Quark/4: Vonda N. McIntyre and Marek Obtulowicz

Let's finish up our examination of Quark/4, the final installment of the 1970-71 anthology series edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker that Donald Wollheim (in The 1972 Annual World's Best SF) called "probably the farthest out of the 'New Wave' original collections."  After Helen Adam and Gail Madonia's pieces, which I dealt with in our last episode, comes Thomas M. Disch's "Bodies," which would later be included in 334.  I wrote about 334 back in 2014 and won't address "Bodies" here.  After "Bodies" is a 24-line poem by Marilyn Hacker, "Nightsong," that I don't have anything to say about (well, I'll say it is better than Marco Cacchioni's poem in this book.)  Then comes Vonda McIntyre's "Cages."

"Cages" by Vonda N. McIntyre

Vonda McIntyre is a big success, with a Hugo and multiple Nebulas.  I think I've read four stories by McIntyre, "Only at Night," "The Galactic Clock," "Recourse, Inc.," and "Elfleda," liking two, disliking one, and finding one merely adequate.  According to isfdb, "Cages," interestingly enough, has never been reprinted, so I get to tell all you McIntyre fans that you have to surf over to ebay to buy yourself a copy of Quark/4.

Sprinkled throughout Quark/4 are
thirteen drawings by Olivier Olivier;
all of them are variations on this
elephant and robed men conceit

"Cages" is like nine pages long, and McIntyre writes it in straightforward direct sentences that focus on the surface of events and provide only glimpses at what is really going on, but those glimpses eventually add up to a full picture.  The full picture: A psychologist doing one of those nature vs nurture experiments has isolated two boys for sixteen years; they have been raised by a computer so that their experiences have been identical--this computer even has the ability to control their minds so that they do identical things, day after day.  The result: even though they have different genetic heritages, they are like the most indistinguishable of twins, with similar bodies, attitudes, beliefs, etc.  On the day the story depicts, the sixteen-year-old boys are set free from isolation, and for the first time meet other human beings, including the psychologist, who hopes they will see him as their father, though he is not their biological father--besides resolving the nature/nurture debate, the researcher also seems to have been trying to create supermen who would be his family and would respect his authority.  But the boys miss the computer, whom they have come to love as if it were their mother, and they do not react well to exposure to the real world--in fact, they kill the psychologist and burn down his research facility.

After I read this story the first time I was going to judge it just OK, but I kept thinking about it and on a second read liked it much more--the first time I read it I expended all my energy figuring out the basic background and plot, and during my second read, as I already knew the framework of the thing, I could focus more on the details and the more emotional elements.  McIntyre does a good job of describing the reactions to the real world of two kids raised in a strictly controlled and isolated environment (e. g., everything IRL smells bad and looks chaotic to them) and the science stuff McIntyre addresses is interesting, even if I don't find her nurture over nature attitude very convincing.  A thumbs up for "Cages,"--McIntyre fans, and those interested in SF treatments of the nature vs nurture issue, should seek it out.

"A Man of Letters" by Malek Obtulowicz

Like so many of the pieces in Quark/4, "A Man of Letters" appeared here and nowhere else.  Obtulowicz has six stories listed at isfdb, and all of them appeared in issues of Quark or in one or another of New Worlds's incarnations (Obtulowicz's first two stories appeared in 1969 issues of the magazine, which ceased regular publication in the 1970s but lived on as a paperback quarterly put together by many people who had worked on the magazine, including Michael Moorcock, Charles Platt and Langdon Jones--Obtulowicz's last two stories were printed in 1972 and 1973 in that quarterly book version of New Worlds.)

The two line bio of Obtulowicz in Quark/4 suggests that in 1971 he was an aspiring novelist living in Canada.  A brief internet search turned up nothing about Obtulowicz's career, though there is a gentleman by the name of Malek Obtulowicz who produces amateur videos of himself discussing Polish politics...at least that is what I think he is talking about.
   

"A Man of Letters" is like a dozen pages, and as the title should have led us to expect, it is written in the epistolary form.  The writer is an old man, an architect, and the surreal letters suggest he is going insane and/or is the prisoner of some kind of tyrannical government or maybe a mental institution.  His cell, if that is what it is, is outfitted like an apartment, and a woman comes in regularly who prepares his meals and sleeps with him.  The letters seem to be written to his wife, who is apparently distinct from the woman who comes to the apartment every day; the narrator advises her to change her and their children's names so their children's life prospects won't be harmed by his bad reputation.  By the end of the story he is on the path to committing suicide.

