Orbit 13: Lafferty, Bryant, Sallis, Grant, Etchison and Dozois

At the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books, on the clearance carts, I recently spotted a volume entitled Speaking of Science Fiction, a collection of interviews of SF writers and editors conducted during the 1970s via the mail  mail by Paul Walker.  I was interested in the book, but I am incredibly cheap and so instead of buying it I found the scan of it at the internet archive and flipped through it while riding the subway (which in D.C. they call the Metro--oh la la!)

One Paul Walker's interviewees is Damon Knight, and one of the main topics of the interview is Knight's famous series of anthologies of original stories, Orbit.  (Knight also does his husbandly duty, gushing praise for his second wife Kate Wilhelm, talks up the Clarion workshop, and admits that his famous attack on A. E. van Vogt in In Search of Wonder was one-sided and he wishes he had "included something about vV's strong points.")  Orbit, Knight writes, "represents an attempt to bring about a renaissance in science fiction by demanding high standards and giving a lot in return--high rates, prompt reports, courteous treatment, etc."  He says that improving the quality of SF requires "redefining the field" and "letting go of rigid conceptions of what science fiction is;" he argues that "booms for quality" in the past have been the product of editors who have done just that, citing "Tremaine in the mid-thirties, Campbell from '37 to '42," and "Gold and Boucher in the early 50's."  With Orbit, Knight claims, he is not "editing to strict ideas of subject and content," but is "keeping the boundaries fluid" and publishing lots of work on the "fringe of science fiction" or even beyond it that surprise him.  At the same time, and perhaps most interestingly, he asserts that "Orbit has never had anything to do with the stylistic experimentation of the New Worlds/New Wave scene."  I am often struck by how nobody can agree on what the New Wave is or what it was all about. 

The listing of "Gene Wolf" on the cover of the paperback edition is a mistake;
Gary K. Wolf appears in the anthology, not Gene Wolfe.  The promise of 
editorial notes and personal commentary also seems to be a mistake--
at least there is no such additional matter in the scan at isfdb, just two pages of
jokey biographies at the end of the book; in his interview with Walker,
Knight discusses why he stopped composing intros and "blurbs" for Orbit.

Reading this interview has made me want to read some Orbit stories, so I again turn to the internet archive, this time to take a look at Orbit 13 (lucky!) from 1974.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we recognize all too well that life is short, and so we won't be reading all 240 pages of Orbit 13, just cherry-picking stories by writers we already have a particular interest in.  I guess this goes against Knight's whole open-minded, innovation-privileging, no-set-ideas, aim-to-push-the-boundaries mindset, but that's how it is.

"And Name My Name" by R. A. Lafferty 

We start off with a story the superiority of which was endorsed by another important SF editor; after its debut here in Orbit 13, "And Name My Name" was selected by Lester del Rey for inclusion in the 1975 edition of his Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year series.  The tale has since appeared in Lafferty collections.

"And Name my Name" posits a bizarre secret history of the world in which the Earth has been successively ruled by different classes or orders of animals: elephants, sharks, whales, crocodilians, etc.  In their time of primacy the ruling beasts have speech, art, even wear clothes, but when they are supplanted by the next rulers, lose these abilities and attributes and become dumb animals.  All except a small elite of seven or nine of their number, immortal representatives of their order at its height.  As the story (15 pages) begins, the seven elite apes, drawn from all across the world, are travelling to a conclave of all the sophisticated elites representing all the past rulers, because the times they are a-changing.  After we have been introduced to the ape delegation, we encounter the seven elite individuals who represent the current rulers of Earth, the human race.  At the big meeting in Mesopotamia a shining man appears; able to bend space and time he treats with each delegation separately but also simultaneously.  He assigns all the different species their roles in the new age, a process referred to as "telling them their names," and the members of the human delegation are pretty discomfited to learn they have no real name beyond "secondary ape" and to hear their culture of towering cities, nuclear reactors and space ships, dismissed out of hand by the shining man, judged less admirable than the hives of termites or the song of the mockingbird.  What will replace the human race that is about to be reduced to dumb animals as its civilization is swept away ,is left to the reader's imagination, but all the non-human characters seem sure it will be an improvement on humanity!

This is a good, fun story, and I think it fulfills Knight's ambitions for Orbit--it is innovative, throwing a new and crazy idea at you, and it is on the fringes of standard definitions of science fiction, seeing as it totally ignores all accepted science around biology and paleontology and all that and replaces it not with speculative science but what is a sort of religious view or just a fairy tale that casts the human race as inferior to the birds and the bees.  At the same time, the story is in direct dialogue with quintessential mainstream SF, as some of the human characters refer to Arthur C. Clarke stories by name. 

Good on Lafferty for producing a good story and good on Knight for publishing it.  Thumbs up!  

"Going West" by Edward Bryant

Looking at the records, it seems that 15 stories by Edward Bryant have been subjected to the sometimes pitiless, generally myopic and always erratic MPorcius microscope, plus the novel Bryant coauthored with bad boy Harlan Ellison, Phoenix Without Ashes, which you might call a piece of shrapnel or a submunition thrown off by one of Ellison's many explosive collisions with Hollywood.  While there are some clunkers among those fifteen, Bryant is a serious writer and his stories are generally thoughtful and ambitious (for one thing he seems to write a lot about various "marginalized communities," e. g., women, blacks, Hispanics, and homosexuals, which is sort of risky and interesting), and they are often effective, so we have reason to hope "Going West" will be a good story.   

