1970 stories by Gardner Dozois, Avram Davidson and Thom Lee Wharton from Orbit 8

When I find myself near Dupont Circle in this nation's capital on a rainless day, I generally spend time looking at the clearance carts on the sidewalk in front of Second Story Books.  It is always fun to flip through the art books and military history books that are going for four bucks, and I have purchased quite a few SF paperbacks there for one dollar or even a mere 50 cents.  On my most recent visit I found two volumes in the Orbit series of original anthologies edited by Damon Knight, numbers 8 and 10.  A look at isfdb indicated that these books included stories by Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty that I did not already own and had not already read, so I parted with a dollar to take them home.  I'll read my perforated copy of Orbit 8 first--looking over the table of contents I have decided to read every story in this volume (excepting any I have already blogged about.)

Joachim Boaz, SF blogger extraordinaire and generous supporter of this here blog, read Orbit 8 and wrote about each story back in 2015.  Enough time has passed that my memories of his opinions are a little hazy, and I think I can read and assess these stories without being unduly influenced.  After I read each story and draft my own opinion I will check out Joachim's blog post and see if we are at loggerheads or seeing oculum ad oculum.

"Horse of Air" by Gardner R. Dozois

This is a well-written and compelling piece, a strong start to the book; Knight must have been excited to get it.  At least he included it in the 1975 Best from Orbit anthology.

Dozois employs an interesting narrative strategy: we get an unreliable first-person narrative, interspersed with a more honest stream-of-consciousness (or unvoiced inner monologue) narrative and a third-person omniscient narrative; these latter two texts emphasize or undermine the claims in the main text.  This is quite effective at presenting and distinguishing between different facets of the character, those he wants to display and those he'd rather not.

Our narrator is one of the few people left in a big city (I guess New York), trapped in a high rise apartment far above the street with a fenced in balcony like those one sees in public housing projects.  The start of the story consists of the narrator looking out over the city, of descriptions of his view and his intellectual and emotional responses to what he sees.  As I have told readers of this blog before, I love the kinds of descriptions of rooms and views we find in literary fiction like Proust's In Search of Lost Time (Marcel's room in Balbec, for example, and his view of the church steeples from a moving carriage) and Wyndham Lewis's Self Condemned (Rene Harding's Canadian hotel room) and Dozois really succeeds in painting an absorbing picture in the reader's mind here.   

Then the back story is filled in.  Our narrator, who studied at Annapolis, is a member of what he calls "the upper class" and even "the aristocracy."  (This isn't really the way educated Americans talk, especially self-described "liberals" as this guy is--perhaps a hint this is all a dream or fantasy?)  His class of people, in response to black crime, secluded themselves in these high-rises, and (shortsightedly) handed over political power to the managers of the high-rises.  Eventually the management company sealed the high-rises' inhabitants in, "for their own good." (The plumbing is maintained and twice a week food and supplies arrive via a dumbwaiter.) 

The narrator hates blacks because they "are responsible for the destruction, for the present degeneration of the world," but the third-person omniscient narration indicates that his hatred largely stems from envy--reminding me of the scene in Henry Miller's Plexus (Chapter 15) in which the narrator goes to hear W. E. B. Du Bois speak, Dozois enumerates the many ways (in the eyes of the narrator, at least) black people are better than white people; their easy sexuality, their depth of feeling, their exuberant and happy culture, their rebellion, all a contrast to the square and bland and boring and obedient ways of whites. 

In the final third of the story we are given an increasing number of clues that suggest that some, maybe all, of this SF stuff is the delusion or dream or fantasy of an ordinary man, maybe a businessman, who is stressed out by the pressures of city life in the late '60s/early '70s and a failed relationship with a woman.

"Horse of Air" is quite good, like a Malzberg story that has been carefully polished over a number of drafts instead of being slapped together at high speed as Malzberg's work so often appears to have been.  Joachim also liked it, saying it is the best story in the book.  Whoa, does this mean I should quit now?  "Horse of Air" would reappear not only in The Best of Orbit but the Dozois collection The Visible Man and the seventh Nebula anthology, it having been nominated.

