1970 stories by Clifford Simak, Ed Bryant, and George Zebrowski & Jack Dann

While working on my blog posts about Bob Shaw's 1973 collection of short stories Tomorrow Lies in Ambush, I flipped through the March 1970 issue of If and became intrigued by a story by Clifford Simak, "The Thing in the Stone," because it was accompanied by a moody illustration of a bipedal dinosaur.  Like everybody, I love dinosaurs.  So today we are looking at this story and two others in that issue of If, which also features debate about race and IQ in the letters column and an ad in which Tony Curtis offers you a button reading "IQ" (which stands for "I Quit") if you quit smoking cigarettes.

"The Thing in the Stone" by Clifford Simak

"The Thing in the Stone" was apparently a hit with readers, coming in second to Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser story "Ill Met in Lankhmar" in the voting for the 1971 Hugo for Best Novella.  It was included in Wollheim and Carr's World's Best Science Fiction 1971 and has appeared in many anthologies and collections and been translated into six foreign languages.

This is one of those pastoral stories about country folk in the Wisconsin hulls who sit on porches and look at the hills and gossip about foxes and chickens and moonshining.  Wallace Daniels has lived in the area only three years as the story begins.  We learn that he likes climbing the hills and looking for fossils, but he sees more than fossils on these daily outings--he sees prehistoric plants and animals in the flesh!  In a flashback we learn that he developed the ability to see the past after a car accident (which wiped out his family) injured his head and "rearranged" something in his brain.  As he hikes, this ability will kick in and shut down at random intervals, enabling him to walk the countryside some apparently randomly determined time in the distant past, but not really interact with it; photographs taken in the past do not develop, he can't bring samples back to the 20th-century, and the dinosaurs and other prehistoric fauna can't see or smell him.

That car accident gave Daniels still more powers--he can listen in on the telepathic communications of aliens!  In a cave in a cliff face, accessible by climbing a tree, Daniels senses an alien intelligence embedded deep inside the rock which he suspects to be the crew of a space ship which crashed tens or hundreds of millions of years ago and was buried in the mud that this stone then was.  When an envious neighbor traps Daniels in the cave our hero tries to communicate with the alien and succeeds in holding a conversation with making a friend of not the actual space traveller trapped in the stone but a lesser creature loyal to it, a creature of pure energy that plays a role in alien society similar to that of a dog in human society.  This space hound has an intelligence similar to that of a human, but is a "lowly" creature in the  hierarchy of super smart alien society--it has been waiting here for the alien to somehow achieve freedom for millions of years.

Daniels escapes the cave when his power kicks in and he finds himself at a time before the cliff and cave had formed (luckily, his power always materializes him at ground level, not up in the air even if the ancient landscape was at a lower elevation than it will be in the 1900s.)  He is on the shore of an ancient ocean, at the time of the dawn of land-based life, there are no trees or grass, just slime and little amphibious creatures Simak doesn't describe.  An alien space ship appears, and drops a sphere into the shallows of the prehistoric sea; Daniels can "hear" the alien authorities bidding a farewell to an alien criminal who is being left imprisoned on the primitive Earth ("beyond the farthest track of galactic intercourse") for unspeakably horrible crimes--this is the alien entombed alive in the Wisconsin stone, beloved of the space hound despite its evil.

I guess the fact that the trapped alien is some kind of interstellar Mengele is our twist ending.  Our happy ending is provided by the fact that the space hound is going to be Daniels's bosom buddy--both lost their loved ones to some kind of tragedy but neither need ever be lonely again.

The big theme of this story seems to be the unity of all life, and the responsibility of living things for each other, even across borders of species and regardless of considerations of justice and worthiness.  Daniels feels a sense of duty regarding his cows and hogs, who rely on him for food and shelter, and when he is in the cave, in danger of dying of cold or thirst, he is thinking about the poor trapped alien and his own poor unfed livestock as much as he is about his own skin.  (The space hound notes the similarity of this devotion to his own devotion to the trapped alien.)  Daniels, who has no interest in hunting and doesn't own a gun, refuses to try to kill the fox who steals his chickens, and doesn't report to the cops the life-threatening trick his jerk of a neighbor played on him.  Like the aliens who don't execute a perpetrator of unfathomable atrocities and the space dog who loves his master despite his crimes, Daniels forgives those who trespass against him.

This story is not bad, though the conversations and descriptions feel a little long-winded at times and of course the powers Daniels has are pretty nonsensical.  "The Thing in the Stone" is a good example of the "pastoralism" for which Simak is famous, and it lacks the sort of bitter complaints we sometimes get from Simak about city life and human shortcomings that can get on my nerves.

"In the Silent World" by Ed Bryant

"In the Silent World" doesn't appear to have been a hit; besides If, it has only ever appeared as a bonus story in an Italian collection of Sterling Lanier stories.

Julie is a nineteen-year old college girl from a small town in Georgia and a telepath who can read minds.  She is lonely because she has never met another telepath.  One day during a lecture on Baudelaire she receives a mental message--another telepath, a young man named Ted, has found her!  After class she walks across campus to meet him, already thinking of what their married life will be like--who else could she fall in love with and marry besides the only other telepath in the world?  Especially since with her mind reading power she knows how selfish and horny all other men are!  But when she meets Ted she sees an obstacle to her new found happiness--Ted is black!

This is more of an idea than a story--it doesn't have anything to say about racism or interracial relationships or the black experience in America or anything like that, it just points out that people are racist as a twist ending--but it is acceptable filler, I guess.

"Traps" by George Zebrowski and Jack Dann

The galactic government is almost ready to OK colonization of an as yet unnamed planet, but they need a specimen of all the planet's land animals first, and one beast has so far eluded captured--the greycat!  Rysling is hired to capture one of these elusive beasts, and after landing on the planet sends out his remote controlled robot cage to snag the feline.  (Remember when J. Jonah Jameson remotly guided a robot designed to catch Spider-Man?  That was really something, wasn't it?)

The cat, it turns out, has psychic powers and somehow part of its soul enters Rysling's body and part of Rysling's soul enters the cat's body.  Not realizing the limitations of a human body, the cat psyche in Rysling's body tries to jump off a cliff, breaking the human's neck.  Meanwhile, the surviving portion of Rysling's psyche enjoys being in a cat body and quickly forgets its former human life altogether.

(Science fiction people love cats!)

OK, I guess.