I guess this is all a metaphor for a stifling career and an unhappy marriage, maybe with some satire of overbearing bureaucratic government/medical establishment.  The only clear and sharp portions of the story are the writer's memories of his childhood and university days--this story would have been a lot more appealing to me if it was just a comprehensible bildungsroman about a poor boy who became an architect and got married and then became disillusioned or disappointed with life.  As it stands, "A Man of Letters" feels like a waste of time, a bunch of elements that don't add up to a coherent whole or entertain the reader.  If somebody were prosecuting a case against the [worst examples of the] New Wave, "A Man of Letters," with its surrealism, explicit but unpleasant sex, and literary anecdotes about a semi-unhappy childhood and a semi-rebellious youth--all of which don't add up to an interesting or fun story--could be Exhibit A.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

**********

After "A Man of Letters" comes the final story in Quark/4, Larry Niven's "The Fourth Profession," which I liked when I read it back in 2016.

While there are a few stories that repelled me, taken as a whole, I think Quark/4 is a big success, with numerous stories that are worth reading, several of which have only ever appeared in this volume.  If literary SF is your thing, it is well worth worth picking up if you can get it as cheap as I did, especially if you have a particular interest in McIntyre, Davidson, or Platt.

1972 (1969?) stories by Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, David Gerrold, Vonda McIntyre & Gardner Dozois

Did the Half-Price Books employee
deliberately put the price sticker over
the figure's face?

I've been trying to resist the urge to buy more books, but I got a gift card for Half-Price Books for Christmas and, when I went shopping for Kinks CDs to help make more tolerable all the driving that is an inevitable part of post-NYC life, I couldn't resist Generation, a 1972 anthology showcasing "new stars of science fiction" edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin.  (You'll remember I read Gerrold and Goldin's 1974 anthology Alternities, and that I have enjoyed four or five novels by Gerrold and two by Goldin.)  Not only do we have here an absorbing and crazy Robert Foster cover, but rarely-reprinted stories by Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg which I have never read, and numerous stories by other interesting writers.  

On the Acknowledgments page Gerrold gives us a hint of the odd history of Generation, saying it was assembled in 1969, but publication was delayed by unspecified problems (problems he takes care to say were not due to Dell, the publisher) until 1972.

Going in to Generation I assumed I would be facing very "New Wavey" stories.  In his introduction Gerrold takes pains to call the volume a collection of "speculative fiction," tells us that the best SF writers are no longer "preoccupied with science and scientists," but instead write about "what it means to be a human being," and that SF is no longer "content merely to entertain."  Gerrold admits that some "writers are still doing the space operas," but they "don't count," they are "no longer where it's at."  I find this needlessly hostile attitude a little irritating, and especially puzzling coming from Gerrold and Goldin--the books I have read by them, like Gerrold's Deathbeast, Yesterday's Children and A Matter for Men and Goldin's A World Called Solitude and Assault on the Gods, are full of entertaining battles involving monsters, laser guns, robots and space ships.  I also have the strong impression that Gerrold and Goldin are fans of old timey writers like Heinlein, van Vogt and "Doc" Smith.

More congenial is Harlan Ellison's back cover blurb, in which he subtly pooh poohs the idea of a collective "New Wave" and instead focuses on the fact that each writer is an individual talent.  In the past I have commented that one of the things I like about Ellison is that, while he has that angry young man thing going and is associated with pushing the envelope and encouraging innovative writing, he still has nice things to say about the writers of the past, people like A. E. van Vogt (whom he righteously championed as a candidate for the title of Grand Master), Poul Anderson, Edmond Hamilton, and L. Ron Hubbard.  You don't always have to tear down the old in order to build something new.

Enough preamble, let's check out stories in Generation by Wolfe, Malzberg, and Gerrold, as well as Vonda McIntyre and Gardner Dozois, and see if they are good representatives of the "fresh young talent" of 1969.

"It's Very Clean" by Gene Wolfe

Miles is a cultured young man (he reads Gunter Grass) and a virgin who has saved up a lot of money so he can go to a brothel where the whores are robots.  You probably remember that I've said Wolfe is my favorite writer, so you are not going to be surprised when I tell you that Wolfe very skillfully sets the scene and evokes our anxieties about our first sexual experiences and such socially and psychologically fraught practices as masturbation and prostitution.  And that the surprise ending actually surprised me. But what I say is true, this is another hit by the master.

