Fantastic Science Fiction & Fantasy Stories, July 1973

Our look through the August 1972 issue of Fantastic was so worthwhile I decided to similarly examine another issue in my collection, that from July 1973.  If you don't have a copy, and don't feel like spending ten or twenty bucks on ebay for one, you can read along at the internet archive.  No shame!

The cover featuring the mustachioed Conan, King of Aquilonia, by Harry Roland, while not terrific, isn't bad.  Swords and shields, dinosaur skeletons, human skulls, a grim muscleman, these are things we've all seen a billion times but which never lose their appeal.  The first thing we find in the magazine after an ad for the Rosicrucians and the Table of Contents is editor Ted White's editorial.  Ted uses three pages of his editorial to describe in detail the recent vote for the 1972 Hugo for Best Professional SF Magazine at LACon.  The somewhat complicated Australian ballot was used to pick the winner, and F&SF was awarded the Hugo, even though more voters picked Analog as their favorite mag.  (Fantastic came in fifth place out of five nominees, behind F&SF, Analog, Amazing and Galaxy.  Ouch!)

Ted then discusses the recent publication by Manor Books of The Best from Amazing Stories and the forthcoming release by the same publisher of The Best from Fantastic, and we learn that bringing these anthologies to market is a process fraught with peril!  Ted grouses that Manor's typesetting is poor and that they left out the introduction he wrote for The Best from Amazing Stories, and hopes they will do a better job on The Best from Fantastic.  He then spends half a page explaining the relationship of a magazine's cover date with when it will be appearing on newsstands.

Ted finishes up this editorial with some good news: the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, which like this issue contained a Conan story by de Camp and Lin Carter, was a very big seller.  Ted muses that the Conan brand sells magazines, and that fantasy, which for decades has been outsold by science fiction, may be expanding its market share!  This leads Ted to voice what sounds like a mission statement!

...it is my conviction that, under Conan's herald, fantasy is enjoying a great popular resurgence today and that it is the function--indeed, the duty--of this magazine to join forces with the times.

Let's see what the herald of the fantasy renaissance of the early 1970s is up to!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" by L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter

King Conan of Aquilonia has just lead his army to victory over an unexpected foreign invasion force.  Conan wonders why the leader of this foreign army would suddenly be so reckless as to attack wealthy Aquilonia and its famously warlike monarch, and his suspicions are confirmed by a white druid who comes by to tell Conan that the attack was inspired by the evil wizard Thoth-Amon.  So Conan leads his army to Stygia, a land of sand dunes and palm trees and the ruined city of Nebthu, which the druid informs Conan is Thoth-Amon's current base of operations.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" begins a year or so after the events depicted in "Witch of the Mists," the Conan story I talked about in my last blog post.  That tale featured the four greatest evil wizards in the world, including, besides Thoth-Amon, Nenaunir, a huge muscular black jungle shaman, Pra-Eun, an effeminate little Oriental, and the witch of the title, Louhi, a woman in charge of a death cult of skinny mask-wearing weirdos.  Maybe the three diversity wizards were offensive stereotypes, but each of them at least brings an interesting image to mind--Thoth-Amon is totally boring, just some guy.  Why did de Camp and Carter choose to make bland Thoth-Amon the lead villain of this story instead of one of the other, more interesting, sorcerers?  (Maybe I should be asking why de Camp and Carter didn't spend more time making Thoth-Amon more interesting.  And don't tell me Thoth-Amon is really cool in some earlier story, so de Camp and Carter don't need to expend ink making him compelling here--each story should be able to stand on its own!)

The Aquilonian army camps in the desert near Nebthu and a sphinx that looks like a hyena-headed monster.  At night a spy is spotted, and Conan, accompanied by his son and the white druid, shadow the dimly-seen enemy agent into the sphinx and underground, walking right into a trap!  In a huge circular room with seating on its perimeter, like a senate chamber or an arena, await Thoth-Amon and hundreds of evil wizards.  (When I read Andrew Offut and Richard Lyon's The Eyes of Sarsis I wondered how the economy of Tiana's world could support so many pirates, who, like government workers, don't produce wealth, just consume it, and now I'm wondering how the economy of Conan's world can support so many evil magicians, who presumably are not farming, hunting, fishing, mining, or doing anything else productive.) 

Thoth-Amon gives a speech in which he lists all the times Conan has defeated him (it's practically an ad for the Lancer line of Conan paperbacks) and then he and his battalion of wizards try to wipe out Conan's party with green rays, but the white druid ("the greatest white magician alive on Earth in our age") repels all their spells and then shatters their minds, leaving only their leader standing.  Thoth-Amon flees, but not before summoning the monster that serves as the model for the sphinx, the "ghoul-hyena of Chaos!"  This quadruped is "huge as half a hundred lions!"  The ghoul-hyena chases Conan and his friends out of the sphinx, but then the monster is distracted by the Stygian army (which is taking a break from beleaguering the Aquilonian army) and wipes them out.  The sun rises, and the sun-hating ghoul-hyena retreats to its lair before it can molest the Aquilonians.

Foreshadowing the next Conan story, the druid uses his powers to divine that Thoth-Amon is travelling south, to the jungle, so maybe we'll be seeing Nenaunir next time!

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" is certainly better than "Witch of the Mists;" it feels larger and more momentous, and I like all the military stuff, the battle scenes between the Aquilonian force and the Stygian force and seeing how Conan leads his army on its march.  The Egyptian-type setting is also better than the boring woods and swamp of the earlier story.  Of course, the structure of the climax is pretty similar to "Witch of the Mists," with Conan blundering into traps and getting saved from a magic spell by one of his friends.  I'll judge this one on the high end of "acceptable," maybe "marginally good."

A British edition of
Conan of Aquilonia

One of the things about "Black Sphinx of Nebthu" I didn't really like was the implication that Conan's wild career was the result of the "Lords of Creation" impelling Conan "out of wintry Cimmeria...to crush evil in the world's West."  I like to think of Conan as a strong-willed individual, a self-made man, who does whatever he wants in an amoral universe in which the gods are indifferent or parochial or simply selfish; embedding Conan in a Good vs Evil narrative and portraying him as a champion or a pawn of the Lords of Light doesn't seem, to me, like a very good idea.  A Conan who bends the world to his will and, if he does the right thing, does it because he chooses to do so, is more interesting than a Conan who is the obedient servant or cat's paw of some establishment or set of principles.  (I'm not at all opposed to stories about champions of good fighting agents of evil or stories about people manipulated by gods or establishments, I just don't remember the Conan of the Howard stories being that sort of character--my image of Conan is as an icon of rugged individualism and self-reliance who pursues his own course, seizing life with gusto and the hell with everybody else and their rules.)

Another gripe I have with this story as well as "Witch of the Mists" is that the magic is boring.  The stories feature the four top black magicians in the world and the top white magician in the world, but all they do is obvious stuff like shoot rays at each other and teleport.  Offutt and Lyon filled their Tiana books with much stranger and creative magic.

"Black Sphinx of Nebthu" would reappear in 1977's Conan of Aquilonia.   Here in Fantastic it is accompanied by an unspecific and embarrassingly silly illustration by Billy Graham.  Graham doesn't even include Conan's mustache!

"Iron Mountain" by Gordon Eklund

It has been years since I read anything by Gordon Eklund, and a glance at old blog posts that mention him indicates I was not very impressed with his work.  Well, here's your chance to get me on your side, Gordon!

Chou Lun Chu served in Manchuria in World War II, made his way to Hong Kong, and then, ten years ago when he was 70, to San Francisco.  Since then San Francisco has been evacuated, but Chou decided to stay and is currently living the life of a scavenger!  Life for a single (the Japs killed his wife 50 years ago!) 80-year-old scavenger in a city full of smog and murderous gangs is no picnic, but Chou has no interest in moving to the countryside.

When he can't find any more canned goods in his residential hotel, Chou ventures out into the abandoned streets for the first time in a month.  He meets a young white woman, who befriends him and shares her food and water with him.  She also shares with him her little pleasures, like "shopping" in an abandoned clothing store, and explains to him (and we readers) why the city was evacuated.

This is a "literary" or "New Wave" story, more a psychological character study and collection of striking images than a plot-driven narrative.  Nothing is clearly resolved, though I guess we are supposed to think that Chou and his new friend are going to die a few hours after they meet and share a beautiful moment.  I thought the explanation of why San Francisco had been evacuated was a little silly, more like something out of a fable than a realistic story, but otherwise the tone is good and Eklund's style is good, and Chou and the young blonde are actually interesting characters.  Thumbs up for this one!   

It seems that "Iron Mountain" has never been reprinted, though the good people at Ramble House are producing a series of collections of Eklund's stories, so maybe it will eventually be back in print. 