"Traps" would later be translated into Italian and French (it appeared in the French edition of Galaxy) and was included in a 21st-century collection of Zebrowski and Dann collaborations titled Decimated. 

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These stories are a little underwhelming, but not actually bad.  (I'd have read the Poul Anderson story in this issue of If but the Poul Anderson estate requested that it be excluded from the file at the internet archive.) 

In our next episode, stories from SF magazines published in 1971.

Phoenix Without Ashes by Edward Bryant & Harlan Ellison

"We all forgot we were on a ship.  We forgot the cataclysm, and the accident, whatever it was...and we even forgot the Earth.  We lived as if our entire universe was a hundred kilometers across with a metal sky...."

When I lived in Manhattan I would spend untold hours walking the streets and admiring the skyscrapers and the crowds of aspiring actresses and fashion models, loitering at the river watching the container ships, oil tankers, sailboats and cruise liners bobbing with the tide or cruising up or downstream, and squinting in the Metropolitan Museum of Art at the Greek vases, Roman statues and European paintings and drawings.  Life in Central Ohio doesn't offer these same sorts of opportunities, but one Columbus area pastime I can recommend is scrutinizing the bookshelves at Ohio Thrift's various locations.  Among the rough of all the romance novels and cookbooks and computer language tutorials one can often find a diamond. For example, I recently discovered a paperback edition of South African athlete, writer and adventurer Robert Crisp's memoir of his service with the Royal Tank Regiment in North Africa, Brazen Chariots.  (I read Brazen Chariots in my teens, never forgot it, and having reread it now can confirm it as a great read.)

Another recent Ohio Thrift find was a 1975 Fawcett Gold Medal paperback, Phoenix Without Ashes, a novel by Edward Bryant based on a TV script by Harlan Ellison for the TV show he created, The Starlost.  I've never seen The Starlost, or even read about it (I'm a cultural illiterate!) but the first page of this paperback (that page where the publisher tells you how awesome the book is and shares ecstatic blurbs if they can get them--Fawcett couldn't get any for Phoenix Without Ashes, Neil Gaiman and Stephen King being too young, I guess) indicates that Ellison conceived of the series, wrote a teleplay (which won an award from the Writers Guild of America) and then, when the show was actually produced, felt that the TV people had screwed it up and ripped him off.  There's an acknowledgements page on which a host of writers who have used the "enclosed universe" idea are listed, apparently a prophylactic or retaliatory measure against those who might have the temerity to accuse Ellison of acting like he came up with the "enclosed universe" theme, and then there is a 20-page introduction from Ellison.  I decided to skip the intro and read the actual novel first, as if it was just some ordinary novel I might judge on its own merits and not an exhibit in the never-ending case of Harlan Ellison vs. The World.

The first 60 of Phoenix Without Ashes's 160 pages are set in Cypress Corners, a spot of land 100 kilometers wide with a hexagonal sun and moon and a metal dome for a sky.  Here lives a sort of 19th-century farming community managed by Elders who preach from a Book that says that premarital sex is bad.  Devon and Rachel are in their late teens and in love, but the Creator (a eugenics computer susceptible to manipulation by the unscrupulous Elders) has decreed that Rachel marry some other guy with a better "genetic rating."  This part of the book is there to tell you that sex is good, religion is a scam perpetrated by lying hypocrites, and people who believe in religion are sheep--you know, in case you forgot.  We get to witness Rachel's erotic dreams, as well as Devon's dreams which cryptically reveal to him the true nature of the universe--poor Devon can't just read the back of the book like we can to see that Cypress Corners is but one component of a generation ship ("space ark") and has to make do with his latent psychic powers.

Going full rebel, Devon pulls a tape out of the Creator computer and tries to convince Rachel's family that their religion is a trick, but he ends up being chased into the woods by a torch-wielding mob.  By luck (or through unconscious use of his powers?) he discovers a hatch that leads to the maintenance and control areas of the generation ship, which he finds bereft of crew and in considerable disrepair.

These generation ships are pretty unreliable means of transport, always suffering mutinies like in Heinlein's Orphans of the Sky, or breaking down like in Aldiss's Non-Stop and Malzberg's "Over the Line."  And all the stories about them seem to somehow be about religion, mostly saying religion is crap, though in Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun the crap religion obliquely leads the characters to what Wolfe considers true religion--at least that is how I remember The Book of the Long Sun, having only read it once, and that long ago.

Anyway, Devon figures out how to use a space suit and operate an air lock, and then spends 20 or so pages talking to a computer, learning the history of the destruction of Earth five centuries ago in 2265, the creation of the 1,600 km long ark, its populating with three million passengers from dozens of different cultures (each hermetically sealed in its own individual sphere) and its doomed voyage.  Yes, doomed--there was an accident 400 years ago that killed the crew and the ship has been off course since then, and, in fact, is projected to crash into a star in five years.

I like the back cover
illustration, spare and evocative

I had hopes that Devon would immediately start exploring the other biospheres, looking for a technological society that could help steer the ark onto a safer course, but instead he returns to Cypress Corners because he loves Rachel and wants to coax her into joining him in his adventures beyond the CC dome.  We readers get an abortive sex scene, and a full serving of the kind of material we have already seen hundreds of times in popular fiction: Devon throws pebbles at Rachel's window at night to awaken her; Devon climbs up a tree whose branch approaches her window; Devon gets captured by an ignorant mob; Devon is put on trial in a kangaroo court.  He gets sentenced to death by the fraudulent preachers, but a minor character liberates Devon from jail and he and Rachel escape Cypress Corners.  On the final full page of the book it is made clear to us that, as in The Fugitive and the Lou Ferrigno/Bill Bixby The Incredible Hulk, a not wholly unsympathetic person will be chasing our protagonist through future episodes.

This novel is not very good.  While essentially competent, it is very conventional, a bunch of ideas and themes we've seen before without any additional elements or a distinctive voice to make it fresh or engaging.  Phoenix Without Ashes doesn't inspire any emotion in the reader, the characters are stock and forgettable, the style is cold and bland, and the pace is slow and unvaried--each character's every little movement is described, so much of the novel reads like a mechanical record of stage directions transcribed by somebody watching a TV show.  Structurally it has problems--as the first episode of an episodic story it lacks climax and resolution and suffers from long expository sections--and I for one don't find Amish-Mennonite type environments very interesting; maybe the constraints of TV production or the desire to attack religion lead to the low-tech setting, but I would have preferred some kind of strange futuristic or otherwise speculative setting.