"Going West" is indeed a good psychological horror/crime story, a character study and biography of a guy whose unhappy life drives him to trespass against the law and others; I guess you could call "Going West" an attack on our society, argue it suggests that American foreign policy and American racism created a monster out of the main character and that all the empty highways and congested interchanges in the story represent the loneliness and chaos of our individualistic culture of strivers and our complex capitalist economy.  (The title itself is a clue that the story is about America writ large, "going west" being a sort of quintessential theme of American history.) 

Lindsey was raised on the East coast by a single mother, his father having been killed in Cambodia.  Mom was cold and distant, and little Lindsey didn't make friends and was pretty maladjusted.  For example, he came to adore the school buses, to think of them as living animals, and was traumatized when activists angry about busing blew up one of the buses while it sat in a parking lot.

In college Lindsey's bicycle was repeatedly vandalized and eventually stolen.  After graduation, Mom got Lindsey a job at an accounting firm, owned by a Lindsay and his son.  The fourth man at Lindsay, Lindsay, Lindsey and Veach was an aggressive homosexual who kept irritating shy and sad Lindsey, flirting with him and advising him to see a shrink he knew who was a "pussycat."  

Lindsey started having some kind of breakdown, which the senior Lindsay recognized, so he gave Lindsey some time off, and Lindsey is now driving to Los Angeles with no fixed reason to do so in mind, other than to get away from home, where he assaulted the doctor recommended by Veach.  As he drives he becomes progressively more insane, and we readers are privy to what appear to be hallucinations as well as memories, each of which may or may not be false, of people and of conversations--we cannot be sure that anything Lindsey sees or hears or remembers is real.  There are also allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice.  In the story's climax it seems Lindsey dies after driving off a highway overpass, victim of his hallucinations or a death trap in a through-the-looking-glass universe of murderous highways.  

As I have told you a hundred times I miss living in New York City and one of the things I miss is never  having to drive--I hate driving and all the attendant risks and responsibilities, worrying about the car's tires and oil and fuel and all that.  Because I am from New Jersey and my wife is from the Middle West and has family who have fled the Northern winters for the balmy South I find myself on many long road trips, driving hundreds and hundreds of miles up and down the East coast and back and forth between Washington D.C. and the rural Heartland.  So, I found Bryant's descriptions of the experience of driving for hours and hours and then trying to navigate a complicated series of junctions quite compelling.  The horror stuff in "Going West" is suitably sad and disgusting, and while the story is something of a puzzle, told out of chronological order and full of surreal sections, it is not hard to figure out.      

So, thumbs up for "Going West."  As a psychological horror story it is certainly on the fringes of, or even outside, conventional definitions of science fiction, though maybe the magical realist ending qualifies it as "SF."  According to isfdb, "Going West" has never been reprinted; too bad.   

*"Sending the Very Best," "The Soft Blue Rabbit Story," "Shark," "Pinup," "Road to Cinnabar," "Audition: Soon to Be a Major Production," "Strata," "Dancing Chickens," "Cowboys, Indians," "Nova Morning," "Beside Still Waters," "In the Silent World," "Dark Angel," "Jody After the War," and "Black Onyx"

"My Friend Zarathustra" by James Sallis

I've read eight or nine stories* by James Sallis over the course of this blog's tempestuous life and I have not liked many of them; in fact, I think I have denounced half of them as a waste of the reader's time.  I am just reading this one because it is a mere three pages long and because I wanted to say that seeing the name "Zarathustra" in print always makes me think of Roxy Music's "Mother of Pearl."

This is one of those stories by a writer that is about being a writer, how hard it is, how you hang around with other mentally unstable creative people who cry and vomit all the time and sometimes commit suicide.  It is vague.  Some of it is written in the first person, some in the third person; some is in past tense, some in present tense.  There are lots of images of stuff like the sunrise and neon signs.  The plot, such as it is, is about how the narrator's girlfriend left him for a friend.  The last paragraph seems to be evoking scenes of the torch-wielding villagers who come to the castle at the end of movies about Dr. Frankenstein, perhaps suggesting that writers, painters, musicians, etc., are like mad scientists who take risks, break the rules, and sacrifice others to bring about new life, new life that is sometimes twisted and destructive and arouses the enmity of the populace.  

Pretentious goop that goes nowhere and is eminently forgettable.  "My Friend Zarathustra" would reappear in Sallis's 1995 collection Limits of the Sensible World.

*"Field," "Tissue," "The First Few Kinds of Truth," "Delta Flight 481," "They Will Not Hush," "Faces and Hands," "Binaries" and "Only the Words are Different"

"Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" by Charles L. Grant

Charles L. Grant is the "quiet horror" guy.  If isfdb is to be believed, "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" has never been reprinted, so if you are a Grant completist, it is time for you to hit up ebay and drop two or three sawbucks for a copy of Orbit 13.

There was a nuclear war recently, and almost everybody is dead.  A man and a woman meet at a seaside amusement park, both of these thin and haggard victims of radiation sickness who vomit all the time have independently come to the beach because they have happy memories of the place.  "Everybody a Winner, the Barker Cried" chronicles the first few hours they spend together, during which they fall in love.  As a college kid the man worked on the boardwalk, running a wheel of fortune, and says the line that serves as the story's title, and then remarks that the game is "fixed."  I suppose we are expected to see this as symbolism that our lives are similarly rigged by the existence of nuclear weapons.  The man is resourceful and has got generators running so the two can ride the decrepit ferris wheel.  (Feminists will groan at how the man saves the woman when she gets in trouble, picks her up when she falls, cooks the food, fixes broken machinery, and is a total gentleman who doesn't molest the woman, while the woman mostly cries and worries about her looks and obviously needs a boyfriend more than any fish ever needed a bicycle.)  Riding the ferris wheel offers these two ferris-wheel-lovers hallucinations of their happier days, and they decide to find a boat and sail to Coney Island to ride the much bigger ferris wheel there.  The end of the story is sort of ambiguous, with notes of hope as well as the pervasive idea that they are likely to die at any moment of their radiation sickness. 

