1971 stories by Larry Niven, Joanna Russ and Stephen Tall

I recently purchased a coffee-stained copy of the hardcover edition of Donald Wollheim's The 1972 Annual World's Best SF.  This Book Club Edition has a Frazetta cover with a weird color scheme that celebrates the beauty of the human body, exudes confidence, and includes a wacky robot in the background.  Let's check out some stories first published in the year of my birth!

"The Fourth Profession" by Larry Niven (1971)

This story first appeared in Quark/4, which I also purchased recently. Wollheim, in his intro to "The Fourth Profession," calls Quark "probably the farthest out of the 'New Wave' original collections."

As Wollheim hints, "The Fourth Profession" isn't really very New Wavey.  It is a very good traditional SF story, with aliens, science, a guy developing super mental powers, and a "humanity is on the brink of exploring the stars" sense of wonder ending.  I really enjoyed it.  Niven writes it in an economical style, without any extraneous distractions, but still manages to include clues and foreshadowing and interesting astronomy, chemistry, psychology, and religion, as well as speculation on how interstellar merchants might behave.

"The Fourth Profession" has a sort of detective story structure, beginning in medias res, the morning after a bartender, our first person narrator, served an alien at his bar. Through flashbacks and an interview of the bartender conducted by a Secret Service agent curious about the extraterrestrial, we gradually learn what happened last night at the bar.  The aliens are purveyors of pills that alter the brain chemistry of those who eat them, giving them memories--by eating the correct pill you can, almost instantly, become an expert in a complicated topic like a foreign language or the history of a civilization, or learn a complex skill, like how to pilot a spaceship or how to build a fusion reactor.  The pills can also alter your personality.  The alien fed the narrator and the bar's waitress some pills, and the three main characters, bartender, waitress and government agent, scramble to figure out what the pills did to them and what the alien's purpose in giving them out was.  They begin to suspect the aliens are absolutely merciless (considering civilizations like our own that have not achieved interstellar flight to be no better than animals) and that the human race is in grave danger!  In the final part of the story the bar is again visited by an alien, and our narrator uses his wits and the abilities he has gained from those earlier pills to save the day and set the human race on the course to an heroic future.  

The story I read before this one shook my faith in the written word, as I chronicled in my last blog post.  But Larry Niven has restored that faith!  "The Fourth Profession" is a very entertaining, well-structured and well-executed tale--Wollheim (and Samuel Delany and Marilyn Hacker, editors of Quark) were wise to publish it!  

"Gleepsite" by Joanna Russ (1971)

I've spent way too much time (in what the kids call "meatspace") with leftist college professors to relish reading fiction by one.  But when I took a chance on Joanna Russ's Hugo-winning "Souls," I found it was actually a pretty good story!  Let's see if lightning strikes twice.  "Gleepsite" first appeared in Orbit 9, and in his intro Wollheim suggests we read it multiple times.

This five-page story is a little opaque, but let's try to figure it out.  (I did read it twice!)

The setting: a future Earth in which the air is a deadly acid poison, and people now live in buildings retrofitted to be airtight.  Ninety-seven percent of the population is female because the authorities deemed men to be "inefficient."

The characters: Two middle-aged women, twins, who work in a travel office on the 31st floor of a skyscraper, and our narrator, some kind of shape-shifting creature who can breathe the poison air.

The plot:  Our narrator, at night when few people are in the skyscraper, accosts the twins and tries to sell them a device.  This device, consisting of a ring and a necklace, allows you to experience preprogrammed daydreams and even (I think) transmit your own daydreams to others; in practice the device seems to conjure up vivid and realistic illusions.  The narrator convinces the women to purchase the device, and then opens an airtight window and, sprouting bat wings, flies out into the deadly atmosphere.

"Gleepsite" is all about illusion and deception and how forms and identities are malleable and names are changeable, are arbitrary.  (As Wollheim indicates in his intro to the piece, there is no clue what "gleepsite" means.)  The narrator creates illusions and peddles an illusion-generating device, deceives and manipulates her customers, and starts calling them by names that are not their own, but which she thinks appropriate.  Thanks to the narrator, the twins will soon be creating illusions of their own and themselves acting deceptively (breaking the law in their use of the device.)

The narrator seems to have a lot in common with traditional depictions of the Devil: her bat wings, her shape-shifting nature, her seductive and dishonest bargaining, the way she corrupts the twins, and the use of the word "hell" to describe the post-apocalyptic Earth.  If we accept the fire and brimstone apocalypse at face value, it certainly makes sense for the Devil to be there, right?