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UK edition

After I drafted the above I read Ellison's long intro, which is full of spoilers (if isfdb is to be believed, the 1978 British edition of the novel relegates Ellison's intro to the back and retitles it "Afterward"--heed the wisdom of a people steadfast enough to eat a bazillion jars of Marmite every year!)  It describes the genesis and development of The Starlost project, mostly focusing on how nobody involved with the show knew anything about SF, the exceptions being Ellison and Ben Bova, whom Ellison enlisted as a technical adviser and whom he describes as "editor of Analog, the leading sf magazine in the country," and the program was a disaster because these people wouldn't listen to Ellison.  Robert Silverberg and Gene Rodenberry have cameos as people who back up Ellison and attest to his greatness.

This intro, titled "Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto," has the distinctive Ellison voice and thus is more readable and emotionally involving than Bryant's novel; it should interest people who like stories about Hollywood shenanigans and those who enjoy hearing Ellison insult people.  Most interesting to me was the fact that the Fugitive angle, seemingly tossed in at the end of Bryant's novel, was apparently the germ that started the whole project--we are told that a "West Coast head of taped syndicated shows" requested a meeting with Ellison because, he said, he wanted "the top sf writer in the world" to write "a sort of The Fugitive in space."

Bryant gets a page and a half to introduce himself, and his last line is "And I'm a dilettante inland lay-authority on sharks," which made me smile because one of Bryant's more memorable stories is about sharks.

While not offensively bad, I can't really recommend Phoenix Without Ashes.  Perhaps people interested in Bryant's career (this is his only novel listed at isfdb) and those who have seen The Starlost (Ellison says he never saw any episodes after the first, which he calls "the abomination," but that friends call him up to tell him how much they like it after catching it in reruns) will find it intriguing, and Ellison completists may want to own "Somehow, I Don't Think We're in Kansas, Toto."

Generation, Part 2: Anthony, Bunch, Bryant (w/ Sutherland & Harper) and Yarbro

Let's continue our exploration of Generation, a 1972 anthology of stories that were probably written in 1969, stories by people promoted as "the brightest talents of the new generation of science fiction masters."  Today we'll read stories by Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch, Ed Bryant (one each with James Sutherland and Jody Harper) and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.

"Up Schist Crick" by Piers Anthony

In my teens I read lots of Piers Anthony novels--Xanth novels, the Bio of a Space Tyrant series, the Battle Circle series, the Chthon books, the Orn books, the Apprentice Adept series, and more--because there was a lot of sex in them.  They were practically pornography (at least to my naive mind) and in the pre-internet era pornography (for a teen-aged MPorcius, at least) was hard to find.

"Up Schist Crick" would later appear
in Anthonology

"Up Schist Crick" isn't providing me any reason to revise my view of Anthony as a guy who writes about sex.  Our hero is William Zether, a junior executive at a big manufacturing firm.  In the files Zether has found evidence that a branch of the company has been test marketing a new kind of material in a tiny secluded town, and that the company bigwigs have forgotten about it.  Zether goes to the little isolated town, thinking maybe he can somehow appropriate the invention and make himself rich.

Sure enough, in the little town he discovers everybody is using the new material, an unbreakable one-molecule-thick stretchable fabric which has a wide variety of applications.  The most provocative use is as a transparent one piece suit which keeps the wearer comfortable and safe.  Because the material is so very thin and absolutely impenetrable by liquids, women wearing it can have risk-free sex without any other sort of precaution.  This convenient form of birth control has lead to a culture of casual sex in the little town, a culture which Zether takes advantage of soon after his arrival.

There is a catch, however.  The woman Zether had sex with is very marriage-minded, and her guardian is ready to vigorously defend her honor, so the story's main plot thread concerns Zether's efforts to escape the area and the impending shotgun wedding, a real challenge because his car has broken down on the ill-maintained road leading to the town.  

Looking beyond the story's erotic aspect and its climactic scatological humor, "Up Schist Crick" has much in common with a traditional SF story in which a new piece of technology is proposed and the writer speculates on how it will affect society; there are many passages describing the material and its many uses.

Acceptable.

"The Lady was for Kroinking" by David R. Bunch

I've read a number of stories by Bunch and I haven't been very impressed by him, but here I am, reading him again.  Bunch stories are always short, at least.

"The Lady was for Kroinking" would
later appear in Future Pastimes

"The Lady was for Kroinking" takes place in the future, and is mostly a dialogue between two characters, a man and a woman.  The "point" of the story is that the pace of future life is such that it drives people to sadism. The go-go life of the future fills people with rage and hate, feelings which, if left unvented, will cause dangerous levels of insanity.  So, the people of the future regularly patronize "Enjoy-Your-Hate houses," which are kind of like brothels, but instead of prostitutes these establishments provide realistic rubber dummies for customers to torture. Most of the text of the story consists of the woman's detailed description of the elaborate tortures she inflicted on a particularly interesting dummy earlier in the day.  Sample detail: the dummy had installed in its artificial head real lambs' eyes, so when the torturer penetrated them with red hot rods she could smell burning flesh.  The punchline/twist ending (?) of the story is when the man and woman kiss each other goodbye; they bite each other's lips so hard they both bleed profusely.

At five pages this story isn't quite long enough to get tedious, and I can't help but admire its audacity and bizarreness.  So I think I can give it an acceptable grade.

"Beside Still Waters" by Ed Bryant and James Sutherland

I have read several stories by Bryant, and have a better opinion of Bryant than Bunch; while some of Bryant's more self-indulgent and experimental pieces have aroused my distaste, he has also produced some well-written and well-constructed stories which I have liked.

James Sutherland has only one novel and four short stories listed at isfdb; one of the four shorts was slated to appear in The Last Dangerous Visions and has thus never been published.  (Oh, Harlan....[shakes head sadly.])

"Beside Still Waters" is a silly sort of story, one of those things in which some mythological creature suddenly appears in 20th-century America.  Bryant and Sutherland play it for laughs rather than trying to evoke a sense of wonder or horror.