Acceptable.  This is more mainstream science fiction than some of our other Orbit 13 reads, consisting of speculation of how people will react if there is a nuclear war, though the focus is on nostalgia and sadness and a human relationship than rebuilding civilization or something like that.    

"Black Sun" by Dennis Etchison

I've been impressed by many of the Etchison stories I have read, like "Daughters of the Golden West," "It Only Comes Out at Night." and "Wet Season"; at one point I even had the idea of reading the entire Etchison collection Red Dreams, though that ended up not happening (yet.)  So, I have hopes "Black Sun" will be good.

Well, the good news is that I am one step closer to reading all the stories in Red Dreams because "Black Sun" is included in that collection.  Maybe we'll really accomplish that goal some day.  The bad news is that this story is pretty opaque and boring.  As far as I can tell, the narrator is in a legal fight to avoid the draft, and his wife is pregnant, sick and suicidal.  There are lots of surreal scenes in which he deals with bureaucratic forms, his insane wife says crazy things, he looks at how skinny she has got, and wonders about the dots on her skin (it seems she is going to an acupuncturist instead of an obstetrician.)  Both these characters are getting pretty rundown, and in the end of the story it appears the narrator is so changed that people don't recognize him anymore.  He resolves to murder the acupuncturist and then take refuge in the wilderness, I guess an extreme reaction to losing his legal fight and/or the death of his wife.

An impressionistic mess; it takes some work to figure it out and what you end up with doesn't seem to justify the effort.  I didn't really see the connections among the story's themes of draft-dodging, acupuncture, pregnancy and darkness (Vietnam is in Asia and acupuncture is from Asia? burning your draft card is associated with hippies and lefties and so is acupuncture?)  The story is just a jumble of stuff and doesn't build to a climax or have any twists or turns, it is just a vague flat line from start to finish.  One problem with the story may be that Etchison is relying too much on readers' passionate connection to current events to give the story energy, expecting people in 1974 to get all worked up over the issue of the draft and so neglecting to include more universal themes; will readers in 2074 get the charge out of a story the main theme of which is the provision of puberty blockers to minors or AFVs to Ukraine that today's readers might get? 

I think I have to give "Black Sun" a marginal negative vote.  

"Flash Point" by Gardner Dozois

Looks like another horror story--"Flash Point" would go on to be included by Charles L. Grant in his 1983 anthology Fears and by Dennis Etchison in his 1986 anthology Masters of Darkness.  Were SF readers in 1975 disappointed by the high proportion of horror tales in Orbit 13?  Did Knight think that publishing horror stories in a science fiction anthology was somehow "innovative" or "redefining the field"?  Well, in Knight's defense, "Flash Point" does consist of speculation about the near future, so is more like traditional SF than Bryant's "Going West" or Etchison's "Black Sun."

You can also find "Flash Point" in Noreen Doyle's 2008 Otherworldly Maine, and it is a good choice for Doyle's anthology, as much of its text is devoted to creating a strong sense of place, offering lots of descriptions of the sights and sounds and the flora and fauna of its wooded setting and portraits of its small town people and the main character's relationships with them.  That main character is Jacobs, a guy who makes his living repairing appliances and doing handyman jobs; he is also a Vietnam veteran who was wounded in combat.  (Like "Going West" and "Black Sun," "Flash Point" reminds you that communism is nothing to worry about and that the world's problems stem from the sick society of the United States.  Maybe this is what Knight considered "innovative.")

Jacobs finds a deserted car on the road; Dozois's detailed description of the vehicle and its contents makes it clear to readers that we are dealing with a case of spontaneous combustion!  Jacobs does not recognize this, however, apparently never having had a copy of that Reader's Digest volume Mysteries of the Unexplained that creeped me out as a kid.  He contacts the cops (the sheriff is a violent brute and his subordinates are idiots) and then has lunch at the local diner where we meet the various town  eccentrics and, from the town doctor, get a strong dose of one of the story's themes: abnormal psychology and psychosomatic illness, how the mind can powerfully affect the functioning of the body. 

Dozois gives us a lot of verbiage about Jacobs's feelings, his changing state of mind after finding the abandoned car.  He becomes subject to powerful, violent rages, savors the idea of harming the anti-communist at the diner, a stray dog, the raucous wealthy tourists ("gypsies") who recklessly pass his pickup on the road and harass him.  Late in the story, with a reference to hologram TVs, Dozois makes clear something that has not been evident earlier, that this story is set in the near future; the "gypsies" are a reflection of how violent and cruel and even suicidal American society has become, their extended visits to rural Maine symbolizing how even remote areas are subject to the degradation of American society that started, or at least was most evident initially, in big cities.  The climax of the story is the presentation of stark evidence that the sick culture of America at large has subsumed even this little Maine community, a rash of the spontaneous combustion events and even the discovery of a Satanic coven that practices human sacrifice!

"Flash Point" is well-written, but some will perhaps find disappointing the fact that it is a longish (22 pages) mood piece; the main character does very little, acting merely as a witness, and the plot consists not of the characters taking a journey or overcoming obstacles but instead of the author progressively revealing to us readers the extent to which American society is sick and is turning ordinary people into killers and suicides.  I've already compared it to Grant and Etchison's stories, and a similarity we might see to "Going West" and "Black Sun" is how over-the-top, through-the-looking-glass and surreal the ending of "Flash Point" might seem to some--witches sacrificing babies and a multitude of people spontaneously combusting is pretty "out there" for a story so much of which is so realistic.  