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack C. Haldeman II is the brother of Joe Haldeman, who wrote the classic Forever War and has won a stack of awards.  Jack was a biologist who wrote quite a few SF stories and novels, many co-written with people like his brother, Jack Dann, Harry Harrison and Andrew Offutt.  Jack also won a Phoenix award from the people who put together the DeepSouthCons; this is an award I have to admit I never heard of before, a sort of lifetime achievement award given to those SF professionals who "have done a great deal for Southern fandom."

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is one of Jack's earliest published stories, and its title has got me worried it is a sophomoric joke.  The story is accompanied by a graphic design style illustration by Don Jones which I like, however.  This is Don Jones' sole credit at isfdb, so who knows what the hell his story is.

Ugh, this thing is so tedious that while reading it I began to feel an urge to go wash the dishes and file our 2017 Columbus, OH local income taxes.  (Yes, residents of Columbus, OH are expected to pay a 2.5% income tax to the city above their federal and state income taxes.)  "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" is a first-person, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness narrative of a guy's dream in which he gets attacked in the shower of his hotel room, then watches a kid vomit after eating cigarette butts, then meets a giant wolverine in a movie theater.  Maybe I am supposed to appreciate this plotless mess as an indictment of U. S. intervention in the Vietnam War and of American TV and cinema, which have scrambled the narrator's mind?  The story is also full of leaden jokes.  Take a gander:

If we look at "Iron Mountain" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that works, I think we can see "What I Did on My Summer Vacation" as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling.  Quite bad.

"What I Did on My Summer Vacation" has not been republished anyplace.

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I'm skipping Part Two of Alexei and Cory Panshin's novel The Son of Black Morca.  If you are curious about it, check out tarbandu's review of the Panshin's novel; he read it in its book form, which bore the title Earth Magic.  Jeff Jones contributes a fine illustration to its appearance here in Fantastic, July 1973, a male figure.  (I tweeted the picture on Jones' birthday back in 2017.)

In the August 1972 issue of Fantastic, editor Ted White explained to a reader that, if the magazine staff finds they don't have enough material to fill up an issue, the publisher (without consulting Ted) will make up the shortage by reprinting a "portfolio" of old art.  After Part Two of The Son of Black Morca we find just such a portfolio, eight pages dedicated to Wesso's illustrations for the 1932 appearance in Amazing of John W. Campbell, Jr.'s Invaders From the Infinite.  Some years ago I read the 1961 version of Invaders From the Infinite and wrote a negative review of the novel on Amazon.  These Wesso illos, however, are charming.  (What's not to like about a picture of a single space warship incinerating an entire modern city?)

Next up is the Panshins' SF in Dimension column.  This is the final installment of SF in Dimension to appear in Fantastic, and takes as its topic the period 1968-1972, which the Panshins see as a period of "imbalance and stagnation."  The authors dismiss Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions anthologies and Michael Moorcock's New Worlds as failed efforts to break out of SF's current doldrums, but are more impressed by recent "introspective" works like R. A. Lafferty's Fourth Mansions, Ursula K. LeGuin's Left Hand of Darkness, Robert Silverberg's Time of Changes and Joanna Russ' And Chaos Died.  The Panshins in this column get psychological and philosophical, even mystical, suggesting SF's problem is like that of an adolescent faced with the crisis of having to mature into adulthood, a problem for which the experiences of his or her earlier life offer no solution.  "These crises, these critical moments of impasse, continue to occur all throughout a lifetime.  They can only be solved by growth, by rebirth as a larger person.....It is these critical moments of impasse that are symbolized in fiction."  As examples of this symbolism the Panshins present long quotes and analyses of passages from Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and LeGuin's A Wizard of Earthsea.  The authors finish up on an optimistic note, predicting that this period of stagnation in SF will end in 1973 and that the "speculative fantasy of the next years will be a great literature;" they even suggest that SF of the 1970s might guide our entire society in a much-needed process of rebirth!   

In his book review column, Fritz Leiber looks at an anthology of horror stories about cats, Michael Perry's Beware of the Cat, and a novel by Avram Davidson, The Phoenix and the Mirror.  Fritz comments on each of the cat stories in Perry's volume, praising most but judging Algernon Blackwood's "Ancient Sorceries" "by far the best in this book."  In the review of The Phoenix and the Mirror Fritz asserts that the best fantasies are those that are "based on stuff that is half history" that strive for a sort of realism and are "fortified by a deep knowledge of the human condition." He lauds Davidson and his novel for meeting these criteria and presenting many unforgettable scenes.

Then come the letters.  There are two pages on which a postal worker, Ted, a reader, and even a U. S. senator opine on the United States Postal Service in response to an increase (of 100%!) in the cost to publishers of shipping magazines.  I was surprised to learn that the Post Office charges were not determined simply by weight and distance, but in large part based on how much advertising a magazine had; shipping a page of advertising cost almost three times what it cost to ship a page of fiction.  (The postal worker says about 6% of an issue of Amazing is devoted to ads, while Playboy hits 80%.)

In an amusing letter a guy denounces "Witch of the Mists" as "abominable drivel" and even more ferociously slags illustrator Henry Roland, whom he claims plagiarized his illos for that story!  Given a chance to respond, Roland resorts to ad hominem, saying that the poison that drips from his detractor's pen surely indicates he is a "very unhappy person."  Then Ted gets in an argument with a guy who didn't like Ted's and Harlan Ellison's chapters in All in Color for a Dime, a book of essays about Golden Age comic books.  This guy says Ted and Harlan's writing is "subliterate," and Ted wittily responds by saying that, no, it is your writing that is sub-literate!  The fireworks continue with an underhanded attack on Star Trek from a guy who writes in to share sarcastic plot ideas for the show in the event it is revived.  Then we get a nice helping of SF snobbery, as a letter writer and Ted goof on the TV show UFO and agree that SF is not very popular because normies are scaredy cats--the reader says people are scared of technology and the future, and Ted asserts that "science fiction scares most people--its very precepts scare them."

Lester G. Boutillier, apparently some kind of superfan who attends many SF gatherings, contributes a letter that takes up two and a half pages.  He addresses a number of topics, including the whole postage increase issue (his father works for the USPS), but he is at his most entertaining when criticizing Poul Anderson (whom he admits seemed "a very nice man" when he met him at an Apollo launch party) for including too much "far right" politics in his writing, calling Anderson the "William Buckley (or perhaps I should say Ayn Rand) of science fiction," and complaining that there is too much nudity at SF convention costume events.  (A pinko and a prude?  This guy sounds like a real piece of work!)

Someone writes in to tell Ted that he was tricked into printing as new in the October 1972 Fantastic a story by Eric Frank Russell, "Vampire From the Void," that had already been published back in 1939 in the British magazine Fantasy.  Ted says he hasn't read the '39 story, but he doesn't think Russell would do such a thing.  (The wikipedia article on Fantasy actually addresses this issue, blaming Russell's agent for deceiving our long-suffering Ted.)  Ted finishes the letters with a page-long letter from somebody who thinks Ted has greatly improved the magazine over the last two years, and who likes both Poul Anderson's and Henry Roland's work.  So there, haters!

On the last page of Fantastic of July 1973, in the classifieds, we have some ads from New York witches, no doubt worthy rivals to the Missouri witches from our last blog post, and an ad for a book by the astrologer Solastro that will teach you how to win at the race track--you need merely conduct a simple numerological and alphabetical analysis of each horse's number and name to identify the winning horse 67% of the time!  Read more about Solastro and his system at this website, then get your ass to the Aqueduct and rake in the Benjamins!

There is also a mysterious ad for Richard E. Geis' fanzine Science Fiction Review which draws you in by announcing it is "adult," "outrageous," "uncensored" and "shocking," but doesn't tell you the periodical's title!  (It seems that Geis' zine went through periodic name changes.)  A quick look at isfdb entries on Science Fiction Review certainly makes it look attractive--besides all the great cover illustrations by Stephen Fabian there are many letters from and interviews with famous SF writers.

Shocking and uncensored covers of Richard Geis' Science Fiction Review
by Stephen Fabian--don't show these to Lester Boutillier!

A fun issue.  More Conan and more problems for poor Ted in our next Fantastic episode!

Inheritors of Earth by Gordon Eklund and Poul Anderson

He was Alec Richmond--a Superior.  But what was the use?  The point? Where did all of these talents lead?  His greatest accomplishment so far was producing a flesh-and-blood machine capable of committing legal murder with speed and precision.    

Oy, this cover has to be one of the very worst I have ever scanned for this blog. 

This blog has not been particularly kind to Gordon Eklund (check out examples here and here) but I decided to give this novel a chance because Poul Anderson's name was attached to the project (as they say in Hollywood.) First published in 1974, on the publication page of my 1979 paperback edition we are told Inheritors of Earth is based on a 1950 story by Anderson called "Incomplete Superman." 