Sidney Bates lives in LA, a divorced father with custody of his kids who has trouble meeting his alimony payments to his ex-wife Edna.  (I remember from my childhood viewing of Johnny Carson that California divorce law was a rich mine for jokes in the '70s; wikipedia indicates that California was the first state to pass a no-fault divorce law, in 1969.)  Bates has a pool, and dangerous creatures (a shark, a giant frog, a crocodile, etc.) and weather phenomena (an iceberg, a waterspout) have been appearing in it.  He contacts a psychic detective, who figures out what is going on: the pool draws water from a spring guarded by a beautiful naiad.  The detective summons and opens negotiations with the naiad, and there is a happy ending for everybody: the psychic detective has an affair with the naiad and when the supernatural creature learns that Edna, not Sidney, had the pool installed, one of the naiad's monsters kills Edna when she comes to visit to nag about her alimony payments.

This story is OK.      

"Beside Still Waters" and "Nova Morning" only ever appeared in Generation

"Nova Morning" by Ed Bryant and Jody Harper

This is Harper's only credit at isfdb.  Gerrold tells us Harper is good-looking and worked as a go-go dancer in Beirut, Lebanon, in case you were wondering.  (As Karen at goodreads suggests in her review of Generation, Gerrold talks about the female authors represented in the anthology in a way that probably wouldn't fly today.)

This is one of those arty stories in which almost every line of prose includes a metaphor and in which the paragraphs of prose are separated by snatches of italicized verse.

It is the end of the world!  Almost everybody is dead!  But Lea, a young poet, is still alive, on a college campus in Manhattan.  She goes to an empty classroom and activates the recorded lecture on metaphysical poetry.  Then a young man with whom she has a relationship, for whom she has even written a poem, appears; he wants to have sex, and she is revolted by his blunt overtures.  ("Let's fuck.")  She reads him her poem and he calls it "rotten."

Lea resists the urge to go away with him ("It's incredible, what a wretchedly bad bargain we are together--even if there's no one else"), but then succumbs; after all, how should she expect people to act at the end of the world?  "It's the way it is now," he tells her.  "You got to take it like that."

This story is alright.

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

Yarbro is a big success; she has published a huge stack (thirty or so) of those sexy vampire novels which (I assume) are mostly read by women, and she has won a bunch of big awards.  I didn't like her postapocalyptic novel False Dawn when I read it, but what do I know?  Gerrold tells us that this is the third story she ever sold--from little acorns!

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'"
was later included in Cautionary Tales

"Everything that Begins with an 'M'" is about how the impoverished citizens of a tiny isolated village (in some kind of mythical medieval or early modern land, I guess) amuse themselves and enliven their dreary lives by spreading rumors and engaging in absurd speculations.  A mentally ill homeless man spends his time reclining at the "sand pit" where the villagers throw their refuse, singing to himself and tracing designs in the sand. When the tax collector comes to town he chokes to death on a hunk of meat, and, because the madman was scribbling on a piece of paper with a bit of charcoal at the same moment, the villagers begin to think the insaniac is some kind of wizard or holy man, and begin visiting him, hoping to receive sage advice, even making him a crude crown and giving him a fine robe.  The fact that the madman ignores them does little to shake their faith.

This is essentially the whole story.  Merely acceptable.

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My reaction to all five of these stories was lukewarm; none of them is actually good, but none excited my resentment, either.  I can imagine people being offended by the Anthony and the Bryant/Sutherland for what they would call sexism (though whether we should admire or deplore the protagonist of the Anthony is left ambiguous, and he does suffer his comeuppance in the end, frustrated in all his designs and humiliated into the bargain); being shocked or sickened by the Bunch; being touched by the depiction of a sensitive woman being treated like a sex object by a brute in the Bryant/Harper piece; and finding the Yarbro piece amusing, but somehow I was not strongly affected by any of them.  Maybe I'm getting blase in my old age, maybe all the stories are successful on their own terms, all achieve what they want to achieve, but I am not really the audience for what they are doing.

More Generation in the future; I've decided to read a bunch of included stories by writers I've never heard of, always an interesting exercise.

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My copy of Generation has bound within it a page of full-color advertisements.  Alas, these ads are not for science fiction books.  On one side, the people at Schick exhort us to embrace the new and different, in particular their new single-edged razor.  On the other is an ad for a free book of advice for car buyers; seeing as the book is produced by the people at Ford Motor Company, I doubt it includes my own advice to car buyers, that they buy a Toyota.

1974 stories by Barry Malzberg, David Bunch, Ed Bryant and James Sallis

The back cover text of Alternities ("DAZZLING VISIONS...unfettered by strictures and taboos..probe the forbidden...."), and the titles of the included stories (e. g., "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb with a View") made me think the anthology, published in 1974 and edited by David Gerrold (associate editor, Stephen Goldin), was part and parcel of the New Wave.  But Gerrold's intro makes me wonder if it is a blow struck against the New Wave:

Science fiction has been standing neck-deep in bullshit for so long....Science fiction used to be fun.  Now it's become "important," with all the resultant literary in-breeding and incestuos navel-studying that implies.  Too many writers have forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money....I want science fiction to be fun again....The goal of this editor is to provide a place for stories that I believe are worth reading because they're "fun" in one way or another.

In this intro Gerrold seems to be calling out (though not by name) Golden Age writers L. Ron Hubbard and Robert A. Heinlein for acting and/or being treated like gurus:

Being able to tell a story--no matter how well--doesn't automatically qualify a man as a magician.  (Oh hell, we really are the special dreamers, but "special dreamers" shouldn't be capitalized and turned into a religion.  That way leads only to Scientology and Terminal Grokking.)

More subtly, I think Gerrold criticizes Harlan Ellison, who likes to write long intros to stories in anthologies he edits:

The stories [in this book] speak for themselves, which is why I have specifically avoided introductions at the beginning of each one.  That's one of the places where the bullshit quotient is highest.

Zing!

It makes sense for Gerrold and Goldin to be the editors of such a volume, as, while they both have agendas that are evident in their fiction (advocacy for social acceptance of homosexuality in Gerrold's fiction and hostility to religion in Goldin's), both are strongly influenced by Golden Age SF (Gerrold's War Against the Chtorr books reminded me alot of Heinlein's juveniles and Starship Troopers, and his Yesterday's Children was reminiscent of van Vogt's Voyage of the Space Beagle; Goldin has worked with and in the style of E. E. "Doc" Smith) and their novels (that I have read, at least) are primarily entertaining adventure stories.