As I have said, Dozois's writing is quite good--he delivers sharp clear images of the character's environment and his mental state, and the pacing is good; I was always interested, the pretty extensive descriptions never becoming boring.  So, thumbs up for "Flash Point."

**********

Living up to our stereotyped view of the 1970s, these are some pessimistic, apocalyptic stories.  And I suppose living up to Knight's objectives with the Orbit series, none of them is straightforward and none offers rational scientific explanations for the events they depict--all of them present characters who are hallucinating or who have experiences that are inexplicable except as religious phenomena or suspension-of-disbelief defying symbolism.  I like horror stories and as I always do, I have judged these stories today on how interesting, entertaining and well-crafted they are, not on how closely they adhere to some kind of platonic definition of "science fiction," but I think it is fair to wonder if Knight, in expanding the definition of "science fiction" so far, is perhaps rendering the term meaningless, or making its essential meaninglessness more obvious.  It is easy to suspect terms like "New Wave" and "science fiction" lack any concrete definition and are mostly useful as marketing categories or shibboleths used by people to declare allegiance to (or express contempt for) an identity group or cultural phenomena.       

More terror awaits us in the next episode of MPoricus Fiction Log.  Stay tuned!

Orbit 9: K Neville, R Thurston, J Sallis, V Vinge & R A Lafferty

Let's take another paperback off the SF anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library.  Today: Orbit 9, edited by Damon Knight and first published in 1971.  (My paperback was printed in 1972.)  I've already read a couple of stories from Orbit 9, and blogged about one of them, Joanna Russ's "Gleepsite."  (I called it an "insoluble puzzle.")  Let's attack six stories today--I know, six is a lot, but it looks like they are short!

"Dominant Species" by Kris Neville 

This story has never been reprinted in English, but our friends over in the Netherlands have had two cracks at it, in 1977 and 1992.  Maybe the subtle and sophisticated Dutch saw something in "Dominant Species" that our gross Anglophonic minds are unable to grasp!  

To my crude American sensibilities this seems like a gimmicky trifle.  A creature much like a duck--maybe it is a duck--thinks itself a god that controls the universe, willing the appearance of food, controlling the weather, etc.  When what we have to assume is a spaceship lands nearby he takes credit for its appearance.  When the beings that emerge from the cylinder capture him he assures himself he has willed this to happen.  Anyway, eventually the aliens (or humans) dissect the duck (or duck-like alien) or whatever it is and we know the bird was suffering delusions of grandeur.  

At four and a half pages, barely acceptable. 

"Stop Me Before I Tell More" by Robert Thurston

Even the Dutch took a pass on this baby!  "Stop Me Before I Tell More" has never been reprinted.  I have good feelings about Thurston, though; I really liked his 1978 novel Alicia II, which I read twice before I started this blog, and also enjoyed 1985's Q Colony.  So maybe I'll be able to tell you "Stop Me Before I Tell More" is some kind of lost classic with a straight face.

"Stop Me Before I Tell More" is an extrapolation or elaboration of a travelling salesman joke.  All through the story's nineteen pages a single line in italics (e. g., "--There was this travelling salesman, see--") is followed by a paragraph or three expanding on it (in our example, describing the salesman's appearance, psychology, and career.)  

The salesman stays the night at a farmer's house after his car breaks down.  The farmer has sexy twin daughters.  One sneaks into the salesman's bed and they have sex.  He can't tell which of the two women she is, and in the morning the girls refuse to reveal the truth.  He stops by this house every year, and each time one of the daughters joins him in bed and he tries to figure out which it is, unsuccessfully.  This is a shaggy dog story, and he and we never learn which twin has been having sex with him.  The punchline of the story, made clear in the italicized lines, is that the joketeller has forgotten the punchline of the travelling salesman joke.    

    

Waste of time.

"Binaries" by James Sallis

Knight would include this one in The Best from Orbit Volumes 1-10 in 1976; otherwise, it has not been reprinted.

"Binaries" is a series of surreal images and paradoxical passages, ten and a half pages, I guess about a writer and his career, his relationships with women and his father, and his trips between and within France, England, and the United States.  One woman has breasts that are different sizes, one woman has a slim torso but big hips and thighs, the guy thinks of himself as a European but stays in America because he feels he belongs in America, this kind of thing.  Sallis presents a self-important and stereotypical view of the writer's life--smoking lots of cigarettes, name-dropping French writers and painters, suffering paranoia. 

Waste of time.

"Only the Words Are Different" by James Sallis

Sallis has two stories in Orbit 9.  "Only the Words Are Different" would be reprinted in Sallis's 1995 collection, Limits of the Sensible World.  It is yet more surreal images of the lives of writers who smoke many cigarettes, but is more coherent, more anchored in reality.

Five vignettes that collectively take up six and a half pages.  1: A writer looks out the window and sees a guy has fallen from the scaffolding to his death far below--the blood is the color of strawberries.  The writer figures this guy was climbing the scaffolding to express his love to the writer.  2: A college professor and his wife are driving home from a party; the wife cries because she thinks her husband is having an affair with one of the female students.  3: A writer discovers a petition signed by millions of people, a petition demanding that poetry abolished.  It is suggested that the people who know poets want poetry abolished because the poets' obsession with poetry is an obstruction to the progress of love lives, profitable enterprises, etc. 4: An American woman wants to have her English boyfriend's child, but he always uses a condom.  He moves to New York to be with her but their relationship collapses and he leaves her.  Then he mails her a condom full of his jizz.  5: In a future (I guess) town where the population is in decline because people don't have any interest in having kids, the Mayor tries to unite the depressed citizenry and shake them out of their ennui by declaring war on roaches.  One woman fights hand-to-hand with the police when they come to destroy her pet roach, a creature she feeds cigarette butts.