"It's Very Clean" was published a second time in the 1996 anthology Cybersex, which has a hideously flat and busy computer-generated cover.  From Richard Powers, Robert Foster, Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta to this?  Sad!

"Vidi Vici Veni" by Barry Malzberg

This story is so outrageous that I am reluctant to tell you it made me laugh until I cried.  But I can't lie to my public--this story is hilarious!

"Vidi Vici Veni" (the title is a joke for all you classics scholars out there) is a cold and dispassionate government report about the sex crimes of a "supervising maintenance operator" at a "tool and die plant."  (Full disclosure: Your humble blogger spent some months working on and off in a machine shop doing tool and die work in the late '80s and early '90s.)  The actual meat of the plot is sort of obliquely described, but it appears that the main character's work generated in him an irresistible sexual desire, which he satisfied not only with his wife, not only with a very surprised male stranger (yes, this story is in part a joke about rape) but then with sundry inanimate objects, including pipes and furniture.  The punchline of the story is that his activities become famous and, if I am reading the obscure text rightly, that America is swept by a mass movement of people who have sex with inanimate objects.

Maybe this story is a sort of lament that our modern society has become so mechanistic and we have become so alienated from our fellow humans that we can more readily feel for manufactured items than each other. Whatever the serious intent of the story, if any, it is so funny it gave me physical pain. If you are the kind of person who won't be offended by a joke in which a male rape victim tells the police, "it was more the surprise than the other thing; if I hadn't felt so depersonalized I might have enjoyed it," I recommend it highly.

(It would be great if somebody else who has read this would confirm my interpretation or provide an alternate one--the story really is opaque and tricky.)

"Vidi Vici Veni" has only been printed once in English, but was translated into French and included in a 1976 volume with a cigarette-smoking frog on the cover!  Zut alors!

"All of Them Were Empty" by David Gerrold

Gerrold, in his long intro to this story, says it is "a favorite child," one of his best stories.  He also tells us he wrote it while high on drugs, and didn't revise it--the first draft was the final draft!

"All of Them Were Empty" is a first-person narrative, delivered by Deet, a guy who smokes a lot of pot, drops acid, uses mescaline, and says things like "Doors like hungry mouths pulled at us," and "Cars like giant panthers prowled the night streets, rolling silent-rumbly through dark-lit intersections and wet gutter bottoms."  Deet is looking for a new high, but is afraid of heroin, so when he hears about a place offering "a new kick" he braves the "hungry mouths" and panther-like automobiles and makes his way through the city streets to the source of this new high, dragging his girlfriend Woozle ("She had sucking eyes") along.

In a narrow apartment two girls sell them the new kick.  Deet and Woozle strip naked and spread goop from a jar all over each others' bodies.  (This sounds like one of the oldest of the old kicks, but be patient.)  Thanks to the goop, when Deet and Woozle hold hands they fly out into space, growing bigger and bigger until they dwarf the Milky Way and approach the limits of the universe.  Then they shrink and return to Earth, but somewhere along the way Deet lost Woozle, and when he gets back to the narrow apartment everyone is gone.

This is quite bad, with a pointless plot and a style that is annoying, not only long and tedious, but weighted down by repellant "experimental" techniques which consist of mind-numbing repetition.  But I guess it strikes a chord with some people; "All of Them Were Empty" was not only included in the Gerrold collection With a Finger in My I, but would later appear in an anthology devoted entirely to stories about drug use, Spaced Out.

"The Galactic Clock" by V. N. McIntyre

I thought McIntyre's stories "Only at Night" and "Recourse, Inc." were effective; and had hopes that "The Galactic Clock," which I believe has never appeared in any other publication, would be equally enjoyable.  My hopes were not realized.

"The Galactic Clock" is a long tedious story that consists almost entirely of obvious jokes.  Elroy Farnsworth is an academic who has bad luck.  When he drives he hits every red light.  When he walks he hits every "Don't Walk" sign.  When he puts important papers in the mail they arrive at their destination one day late and so he misses out on an important opportunity.  When he applies for a job the other applicant is a beautiful woman and the person doing the hiring is a lecher; another big opportunity missed. Page after page (21 in total!) of these kinds of jokes, jokes which are not actually bad, but which don't actually make you laugh, either.