(I wrote about Gerrold's celebration of dinosaurs, laser guns and gore, Deathbeast, in 2013.  This year I wrote about Goldin's Assault on the Gods.  Joachim Boaz reviewed Yesterday's Children in 2014; in the comments to his review we discuss the radical differences between the original edition of the novel and the revised one.)

Gerrold's intriguing introduction to the volume has me wondering what Alternities has in store for us.  Let's check out some of the stories; in this post we'll look at contributions by people we've read before: Barry Malzberg, David R. Bunch, Edward Bryant and James Sallis.

"Before the Great Space-War" by Barry N. Malzberg

ATTENTION!  Calling all Barry Malzberg completists!  If isfdb is to be believed, "Before the Great Space-War" has appeared in one and only one publication, right here in Alternities.  Order your copy today!

"Before the Great Space-War"'s six-pages consist of messages sent back and forth between an invasion force and HQ.  First we have messages from Interstellar Scout Wilson, who is making friends with primitive natives on some planet, learning about them in preparation for the invasion.  The natives have invited Wilson to a mysterious ceremony, and HQ insists that he accept the invitation, but Wilson is reluctant.  Perhaps fearing that he will be relegated to the "basket of deplorables," Wilson assures HQ that "it is not, not xenophobia which makes me reluctant to participate in the Ceremony of Hinges but merely a certain shy reluctance...."  Later messages indicate Wilson has gone native--he vows to join the locals in resisting the invasion force.  The final communications, to and from the commander of the invasion force, suggest that the entire fleet has been suborned and seduced by the natives, who are cannibals and hope to entice down colonists to serve as the meal at the next ceremony.  Presumably the space war of the title is between the now-cannibalistic spacemen and a fleet sent to rescue or destroy them.

Trifling perhaps, but the style is the classic Malzberg we fans are used to and so "Before the Great Space-War" is an acceptable entertainment.

"How Xmas Ghosts are Made" by David R. Bunch

This story is four pages long and is perhaps the kind of thing that "breaks taboos" in its irreverent attack on America's bourgeois society and its rituals and mores.

A married couple with two young children (three and four) is out Christmas shopping.  Bunch stresses that the mother wears expensive clothes, perhaps trying to excite the reader's supposed envy of the rich, or just lampoon the pretensions of American consumers.  In an ironic deadpan Bunch describes how Mom slips in the snow and is run over by public busses trying desperately to keep to their schedules.  Mama is torn in half by the machines as husband and children watch; the pieces are then carried away by the wheels of the vehicles so that the woman has simply vanished without trace.  Right before she is killed Mom is thinking of suing somebody for causing her fall, a means of defraying the cost of all those Christmas presents.  (Bunch never spells out "Christmas," it is always "Xmas," like ten times.)  A drunken Irish cop is no help and Papa can find no witnesses; in the coming years Papa and kids embrace the fiction that Mom abandoned them.

If you haven't heard enough that Christmas is too commercialized and people these days are in too much of a hurry and Americans are too selfish and materialistic and litigious and religion has become a pro forma scam and the government is a callous and incompetent racket, well, here is your chance to hear it again. The style is alright and at only four pages this thing doesn't overstay its welcome, so I guess I can award "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" the coveted grade of "acceptable."

Like Malzberg's "Before the Great Space-War," Bunch's "How Xmas Ghosts are Made" seems to have appeared only in this volume; Alternities is shaping up to be a must-buy for all you fans of short wacky misanthropic trifles.

(Back in 2014 I read other Bunch stories about how crummy American society is and about people getting run over.  Apparently in 1974 Bunch really had hit and run accidents on his mind.)

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

This is the third story from Alternities that has never appeared anywhere else, but the first which I can't dismiss as a trifle; Bryant really tries to construct a provocative and believable alternate reality here.  "Cowboys, Indians" depicts a United States onto which a sort of Vietnam War template has been placed--the country bubbles with revolutionary fervor, while Canada (!) and Communist Vietnam send agents and commandos to infiltrate the USA as part of their covert war on America.

Our narrator is a young rancher from Wyoming.  At college he got radicalized by smoking weed and reading Marxist texts; this story includes flashbacks to his youth (episodes illustrating how violent and racist people in general or maybe just Americans in particular are) but primarily describes a raid on a government facility in which he participated.  The raid team includes a Vietnamese agent (his eyes altered so he can pass for a Mexican laborer), a female Canadian "exfiltration expert" equipped with electronic jamming devices, and another American radical.  Their mission is to sneak into a fortified lab in the countryside (where an addictive birth-control drug is being developed for use in the effort to limit the fecundity of urban blacks) and rescue a scientist (an expert on steroids) being held there against her will.  The scientist will be extracted via a Harrier jet that revolutionaries have stolen from the USMC!

The raid is a disaster; not only do some of the team members get killed, but the steroid scientist has been used as a guinea pig by the government researchers: "She was no longer a woman, and I didn't know what she was."  The narrator escapes with his life and abandons the cause of revolution.

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

I've read two stories by James Sallis before, "The Field" from Quark/3, which I gave a thumbs down to, and "Tissue" from Dangerous Visions, which I thought was more worthwhile.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" is a sort of four-page literary experiment in which the narrator describes his wife walking down a street barefoot, watched by five men, as she collects mail and steps on an earthworm which has died on the pavement.  We hear about the wife's thoughts (she is an artist) and get to read a piece of her mail and hear a pitch for her husband's idea for a stage play based on this walk.

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

Sallis's second story in the anthology is just two pages.  It describes a dream or maybe just a load of nonsense in the first-person.  The narrator takes a flight to the city where a friend lives, and along the way there are visions of warfare, cannibalism, and crime.  The narrator gets on the plane never having considered writing a novel before, but during the flight he becomes a best-selling novelist.

I can't recommend this, either.

Both "The First Few Kinds of Truth" and "Delta Flight 281" would show up in the 1995 collection of Sallis's work entitled Limits of the Sensible World.

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Despite Gerrold's complaint that SF writers have "forgotten their responsibility to first and foremost tell a good story, worth the reader's time and money," this anthology appears to be full of stories with thin or nonexistent plots and little or no characterization, stories which would only appeal to a very small market.  The Malzberg, Bunch and Sallis stories are what I would expect from them, but they seem to go against the sensibilities Gerrold propounds in his intro.  Very strange.

(Bryant's work seems to actually try to fulfill Gerrold's mission, and it is the most successful of the stories we read today.)