"One Life, Furnished in Early Poverty" by Harlan Ellison

I tackled this one, the second story in Orbit 8, back in 2016 when I read Donald A. Wollheim's 1972 edition of World's Best SF.

"Rite of Spring" by Avram Davidson

Here's another story that Knight included in The Best from Orbit.  "Rite of Spring" doesn't seem to have gotten a lot of traction otherwise, however--I think it only ever appeared in books with "Orbit" on the cover.

This is a trifling little vignette (less than seven pages of text) from some weird (post-apocalyptic?) future or alternate world.  I am guessing it is an acknowledgement and demonstration of the fact that customs and social arrangements are arbitrary and silly.  Davidson's story is full of hard-to-decipher allusions and hints about the alien milieu it vaguely depicts; maybe it is supposed to recreate in the reader the feeling of spending the briefest moment in a foreign culture or being exposed to only a few snatches of information about a foreign civilization, to give us the sense that all the apparently bizarre things these people are doing have deep roots and layers of meaning it would take a lifetime to fully understand.  Maybe Davidson is trying to put us in the shoes of an explorer or traveler confronted by alienness, like an 18th-century European who found himself briefly among  people in China or Persia or sub-Saharan Africa, or an Eskimo or Yanomamo who suddenly found himself in Victorian London or the Paris of the Second Empire.

"Rite of Spring" takes place on a farm, owned by Mr. and Mrs. Robinson.  Living there as well are a young man, Roger, a young woman, Betty, and a spectacularly obese woman, Mrs. Machick.  The action described in this deliberately opaque story suggests that the Robinsons are responsible for feeding the (apparently idle) Machick, and training young people like Roger and Betty in "the old ways."  It is suggested that both Betty and Roger are only the latest in a series of young people who are employed and tutored by the Robinsons; Betty does domestic chores and Roger does farm work, chopping wood and the like. Betty is from the city, where, the characters say, it is difficult to teach young people the old customs.  (These 1970s stories are down on city life; I guess I am lucky I moved to the Big Apple after it had been tamed in the mid-1990s.)  Roger wants to have sex with Betty, but he is told to wait until the time is right.  The arrival of the first robin of spring is the signal that the right time has arrived; Roger catches the bird, it is decapitated and its blood drunk, and then Roger roughly takes Betty, who initially puts up some resistance.

Gimmicky, a story that is technically competent but has no human feeling or real intellectual content.  Joachim liked it even less than I do, giving it only one out of five possible stars.  I am willing to say it is an acceptable experiment.

"The Bystander" by Thom Lee Wharton

Who is Thom Lee Wharton?  Well, this is his only story listed at isfdb, and that is all I know.

"The Bystander" feels like what I guess the mainstream detective novels I never read are like, if that makes any sense.  A retired dentist, in his forties, is now owner/manager of a bar in New Jersey (or as I call it, the greatest state in the union.)  An FBI investigator comes by to talk to him about his relationship with his business partner, "Joe the Nuts."  The dentist drives the flatfoot to the shore in his antique car (a 1934 Packard) where they talk in an old Coast Guard bunker from World War Two.  The bar owner describes how, like the guy in that Kinks song, he was a success as a bourgeois professional but was not satisfied and became a drunk.  After hitting bottom he lucked into owning a bar; the FBI man and we readers hear all about his struggles to make the bar a success.  And the bar is a success, because the Mafia supplies the food and entertainment.

In the story's last pages we learn that this interview was the first move in a war between the federal government and the Mafia in which many are killed.  The dentist is not killed however, and it is implied that he is somehow pulling the strings behind the scenes, that he caused this war because he is bitter that his wife and child died of a disease or something and he sees the Mafia and the government as equally bad.  Or something.  I don't get it.