As for plot, the plot is just one of the jokes writ large, an example of this dude suffering some misfortune.  I am going to have to give this one a marginal negative vote--it is not a crime like the Gerrold, but it is a pedestrian waste of the reader's time.

"Conditioned Reflex" by Gardner Dozois

Here's another piece which, I believe, has not appeared elsewhere.

"Conditioned Reflex" relates the thoughts of infantrymen as they await the approach of enemy troops, reminiscing about their childhoods, regretting never having had children, expressing disbelief that death could come in just a few minutes, and so forth.  It is suggested that these soldiers may be among the very last human beings alive, and the impending battle may be the very last of a war that will destroy all of humanity.  Dozois uses the story to muse about the possibility that mankind is reflexively and inherently, destructive, or that society has conditioned people to be destructive.

Back cover of my copy of Generation

This story is vulnerable to the charge that it is melodramatic and overwrought, and that it has no real plot.  I liked it anyway; the soldier's thoughts were all quite believable, even affecting, and the story is well-written, just the right length, and it kept my interest. Thumbs up!

**********

The Malzberg story in Generation is one of the funniest things I have ever read, and all on its own generously repays my two dollars. The Wolfe is quite good, and the Dozois is solid.  The McIntyre is competent, but it is sterile, having no emotional intellectual impact.  The Gerrold is surprisingly bad.

Generation's 25 stories include pieces by Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch and Ed Bryant, writers I have some familiarity with, and two by the famous "James Tiptree, Jr.," a writer whom I hope to start reading soon. We will definitely be coming back to Generation.

Final Alternities: 1974 stories by Greg Bear, Vonda McIntyre, E. Michael Blake, Duane Ackerson, and Lee Saye

To me, the biggest name in Alternities is Barry Malzberg.  (Ed Bryant was also a draw.)  But by an objective measure, like sales, Greg Bear and Vonda McIntyre are probably bigger names to the SF world at large than our pal Barry.  Can either Bear or McIntyre produce a story that will prove 1974's Alternities is something more than a collection of odd trivialities and childish dick jokes that is perfectly calibrated to offend prudes, feminists and the LGBT crowd?

"Webster" by Greg Bear

I haven't read anything by prolific author Bear, but today that Bearless period ends, as we examine "Webster."  "Webster" was never picked up by any other anthologies, but it was included in several collections of Bear's work.

Bear immediately tries to get me on his side by mentioning Roy Chapman Andrews in the first paragraph of this story.  One of my very first book-related memories is of reading In the Days of the Dinosaurs with Nana, my maternal grandmother.  This story actually has little if anything to do with Andrews or dinosaurs, though the reference to Andrews' pioneering discovery of dinosaur eggs does foreshadow a strange birth and discovery in the story.

Regina Abigail Costes is a fifty-year-old virgin living in a small apartment, lonely and horny, her only companions her books, most prominent of which are a Bible and a dictionary. She dreams of having a man, and hits upon the idea of magically conjuring forth a man from the dictionary! Tall and handsome, the man, whom she names Webster ("Johnson" would have been funnier, but maybe wouldn't work in the story's 20th-century American context) has sex with "Abbie." The next morning she bursts out onto the street and says "I know...what all you other women know."  The clouds and the sky tell her "Breathe deeply.  You're part of the world now. The real world." (Bear really goes in for this sort of overwritten romanticism.)  Apparently Abbie (and maybe even Bear?) hasn't heard that a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle and thinks a woman is not complete without a sexual relationship with a man.

Webster can't go outside, doesn't eat, and he and Abbie have nothing to talk about. Their relationship pales after a few weeks, Abbie even buying a gun, wondering if Webster would survive being shot. For his part, Webster acquires a dictionary of his own, likely to create a woman with whom he has something in common. In the end of the story, more or less by mutual consent, Webster is dispelled and Abbie heads to the bookstore, I guess to get a different book to conjure a different man?  The last line of the story is "She had her choice now."  This ending is a bit confusing to me; didn't she just learn that love with a golem or simulacrum or whatever word we want to use was impossible, that such relationships are unsatisfying? Let's be optimistic and believe she is going to the bookstore to try to date up one of the customers or clerks, not get material needed to conjure up Mr. Darcy or Heathcliff or Odysseus.