There are 16 stories in Alternities, which leaves 11 to go.  We'll look at about half of those in our next episode.

1980s & '90s horror stories by Edward Bryant, Poppy Z. Brite and Gene Wolfe

The Halloween celebration at MPorcius Fiction Log continues with three more late-Twentieth Century horror stories selected by Ellen Datlow for her 2010 anthology Darkness, these by Edward Bryant, Poppy Z. Brite, and Gene Wolfe.

Click to read a census of Ellen Datlow's pets and library.

"Dancing Chickens" by Edward Bryant (1984)

I've devoted two posts to Edward Bryant in the past, liking some stories and disliking others.  Let's see what Bryant has in store for us this time.  I have to admit that "Dancing Chickens" is not an inspiring title--I don't want to read any dumb jokes! "Dancing Chickens" first appeared in the anthology Light Years and Dark.

Like Koja's "Teratisms," which I talked about in my last blog post and also appears in Darkness, this story realistically describes a lifestyle which is disturbing and disgusting.  Our narrator, Rick or "Ricky," is the product of a broken home, a street kid who loves dancing.  He was lifted out of the gutter by a man he calls "Hawk." Hawk and Rick have a pederastic relationship:

He had taken me home, cleaned, fed, and warmed me.  He used me, sometimes well.  Sometimes he only used me.

We are even informed that Rick has suffered anal damage which he tries to pass off to doctors as hemorrhoids.  Yuck!

Alien spaceships have been hovering over the Earth for months; they have yet to communicate with the human race, and everybody is constantly wondering why the aliens are here and what they will do.

At a party where cocaine is available and all of the attendees appear to be gay men, one partier uses a raw chicken, dressed in doll clothes, as a puppet, making it dance to a recording of  "Tea For Two"and "If You Knew Susie."  (Not "Sledgehammer," however, which would not be released until early 1986.)   This performance sickens Rick, who flees the apartment and runs in front of a bus.  As he lays dying, the space aliens use a tractor beam to make him dance around, their first interaction with the human race.  The point of the story is, no doubt, that the strong do what they will, and the weak suffer what they must.

This story is well-written, and certainly horrible, but it is hard not to see the resolution of the plot as sort of ridiculous.  It is like those EC comics in which a guy who enjoys pulling off flies' wings is captured by giant alien flies who delight in tearing people's arms off--a little too obvious.  "Dancing Chickens" is a borderline case that I hesitate to say is bad, but don't feel I can endorse.

"Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" by Poppy Z. Brite (1992)

Poppy Z. Brite is one of those names that I see in anthologies all the time, but I had never read any of her work.  I decided to give her a shot this week.  When I read editor Datlow's intro and learned "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," which first appeared in the anthology Still Dead, was a zombie apocalypse story I was discouraged, as I am sick of that kind of thing, but having committed myself I went through with reading it. Luckily its main focus is not the kind of zombie stuff we've read and seen a billion times already.  (Maybe I shouldn't read these introductions until after I've read the stories they are affixed to.)

You might call this story transgressive.  How often do you read a story in which the smell of the vagina(!) takes a starring role in a metaphor:

The world squats and spreads its legs, and Calcutta is the dank sex you see revealed there, wet and fragrant with a thousand odors both delicious and foul.  A source of lushest pleasure, a breeding ground for every conceivable disease. 

This story is also a real gorefest--among other things, we hear how zombies will claw the breasts of a new mother so the milk spurts out of the wounds!  Yuck again!

The plot: Our narrator was born in Calcutta to a local woman and an American man. Mom died in childbirth, and Dad took him back to the US.  Dad was a drunk, and died when our hero was 18; soon after the narrator moved to Calcutta.  While he was living there the zombie apocalypse broke out.

Because the zombies move slowly, they can only catch cripples and children, so life in Calcutta goes on more or less as usual: the buses run, shops open and do business, etc. The story consists primarily of our narrator, who apparently has no need to work, spending a day strolling around the town. The picture he paints of Calcutta would not be appreciated by the Department of Tourism of the West Bengal government (whose official English website is full of adorable typos.)  We are told that the people smell bad, and shit and piss wherever they feel like.  Five million of the inhabitants "look as if they are already dead--might as well be dead--and another five million wish they were...."  I'm not feeling encouraged to book a flight to this center of art and culture!    
In the morning our Indian-born, American-educated hero visits the temple of Kali, the four-armed and three-eyed Mother and eater of souls, where he offers her statue a handful of flowers and spices.  In the evening he returns to the temple, and finds a gaggle of zombies there, also making an offering.  The living dead offer Kali severed heads, hunks of human flesh, and piles of bones!  Our hero hallucinates that the statue of Kali begins to move, exposing her gaping sex and gesturing him to come inside. Our narrator flees.

This is a pretty crazy story.  Like the Koja and Bryant stories in Darkness it relies for much of its power on realistic descriptions of the desperate lives of poor people.  I'm even considering the possibility that the "point" of "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves" is that life is a horror story already for many people, that a zombie holocaust would be superfluous.

I would recommend the story as an experience: Brite's writing style is good, I learned a little about Calcutta (Brite does a good job of creating a sense of place), and the bizarre sexual elements (as in "Dancing Chickens") are striking and memorable.  Plot and character are lackluster, however.  In a conventional story a character faces a challenge or pursues a goal, and/or changes in some way.  I didn't get that from "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves;" the story is more like a "slice of life" or "tour of the city" kind of thing, meant to say something about Calcutta, that happens to be set during a zombie apocalypse.  There was also no real tension or emotional attachment, just the simple shock moments caused by the gore and cringe-and-laughter inducing sexual references; I didn't care what happened to the narrator, who in turn seemed detached and aloof himself (maybe that is part of Brite's point, that people from First World countries don't care about Third Worlders, or that the middle and upper classes don't care about the lower orders.)

I'll read more Brite in the future.

"The Tree is My Hat" by Gene Wolfe (1999)

I read this years ago, and didn't remember the details all that well, so decided to give it another read.  "The Tree is My Hat" first appeared in 999: New Stories of Horror and Suspense, and is also in the 2009 collection The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction.

Like Brite's "Calcutta, Lord of Nerves," "The Tree is My Hat" is a first-person narrative by an American in the Third World, and has at its center an ancient non-Western religion and the narrator's relationship with one of its dangerous deities.  Wolfe's story is more complicated, though, told in the form of a diary and not quite in chronological order, and our main character is not at all aloof--the story is about his intimate human (and inhuman!) relationships.  It also has a conventional man versus nature, man versus society, and man versus himself plot.