This story has no SF content and as a mainstream crime story is a total waste of time.  Wharton makes no discernible effort to back up his apparent argument that the government is a racket just like the mob and is equally delinquent in any effort to portray the psychological pressures of a man broken by the loss of his family or dissatisfied with middle class suburban life.  I am very open to the argument that the government sucks and that middle class life is a tragedy, but the author offers only the tiniest of crumbs to dramatize these themes.  Instead we get twenty pages of pointless details, the literary equivalent of white noise.  Bad!  Joachim gives it one out of five stars and even admits he couldn't finish it!

Inexplicably, Knight not only included "The Bystander" here in Orbit 8, but in The Best from Orbit!  Damon, what are you doing?  Was Thom Lee Wharton the pen name of a loan shark? 

"All Pieces of a River Shore" by R. A. Lafferty

I recommended this one, the fifth story in Orbit 8, with some enthusiasm back in 2016 when I read it in Wollheim's 1972 World's Best SF.

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We'll get back to this 1970 anthology, but first we'll take a little trip to the 1920s and to the Moon with Edgar Rice Burroughs.                 

American Fantastic Tales by Major Women Authors: Chopin, Wharton & Cather

While it is true I have been effusive in my praise of Tanith Lee and Thomas M. Disch on this website, I don't think anybody would mistake MPorcius Fiction Log as the go-to place for celebrating diversity in SF and promoting the publication of more SF by members of marginalized populations.  But maybe today is the day I will get a little absolution from the powers that zhe for my harsh criticism of The Tomorrow People and The Killer Thing.  Because today is the day I read three "tales of the fantastic" by women, women who are iconic members of the American literary canon: Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather.

It is fair to see this post as a companion piece to my late September post about stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville and Henry James, because I have also drawn these three stories from The Library of America's American Fantastic Tales: Terror and the Uncanny from Poe to the Pulps.  As was the case with Henry James, I know just about zero about Chopin, Wharton and Cather, not having been required to read them in school and not having sought them out since I bid farewell to the classroom. This will be my first experience of these big name American authors.  I know we're all crossing our fingers hoping I love these things!

"Ma'ame Pelagie" by Kate Chopin (1893)

Fifty-year-old Ma'ame Pelagie and her sister Pauline, thirty-five, live in a cabin on their Louisiana plantation, saving their pennies in hopes of rebuilding the mansion they lived in as children, which has been a ruin since it was wrecked by Union soldiers during the Civil War, some three decades ago.  Maybe in twenty or thirty years they will have amassed enough funds to rebuild the place.

A niece, whom they call "La Petite," comes to stay with the childless unmarried sisters.  La Petite quickly becomes the light of Pauline's life: "...she seems like a saviour; like one who had come and taken me by the hand and was leading me somewhere--somewhere I want to go."  La Petite, who has lived in big cities, tires of life in the little cabin far from her piano and any excitement, and declares she will leave.  Pauline tells Ma'ame Pelagie that "if La Petite goes away I shall die."

In her youth her father impressed upon Ma'ame Pelagie that she must look after her little sister.  So Ma'ame Pelagie abandons her dream of rebuilding the mansion, and instead uses the accumulated money to build a smaller but still fine house.  The house becomes a meeting place for local society, and La Petite and her father are happy to move in permanently.

This is a reasonably good mainstream story about self-sacrifice, moving forward in life, and women's relationships, but what is "fantastic" about it?  I guess the scene in which the title character looks into the ruin and "sees" the big party she attended right before the war.  Or how the ruin seems to brood "like a huge monster."

"Afterward" by Edith Wharton (1910)

The Boynes, engineer Ned and wife Mary, left New York City for Ned’s work and have “endured for nearly fourteen years the soul-deadening ugliness of a Middle Western town.” Ay carumba, this is a horror story!  Thank heavens they finally struck it rich and moved to a country estate in Dorsetshire, England.

Life is good for the Boynes at their English estate, with the garden and the library and the servants and walks in the countryside and all that, but then supernatural disaster strikes! A mysterious man appears, and Ned leaves with him, leaving no word with Mary or the servants as to who the man is, where they are going, and when he will return.  In the event, Ned does not return!  Weeks later, with the arrival in England of an acquaintance of Ned’s, all the clues fall into place and Mary learns the terrible truth.  In the course of striking it rich back in what we now call flyover country, Ned screwed over some business associate (in a way Wharton does not specify) and this joker lost all his money and committed suicide.  It was the ghost of this suicide who came to take away Ned, presumably to some final, fatal, punishment.