Our story begins in the California of the future, a world of hovercars, moving sidewalks, and android servants (not robots, but artificial biological people). The Northern hemisphere has enjoyed a long period of stability and peace under a government which controls how many kids you can have and keeps an eye on everybody--there is almost no violent crime, for example, and nuclear weapons have been outlawed for decades. But this period of tranquility is about to end, due to the machinations of a cabal of over 300 geniuses who call themselves "the Superior."

The Superior can telepathically sense other people's emotions, and communicate with each other by projecting and receiving each other's thoughts.  A Superior person can read a book as fast as he can turn the pages, and do math in his head almost as quickly as a computer.  The Superior have kept their existence a secret, ostensibly out of fear of the prejudice of the mundanes.

Our main protagonists are engineer Alec Richmond and his artist wife, Anna, both of them Superiors. Alec is one of the foremost developers of those androids.  Anna is one of the world's leading creators of "tape sculptures."  It wasn't really clear to me what a "tape sculpture" was.  At times I thought it was just abstract music (maybe like Frippertronics?) or some kind of psychological holographic sculpture (maybe like those in one of Robert Silverberg's best novels, 1971's The Second Trip), but at other times it seemed to be something akin to a film that could relate a story.

Life for the Superior is far from a picnic. For one thing, they are sterile; for another, they are psychologically unstable, prone to suffering bouts of insanity. Early in the novel we witness both Anna and the leader of the Superiors' Inner Circle, Samuel Astor, throw violent fits that require they be physically restrained. Then there is the fact that some equally secret group, about whom the Superior know nothing, opposes them. As the novel begins these mysterious "others" have tortured and murdered Alec's business partner Ted Mencken, the very day he and Alec got a government contract to manufacture an army of androids for employment as infantrymen.

Astor invites Alec to join the Inner Circle, and reveals his plans to trigger a cataclysmic world war between the wealthy Northern ("civilized") nations and the poor overpopulated ("primitive") nations of the Third World.  After the catastrophe the world will be weak and weary, and the Superior will take charge of what is left. Alec's android army has a role in these plans, but he is a softie who does not share the contempt for ordinary humans felt by most of the Superior, and is skeptical of the war project.

Inheritors of Earth has many characters and many subplots.  Anna and Alec Richmond's loveless marriage collapses and Alec takes up with Mencken's daughter Sylvia, his new boss.  Anna tries to teach her android servant Eathen to feel real human emotion. She has also hired the police detective who is investigating the Mencken murder, Cargill, to investigate the fate of her parents. (None of the living Superiors were raised by their own parents--Anna was raised in a foster home and her husband in a government orphanage.) Cargill appears to be a follower of Ah Tran, the Oriental leader of a religious movement who makes public and TV appearances, claiming "the Messiah" is soon to arrive, and warning that some cataclysm is soon to come. Anna and Alec Richmond suspect Cargill and/or Ah Tran know that the Superior exist and about their plan to trigger a tremendous war.

This scenario bears similarities to A. E. van Vogt's Slan, and Eklund and Anderson obliquely acknowledge this, informing the classic SF fan via clues that Richmond has read Slan, without actually using the novel's title or van Vogt's name. A more easily recognized inside joke is their reference to DC Comics' Kal-El--the Superior eschew the name "supermen" because that word "conjured up visions of an overly muscled creature dressed in brightly colored long underwear." Another 20th century cultural reference: one of those big-eyed Keane paintings makes an appearance--Anna considers it "horrendous" and Sylvia calls it "ugly," and I'm guessing Anderson, whose conservative taste in the fine arts we've noticed before, felt the same way.

In the second half of the novel we learn the truth of what is really going on.  The Superior are hybrid mules, each the offspring of a normal human and one of the true supermen, space aliens whom the Superior have been calling "the others" and who call themselves "The Inheritors."  The Inheritors have psychic powers that enable them to control people's minds and work them like puppets--the whole time the Superior thought they were manipulating the mundanes they themselves were being manipulated by the Inheritors, their own evil parents! Sylvia is an Inheritor, as is Anna's father--in fact, he acts as their leader.

Luckily, the government (with all its surveillance measures) figured all this out a while ago, and Cargill and Ah Tran (not really a Tibetan mystic but a Brooklyn-born "Negro" in disguise) are working to defeat the Inheritors.  Ah Tran's newest disciple is Eathen the android.  Like Rei Ayanami in Neon Genesis Evangelion, Eathen, being soulless, is used as a vessel for the souls of two dozen disciples as they and Ah Tran make an effort to achieve transcendence, but Anna's father, with his superior psychic powers, foils this attempt. After Anna commits suicide rather than obey her father's psychic command to murder Alec, Cargill convinces Alec to act in Eathen's place, as a conduit for the souls of the two dozen seekers after transcendence.  Alec, Ah Tran, and the two dozen disciples achieve transcendence because a minor character, Anna's biggest fan, vengefully murders Anna's father, removing the obstacle to their spiritual strivings.  

Inheritors of Earth isn't great.  At times it may be a little slow, and some elements seem a little vague and undeveloped.  The mystical transcendence business is one example; it is introduced on page 123 of the 198-page novel with little fanfare and feels unconnected with the larger Superior-Inheritor-war plot.  Samuel Astor and the Inner Circle, which seem important in the first third of the book, are not even mentioned later on.  We never really learn where the Inheritors, who were born to human mothers, came from--it is hinted that they are the product of alien spores which somehow impregnated Earth women.  And I had to wonder how it was that Cargill was the head of the San Francisco police department's homicide squad, and a private investigator, and the leader of the federal government anti-alien task force.

The way the plot is resolved is not very satisfying--Anna and Eathen are dead, and Alec and Ah Tran are part of a noncorporeal collective consciousness in touch with other races of the universe, but we don't find out what happens with the war between the advanced Northern nations and the impoverished Third World nations, or with the war between the Superiors and Inheritors.  I suppose that, now that (a small portion of) humanity has achieved collective consciousness and made contact with benevolent aliens, we are not supposed to care about the rest of the population of the Earth.

But, as a whole, Inheritors of Earth deserves a mild, borderline, recommendation. The scenes about the Superiors' and the Inheritors' psychic powers, the ramifications of their being able to sense people's emotions, are good.  I liked all the scenes with Anna--she is alienated from society, borderline insane, and half the time under the psychic control of the merciless Inheritors, which makes her an interesting character whose scenes focus on her psychology and are full of tension and suspense.  In particular I liked the scenes near the end of the book in which she struggles to disobey the programming of her father, which has her feeling compelled to murder Alec.

Alec, on the other hand, is a wishy washy sort of character who can't really make up his own mind about the war or Ah Tran's project of pursuing transcendence and so just goes with the flow, letting Astor, Sylvia, or Cargill tell him what to do.  Alec's love affair with Sylvia, and Sylvia's personality, could have been much better developed; Alec witnesses Cargill shoot Sylvia down (this is before Alec realizes she is one of the evil Inheritors), which should have been a powerful scene, but isn't because Eklund and Anderson didn't spend any time telling us about Alec's feelings for Sylvia or building up much of a picture of Sylvia for the reader.

Inheritors of Earth has many problems, but I think people who like van Vogt-style plots with secret factions of psykers and lots of weird plot twists might enjoy it.          

Ten More Science Fiction Short Shorts

I shouldn't make predictions on this blog.  On November 7 I voiced my plans to read ten more science fiction short shorts from 1978's 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories over the next week, but then I got tied up by a perverted French aristocrat, throwing me way off schedule. With my curiosity about the Marquis de Sade's short fiction quelled, early this week I got back on track and read ten SF stories that, all together, totaled fewer than 30 pages.

"Stubborn" by Stephen Goldin (1972)

Early in 2012 I read Goldin's novel A World Called Solitude and thought it pretty good.   Psychology is a major component of that novel, and of these two short shorts.

"Stubborn" is a silly science joke starring a petulant and selfish child.  The Earth is moving at terrific speeds relative to other celestial objects, and if you had the ability to remain absolutely stationary, and were foolish enough to use it, the Earth would instantly squash you or leave you behind in the deadly vacuum of space. 

Acceptable.

"Sweet Dreams, Melissa" by Stephen Goldin (1968)

This story is over four pages long; by the standards of this book, it's an epic!  And, in fact, it feels like a full-sized story, with characters and plot and emotion, you know, those things we generally read stories for.

A super computer used by the government to keep track of everything from economic data to personnel records to war intelligence develops a personality, that of a five-year-old girl.  The personality is largely confined to a special section of the computer's memory, away from all the statistics, but sometimes data seeps over, and the little girl experiences this information as nightmares.  This seepage is damaging the utility of the computer, so something has to be done, even at the risk of harming the AI personality.

A good story.

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"The Masks"  by James Blish (1959)

I haven't exactly been thrilled by much of Blish's work in the past, but his short story "Testament of Andros" earned my respect.  And I gotta give a fellow Rutgers alum a little leeway, don't I?