Acceptable.

"The Science Fair" by Vernor Vinge

Vinge is an actual math professor who often writes stories about science and technology, and this story actually has "science" in its title, so maybe Vinge can get us out of our New Wave doldrums.    

"The Science Fair" is a first-person narrative delivered by a private eye--a spy for hire living on an alien world of people with hooves who can see into the infrared spectrum.  He is hired to protect a famous scientist who is giving a speech at the upcoming once-in-a-generation science fair.  There is an action scene in which the private dick shoots it out with assassins.  Then comes the fair.  The scientist reveals that a star is approaching their planet and will likely destroy their civilization in eight generations!  He calls for the scientists of the world to stop working as individuals seeking profit and to work together to create a technological and industrial base capable of preventing the coming cataclysm.  People are thrown into an uproar by these revolutionary statements.  

"The Science Fair" feels like the first chapter of a novel--its last line is a clue that, I believe, suggests the approaching star has a planet orbiting it that is home to another intelligent race.  

I like it; Vinge does a good economical job of sketching out an interesting setting for his story; these aliens live in an environment and have a society I would have read much more about.  "The Science Fair" would reappear in 2001's The Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge as well as two European Vinge collections published in 2006.  Look how sad 21st-century book covers are; it is like nobody is even trying any more.

"When All the Lands Pour Out Again" by R. A. Lafferty

This one is a little hard to grok, but I'm going to throw some interpretation out there: "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" is a satire or spoof of man's restless nature, his desire for change, any change, no matter how risky; also, it is a satire of man's solipsism, his hubris and overconfidence, his belief that he can master the world, can know its nature and even control it (this applies especially to academics, politicians and would-be revolutionaries.)  The story may also be a depiction of the Second Coming of Christ or just an assertion of God's power that echoes the Flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.

At the start of the fourteen-page story we meet three academics; Lafferty here gently spoofs academic self-importance and highlights how little academics really know and how little they agree with each other.  These three geniuses think that a major, cataclysmic change is in the offing, that everybody and everything is about to change, and they actually welcome rather than fear the change, though millions will die.

Sure enough, people, animals, even geographic features begin mass migrations, and they do it with joy.  People eagerly blow up their homes and places of work and begin long journeys they know not where, surrounded by earthquakes, lava flows, the arrival of space aliens, the sudden reappearance from under the earth of Native American tribesmen and from under the sea of the lost continent of Lyonesse.  The leaders of all the governments of the world escape danger via airplanes and then convene on Lyonesse, Lafferty joking that far away from everybody else maybe they won't cause so much trouble.

Near the end of the story we meet three revolutionaries, men bearing the appellations the red lion, the red tiger, and the red wolf.  Lafferty hints they are satanic; for example, they get their power from below in the form of lava.  These revolutionaries are angry that the radical changes taking place are not under their control; they try, without success, to reassert control, and the whole world laughs at their failure.

In the last paragraph of the story the three academics from the beginning, the men who predicted and welcomed the cataclysm, are described as "three wise men" and depicted wearing sandals and carrying staves and lanterns.    

As usual, Lafferty provides strange images and charming turns of phrase, lots of allusions and thought-provoking mysteries.  I like it.  "When All the Lands Pour Out Again" would be reprinted in a French collection of Lafferty stories and in Lafferty in Orbit.

**********

In an article in the May 12, 1956 issue of The Saturday Review, John W. Campbell, Jr., one of the most important figures in the history of science fiction, informed readers that "science-fiction's fundamental purpose is to make accurate, loose prophecies of general trends" and that it is written by, about, and for "technically-minded people."  When Barry Malzberg met Campbell in 1969, Campbell, as Malzberg tells it in the 1980 essay "John W. Campbell: June 8, 1910 to July 11, 1971," told him that "Mainstream literature is about failure...a literature of defeat...Science fiction is challenge and discovery," and that "science fiction is a problem-solving medium, man is a curious animal who wants to know how things work and given enough time can find out."

To what extent Campbell's definitions of science fiction are merely prescriptive, and to what extent they are accurately descriptive, is up for debate.  Either way, the stories we read today from 1971's Orbit 9 show that much of the science fiction promoted by important figures in the SF world of that year either ignored or deliberately sought to refute Campbell's strictures.  While Vinge's story fits into Campbell's definitions, being about science and technology and offering a hopeful view of the efforts of people to learn about the universe and master it, Neville's, Lafferty's and Thurston's stories suggest man's ability to comprehend and control the universe are illusory; Thurston's in particular is a pure literary piece, relying for its effects entirely on literary technique and containing no science or speculations of any kind.  The fifth of Sallis's vignettes in "Only the Words Are Different" contains some speculation about society and government, but otherwise his contributions to Orbit 9 are like a caricature of mainstream literature: they consist of surreal and fragmented episodes that offer impressionistic glimpses into the disordered psychologies and disastrous relationships of chain-smoking writers, artists and academics.

Thanks for embarking on this brief foray into the New Wave era with me.  In our next episode we'll again be exploring 1970 fiction, this time with one of our favorite women writers.  