One assumes this story is an attack on business or capitalism or the free market or whatever you want to call it.  Wharton portrays businesspeople as unscrupulous and business as a lawless realm beyond concepts of honor and dishonor or good and evil. Mary asks the American visitor, “you accuse my husband of doing something dishonourable?”  His reply is “I don’t say it wasn’t straight, and yet I don’t say it was straight.  It was business.”  Wharton includes his line twice in the story, to make sure we get the message.  Another clue that this story is about economics as much or more than it is about ghosts is that Ned was spending his retirement in England writing a book with the working title of Economic Basis of Culture.

“Afterward” is alright, I suppose, but it is no big deal.  It kind of just sits there.  It feels a little long for what it tries to accomplish, and doesn’t generate much feeling; Wharton doesn’t give the reader much reason to like or dislike Mary or Ned or the suicide, or to care what happens to any of them. And of course its politics are hardly interesting or novel; every day we hear broad emotional denunciations of businesspeople and the business world from those who think society would be better off if there was more power in the hands of aristocrats, commissars, or government bureaucrats.

"Consequences" by Willa Cather (1915)

Eastman, an industrious and successful lawyer (sometimes he argues before the Supreme Court in Washington!), and Cavenaugh, a playboy (sometimes he parties til dawn with showgirls!) are bachelors living in the same building in midtown Manhattan.  Oh yes, this is one of those stories which makes me wax nostalgic about "the good old days" when I stalked the streets of New York City, lounging in parks, on street corners, in museums, and at esplanades, stuffing my face with the world's finest pizzas and bagels, watching the girls, the trains, and the ships going by.

Eastman and Cavenaugh exchange stories about suicides they have known. Cavenaugh eventually unburdens himself about his own dark secret: an old man haunts him, appearing at random intervals when he is alone.  This mysterious figure, who wears worn out evening clothes, knows everything about Cavenaugh and his life and puts a bad color on everything:

"...he knows me like a book; everything I've ever done or thought.  But when he recalls them, he throws a bad light on them, somehow.  Things that weren't much off color, look rotten.  He doesn't leave one a shred of self-respect...."     

Is this phantom a cautionary vision of the future Cavenaugh, who regrets his wasted life?  Is it the ghost of Cavenaugh's athletic and ambitious brother Brian, who died young, of who Brian might have become?  Is it a materialization of Cavenaugh's conscience?  

Eastman advises Cavenaugh to quit his idle ways and become a businessman or an engineer or something.  He even helps the playboy get in touch with a ranch in Montana where he can ride horses and shoot guns and do real physical work, far from the decadence of New York.  But it is too late--after a final visit from the old man, Cavenaugh shoots himself.

Even accounting for my New York prejudice, this is easily the best of the three stories I'm talking about today.  Cather's style is more modern: it is clear, smooth, and alive. Eastman and Cavenaugh seem like real people, Cather discusses issues of universal interest, like "how should you live your life?" and "why do people take their own lives?" and exhibits the kind of cynical wisdom I am a sucker for:

"It reminds me of what Dr. Johnson said, that the most discouraging thing about life is the number of fads and hobbies and fake religions it takes to put people through a few years of it."  

"People never really change; they just go on being themselves."   

Perhaps most importantly, for stories in a collection of "fantastic tales," the supernatural element of "Consequences" actually works: it is prominent, interesting, and genuinely creepy.

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I'm sure there are legions of college professors and mountains of books that could explain to me why Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton and Willa Cather are the queen bee's knees.  But instead of consulting them I went right to the source material and came up with my own almost totally uneducated assessment.  My brief reconnaissance into the distaff side of the American literary canon has left me with a good impression of Willa Cather and the feeling Edith Wharton is not for me.

In our next episode, more American Fantastic Tales, this time by women whom I don't think are as famous as Chopin, Wharton and Cather--at least I've never heard of them.