantasies like Star Wars and Warhammer 40,000) when the tall and beautiful woman who runs the publishing ship, Tatja Grimm, appears and seduces him.  Grimm uses her womanly charms to persuade Hedrigs to join the publishing company on a perilous secret mission.  This mission is to infiltrate the impenetrable fortress in the capitol of the most powerful nation in the world, which is ruled by a murderous tyrant.  This dictator has the world's only complete collection of the aforementioned science fiction magazine, and he is planning to sacrifice this literary treasure to the gods!  This crime against humanity must be stopped!  The only way to rescue the magazines from the fortress is to use Hedrigs's little psionic monster to fool the guards.

In fact, the ruthless and manipulative Tatja Grimm has even bigger fish to fry than preserving old issues of her world's analogue of Analog.  She ends up using Hedrigs and his little hypnotic pet to overthrow the tyrant and make herself Queen of that powerful country.  As it turns out, Grimm isn't just the sexiest woman on the planet, but the smartest human being.  She thinks that, at the head of the world's strongest economy, she can advance technology to the point that people can fly to a neighboring planet!  And why does she want to fly to that planet?  Because she is lonely and hopes that on that other planet is a man smart enough for her to love!  On the last page of the story Grimm says:

"...I am going to turn this world upside down, and regain the ancient arts that mythology said we once had.  For somewhere in this universe there must be what I need most...a man."    

Was that sound I heard feminists' heads exploding?

I thought this story was pretty good.  I love the idea of a huge centuries-old ship, and thought the idea that they were on a quest to save old SF magazines pretty adorable. And I thought Vinge did a decent job with Tatja Grimm, a sort of anti-hero with mysterious motivations about whom we learn more and more as the story progresses. Now I want to find that fix-up novel and see what happens to Grimm and her quest for love!

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I'm quite happy with this edition of Orbit--all three of these stories are entertaining and interesting.  (I read the included Silverberg story, "Passengers," some years ago and liked it, as well.)  I'll be reading more of the anthology in the future to see what else Knight served up the SF readers of 1968.

Three Worlds to Conquer by Poul Anderson

"As always, he found engineer thoughts soothing.  Forces and matrices were so much easier to deal with than people." 

My (and Bill Meeker's) copy of the novel

Jesse at Speculiction recently reviewed The High Crusade, one of Poul Anderson's more famous novels. I read High Crusade soon after the start of my exile (it was in the local library here on the prairie), like four years ago, and I have to agree with Jesse that the novel is just too incredible. The idea that medieval English fighting men might have admirable qualities that are lacking in modern technological societies, like physical courage or a willingness to take risks or whatever, is an interesting insight and is typical of Anderson's work, but it is too difficult to accept them conquering societies with the wealth and organization required to achieve interstellar travel.

(On the other hand, I recall High Crusade being more readable and memorable than some of Anderson's later work, like For Love and Glory, which I read and have completely forgotten, and Harvest of Stars, which I read and remember being tedious.)

I may not be Poul Anderson's biggest fan, but I enjoyed Brain Wave and The Enemy Stars, and on this blog I have praised several Anderson stories and collections. I am quite sympathetic to Anderson's point of view, so, despite periodic bumps in the road, I keep going back to him.  This week I read a novel published four years after 1960's High Crusade, Three Worlds to Conquer, which was first serialized in If in the first months of 1964. I have the Pyramid paperback, X-1875, printed in 1968.  This copy, for which I paid $1.50 in Minnesota, was originally owned by a Bill Meeker.  

Fellow SF fan Bill Meeker,
we salute you!

Three Worlds to Conquer is a traditional science fiction story about science and wars.  Our hero is Mark Fraser, an engineer on the Ganymede colony of 5,000 people.  He's a skilled pilot of space craft and also the human most adept in the lingua franca that has developed between humans and the natives of Jupiter known as the Nyarr.  Because Jupiter is so inhospitable to human life, humans and Jovians have never met in the flesh, but for over a decade the two civilizations have corresponded via a neutrino-based transmitter system.  As the novel begins Fraser's counterpart on Jupiter, Theor, is asking for Fraser's help because another Jovian society, the Ulunt-Khazul, have launched an aggressive war on the Nyarr.  But Fraser has his own problems--the civil war taking place on Earth has just spread to Ganymede, and the crew of a space battleship (a huge sphere bristling with gun turrets--awesome!) is arresting all the technical personnel on the colony!