I think the plot and themes here are good, but Bear's style, especially at the start of the story, is long winded, overwrought, and heavy-handed.  Still, I'll judge this one marginally recommendable.

"Recourse, Inc." by Vonda N. McIntyre

In 2014 I read McIntyre's "Only at Night" and thought it quite good, and "Elfleda" and thought it just OK.  Let's see what we make of this one, which would reappear in the 1979 collection, Fireflood and Other Stories.

"Recourse, Inc." tells a story with a series of documents, first an advertisement, then a bunch of letters and telegrams.  A man with psychological problems was told by his therapist to start using credit cards in order to gain confidence(!)  One of the banks whose card he has is overcharging him, either due to computer error or criminal intent, sending threatening collection letters for huge amounts.  Recourse, Inc. is a sort of A-Team of people on the edge of the law (former green terrorists, it is implied) that comes to the aid of those harried by collection agencies and fraudulent businesses.  Through correspondence we follow their efforts to get the disturbed man restitution and punish the bank; they try legal means, contacting the government (North America in the story's setting appears to consist of numerous largely autonomous states under a relatively weak federal government), computer hacking (is this 1974 reference a pioneering depiction of attacking a computer over the phone lines?), and eventually resort to breaking and entering.          

One of the story's themes, I think, is the idea that late-20th-century (North) American society, which seems so stable compared to societies of the past and of other regions of the world, is in fact resting on a shaky foundation.  If the computers all go kablooey, or all the oil is suddenly eaten by bacteria--and in this story such things seem very possible--we are in serious trouble!  In the world of "Resource, Inc." governments and other people and institutions with authority or power, including scientists, psychologists, and businesses, are incompetent and/or untrustworthy.

I don't like the plot any more than the plot of Bear's story, but McIntyre's execution is much better; the story is economical, with each sentence adding to the story, each sentence in the voice of a character.  There is no fat, no fluff.  "Recourse, Inc." is a strong contender for the title of "Best Story in Alternities."

"The Legend of Lonnie and the Seven-Ten Split" by E. Michael Blake

True story: Once the academic department where I worked in Manhattan took some of the public monies (meant to finance public policy research) with which we were entrusted and used them to go bowling.  This is called "a team-building exercise." None of us was a regular bowler, and so, by employing the tactic of violently hurling the ball down the lane with all the strength I could muster, I won the title of best bowler in our office of depressed slackers, arrogant hipsters, and committed bolshevists.

Blake has 11 fiction credits at ISFDB and a brief look at his livejournal page suggests his SF-related work is meant to be funny and includes cartoons and skits.

Twenty-year-old Lonnie is the best bowler in the overcrowded America of the future, where almost every square mile is covered in "Urban Complexes."  Except for the five kilometers around Las Vegas (known as "LaVe"), a city of sinful pleasure operated by the "Satan-Mephistopheles-Diablo Holding Company."  Most who enter LaVe do not return, but those who do escape become legends, and Lonnie seeks to become just such a legend.

This is one of many stories about making a deal with the Devil and/or competing with the Devil, like in that 1979 song, "The Devil Went Down to Georgia."  Instead of competing in a violin competition, Lonnie bowls against the Devil.  Lonnie is an expert practical physicist (Blake edited Nuclear News and includes lots of references and jokes about such topics as probability curves, electrons, and Karl Schwartzchild), able to bowl a strike without fail after learning the nooks and crannies of an alley. Lonnie wins his bet with the Devil, and is even clever enough to escape the city when the Devil tries to badger him into joining up with Satan-Mephistopheles-Diablo Holding Company; the SMD offers high salaries and easy women, but Lonnie has seen how working at such a firm can destroy a man's body and soul.

This story actually fits the old fashioned SF model of a guy succeeding because he is clever and cunning and knows all kinds of hard science and engineering jazz.  It also fits right in in Alternities with its juvenile sex joke--the guy who runs the bowling alley in LaVe bears a curse which limits his sexual activities to intercourse with the finger holes of bowling balls, and poor Lonnie has to witness just such a performance.

Mildly entertaining.  Blake has no collections listed at isfdb, and "The Legend of Lonnie and the Seven-Ten Split" never appeared elsewhere, though personally I think it would be quite suitable for an anthology of 20th-century stories about the Devil, or of SF/F stories about sports.  I assume there must have there been such anthologies. 