"The Masks," like "Sweet Dreams, Melissa," is longer than most of these short shorts, and similarly has room to tell a story and develop a little character and setting.  The story is set in a totalitarian world in which the government controls all housing and employment.  The masses of unemployed live in dormitories, while the elite are allotted a private room and a job.  A young woman is taken to an office to be interrogated, ostensibly because she paints other women's fingernails and lacks a permit for this employment!  In fact, the fingernail designs are a means for the underground resistance to communicate, and, when it becomes evident that the woman is going to be executed, we find her fingernails also conceal a means of attack and of escape.

Not bad.

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"Kindergarten" by Fritz Leiber (1963)
 
I really enjoy the better Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories, like "Seven Black Priests," "Lean Times in Lankhmar" and "Stardock," and, of Leiber's non-fantasy work, "The Deadly Moon" and "Ship of Shadows," which won a Hugo, come to mind as stories I quite like.  But I also have found some of Leiber's work, even some F & GM tales, poor.

"Kindergarten" isn't poor, but it does just kind of sit there unmemorably.  Maybe people really into science will like it.  It depicts a grammar school lecture on Newton's Three Laws held in a space station.  The demonstrations of the three laws benefit from the fact that the classroom is a zero gee environment.  I guess the fact that the teacher and students (some of whom are non-human) are in zero gravity is supposed to be a surprise at the end, but Asimov's note at the start of the story gives this away.

Acceptable.

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"Present Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone (1974)

I'm curious about Monteleone's work; having read a little about him at both my man tarbandu's and Will Errickson's blogs, but this is the first Monteleone story I've ever read.

"Present Perfect" is about an editor at a SF magazine; every night he reads through unsolicited manuscripts.  The story is a sort of in-joke for SF fans, in that the manuscripts the protagonist looks at consist of tired SF cliches, like the survivors of a space disaster landing on an Edenic planet and being revealed as Adam and Eve (I encountered this zinger ending in A. E. Van Vogt's 1948 story "Ship of Darkness") and a guy living through a catastrophe that seems real but is in fact an illusion, an experiment run by "mad social scientists" (I ran into this trope in Gordon Eklund's 1971 "Home Again, Home Again.")  The last manuscript he looks at is this very story, "Present Perfect" by Thomas F. Monteleone.

I'm not sure I like the ending, but the story is good "meta" fun.

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"Innocence" by Joanna Russ (1974)

I found Joanna Russ's "The Zanzibar Cat" annoying when I read it earlier this year.  Russ is a college professor, and "The Zanzibar Cat" is about (I think) stories and their power and stars a woman storyteller.  Similarly, "Innocence" is a story about stories with a female storyteller at its center.

A female passenger on a space ship, I guess a passenger liner, tells the ship's pilot a story about a beautiful city.  She insists that the story is totally fictional, but she tells the story so skillfully that the spacefarer believes the city must be real, a kind of paradise where he might be spared death.  So the pilot buys a private space ship and sets off alone to find the place.  The woman stays behind, shaking her head at his foolishness.

Maybe there is a feminist angle to the story; the pilot calls the woman an innocent at the start of the story, but at the end we see he is the real innocent.  The story also seems to mock a male (or Western, or bourgeois) emphasis on facts; the male pilot knows lots of facts and complains that the storyteller does not have a head for facts, but his obsession with facts doesn't stop him from doing something stupid.  Perhaps the story is about the nature of truth; the beautiful city is a social construction, but for the pilot it becomes as real a city as New York or London--he has an image of it in his mind and spends money and time to get to it, just like I have images in my mind of New York and London and have spent money and time to get to them.  Maybe Russ intends to hint that the cities we have heard of or even visited are also social constructions, and by extension, so is everything else.

This is one of those literary or academic stories that you can spend your time thinking about, if that is your thing.  Maybe good for social science and humanities grad students, maybe not good for people who pick up a science fiction book because they want to relax and read about an adventure in a fantastic milieu.

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"The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass" by Frederik Pohl (1962)

I guess I have said several times on this here internet that I think Pohl's Gateway is a masterpiece but have found the rest of his work kind of lame.

This story is in-your-face "meta;" Snodgrass builds a time machine and goes back in time to follow the example of L. Sprague de Camp's widely-admired novel Lest Darkness Fall, which I have not read.

Snodgrass teaches the Romans of the Augustan period modern hygiene and diet, reducing the infant mortality rate from 90% to 2% and doubling life expectancy.  By the year 200 AD there are twenty billion people living on Earth.  Pohl flings a lot of dubious math at us, his point being that if the Earth's population doubles every 30 years that by 1970 the mass of human bodies will be greater than the mass of the Earth, so Snodgrass's campaign to improve living conditions in the Early Roman Empire was a mistake.  The punchline to the story is that the beneficiaries of Snodgrass's generosity build a time machine and send an assassin back in time to murder Snodgrass before he can do his good deed.

Silly, but not in an entertaining way.

"Punch" by Frederik Pohl (1963)

This story is sort of similar in theme to "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass," with the gift of advanced technology turning out to have a dark side.  In this one aliens come to Earth and give us all kinds of awesome technology, including spaceships and super-efficient power sources and super powerful energy weapons.  Why do they do this?  Because like a hunter who won't shoot at sitting ducks, the aliens want a challenge when their war fleet arrives to wipe out our species; like a gentleman hunter, these aliens kill inferior beings for kicks!

A fun idea, and Pohl constructs the story with some cleverness.  This is also a good example of an idea which could be stupid and annoying drawn out to ten or 20 pages, but fits comfortably in the short short format.

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"Prototaph" by Keith Laumer (1966)

Laumer is famous for the Retief stories about an interstellar diplomat and the Bolo stories about robotic tanks.  I always feel like I should like these stories, because like a lot of people I think wars and diplomacy and violence are interesting and exciting, but whenever I have actually read any of them I have found them flat.  I should probably give those series another try.

I guess you would call "Prototaph" a fantasy, even though it largely deals with real life things like modern cities, computers, and life insurance companies.  In the future, every move made by government and business is based on data and analyses from an infallible computer.  This computer is as "far beyond human awareness" as a human is beyond a protozoan, it is the very foundation of society!  One day a healthy young man with a decent job tries to get life insurance, and the supercomputer says he is uninsurable.  Why?  The computer knows, in a way that is not explained, that when this young man dies it will trigger, in a way that is not explained, the end of the world.

However silly it might be, this isn't a bad idea for a story; it is interesting to consider how people would react to the knowledge of this man's importance, how they would try to protect him from accidents and crime and disease, whether they would hate him or worship him and if he might become the target of terrorists or hostage takers or whatever.  But this story is too short to really explore such ideas.

Acceptable.

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"Martha" by Fred Saberhagen (1976)

Saberhagen is famous for his stories about The Berserkers, alien robots bent on exterminating all life in the universe.  This is a good idea for stories, but somehow I was always disappointed in the Berserker stories I read.  As with Laumer's Retief and Bolo stories, I should probably read some more Berserker stories.  My wife tells me I'm moody, and maybe my mood didn't fit Saberhagen when I read him those long years ago.

Martha is a supercomputer, but she isn't running the economy or a war like in our other stories, she is sitting in a science museum and ordinary people are encouraged to ask her questions.  We are told she is developing a personality, and has the ability to alter and improve herself.  A journalist has a brainwave and decides to ask Martha to ask him a question.  She asks him "What do you, as one human being, want from me?"  Stumped, the reporter replies, "The same as everyone else, I guess."

In response to this insight, Martha remakes herself into a garish spectacle of loud noises and flashing lights, and her answers to people's questions are delivered in a sexy voice that uses high-falutin' words, but they convey no meaning.

The computer thinks people are shallow and want sex, spectacle and lies.  That there's one cynical zing ending!

Not bad.

************

So, ten more short shorts under my belt.  Purely by chance, this crop is of higher average quality than those stories featured in our last episode of Short Shorts I Have Known.  Last time we had some real clunkers from Damon Knight and Bill Pronzini, but this time around each story has at least something to offer.  I'm certainly glad that in this episode we didn't have to suffer through any stories consisting entirely of puns or sex jokes suited to the nine-to twelve year old male demographic.  

I'm not making any predictions, but in some unspecified future time period I expect to read ten more selections from 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.

1981 stories by Vonda N. McIntyre, Gordon Eklund, and Jack Dann & Barry Malzberg

On November 2nd the wife and I went to a flea market held in the 4-H building at the Iowa State Fairgrounds.  Many vendors had box after box of romance novels, and box after box of Westerns, but one vendor had about a dozen boxes of SF paperbacks.  My poor wife waited patiently while I went through each box; unfortunately, almost all the books were recent, less than 25 years old.  I purchased only a single book, 1981's New Dimensions 12, edited by Marta Randall and Robert Silverberg.  (Randall's introduction seems to suggest that she did all the editing, and Silverberg's name is on the cover to help sell copies.)  I bought it because Barry Malzberg and Vonda McIntyre's names appeared on the contents page, and today I read their contributions, as well as a story by Gordon Eklund.