1970 stories by Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold and James Sallis

I recently found myself in Myrtle Beach, celebrating the birthday of one of my in-laws.  Of course it is nice to walk on the beach, finding dead crabs and hearing the surf and seeing how the moonlight is reflected on the breakers and all that, and I had a good time at the pottery stores in Seagrove, NC, and the antique stores in places like Weyer's Cave, VA, and Bennettsville, SC at which we stopped on the drive down, but let's be honest: Myrtle Beach is a hideous tourist town where I don't really belong.  So I had ample time to sit in the decrepit condo my in-laws rented and read old issues of Weird Tales and a 1971 paperback SF anthology I brought with me, Nova One.  Nova One, first of a series of four, was edited by Harry Harrison and first published in 1970 in hardcover.  My copy of Nova One once was part of the library of the M. I. T. Science Fiction Society, which is fun.

In his introduction to the volume, Harrison stresses that science fiction is about science, and argues that we should see H. G. Wells as the first science fiction author, obliquely dismissing Mary Shelly's claim ("Modern SF definitely does not date back to the second century and Lucian of Samosata, or even to the Gothic and fantastic novels of the last century.")  Then he crows that, while the mainstream short story is essentially moribund, science fiction writers continue to produce a large volume of short stories in magazines.  Finally, he produces somewhat vague arguments for why stories from a book of new stories like this one (13 of the 15 pieces in Nova One are brand new) should be better than stories written for a magazine.

Ray Bradbury's name is at the top of the list on the cover, but his contribution to Nova One is not a new story but a three-year-old poem, "And This Did Dante Do," which appeared in 1967 in Florida Quarterly.  The angle of this poem is that living in Chicago is hell, its fanciful conceit that Dante Alighieri created the Windy City in a dream or by travelling to the New World via some machine of his own invention.  That the monstrosity Dante is devising is Chicago is revealed at the end of the poem as a kind of surprise punchline, and Bradbury's complaints about the hog butcher to the world--there is pollution; apartments are small--could probably be said of any decent-sized 20th-century city.  This poem isn't all that bad an example of silly verse, but I enjoyed city life when I lived in a real city and so can't get behind the point of view Ray is espousing here.  

Our beloved Barry Malzberg has two stories in Nova One.  "Terminus Est" I read in 2018 when I decided to read all the stories that made up the fixup novel Universe Day as well as the novel itself; I really liked "Terminus Est" and suggested in my blog post that Malzberg was hewing closer to genre literature conventions when he wrote it, to its benefit.  "In the Pocket," which appears in Nova One under the pen name K. M. O'Donnell, is one of the stories upon which Malzberg's novel The Men Inside is based.  I read The Men Inside before I started this blog, and am toying with the idea of rereading and blogging about it; if I do I'll talk about "In the Pocket" in the same post.  Suffice to say here that "In the Pocket" is a pretty good story and doesn't feel like a fragment or anything.     

Now, let's read three stories new to me by authors with whom we here at MPorcius Fiction Log have some familiarity, Brian Aldiss, David Gerrold and James Sallis.

"Swastika!" by Brian Aldiss

This, Harrison warns us in his little intro to "Swastika!," is a joke story about Adolf Hitler!  The jokes in Aldiss's novel about serving in Burma during the Second World War, A Soldier Erect, made me laugh, so maybe the humor in this story will also work on me?  

Or maybe not.  Our narrator, whose name is Brian, has a meeting with Hitler, who survived the war and is living under an assumed name in Ostend.  The bulk of the story, I guess, is satire, the point of which, I guess, is that 1960s politicians are really little better than Hitler.  Lyndon Baines Johnson, Fidel Castro, Moshe Dayan, King Hussein of Jordan, and Sukarno, among others, are all said to have consulted Hitler, begging for his guidance, while Hitler admits to finding admirable qualities in Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and George Wallace and to having enjoyed the spectacle of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.  

Throughout the story Brian expresses admiration for Hitler, and the punchline of the story is that Brian has come to Ostend to get Hitler to sign a contract so that Brian can put on a musical of Hitler's life, the title of which will be "Swastika!"  Mel Brooks's The Producers was in movie theaters in 1967, and it is a little odd to see Aldiss and editor Harrison not spiking this joke and coming up with some other gag for the ending of this 1970 story.  Maybe "The Producers" wasn't shown in England?

This story is not funny or interesting.  Any effect it might have on the reader relies on the shock value of the narrator expressing admiration for Hitler, from the absurdity of Hitler's claims that he hasn't really lost the war because the war isn't really over yet or the idea of a musical about Der Fuhrer, or from reader sympathy with Aldiss's shallow criticisms of 1960s politicians, which essentially amount to name-calling--Aldiss's attacks on LBJ and the rest aren't much more specific or persuasive than Bradbury's attack on Chicago in "And This Did Dante Do."  Aldiss's strategies in this story are basic, even childish, though maybe when the story was published their audacity excited readers.  Thumbs down from me in 2021, though.          

"Swastika!" would be included in Aldiss's oft-reprinted collection The Moment of Eclipse as well as Best SF Stories of Brian W. Aldiss.  

"Love Story in Three Acts" by David Gerrold

Gerrold may be most famous for the tribbles of Star Trek which are so suspiciously like a creature from Robert Heinlein's The Rolling Stones, but I always think of Gerrold as the guy behind the novels Deathbeast and Yesterday's Children, both of which are noteworthy and crazy in their own way; also memorable are the Chtorr books.  Relatively recently I read Gerrold's novel Space Skimmer, which I have to admit is not nearly as remarkable as the aforementioned books.

This story here is about a married couple...of the future!  In Act One they have sex and then consult the computer which has been reading their vital signs through bands on their wrists.  It reports they only achieved 34% pleasure!  The wife pesters the husband about getting a computer that will be even more invasive--I mean helpful--so they can get a better score.

Act Two is at the husband's office.  A salesman comes by; he was contacted by the wife.  He convinces a reluctant husband to invest in a computer system that won't just read the couple's vitals while they are having sex, but guide their movements to better pleasure each other!  