"Sign at the End of the Universe" by Duane Ackerson

Anything I write about this story will be longer than the story itself:

Maybe this story is about how arbitrary our points of reference and points of view are.  Or maybe the point of the story is that our world, so full of crime and war and heartbreak, is the exact opposite of what it should be.

A silly and gimmicky piece, but if we choose to judge the stories in Alternities on an efficiency basis, this one isn't bad.  Ackerson has only six fiction credits at isfdb, but many poetry credits.

"No Room for the Wanderer" by Lee Saye

Saye has four stories listed at isfdb.

I like art, and I like fiction, and I like poetry, but the self-importance and pretension of some creative people can really make me roll my eyes. "Art is work" and "Art is not a luxury" and that sort of thing. As if life for smart educated people wasn't already easy enough in our welfare state society in which the taxpayers are subsidizing the library, the museum, the opera, the university, et al, creative types turn around and tell the farmers, truck drivers, mechanics, electricians, plumbers and police officers that keep our society from collapsing into starvation and mass violence that those productive types couldn't survive without the artistes' daubs and scribbles--the parasite mistaking itself for the host!

Saye's story is about a poet with a degree in English literature who seeks to volunteer for a place on a starship headed for a new colony on an alien planet. When he is told that the colony is only accepting people with technical or scientific skills, or tourists who can pay their own way ("We're starting a whole new civilization out there and we need mechanics and engineers.  I'm sorry."), the poet says "You're building a whole new civilization with technology, but there's no room for the poet.  I'm sorry for your civilization."  This jackass looks down on any civilization that lacks his own divine presence!

Besides the obvious fact that it makes sense for pioneers in a hostile wilderness to have technical skills and not waste resources shipping an unproductive person across a bazillion miles of space, it is ridiculous to think that people with technical training cannot create a vibrant and satisfying artistic and literary culture. Lots of artists and writers, particularly in the SF field, have had science or engineering degrees, and/or held real 9 to 5 jobs.

I'm not sure if the protagonist of "No Room for the Wanderer" is expressing the author's own view, or if we are supposed to think the poet is being absurd. Either way, this story is well-written and thought provoking, and I'm giving it a passing grade.

***********

It is with some surprise that I report that all five of these stories from Alternities are worthwhile.  Our first two expeditions among its pages were a bit rocky, but today's tales raise the average of the volume to an acceptable level.  Gerrold and Goldin didn't sell us a pig in a poke after all.

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.                  

1950s stories from Algis Budrys, Arthur C. Clarke and Theodore Sturgeon

Triskaidekaphobics beware!  Today we are looking at Groff Conklin's 1960 collection of 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction!  It doesn't say so on the cover (sneaky, sneaky), but this is a themed anthology.  In his introduction to the book Conklin tells us that the stories in this volume are all about inventions of one kind or another.  But he assures us that there are no stories about time machines, which Conklin thinks have "become almost tiresomely commonplace in recent years."

13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction, Gold Medal number d1444, includes stories by writers I have never read, or even heard of, before, but I thought I'd start with three major SF figures: Algis Budrys (author of Rogue Moon, and, as Thomas Disch put it, late in his life a full time employee of Scientology), Arthur C. Clarke (one of the "Big Three"), and Ted Sturgeon (famous for his stories about homicidal bulldozers, collective consciousness, and incest.)

"The War is Over" by Algis Budrys (1957)

Budrys receives considerable acclaim from his fellow science fiction writers, but I was quite disappointed in his famous Rogue Moon.  Maybe this story will help change my mind about Budrys?

"The War is Over" first appeared in Astounding in February 1957.

This is a pretty good story.  We witness a race of aliens building a space ship at terrible cost; they spend all their resources constructing the vessel, even though they barely know what they are doing or why they are doing it.  Workers are dying from exhaustion in droves building this thing!  These people seem to instinctively, but not intellectually, know how to build a ship; after many generations have passed and the ship is built, one of them pilots it purely on instinct.  He encounters the Terran Space Navy, and we learn that the entire race of aliens is descended from a single genetically engineered courier creature developed by Earth scientists centuries ago.  This creature was programmed to deliver messages at any cost, and, hundreds of years behind schedule, its descendants have finally gotten the message through to Earthmen.  Unfortunately, nobody cares about the message, which is the report of the signing of a peace treaty ending a war none of the Earth naval officers even remember.