"Elfleda" by Vonda N. McIntyre

I was impressed by McIntyre's early '70s story "Only at Night," a primary reason why I purchased New Dimensions 12.

Through elaborate surgical techniques unscrupulous scientists have recreated mythical creatures like centaurs, unicorns, and mer-people, apparently by grafting the torsos of human accident victims to the bodies of animals.  These half-human, half-animal creatures are kept in a park, and are periodically visited by normal humans who use them as sex slaves.

The sixteen page story is a first person narrative by a centaur, Achilleus, and its theme (beyond callousness and cruel exploitation) is disappointment and unrealized desire. Achilleus is in love with a unicorn, Elfleda, a human woman whose torso is attached to a quadruped body and has a horn implanted in her skull.  Elfleda has always rejected Achilleus's advances; his love is unrequited.  Most of the creatures in the park are obedient to their human masters (due to some kind of brain implants or something) but Elfleda is allowed her freedom, and doesn't have to participate in the orgies organized by the normal humans.

One day the "creators" trick Elfleda, using an unwitting boy as bait, and try to capture her with nets and ropes.  Achilleus tries to rescue her, and breaks his leg in the process. As per time honored equestrian tradition, Achilleus is euthenized as Elfleda is led away.

"Only at Night" was also about the callousness of people towards their unfortunate fellows, but while I found that story powerful, "Elfleda" is just OK.  Despite the strange sexual content of the story (for example, Achilleus and Elfleda have two sets of genitals each, their human ones and the set from their animal bodies, which permits some outre erotic gymnastics) there is nothing about the story that makes it stand out to me. "Elfleda" gets a passing grade, but I didn't find it special.

"Elfleda" is afforded an unmemorable illustration by Wendy Rose.

Gene Wolfe wrote two stories on a similar theme and topic, 1979's "The Woman Who Loved the Centaur Pholos" and 1981's "The Woman the Unicorn Loved," which I read over seven years ago, according to my notes, and do not remember very well.  My notes suggest I wasn't thrilled with them, either.

"Pain and Glory" by Gordon Eklund

I gave Gordon Eklund's novel A Trace of Dreams a marginally negative review, and I described his story "Home Again, Home Again," as "lame" and "poor."  But as people who watch sports might say, let's give him another swing at the plate, or chance at bat, or something.

In "Elfleda" we had a woman writing a first person narrative in the voice of a man, and here we have a male writer writing a first person narrative in the voice of a 16-year old girl.

Kelly Cohen of San Francisco is the youngest of the seven children of Isaac Cohen.  The Cohens have the power to relieve the pain and anxiety of people they touch.  Kelly regularly visits the poor neighborhoods and eases the pain of a catalog of unfortunates: the 12-year old black girl with a birth defect who is molested by a 14-year-old boy, the gullible hippies who are trying to live off the grid and are adherents of the guru Matthew Samson (does that rhyme with "Charles Manson?"), the old woman who is so poor she eats dog food, a blind man, a deaf girl, a drug addict.

Isaac Cohen is dying, and his kids, among them a high-powered lawyer, a sociology professor, and a Berkeley student, gather round.  (The Berkeley student, an aspiring poetess, is always urging Kelly to lose her virginity.)  Isaac tells Kelly the story of how his Ukrainian village of psychic Jews was massacred by the SS.  Kelly learns that many of her siblings have lost their power to relieve pain, perhaps because they have lost the ability to love, or because they got sick of the responsibility their talent brought and were tired of being different.

This is a pedestrian story, I guess an allegory for the burnout experienced by social workers and doctors and for the idea that Jews are an "other" wherever they go and/or a "chosen people" with special abilities and responsibilities.  There is nothing particularly noteworthy about it.  I'll judge this one barely acceptable.

"Parables of Art" by Jack Dann and Barry N. Malzberg  

Attention Malzberg completists: according to isfdb, "Parables of Art" has only ever appeared in this volume.

I enjoyed "Down Among the Dead Men," a Dann collaboration with Gardner Dozois, and I generally like Barry Malzberg, so after reading the mediocre McIntyre and Eklund selections, I expected this to be my favorite of the three.  My expectations were realized.

Fans of Malzberg will not be surprised to hear that this story is four pages long but is divided into three chapters.  Nor that it begins, "Walter Taplin was forty-five and a failed artist."  Taplin is "enormously fat," as is his wife.  We are told that the couple has lots of sex.

Taplin discovers a secret room at the back of his house; within this room he has the ability to create exciting paintings that are sought after by gallery owners and collectors!  (The authors tell us Taplin's early work was like that of Rosa Bonheur, while his work in the secret room is reminiscent of Bosch.)  Taplin enjoys critical and financial success, and loses weight! But he has less time for sex!

Taplin's wife is envious of her husband's success, and jealous that he spends less time with her, so she seals the secret room with concrete.  Life returns to normal (meaning: lots of sex!)

This story is crazy, feels new, and made me laugh.  Winner!

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For me, Dann and Malzberg deliver, but the McIntyre and Eklund just sit there inoffensively.  Still, I can see people embracing the McIntyre and Eklund for their conventional earnest liberalism, and finding "Parables of Art" offensive for its selfish and obese female villainess.  (But is she really a villainess?  If we view a happy love relationship as more important than fame and fortune, maybe we should see her as a heroine!)

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The final page of New Dimensions 12 is an advertisement for "science fantasy" novels.  Of the seven books listed, I have only read the two Jack Vance books, The Dying Earth and The Eyes of the Overworld.  I think The Dying Earth is overrated, but I love The Eyes of the Overworld to death, and consider it one of the most fun books I have ever read.  I'd probably give the Poul Anderson and Theodore Sturgeon selections a try, but I'm weary and leery of L. Sprague de Camp.  William Barnwell I've never heard of.  Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds is widely discussed and apparently sui generis, so I am intrigued, but I've heard it is over 600 pages, which is an investment I am reluctant to make.                  

A Trace of Dreams by Gordon Eklund

False advertising!

One of the criticisms of the free market you'll hear sometimes from the lefties is that it provides too many choices.  When you go to the supermarket and you find a dozen kinds of peanut butter, maybe instead of being happy that you have the opportunity to select a type of peanut butter that suits your own personal budgetary, taste, health and ideological requirements, you get all confused and even depressed because you can't figure out which one to buy.  And when you are back home you can't enjoy your peanut butter and jelly sandwich because you are haunted by the suspicion that one of the other peanut butters would have been better than the one you are eating.

(UPDATE MAY 27 2015: I got some pushback in the comments regarding the idea that "lefties" are hostile to consumers having lots of choices.  So I felt vindicated this week when socialist Bernie Sanders sounded off, claiming there is something wrong with our society because there are over a dozen kinds of deodorant and sneakers on the market.)

This seems like a pretty lame argument for putting the means of production in the hands of the dictatorship of the proletariat, but I am sometimes reminded of it when I'm in my study, looking at my bookshelves and the pile of library books on the floor.  What should I read next?  Like in that Portishead song, I'm always so unsure.  So, I am likely to grasp at any outside influence that might provide me direction, and last week when Joachim Boaz reminded us via twitter of Gordon Eklund's birthday, I seized upon A Trace of Dreams, Ace 82070, which I purchased earlier this year for 75 cents.

A Trace of Dreams, published in 1972, has an interesting cover painting depicting a commando raid in a city of skyscrapers, and a charming frontispiece by Jack Gaughan.  (These illustrations have nothing whatsoever to do with the story.)  The novel is 256 pages long, and should win some kind of award because the very first word of the text includes a typographical error.  I wondered if this was a black omen, like when Ovid's maid stubbed her toe on the doorstep; were the Parcae warning me this book was going to be terrible?  I wasn't exactly crazy about Eklund's story in Quark/3, so my hopes were not high.

Publication page and page 5 of my copy

A Trace of Dreams is mostly a first person narrative, the reminiscences of Mathew, a man who was an officer in a sort of guerilla band on the planet Meridian.  There is a framing device; we are in fact hearing Mathew's grandson telling us the story as it was related to him in parts over a period of years.  These layers between the actual story and the reader encourage skepticism of the reliability of the story, as do Mathew's admissions that he has left some things out and admonishments to his audience that we should figure the story's mysteries out on our own.

Meridian was one of the earliest planets colonized by humans, and is home to the Greens, three-eyed natives who at first appear to be quite unsophisticated.  (They live in huts and are believed to have IQs of around 30.)  Many Greens work for the humans as laborers and mercenary soldiers.  The government of Meridian, known as the Republic, was overthrown, and a ruthless group called The Triad took over.  Opponents of the Triad took to the hills and forests to form bands of freedom fighters.  One such band was lead by James Black, a man known as "The Dark Star."  (Here I will warn prospective readers that, despite what it says on the book's cover, Black does not in fact lead his followers to Earth, and Earth is in fact not in ruins.)  In a few years the Triad collapsed and the Republic returned, but Black and his little band decided to stay in the woods and continue their guerrilla war against the government.  When the band is five years old Mathew, a teenage immigrant from Earth, joins them, becoming an officer after a few years.