The narrative alternates between Theor and his war on the Jovian surface and Fraser's struggle on Ganymede; Theor and Fraser conduct their relationship entirely through electronic communication.  Three Worlds to Conquer thus reminded me of those hard SF classics A Deepness in the Sky, by Vernor Vinge (1999) and Mission of Gravity, by Hal Clement (1954), which also centered on long distance human-alien relationships.

After suffering military defeats at the hands of their enemies, Fraser and Theor use their engineering ability, rhetorical skill, and willingness to incinerate people with rocket exhaust, to win the day.  

There is a lot of science in Three Worlds to Conquer; we hear all about neutrinos, the solar wind, the atmosphere and geology of Jupiter, and what kind of orbits space ships have to take to efficiently travel about the solar system.  I think Anderson spends two entire pages of Chapter 2 describing the neutrino communications device to us readers.  For the most part this stuff is convincing and interesting.  More fun, perhaps, is the strange ecosystem Anderson comes up with for Jupiter, particularly the plants, animals and people that fly/swim in the thick Jovian atmosphere.  He also makes a creditable effort to figure out what kind of technology the Nyarr and other people living on Jupiter's surface, under tremendous pressure and in terrible cold, would have.

Anderson has a tragic sense of life, and, besides all the people who get massacred in these wars, this is expressed in Fraser's relationships.  A skinny 40-year-old who complains about getting old, he has a wife and children, but his marriage has obviously grown stale.  When Fraser returns from a week-long mission to Io, he goes to the neutrino transmitter to talk to Theor before he goes to see his family.  ("Bros before hos," I guess, even if your bro is an alien you've never seen.)   Fraser and Lorraine Vlasek (mmm, pickles), a woman whose loyalties seem to vacillate between the two different sides in the Earth civil war, have a sad unconsummated love affair.  Fraser also deals with the stress of his work on Ganymede by smoking a pipe and taking "happypills," and frets when tobacco and "psych medicine" are in short supply.  Anderson doesn't imply any moral judgments about Fraser's attitude towards his family or his reliance on stimulants to get through a Ganymedean day.

Characters and style aren't the strong point of this short (143 page) novel; it's a story about plot and ideas.  There aren't any libertarian speeches like the one at the end of the Van Rijn collection Trader to the Stars, but Anderson's politics are in evidence; Fraser carps about government censors and bureaucrats, and Theor gets out of a predicament by trading with primitive natives he encounters.  Anderson portrays war as preferable to living under tyranny or surrendering what is yours, but many minor characters are willing to give up and/or collaborate and have to be convinced by people like Fraser and Theor to do the right thing and stand up for what is right.  And while wars will happen, at the center of the novel is the idea that different cultures will most profit through trade and friendship.

Not spectacular, but solidly entertaining; Three Worlds to Conquer has all the classic hard SF elements, and doesn't outlast its welcome, as new things keep popping up to maintain the reader's interest.

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Some four years ago Joachim Boaz reviewed Three Worlds to Conquer; you'll have to take my word for it that I read his review after drafting mine. 

If we have any substantial disagreements about the novel, it is about Fraser's wife, Eve.  Joachim seems to think her lack of "screen time" is a careless flaw, perhaps a sign of sexism.  I, as I have suggested above, think this is a conscious artistic choice by Anderson, an effort to depict a stale marriage.  The very last line of the book is actually about Eve, and Fraser's strained relationship with her, suggesting Anderson thought the Fraser marriage an important element of his novel.

Joachim also suggests the aliens in the novel are silly-looking, but I thought them better than the cat people, teddy bear people, and girls with blue or green skin we so often get in SF.

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The last page of my edition of Three Worlds to Conquer is an ad for the "Latest Science Fiction!" published by Pyramid.  Of the seven books advertised, I've only read the two included Jack Williamson Legion of Space novels, first written in the 1930s ("latest" indeed.)  I remember enjoying The Cometeers (yay, space war!), but being disappointed in One Against the Legion (instead of interstellar naval warfare we get a detective story in a space casino.)  Joachim read the Sturgeon collection A Way Home last year, and gave it a mixed review.

Feel free to let the world know via the comments why we should seek out The Butterfly Kid, Venus Equilateral, Against the Fall of Night, and The Synthetic Man, or why we should avoid them like we'd avoid the ammonia seas of Jupiter.