Entertaining.

"Silence, Please" by Arthur C. Clarke (1950)

Cronklin tells us that this story, published under a pseudonym in the British magazine Science Fantasy, was later reworked to be the opening story of Clarke's 1957 collection Tales from the White Hart.

This story is OK.  It is about scientists and businessmen in a late 20th century England with aircars and that sort of thing and centers on the rivalry of two firms that make money by developing and/or manufacturing electronic inventions.  The antagonist firm, Sir Roderick Fenton's Fenton Enterprises, gets a hold of a valuable patent for a calculator that the protagonist firm, Electron Products, wants.  To get the calculator patent back and achieve revenge, first, the lead scientist at Electron Products (he is known as "The Professor") develops a device that cancels out soundwaves and thus causes silence in a certain radius.  (The radius depends on the size and power of the device, and in theory is very extensive.)  Without letting Fenton know who invented it, the Professor makes sure Fenton buys the silencer device's patent, and then Electron uses that money to buy the calculator patent from Fenton.        

Then comes the revenge part of the plan.  By consulting a social psychologist who, suspiciously like Isaac Asimov's Hari Seldon, can use math (he's got a "square matrix with about one hundred columns" that "express the properties of any society") to predict societal developments, the Professor knows that the silencer will be used for anti-social purposes and become a PR nightmare for its manufacturers.  Fenton mass produces the silencer, its prestige and stock valuations plummet, and eventually Electron Products buys the patent for the silencer for cheap; the Professor knows he can manufacture it in such a way that criminals and malcontents won't be able to abuse it.

Not bad.  This is one of those SF stories which is really about science and technology, glorifies science and scientists.  Clarke tries to make it funny (I wonder if the competitor is called "Sir Roderick" as an homage to the Rodericks who serve as foils for Bertie Wooster), and while I didn't actually laugh, the jokes were understated and were not annoying.  

Cover illustrates some other story

"The Skills of Xanadu" by Theodore Sturgeon (1956)

Ted is the kind of guy that writes utopias that denounce our society for being too individualistic or having too many taboos.  "The Skills of Xanadu," which first appeared in Galaxy, is just such a story.  It is the far future, Sol has gone nova and the human race is spread all over the galaxy, developing into different cultures.

A man (from planet Kit Carson) loaded down with armor and concealed weapons lands on a planet (Xanadu) inhabited by people who run around practically naked, and Sturgeon uses this scenario to tediously contrast the two different societies.  The bad imperial society has skyscrapers and walls, locks and doors; in the good native society people live in transparent forest huts with no interior walls.  On Kit Carson people don't just have sex and take a dump in private, they actually eat alone; on Xanadu the people urinate and evacuate in full view of everybody.  The Xanadu people are in constant telepathic contact with each other, they all have the same skills and social position, and they have practically no government.  There is no scarcity on Xandau; the people just effortlessly produce whatever they want whenever they want it; they build the Kit Carson guy a house to his specifications in minutes.  

Eventually the man from Kit Carson learns that the miraculous abilities of the natives come from their belts.  He obtains a belt and returns to Kit Carson, where the belts are duplicated and mass produced; the Kit Carson government hopes to use the powers of the belts to conquer the galaxy.  But when the people of Kit Carson put on the belts and gain all the skills of the people of Xanadu their whole social structure peacefully collapses to be replaced by a Xanadu-style culture of anarchistic collectivist egalitarianism.

This story is lame; there is little plot or character, no tension or surprise, it's like a three page essay on what Ted thinks the perfect society would be stretched out to 26 pages, or like a Dr. Suess book with no whimsical rhymes or drawings.  I recently praised Vonda McIntyre's story "Only at Night," which I think could be read as an attack on, or at least a lament about, aspects of our society, for showing instead of telling.  "The Skills of Xanadu," which is like seven times as long as "Only at Night," feels like telling, telling again, telling some more, then telling you one last time just in case.

I might also note that, if my memory is not failing me, the structure of this story is almost the same as Sturgeon's novel Venus Plus X and his story in Dangerous Visions, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

I generally find these kind of hortatory and tendentious stories irritating, but people must like them; Sturgeon got top billing in Galaxy for this tale and his name is top of the list on this edition of 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction.  (British editions have Wyndham and Clarke at the head of the list.)

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Well, I wouldn't call any of these stories "great," but two of them were pleasant.