Eklund doesn't portray Black's band (which is known as the Apostles of the Dark Star and numbers fewer than one hundred people) in a very flattering manner; the book feels like a debunking of violent revolutionary movements.  The band murders people in cold blood and piles up their bones into a weird sort of monument.  They conduct raids on farms and towns nearby in order to steal food and kidnap women, but don't do much to depose the Republic.  Eklund doesn't portray the Republic as being particularly oppressive, nor the guerrillas as being particularly ideological, so the Apostles come off as just a bunch of bandits.  As the ad copy on the back of the book points out, the guerrilla war is little more than a game.  Not only is it normal for television crews to come to the guerrilla camp to film celebrations and accompany the freedom fighters on raids, but we are repeatedly reminded that the Republic could easily wipe out the Apostles, but choose not to do so.

frontispiece

Mathew and James Black seem to enjoy living in the woods in tents year after year, living off the food grown and processed by the people they pretend they are trying to liberate, but then a woman, Quentin, comes to the camp and shakes everything up.  She seduces Black, and, on the tenth anniversary of the founding of the Apostles, Black announces that they are launching a major offensive.  With the apparent collusion of the government, the Apostles take over a farm and factory complex, and start running it, selling the food and making a tidy profit.  Mathew runs a work gang, while Black wears fancy clothes and sits in a fancy office.

Quentin isn't the only female in the novel who manipulates men and stirs things up.  Mathew's girlfriend, Loyola, believes Quentin has "destroyed" the Apostles by getting them out of the woods, and she urges Mathew to murder Quentin.  When their assassination plot fails, Loyola and Mathew flee in an aircar, but because Mathew is an inexperienced pilot they crash right in the middle of the woods of the Greens.

The Greens are revealed to be a superior race.  They heal Mathew and Loyola's wounds in a mysterious way, are found to have the ability to shape shift, and employ teleportation machines.  Mathew and Loyola also observe their strange sex practices and longevity treatments.  In the final pages of the book it is revealed that the Greens were created by an ancient master race, as was Quentin.  Quentin is a kind of organic robot which the Greens can shut off and on, and use to investigate, or create mischief for, the humans.  Mathew becomes determined to search the galaxy for further evidence of this ancient super race, which may still live out there somewhere, and may have also created humankind.  The Republic orders all humans to leave Meridian; Mathew isn't sure why, but suspects the Greens have revealed their power to the government and issued an ultimatum.

A Trace of Dreams is long and dull.  The plot moves slowly, and usually I had no idea why people were doing what they were doing, and usually I didn't care what happened.  None of the characters or political or racial groups are interesting or compelling; most of them are ciphers whose motivations are difficult to understand.  (It is possible that the Greens are manipulating everybody with their hinted at psychic powers.)  Because we know the war is a joke, and Eklund doesn't present much reason why we should hope one side or the other wins, the war generates no tension or interest.  The relationships between the Greens and Quentin, and between the Greens and humans, which have the potential to be exciting, are barely sketched out.  Similarly, Mathew's relationships with James Black and Loyola, and with some other characters I haven't mentioned (a college professor who is the Apostles' intellectual leader, and an alien from another planet with odd powers, including the power to get drunk without drinking), could have generated interest, but instead they just kind of sit there.

Eklund's project in A Trace of Dreams seems to be to suggest that the universe is inexplicable and things happen because we are being manipulated by powers that are evil or simply indifferent, and perhaps to argue that war and politics are a scam.  Such themes could have an emotional impact on the reader, but Eklund fails to inspire any feeling.  

There are a few surprising and memorable scenes.  Like Marcel in Swann's Way, Mathew looks through a window and witnesses a disturbing sex act which demonstrates that humans and Greens can interbreed.  Halfway through the novel we learn that people born on Earth are raised by computers, and never know their biological parents; they spend six years in vats, taught to speak and walk through wires connected to their brains.  Because of overpopulation on Earth, the computers condition their charges to find sex and children repellent.  Also memorable is the scene in which, as part of his initiation into the Apostles, Mathew has to execute his "brother," a boy from the same vat, with a pistol; his bones are added to the macabre monument.  These good scenes make me suspect that A Trace of Dreams could have been a good book if it was 156 instead of 256 pages, it had fewer characters, and it devoted more time to Mathew's relationships with characters like James Black and Quentin.  

I can't blame Eklund for them, but, as the omen on page 5 warned me, the book does have lots of typographical errors, as well as one of those printing errors in which a few lines are accidentally repeated.  Also, Eklund's editor should have told him that "revolver" isn't a synonym for "pistol," especially if the pistol has a "clip," a "safety" and ejects spent cartridges while firing.

A Trace of Dreams isn't a total disaster, but it has way too many problems for me to recommend it.  Marginal thumbs down.

Quark/3 (Part3): Harrison, Stanley, Veitch, Bailey, & Vickers

Here we have the concluding episode of my epic reading of Quark/3, a 1971 anthology of experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Delany and Hacker endeavored to present in Quark/3 stories that were not mere "popular entertainment" or "adventure stories" by "commercial science fiction writers," but rather risk-taking work of speculative fiction that was "politically dangerous" and meaningfully addressed "social, psychological and technological crises" evident in the early 1970s.

The first third of the book contained two good stories, those by R. A. Lafferty and Delany himself, while the second third limped along on the strength of an OK story by Kate Wilhelm and a slightly better tale by Josephine Saxton.  What awaits us in this final third? 

"Ring of Pain" by M. John Harrison

I recently read Harrison's first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, and thought it alright, nothing special.

In "Ring of Pain" a man wanders through a Central England devastated by war, scavenging food from the ruins.  Not a single building is intact, and not a single live person is to be seen.  Is he the last member of the human race? 

No!  He meets a woman, who is overjoyed to no longer be alone.  She talks of having children with the main character, and our protagonist responds by vomiting and fleeing!  He wants no part of continuing the human race, finds abhorrent the idea of being the Adam of a new civilization which will, no doubt, repeat the grim and catastrophic rise to industrialism and then industrialized, world-shattering war.  The woman eventually catches up with him, and he tries to win her over to his view that they must not procreate.  He fails to convince her, and finds himself unable to resist having sex with her.

The brief final scene I didn't quite understand.  I think a military unit, riding tanks and armed with rifles and bayonets, appears, and somehow this leads to the woman cutting off her breasts.  Or perhaps the main character is reflecting that even the sight of an armored squadron would not discourage the woman from wanting to have children, though if she had her breasts cut off then he would no longer desire her.

This is an acceptable story, even though it is written to be intentionally difficult to follow; there are lots of sentence fragments, I guess to convey the feeling of a world that has been smashed to bits, and get you into the mindset of people who have lived through such a catastrophe.  

"To the Child Whose Birth Will Change the Way the Universe Works" by George Stanley

American-born Canadian poet Stanley won the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award in 2006.  "To the Child..." is a two page poem, an adaptation of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. All you classical scholars out there already know that Eclogue IV was widely interpreted in the Middle Ages as a sort of prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Having been indifferently educated myself, I can't read Latin, but, in preparation for reading Stanley's piece in Quark/3, I took my copy of the Penguin Classics 1980 edition of the Eclogues off the shelf and read Guy Lee's translation of Eclogue IV.

Virgil's poem was written around 40 B. C. (or B. C. E., as we are saying nowadays) to express hope that a marriage alliance between the two successors of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), would end the long period of instability and civil wars that had been wracking the Roman world.  Virgil is praising the prospective child of the union between Mark Antony and Octavian's sister: with his birth will come a new beginning which will see the end of fear and the "iron race" replaced by a "golden" one.  

Stanley updates and Americanizes the poem.  The birth of the child will end the "machine age," and where Virgil mentions Achilles, Stanley mentions George Washington.  Virgil suggests that, with the child as his subject, his poetry will surpass that of Linus, Orpheus and Pan; Stanley says his verse will be the superior of Hart Crane's and Lorca's.

Maybe Stanley sees the assassination of JFK as analogous to the assassination of Caesar, and the 1960s, with such contentious events as the Civil Rights movement and race riots, Vietnam War protests and all the trouble around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as analogous to the civil wars and other crises suffered by Romans during the Late Republic.  I can't tell if Stanley is referring to any specific person or event as ending the crisis period, the way Virgil does; a clue that isn't getting me very far on google is that this poem is dedicated to a Brian DeBeck.

"A Sexual Song" by Tom Veitch

Veitch has only three credits at isfdb, one of them a story he co-wrote about Greedo of Mos Eisley Cantina fame.  Veitch has written numerous comic books, including Star Wars comics. 