It is sad to see a cover that is so lazy

Our narrator's name is Baden, and, appropriately enough, because like numerous other Wolfe first-person narrators, he is an immoral person and an unreliable narrator, everybody calls him "Bad" for short.  Bad, for example, admits to being a vicious liar.

Bad works for a US government agency whose (ostensible?) mission is to provide assistance to other countries. After a trip to Africa, where he caught a chronic disease (like malaria, I suppose) he has been sent to some little Polynesian island.  Bad wants to get back with his estranged wife Mary, and even while he is in the process of doing so via e-mail he has a sexual relationship with a local woman.

Besides the native woman, Bad becomes friendly with the native king of the island, a Christian missionary named Rob, and an ancient shark god named Hanga.  (And exchanges e-mails with a psychic, who gives him warnings of danger--Wolfe crams lots of characters into this 24-page story!)  The missionary, who has been on the island for years, gives us the lowdown on the shark god and the island's history.  In ancient times, Rob claims, a great civilization in an unspecified location was ruled by a tyrannical and bloodthirsty aristocracy, who waged war and sacrificed peasants in order to appease a bloodthirsty god.  Finally, the commoners rose up and threw the aristocrats out--the aristocrats resettled on the island in which this story takes place, bringing their god with them.

Hanga appears in human form to Bad, and sees in Bad a kindred spirit--in an unsettling ritual they become blood brothers!  In a line that will thrill libertarian and conservative readers, Bad equates the U.S. government with the murderous Polynesian aristocrats:

...I had to wonder about people like me, who work for the federal government.  Would we be driven out someday, like the people Rob talked about?  A lot of us do not care any more about ordinary people than they did.

When Mary gets to the island all hell breaks loose, and in some effectively creepy and then horrifying scenes, Bad, Mary, and their children are tormented and then attacked by the shark god--there are numerous horrendous casualties!

Perhaps my favorite scene comes a little before the catastrophic ending sections, and I think it exemplifies the feel of the story.  Late at night Bad sees what he calls in his diary a UFO, but we readers can tell from Bad's description that it must be his buddy Hanga, in flying shark form!

Like a lot of Wolfe stories, this one is kind of like a jigsaw puzzle, in that you get all the pieces, but you don't pull them out of the box in the order in which they fit together.  It can take a second read to slot them all together and see the big picture. Also, as usual with Wolfe, it makes sense to pay close attention to every sentence; there is no fat or filler in this story.  Besides airing some of his political views, Wolfe also talks about God and His relationship with man, and about World War II, which, as with a lot of history buffs, apparently fascinates Wolfe.  There is also a surprising little joke which I didn't notice until looking through the story the fourth or fifth time--Mary's maiden name seems to be have been "Mary Christmas!"

Another gem from the master which gets better and yields more pleasure to the reader the harder he or she works at it.  Bravo!

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Worthwhile horror stories.  In our next episode it's back to the pre-war era for some horror stories by M. R. James, whom Otto Penzler suggests was "arguably the greatest writer of supernatural stories who ever lived!"

Three stories by Edward Bryant: "Road to Cinnabar," "Strata," and "Audition: Soon to be a Major Production"

Back in August of last year I read four stories from Edward Bryant, finding two were pretty bad but two good.  Since then I have purchased many decades-old anthologies and magazines, and so have a new crop of Bryant stories to try out.  Early this week I flipped through some of these publications and found and read three Bryant stories.

"The Road to Cinnabar" (1971)

I read this one in Infinity Two, an anthology edited by Robert Hoskins, where it first appeared in the year of my birth.  "The Road to Cinnabar" would go on to be the first selection in Bryant's 1976 collection Cinnabar.  (SF bloggers Joachim Boaz and 2theD both own copies of Cinnabar, as revealed in this blog post, but I don't think either has written about it yet.)

"The Road to Cinnabar" is a decent story; it reminded me a bit of an episode of The Twilight Zone.

Cinnabar is a city on the coast in a desert.   A man, Cafter, walks into the town from the desert, but can't recall how long he walked or where he came from.  He sits in a bar for a long time, watching the establishment's owner abuse his staff.  Cafter is a labor organizer, and tries to convince the staff to organize, but the staff has no interest in being organized.  A giant, a dwarf and an albino with a film camera come into the bar, and are surprised when Cafter addresses them.  At the end of the 12-page story it becomes clear that the inhabitants of Cinnabar are robots of some kind and the town is an elaborate film set--the robots are the actors.  The giant, dwarf and albino are film crew, and the Cinnabar people (the giant calls them "simulacra") are "conditioned" to not see them.  Cafter's having seen them is evidence of malfunction, and he is deactivated so he can be repaired.

The story is well-written, so an acceptable entertainment.

At Infinity, clothing is optional

"Audition: Soon to be a Major Production" (1972)

This story appears in Robert Hoskins's Infinity Four, and was not included in 1976's Cinnabar.  In fact, I don't think it has ever appeared anywhere else.

"Audition: Soon to be a Major Production" is a humor piece, a parody of adventure fiction.  It is too long, 18 pages, but I laughed at some of the jokes so I will have to say this is a positive review.  The punchline to the whole thing is that aliens invade the Earth in order to have a subject to film.  "I'm told the production will gross an incredible amount in the Rigel System," our first-person narrator passes along to us.  I guess Bryant has film on the brain.

"Strata" (1980)

This story appeared in the August 1980 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, a copy of which I own.  "Strata" was well-received, and was reprinted in numerous collections and anthologies, including Fantasy Annual IV (1981) and Dinosaurs! (1990).

Bryant lived for many years in Wyoming, and this story is set in that state.  The first seventeen or so pages reads like a pretty conventional mainstream story.  We meet our four characters as they party in the mountains after their senior prom: Paul, the Japanese-American who is bitter because of the 1940s internment of his ancestors and lingering racism; Carroll, the cheerleader and valedictorian whose brother committed suicide; Steve, the smart but underachieving slacker kid who wants to be an actor; and Ginger, the girl who feels out of place in the country because she grew up in Cupertino, California.  Fifteen years later they meet again back in Wyoming, all of them having suffered setbacks, like divorces and abortive careers in Hollywood or big city journalism.  Paul is the head geologist of an energy company that Ginger, reporter at the Salt Creek Gazette and Paul's lover for a period after Paul divorced Carroll, believes is abusing the Indians and the environment.  Is Paul despoiling the environment and getting rich to get revenge on Wyoming and show the people of Wyoming how superior he is?