In our next episode, I'll take a look at fiction in 13 Great Stories of Science-Fiction by authors who are more obscure than the Hugo and Nebula winners and nominees who wrote today's tales.

Clarion stories by Vonda N. McIntyre, Octavia E. Butler, and Glen Cook

Vonda N. McIntyre, Octavia E. Butler, and Glen Cook all achieved some measure of critical and commercial success in the years after their participation in the 1970 Clarion Writers' Workshop.  Each of these writers has one of her or his Clarion Workshop stories in the 1971 anthology Clarion, and this weekend I read them.  Is their later success presaged in these early works?

"Only at Night" by Vonda McIntyre
The New American Library financed prizes for the top three stories at the Clarion workshop, and McIntyre won the second place prize with her story "Spectra."  "Spectra" does not appear in Clarion (it appeared in 1972 in Orbit 11) but McIntyre is represented in Clarion by her tale "Only at Night."  Editor Robin Scott Wilson tells us that "only a woman could have written a story as sensitive as this one," and that he envies women such sensitivity.

"Only at Night" is a first person narrative (in the present tense we see so often in "literary" short stories) of a nurse who has the lonely night shift in a ward occupied by children with incapacitating birth defects.  Being alone with these children is depressing and even dangerous, as at least one is exceptionally strong and can be violent, but the narrator would rather be in the ward at night, because during the day she would have to interact with the callous and selfish parents who have abandoned these children.  It is suggested that those who would abandon their own children are less human and more monstrous than the babies who lack limbs or brains or eyes who populate the ward.  The story seems to be an indictment of the way individuals and society would rather not deal with, not even see, the least fortunate among us.

The story is quite effective; McIntyre uses a direct style, short sentences, and shows rather than tells.  Fiction about this subject matter could easily feel manipulative, or schmaltzy, or hectoring, but McIntyre avoids those pitfalls. This is probably the best story I have yet read in Clarion; "Wheels" by Thurston is its only competition, and "Only at Night" tackles new and different material, while "Wheels" is about typical stuff (car chases, urban violence, race relations) you read about all the time.

I've never read anything by McIntyre before; if this is a representative sample of her work maybe I should seek out more of her short fiction. (Both "Only at Night" and "Spectra" appear in the collection, Fireflood and Other Stories.)

"Crossover" by Octavia Estelle Butler
This is a competent mainstream story about a woman with a sad, dangerous life.  She works in a factory where the other workers resent her, she lives in a neighborhood where drunks and punks harass her, and she has a boyfriend who gets into fights and has just returned from a 90-day stint in jail.  She has considered suicide and at the end of the story, following the example of the drunks she has lived among "most of her life," she decides to get drunk to forget her problems.  Of course, it looks like turning to the booze will only worsen her situation.

"Crossover" isn't a science fiction story, but it has characters, a plot, and memorable images, and doesn't waste your time with bad jokes or confusing "literary" experiments, in contrast to some of the Clarion stories I have been reading.  I've never read anything by Butler before, and this story leaves me with a good impression of her.

"Crossover" was reprinted in 1995 in Bloodchild and Other Stories.

"Song From A Forgotten Hill" by Glen Cook
I've read 12 novels by Glen Cook, two of which (The Black Company and The Silver Spike) I really enjoyed.  The rest were sort of forgettable, though most of them were entertaining.

"Song From a Forgotten Hill" is set in a post-apocalyptic future.  Nuclear war between the United States and the Soviet Union killed all the white liberals (the Soviet missiles targeted the cities where they lived) and was followed by a civil war in America between the surviving whites ("rednecks") and blacks.  The rednecks won the civil war and enslaved most of the blacks.  The story describes how one of the last free black families, hiding in a cave, is discovered by a party of white hunters and destroyed.

This is an uninteresting anti-racism and anti-war story.  It is competently, but unremarkably, written, the characters feel like archetypes or stereotypes, and nothing about the story is surprising or challenging. I guess I would grade it "barely acceptable."

"Song From a Forgotten Hill" returned to print in 2012 in the collection Winter's Dreams.

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It is certainly nice to read three stories that are not bad; Clarion is looking better.  I guess I shouldn't be surprised that the three most famous people with fiction in Clarion contributed some of the best stories. There are still a dozen stories in the anthology I haven't read, most by people I have never even heard of, and I have to consider if I will give them a try.