But in a story about illusion, deception, and daydreams, does it make sense to accept the setting (or anything?) at face value?  Especially when we remember that one of Russ's most famous stories, "The Zanzibar Cat," is a nonsensical story in which the story itself is a fabrication of one of its characters?  I am boldly going to suggest that the setting and plot of "Gleepsite" are the daydream of a person who might find a world with almost no men congenial.  Russ herself may be such a person-- consider that (Wikipedia is telling me) she was a lesbian and anti-pornography activist, and that in "Souls" she portrays men as creeps and heterosexual sex as something disgusting. The text of "Gleepsite" itself paints men in a pretty negative light, not only suggesting they are "inefficient" but, by referring to how women in pre-apocalyptic days would dance on tables for the pleasure of male viewers and engage in prostitution, portraying the typical man as an exploiter of women.  A clue that suggests to me that the setting is not "real" but a fictional construct conceived by the narrator for her own gratification is that parts of it read like an incomplete draft of a story, with dates and minor characters' names yet to be filled in ("In the year blank-blank, when the great neurosurgical genius, Blank, working with Blank and Blank, discovered in the human forebrain....")

"Gleepsite," appears to be, in whole or in part, an insoluble puzzle.  It is hard for me to recommend it based on conventional criteria; I can't tell you it is fun or entertaining or beautiful or anything like that.  But as an unusual, mysterious, dense and thought-provoking piece, I think reading it has been a worthwhile experience.

"The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" by Stephen Tall (1971)

I didn't recognize Tall's name; isfdb indicates he published something like 20 stories and a single novel. ("Stephen Tall" was the pen name of biology professor Compton Crook.) "The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" is one of Tall's series of stories about the exploration ship Stardust.  One collection of Stardust tales, The Stardust Voyages, has the phrase "In the great tradition of Star Trek" emblazoned on its cover.  Even though I had never heard of its author, "The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" was a cover story for The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and this wasn't the only time Tall's name would appear on the cover of a magazine like F&SF or Worlds of If.  I guess editors considered him a draw.

I wanted to like this traditional first contact story, and the plot is fine, but I found the story poorly structured.  There are too many boring scenes of people sitting around having boring conversations, and too much time is spent introducing these characters and setting the scene.  The beginning feels like the start of a novel.  It makes sense to spend a dozen pages introducing us to characters and setting in a full-length novel, but this story is less than forty pages, so those 12 pages feel like too big of an investment, especially since there is really no payoff--the characters' personalities don't have any real impact on the plot and they don't change over the course of the story.

Speaking of personality, the characters feel a little silly, too flat, too stock, too obvious.  There's the sophisticated English gentleman who has impeccable taste in clothes and always keeps a stiff upper lip; the gruff and cynical guy who lost a leg on an earlier mission; the sexy wife of the narrator who is a talented musician as well as a scientist; and the eccentric artist who has a "sixth sense" which provides her with uncanny insights.  The Stardust is staffed with the best scientists in the galaxy, and we hear again and again how each member of the crew is the best in his or her field--every character in this story is a genius!

The plot: Stardust is in orbit near Luna, listening to a mysterious and untraceable transmission of alien music.  None of the ship's technology can figure out where the transmission is coming from, but the crazy painter has an intuition that she expresses in her latest painting, a canvas depicting the constellations.  The evocative music is, she senses, coming from the direction of Ursa Major's tail, so thither flies the Stardust. The transmission turns out to be the swan song, dirge and S.O.S. of an alien civilization whose sun is about to go nova--the Stardust arrives just 33 hours before this intelligent species is about to be exterminated!  The narrator's sexy wife communicates with the aliens via the universal language of music (she is a guitarist) and the Stardust takes aboard the recorded history and culture of the doomed aliens, and a box full of tiny larval aliens, to be planted on a suitable planet so this noble race will not truly expire, but be reborn on a new world.

This story isn't exactly bad, but it stretches 15 or 20 ages of material to double that length--there are no villains or challenges for the geniuses to use their genius to overcome, so we end up with an  idea/mood story whose idea/mood is "how would you act if your civilization was doomed?" with lots of superfluous character descriptions appended to it.  (This story would work at least as well if the Stardust was a one-man rocket.)  Maybe the story works better as part of a body of linked stories?  I sure hope every single Stardust story doesn't spend the amount of time introducing the characters and the ship that this one does!

"The Bear With the Knot on His Tail" reminded me a little of something Heinlein or Anderson might do (supercompetent people, themes of nobility in the face of adversity, a sense of the tragic, a "liberated" attitude about sex) but lacks any style or intellectual or ideological commitment: Heinlein and Anderson usually use a story to speculate about the future, give you advice on how to run your life, and/or express their beliefs about society, economy, religion, or the government.  Tall's story doesn't do anything like that.

Acceptable, but I don't think it belongs in this book of "Best" stories alongside the well-crafted Niven or the challenging Russ.  Maybe Wollheim thought he needed a space ship story to balance the volume's more experimental content?

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None of these stories is actually bad, and the Niven is a gem, so we have a good start to The 1972 Annual World's Best SF.  Three more selections from the volume (by Michael Coney, Poul Anderson and Christopher Priest) in our next episode!

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."

**********

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.

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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.