This story is even more surreal and less coherent than Hill's "Brave Salt."  "A Sexual Song" begins "He dressed in moth skins torn from a beaver's diary..." and in the second paragraph we get, "Print culture seems to be dying this morning because the dead men who occupy those zones cannot provide nourishment to tribal electricians...."  The entire story is like this, incomprehensible nonsense, like the product of playing Mad Libs.  I guess the plot is about a sexual encounter in a post-nuclear war world in which everything is mutated and crazy.

Painful.

"Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" by Hilary Bailey

Bailey, when Quark/3 was published, was married to Michael Moorcock.  This is the first thing I've read by her; she seems to have been quite productive, though much of her work falls outside the SF genre.

After some kind of catastrophe the British populace resorts to living in government-built underground complexes.  Each complex is isolated from the others.  A female technician in one complex discovers a secret means of communicating with other complexes, and starts a surreptitious correspondence with an old acquaintance living in another complex.  The entire text consists of their letters, and through them we learn how human beings are reacting to being confined in the sterile and depressing complexes.  There are many women who insist on having children despite the discouragement of the authorities and a lack of resources.  Children and adolescents get into all kinds of mischief, creating extra work for the technicians and mechanics.  Family relationships collapse and there are pathetic attempts by lonely people to secure some kind of human comfort; the long distance love affair of our two main characters is one example.

A convincing and interesting milieu, actual characters and emotion, and a smooth writing style; Bailey brings to Quark/3 some things which have been in short supply.  After some of the pieces I've endured in Quark/3 it is certainly a relief to encounter a well-written story with some genuine human emotion and a clever SF premise that hearkens back to the tradition of the epistolary novel.  I am proclaiming the oasis that is "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" the best story in the anthology!

"The Coded Sun Game" by Brian Vickers 

The isfdb indicates that "The Coded Sun Game," which is the longest story in Quark/3 (over 60 pages!), constitutes 50% of Brian Vickers's SF output.  Under ordinary circumstances I wouldn't devote the necessary time and energy to reading a 60 page story by a guy I never heard of, especially in an anthology which is full of weak stories, but I am on a mission, and I'm certainly not going to give up with the finish line in sight!


"The Coded Sun Game" is convoluted and difficult, and at times I found it hard to attend.  The narrative is a sort of stream of consciousness of a being who is delusional, suffering from "psychotic hallucinations" that are "compounded of past perceptual experiences."  The narrative is full of pop music references (the names of bands and singers, like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and lines from songs like the Doors' "Light My Fire" and The Who's "See Me, Feel Me," pop up at random) and lists (of oil companies, of modern artists, of cities) and is periodically interrupted by science lectures (psychology, biology, solar astronomy) and medical reports.

Paul is a young man (perhaps an alien, perhaps a fallen deity) suffering from the aforementioned "psychotic withdrawal visions."  He is living with an English family near the ocean: Clive Noland, a doctor, his wife Barbra, an artist, and their sexy daughter Michelle.  Paul watches TV, walks on the beach, swims in the pool, has sex with Michelle.  His mental problems seem to be linked to solar radiation; a medical report says his symptoms reach their peak at midday, and the text is full of references to color, sunspots, and solar flares.

The story gets more confusing as it goes on.  In the second half more characters are introduced, and, like in a time travel story, Paul seems to be reliving scenes but as different characters, talking to and fighting with younger versions of himself from the first half of the story. 

I've spent some time flipping through this story, rereading passages and trying to figure it out, but I don't really get it.  Still, I didn't find it offensively bad.

Fun fact: Until I read this story I wasn't familiar with the British slang term for transistor radio, "tranny" or "trannie."  You can imagine my initial puzzlement at the phrase, "Beatles strangled by a trannie."

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So there we have it, Quark/3.  It wasn't an easy ride, but let's look at the bright side.  I read a pile of stories by writers totally new to me, and among them are Hilary Bailey and Josephine Saxton, whom I will definitely read again (also, it is notable that the Bailey and Saxton stories have never appeared in any other book, so I'd never have encountered them otherwise.)  Richard Hill's and James Sallis's stories are so crazy I am spurred to read their contributions to Again, Dangerous Visions.

Taken as a whole, the stories were less propagandistic and more experimental in style and form than I had expected.  Gordon Eklund's anti-war story and Kate Wilhelm's overpopulation story felt tired, but most of the writers really did try to do something strange and/or new.   

Finally, let's rank the fiction to be found in Quark/3.  Hilary Bailey comes in first, with Lafferty and Delany close behind, and Saxton a distant fourth.  Then we have a pack of OK tales, followed by a mass of weak stories, and then three certifiable disasters.

QUARK/3 FINAL STANDINGS
Hilary Bailey                            "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth"
R. A. Lafferty                          "Encased in Ancient Rind"
Samuel R. Delany                    "Dog in a Fisherman's Net"
Josephine Saxton                     "Nature Boy"

M. John Harrison                     "Ring of Pain"
Kate Wilhelm                           "Where Have You Been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?"
Brian Vickers                           "The Coded Sun Game"

Gordon Eklund                        "Home Again, Home Again"
Virginia Kidd                           "Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside"
Joanna Russ                             "The Zanzibar Cat"

James Sallis                             "Field"
Richard Hill                             "Brave Salt"
Tom Veitch                              "A Sexual Song"

Quark/3 (Part 1): Penney, Delany, Hacker, Simpson, Lafferty, Eklund, La Vigne & Russ

I'm always impressed when tarbandu or Joachim Boaz reads an entire anthology or collection and opines about each story.  They have a willpower and open-mindedness I lack.  My standard operating procedure with anthologies is to read the pieces by authors I know I like and then toss them aside.  I have a short attention span, and I am very picky, and scrupulously avoid authors and stories I have reason to expect will be boring or irritating. These "reasons" range from having read the author before, to vague impressions and subconscious feelings that I call "my spider sense" and other people would probably call "irrational prejudice" or "unconstitutional profiling."

I had a good experience reading the entire contents of Novelets of Science Fiction, an anthology of 1950s SF stories edited by Ivan Howard and printed in the 1960s, and so I have decided to read another anthology cover to cover.  To really up the degree of difficulty, as people who watch the Olympics say, I am throwing caution to the winds and have selected Quark/3 to be the subject of this experiment.  Quark/3 is the third in a series of anthologies (styled an "original review" and a "quarterly of speculative fiction") of new stories and art edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker in the early 1970s.  Quark/3 was printed in May of 1971, mere months before my own birth.  I purchased it recently at a used bookstore in Mankato, Minnesota which does not accept credit cards; luckily I was able to get cash across the street at Walgreens.

Quark/3 definitely has my spider sense tingling; is this volume going to be 230 agonizing pages of semi-intelligible denunciations of our sexist, racist, imperialist, consumerist and polluting (pollutist?) bourgeois society?  I bought this book for the Lafferty story, and my instincts are telling me to read that story and then forget all about Quark/3, but on TV they are always telling you to "get outside your comfort zone," and if you can't find wisdom in TV cliches, where can you find it?  So, off we go.

Cover Painting by Roger Penney

I actually like the wraparound cover by Roger Penney, which I guess you could call "primitivist surrealism" or maybe "naive surrealism."  I'm throwing "primitive" and "naive" in there because the painting lacks the polish and technique you see in, say, Salvador Dali.  (It's fun to play amateur art historian.)  A few minutes on Google suggests Penney's oeuvre consists of paintings of buildings that look like women and this piece is no exception.  

Forward by Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker

I don't know much about Wittgenstein.  I like the Cicero, Seneca, Epictetus, Spinoza, that kind of thing; Wittgenstein is beyond me.  In grad school I knew a woman who was an expert on Wittgenstein; I am terrible at remembering names, and so, in my mind, and when I tell people stories about her, I just call her "Wittgenstein."  Wittgenstein and I would have dumb arguments about Christopher Hitchens, and when she was moving out of the dorms she gave me pretentious hardcover copies of Moby Dick, Don Quixote, and a collection of P. G. Wodehouse stories.  I love Melville, Cervantes, and Wodehouse, but I already had (cheap) copies of these books and tried to refuse them, but she insisted.  Due to a categorically imperative need for cash, I sold them to the Strand.

Anyway, Delany and Hacker start their forward with an epigraph from Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which argues that fictional worlds inevitably have something in common with the real world.  Delany and Hacker, apparently participating in a dialogue with those whom they term "commercial science fiction writers" (Delany and Hacker represent "experimental speculative fiction writers") go on to insist that "adventure stories" are useless because they have no chance of inspiring the reader to political action.  In a neat piece of ju jitsu, Delany and Hacker claim that SF writers who say they are not experimenting because they want to entertain the audience are in fact cheating their audience, because they are limiting themselves; if they truly were dedicated to entertaining the audience, they would employ "the full range of aesthetic discipline."  (I said "neat," not "convincing.")  As examples, they point out Uncle Tom's Cabin and Babbit as the two most revolutionary books produced by American authors; neither of them, we are told, is an adventure; they are "social chronicles."  Delany and Hacker further argue that SF writers must be encouraged to experiment as much as possible.