In Act Three the device is installed and the wife convinces the husband that they should use it.  (This entire story is about the husband resisting pressure from others but eventually giving in to their manipulations--the modern world of feminism, capitalism and technology--as depicted in this story--is a world in which men are at the mercy of women, businesspeople and machines.)  They hook themselves up to all the wires and then have better sex than they have had for years.  The optimistic trick ending to the story is the revelation that they forgot to turn the computer on--if their sex was better it was because of some reinvigorated rapport between them...or the placebo effect.

Acceptable.   

"Love Story in Three Acts" would resurface in a Gerrold collection and in anthologies, including a French one and an English one which has what must be one of the worst book covers of the 20th century.

"Faces & Hands" by James Sallis

I've read several things by Sallis, like the experimental "Field," "Delta Flight 281," and "The First Few Kinds of Truth," none of which I thought were worth my time.  But maybe this time Sallis and I will be on the same wavelength--hope springs eternal!

It is the future!  Mankind has achieved the ability to travel between the stars.  The Earth has recently joined a space federation called "The Union" which seems to be culturally dominated by people from the Vegan system--everywhere you go people wear Vegan fashions and speak Vegan.  In his little intro paragraph to "Faces & Hands," Harrison tells us Sallis is a poet, and Sallis employs little word games to make his story feel more alien or futuristic.  On the first page of the story we find that the cliché "playing by ear" is now rendered "playing by air;" on page two we learn that "ziggurat" is now styled "zikkurat" and that the name Stein is pronounced "stain."  

Our narrator, immediately after graduating college, was recruited by a guy named Stein to work as a "Courier," a sort of interstellar diplomat.  He relates how, while on a diplomatic mission, he got temporarily stranded on the planet Alsfort thanks to a labor strike.  While waiting for interstellar travel to resume  he sat in a "wayroom" by the spaceport, drinking and people watching.  Sallis gives us several pages of descriptions of people the narrator sees in the wayroom, giving us an idea of how diverse the Union is.  The most pages get devoted to a bird-like alien woman, a beautiful singer, who sits and talks to the narrator.  She describes how the culture of her race of bird people has been changed by contact with the peoples of the Union, changed in a way that causes social upheaval, with some embracing new technologies and ideas and others resisting them.  Presumably these bird people and their problems are supposed to remind us of the fate of Third Worlders who become integrated into the world economy dominated by Western ideas and technology.  Later Sallis makes his point explicit, that engagement with other cultures/economies/polities can both bring benefits and exact costs, and that whether such engagement is on balance worthwhile is not necessarily obvious.  

"Faces & Hands" is in two parts.  The second part is in the third person and takes place after a space war between Earth and another planet; Vega sided with Earth and was severely bombed, reducing this formerly leading society to penury (there are blackouts due to rationing of energy, as in poor countries nowadays and, according to rumor, California.)  The narrative of this eight-page section of the story concerns a prostitute who has mild psychic powers and a space traveler who spends time with her.  There are animal metaphors and a scene with bohemian artists that, I guess, is meant to show the effect of war on culture and maybe how different generations respond differently to change, echoing something the bird-lady said in the first part.  

Because it presents characters and images and human emotions, seems to be responding to interesting historical events like imperialism, the World Wars and Cold War, and the growth of international trade, and sort of has a plot, this is the best story by Sallis I have ever read.  I don't love it, but it at least is worth reading. 

"Faces & Hands" has been reprinted in Sallis collections (as "Faces, Hands") and in an anthology printed in brave little Belgium.  

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It is always interesting and often fun to look into these old SF anthologies.  So more short stories from one of the anthologies on the shelves of the MPorcius Library in our next episode!

Whispers II: Lafferty, Davidson, R. C. Matheson, Chalker, and Sallis & Lunde

They don't have to be in mint condition
for me to buy them

Followers of my twitter feed know the wife and I like to go to antique stores.  In some of those antique malls that host booths from a large selection of sellers you can find a booth which is practically a mini-used bookstore, and at one such booth in the Westminster Antique Mall in Westminster, Maryland this last weekend I purchased a hardcover copy of Whispers II, the 1979 anthology edited by Stuart Schiff.  Let's check it out!

In his Introduction, Schiff, who I guess was a trained dentist living in the greatest state in the union, says that fantasy and horror are now big business, what with Sissy Spacek as Carrie, Max von Sydow as The Exorcist and Michael J. London as The Snowbeast burning up our screens, but these popular commercial versions of horror and the weird designed to please the masses are diluted, adulterated.  In his work as an editor of Whispers, a semi-pro zine, Schiff (his friends like David Drake call him "Stu") has tried to encourage the creation of and to disseminate more pure, less commercial, horror/fantasy fiction.  He goes on to praise the role of little magazines like Whispers throughout the modern history of horror, citing the early careers of Lovecraft, Bradbury and Stephen King.

Whispers II includes 21 stories and I think I am going to read and opine on 19 of them.  I am skipping Karl Edward Wagner's "Undertow," a Kane story.  I read all the Kane stories in the late New York and early Iowa periods of my life and didn't really find them to my taste, though some were better than others.  My vague memories suggest that "Undertow" was better than the average Kane story.  I have already blogged about Hugh B. Cave's "From the Lower Deep" and Russell Kirk's "Lex Talionis," having read them back in 2015 in DAW's The Year's Best Horror Stories Series VIII, which was edited by Wagner.

Tarbandu of The PorPor Books Blog has already trod this ground--feel free to read his brisk and informative blogpost from 2010 about Whispers II and skip my long-winded babbling about it and get back to your real life; I'm sure you'd be better off doing something productive like chasing girls or making money or something like that.