Over the course of his life Steve has often had weird dreams and seen UFOs, and in the last ten pages of the story, when Paul, Carroll and Ginger seek to take advantage of Steve's strange sensitivity to supernatural phenomena, we get the real SF stuff.  The ghost of a mosasaur or pliosaur (in the Cretaceous Wyoming was underwater, you know) or some such creature has been scaring the energy company employees.  Steve's high school chums want him to help them find it!  So they pile into an energy company truck to go look for the ghost.  Ginger moans about the environment ("Nobody actually needs air conditioners,") as they drive the mountain roads.  When the huge flying ghost scares them they crash, and Paul is killed.  Ginger laments that the death of her former boyfriend will probably not stop oil and coal extraction.

"Strata" is competently written but the soap opera stuff and the environmental debates feel tired, and we seem to spend a lot of time meeting these characters for the size of the payoff.  Maybe people familiar with Wyoming would get more out of it than I did; one theme of the story seems to be how Wyoming's beautiful terrain and wildlife get under your skin, into your soul, etc.

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These three stories are alright, but no big deal. 

Four stories by Ed(ward) Bryant from Clarion and Orbit 12

It's our old pal Clarion!

Flipping through my books this weekend it came to my attention that I own at least four short stories by Ed Bryant.  I knew nothing about Ed Bryant, and figured I might as well learn something.

"Sending the Very Best" (1970)

This story first appeared in New Worlds in January 1970, which at that time was edited by Charles Platt. I read it in my copy of Clarion.  The little intro from Robin Scott Wilson includes the phrase "Right on" and asserts that "Sending the Very Best" is both a love letter and an example of nonobjective art.

This is a two page (joke?) story.  A man in the future buys a Hallmark card.  In the future Hallmark cards project a holographic film, and we get a description of the film, which reads like a parody of a student film or some kind of art house short. Sample lines:

"She'll not be back?"

"No, not unless we try to prevent her returning."

Not good.

"The Soft Blue Bunny Rabbit Story" (1971)

This 9 page story, also in Clarion, feels like 90 pages.  Bryant tells us in the intro that it reflects his impressions of California in 1970.

The story takes place on a college campus in the grim but groovy future of 1981.  Violent revolution is taking place all over the world, and our narrator, a Vietnam vet, has drug experiences, gets hassled by the Man, witnesses student unrest, has sex with "Shana, slim black fox from my romantic poetry seminar."  Maybe it is supposed to be funny?  It is surreal, that is for sure.  Sample lines:

"The language of the dialectic has become so fucking confused, man."

FLASHflashFLASHflash--the strobe-light and strobe-sound of machinegun fire. 

Not good.

"Shark" (1973)

"Shark" appears in Orbit 12.  I purchased a hardcover copy of this anthology of all new stories, edited by Damon Knight and published in 1973, at an antique mall while driving back to Iowa from New Jersey after a visit with my family and the Greek vases at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.  My copy is from the collection of Chester Grabowski.  Mr. Grabowski not only stamped his name on the first page, but left his business card in the book, which I think is adorable.  Mr. Grabowski kept the book in very good condition, for which I thank him.

By 1973 Bryant was using "Edward" instead of "Ed," creating extra work for the people who run isfdb.

Unlike the two Clarion stories, "Shark" has characters, a plot, good pacing, and a degree of tension and suspense, all the things we squares like to see in stories.  "Shark" still may count as a "literary" or "New Wave" story because it is anti-war, anti-establishment and is told largely out of chronological order through flashbacks and italicized paragraphs, but these attitudes and techniques don't get in the way of the tale.

In a future war control of the ocean depths is deemed essential, and so the military figures out how to implant the brains of human beings in the bodies of sharks and dolphins.  An oceanographer's girlfriend loves sharks, wants to be a shark, and so volunteers to have her brain implanted into a Great White!  Once she has achieved her dream of becoming a shark she ignores her orders and goes AWOL.  The oceanographer, our main character, pursues her, but when he finds her she bites his arm off!

Years later, the war long over, the oceanographer is approached by government agents. They want to silence him, because the whole brain transplant story is coming to light and is bad PR for the current government.  Luckily the oceanographer's former girlfriend comes on the scene to help him out.

Thumbs up for this quite good story; I enjoyed it a lot.

"Pinup" (1973)    

This one also first appeared in Orbit 12.  It is a horror story, I guess, maybe a feminist story.  It is only four pages.

An assistant editor at Playboy is accosted on the street by a beautiful blue-eyed blonde.  She convinces him to accompany her to her apartment, taking a confusing and roundabout route.  There she imprisons him in a room full of posters of the kind of celebrities sophisticated people are expected to admire, like Bob Dylan, Greta Garbo, the Kennedys.  She applies plaster to his genitals, perhaps making a cast, and for a period shackles him to the ceiling, from which he hangs helplessly and painfully.  It is not clear what she is ultimately going to do to him, and why she is doing what she is doing.  Repeated references to eyes suggest she is doing to him what some would say pornography does to women, reducing him to a helpless sexualized object that exists merely to be viewed.  Her name, Lucia, and references to Saint Lucia, perhaps provide another clue to the point of the story.  The martyr Saint Lucia had her eyes gouged out, while the island of Saint Lucia, sometimes called "The Helen of the West Indies," changed hands over a dozen times during the many Anglo-French wars that took place from 1664 to 1815.

This story is marginally, maybe moderately, good.  Perhaps it is remarkable for being a story by a male author which addresses the issue of "the male gaze."

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The Clarion stories are the kind of stories I find pointless and irritating, but the Orbit 12 stories are the kind of stories I like: both are well-written and include physical and emotional drama and some kind of philosophical/intellectual content.  I should root around in my anthologies and see if I can dig up any more Bryant stories.

If my little descriptions here have generated interest in these stories or Bryant's wider body of work, you will be pleased to learn that all four tales appear in the collection Among the Dead and Other Events Leading to the Apocalypse published last year by ReAnimus Press, and that ReAnimus Press has made available about a dozen volumes of his work, including his collaboration with Harlan Ellison.