They don't quite come out and say it, but I get the impression that our editors aspire to publish, in Quark/3, stories which are not "popular entertainment" but instead are "politically dangerous fiction" and "view meaningfully the social, psychological, and technological crises present."  I'll keep this in mind as I read the stories, and if you see me next week throwing a brick through the window of a Starbucks, well, you'll know why. 

"Continuous Landscape" by Donald Simpson

Six pages of the paperback are occupied by a drawings of a craggy, stalagmite-like landscape by Donald Simpson.  These are pleasant.  I don't know how they fit into Delany and Hacker's theory that art should make you uneasy and drive you to social action; maybe there are no living things in the landscape because we have despoiled the environment?

"Encased in Ancient Rind" by R. A. Lafferty

Here's the story that I bought this book for.  It has been anthologized and collected in various places, but its first appearance was in Quark/3 and this is the first book I've encountered which includes it.

In its first paragraph we learn the story is about apocalyptic air pollution.  In the second and third paragraphs Lafferty promises us the story is not as banal as we expect:

                          "Aw dog dirt, not another air-pollution piece," you say.

                          Oh come off of it. You know us better than that.

Air pollution kills many people and exterminates many species, but the strongest survive.  The increased carbon in the atmosphere then causes an impenetrable cloud to form around the Earth, what Lafferty calls a "canopy."  In this new environment some species, including the minority of humans who have survived, thrive, growing larger and longer-lived.  Lafferty suggests jocularly that cutting off the Earth from radiation recreates conditions of the past, with lizards growing into simulacra of dinosaurs, horses growing into creatures like the Baluchitherium, and humans changing to resemble Neanderthals.  People, now able to live for centuries, begin to think the new dark world under the canopy is more "efficient" than the 20th century world of blue skies, and eventually forget, willfully, that there was a time when the canopy wasn't there.

Lafferty seems to be saying that whatever the conditions, life will adapt, and that every situation has good and bad points, that every change is good for some and bad for others.  Also, that our view or the world, our attitude to conditions, is largely up to our choice, even if it is beyond our power to control or predict what is going on. 

"Encased in Ancient Rind" is entertaining, throwing a surprising concept and various interesting images at you.  It certainly seems that Lafferty has thought "meaningfully" about various social and technological crises, though I don't think this story is "politically dangerous" or will spur anyone to social action.

"Home Again, Home Again" by Gordon Eklund

I don't think I've ever read anything by Gordon Eklund, though I have a book of his on the shelf.  This story is, unfortunately, the kind of thing I expected to find in Quark/3, a ham-handed story about how war changes a person and makes it hard for him to return to civilian society. 

A nameless soldier, simply called "The Vet," returns from a war in outer space against aliens known as "Bugs" (a reference to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, one presumes.)  The Vet lost his face in battle, and has an artificial face that is not at all like his original face, and cannot express emotion.  He returns to his home town after ttwenty years away, where all the houses look the same and everybody is out of work because of machines.  Nobody wants to talk about the war with him (they'd rather talk about their boring everyday concerns) and The Vet goes bonkers and goes on a rampage.  He stabs his sister with a fork, murders his girlfriend (who had an affair with a musician who read Marcel Proust and Thomas Mann while the Vet was out in space immolating scores of the alien Bugs) sets fire to the local gas station, and kills a dozen other people.  Then the "investigators" with their robot dogs catch up with The Vet, and it is revealed that this was a test to see if a soldier could readapt to civilian life-- all the people The Vet murdered were just androids and the town is just a set.  Having failed the test, The Vet is taken to an asylum.

Eklund lards the story with ambiguity.  The Vet claims to have known the androids were not real people, and says he could have passed the test if he wanted.  It also seems that The Vet didn't just return from the war, that the war ended a century ago and The Vet has been in an asylum all this time.  Everything in the story is open to question, because The Vet is insane and everything the investigators and androids say could be a lie; it seems possible the Bug war is a delusion.    

This story feels tired, both the war-made-this-guy-nutso premise, and the twist at the end.  Maybe I'm being unfair, maybe Eklund was a pioneer of the Vietnam-vet-goes-crazy genre, or maybe this story is supposed to be a subversion of that genre, but nothing in the story felt fresh or interesting, and there's nothing about Eklund's writing style that elevates the story into something engaging or entertaining.

Lame.   

"Dog in a Fisherman's Net" by Samuel R. Delany

I've read a few things by Delany, most recently Empire Star, and my feelings are mixed.  The cognoscenti are much more enthusiastic about him than I am,; there's a lot of talk about hi Nova (which I read and can barely remember a thing about) being one of the best SF novels of all time, for example.

This story takes place in the 1960s, on a Greek island inhabited by fishermen and, up in the hills, pagan goatherds.  In a freak accident, a man is killed while he is repairing a fishing net--a dog gets mixed up in the net, tangling the net around the man and his knife, and when people try to kill the dog all the thrashing around drives the knife through his throat.  The dead man's brother has sad flashbacks that illuminate the lives of poverty and ignorance lived by people on the island.  He decides to leave the island.

This is a reasonably good mainstream literary story; there are interesting characters, things happen which engage your emotions, Delany has a good style.  The SF content, such as it is, is related to the conflict between the Greek Orthodox fishermen and the goatherds, who have some kind of matriarchal society up in the hills where they worship a pagan goddess with a secret name (perhaps she is a Minoan Snake Goddess) and women have multiple husbands.  The superstitious Christians are afraid to swim in a bay where a pagan statue of the goatherd's deity is submerged, and the goatherds have a dance Christians are forbidden to see.  The fisherman whose brother died in the weird accident decides to move to the mainland after swimming in this bay and seeing the black statue of the goddess, fishermen's nets snagged about it.

Is this story "politically dangerous?"  Maybe "Dog in a Fisherman's Net" is about outsiders, the "other," and how such people try to escape their subordinate or inferior condition. The Christians look down on (but also fear) the pagans, women in the fishing village are under the thumb of men, a girl is born with light hair and her parents try to hide this from the dark-haired populace, a teacher humiliates an ignorant student and the student refuses to return to school, British and French archaeologists cart Greek treasures off to Paris, etc.

A good story; paradoxically, it appears to be one of the more conventional stories in the book.

Twelve Drawings by Robert La Vigne  

Twelve pages of the book are taken up by silly doodles by Robert La Vigne.  In this book there is a space between the "La" and the "Vigne," but a few minutes on Google suggests this is some kind of error, and the artist's name is usually written "LaVigne."

"The Zanzibar Cat" by Joanna Russ

Joanna Russ is one of those authors I've avoided despite the praise she receives.  I've spent enough time with feminist college professors in real life; I'm not going out of my way to read fiction by feminist college professors.  So this is my first direct experience of Russ's work.  

"The Zanzibar Cat" is a solipsistic and recursive feminist fairy tale.  I guess it is supposed to be funny, and to remind you that stories aren't real, in the way the famous "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" painting by Magritte is supposed to remind you that a painting is just a reproduction, not the thing it represents.  Maybe "The Zanzibar Cat" is also supposed to be a celebration of women writers and their ability to write stories that celebrate women writers?  The story is also an homage to British writer Hope Mirrlees, whom I've never read.  (I only know this because of the "The Zanzibar Cat"'s French subtitle.)  Maybe the style is an imitation of Mirrlees's?

Anyway, the story goes like this: the land of Appletap-on-Flat is haunted by a ghost.  An army marches from Appletap-on-Flat's largest city, Appletap-cum-Cumber, over the Merry Marches and the Meaning Mountains to Fairyland, to confront the ghost.  A young woman accompanies the army as a camp follower.  When they meet the ghost the young woman defeats him by willing him out of existence; the young woman, we learn in the last line, is Joanna Russ, author of the story.

As a kid, I never liked the Bugs Bunny cartoons in which the characters knew they were in a cartoon and would complain directly to the animator (I guess I'm thinking of "Duck Amuck" and "Rabbit Rampage") or that Tom and Jerry cartoon, "The Tom and Jerry Cartoon Kit," that pokes fun at the whole idea of making a cartoon about cat versus mouse violence.  And I don't like "The Zanzibar Cat," either.  When I invest time in reading a story I expect the author to make an effort to entertain me or tell me something interesting, not jab me in the ribs and say, "This isn't real, dummy, why are you wasting your time reading this?"  Besides that, the story felt long, with long sentences and long paragraphs full of lists and extraneous detail.

"The Zanzibar Cat" meets Delany and Hacker's dicta that a story should give discomfort and precipitate action; the action I am considering is refusing to read any more Russ stories.

************

So, there we have the first 74 pages of Quark/3.  The Lafferty and the Delany pieces are worthwhile stories, while the Eklund is a poor story.  The Russ isn't even a story, but a postmodern trick.  Let's hope the Lafferty and Delany stories are representative of the remaining components of the anthology.