"Berryhill" by R. A. Lafferty (1976)

"Berryhill" has a straightforward plot.  On the edge of town is a decrepit house where live some really old people who are rarely seen and are kind of weird.  All kinds of rumors about their alleged crimes have sprung up over the decades.  One day a nine-year-old juvenile delinquent who likes to torture animals and vandalize local farms ventures into the old weirdos' house.  What will happen to all these creepy characters?

Lafferty, with understated brilliance, takes this plot and makes it both hilarious and horrifying.  Everything from people's names to the little turns of phrase he uses to the details about small town life and casual descriptions of human evil work to make the reader smile and laugh or wince and shiver.  Engrossing and surprising, and easier to understand than some of Lafferty's work, which can often be difficult, this story alone is worth what I paid for this book.

Very good, highly recommended.  "Berryhill" first appeared in Whispers #9, and would later appear in the collection Iron Tears, which has a good cover by the Dillons.

"The King's Shadow Has No Limits" by Avram Davidson (1975)

I often find Davidson's stories to be erudite but gimmicky and silly, though I gave his novel Enemy of My Enemy a moderately positive review earlier this year.  "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" seems to have appeared approximately simultaneously in Whispers #8 and the book The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy.  I think this will be the first Dr. Eszterhazy story I have ever read.

I guess this story is a mood piece about historical change with a focus on social class and what today we would call income equality.  Dr. Eszterhazy lives in a bustling metropolis in an alternate history 19th century, the capital of a multi-ethnic empire in the Balkans that I guess was inspired by the Austro-Hungarian Empire.  This empire has a triple monarchy (one better than the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary) and is known as Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.  The city is home to both both modern buildings and ancient ruins, to modern devices, like steam shovels, electric lights and telephones, and centuries-old rituals and superstitions, like poor people clamoring for the dust scarped yearly from a long dead saint's grave.  Esterhazy wanders around the town, seeing the poor working on a construction site, accepting alms, waiting in line for the aforementioned dust, etc.  Some impoverished old men remind him of the aged Emperor, and Eszterhazy addresses one and finds that it is the Emperor!  The Emperor tells him that some wise Jews inspired him to spend time among the poor; he also compares himself to Louis XV, quoting "after me, the deluge," suggesting that after he dies the empire will fall apart.

Later we are provided evidence that the Emperor had been in a coma all day, and his soul left his body to travel around the city and experience life from a different perspective.

Most stories which deal with historical change have the protagonist acting as a change agent, a rebel or reformer or innovator, but Esterhazy seems to be a sincere supporter of the Emperor and I think we are supposed to get a sense of foreboding from this story, to suspect that the death of the elderly Emperor is going to usher in a cataclysm like the French Revolution or World War I that will kill untold numbers of people and sweep away cultures which, while they have faults, perhaps have admirable elements whose destruction is to be lamented.  I detected similar ideas and themes in Enemy of My Enemy; I'm getting the feeling that Davidson is a sort of sad, romantic conservative, or maybe I am just projecting my own tragic view of life onto his work.

(Being the last story in the collection The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy, it is perhaps appropriate that "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" foreshadow and expound upon the passing of the book's setting.)

This is a well-wrought literary story, dense with description and allusion.  It is a success, but it is not exactly fun or thrilling--it is sad, but not cathartic the way a more extravagant tragedy might be; "The King's Shadow Has No Limits" is haunting rather than melodramatic.  I have to admit it is leaving me feeling kind of depressed; maybe I should have eaten more chocolate today.

"Conversation Piece" by Richard Christian Matheson (1979)

Here's a story from the son of the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best film and Vincent Price's best film.  "Conversation Piece" appeared first here in Whispers II, and Schiff liked it so much he also included it in his anthology Mad Scientists.  "Conversation Piece" also shows up in the Richard Christian Matheson collection Scars.

This is a gimmicky silly story; maybe it is supposed to be funny.  Most of it is taken up with the transcript of an interview, "A"s following "Q"s, bookended by the brief recollections and reflections of the journalist who posed the "Q"s.  Basically, the journalo interviews a guy who is just a head, a guy who was born in a normal healthy body and made money by selling body fluids and then body parts to medical scientists until he had sold almost everything.  We don't realize he is just a head until late in the story.  The interviewee's attitude is not that of a victim; he acts like his chosen career of selling off his body piece by piece is just a normal profession, saying it suits him and talking about how he sold this part to pay for his wedding and that part to pay for his daughter's school clothes, etc.  The journalist, at the end of the story, lays on the heavy symbolism, suggesting that we all surrender or sacrifice parts of ourselves, our honesty or convictions, for example, in our pursuit of a career and a satisfying sex and family life.

Acceptable.

"The Stormsong Runner" by Jack L. Chalker (1979)

I think I read a few Jack L. Chalker SF novels in my high school days in the 1980s, but all I can remember is that a party of people was on a space ship, searching for something and being chased by enemy space ships and all that usual stuff, and at one point they had to design a new life form, and they divvied up the design duty, with one person designing the head and another designing the body and whatever.  One guy got the job of designing the life form's penis, and there was a whole paragraph in which the guy described the penis's fascinating attributes (the word "telescoping" was used.)  Did I really read this or is this just a crazy dream I had that I have unfairly associated with Chalker?

Anyway, here we have a short story which first appeared here in Whispers II but would later be included in a Chalker collection and some anthologies of American ghost stories.  Boo!

Our narrator is a guy who got a degree in "elementary education" but had a hard time finding a position and devoted much of his time to booze, drugs, and women with the same dubious hobbies.  Some money falls into his lap after a car accident caused by the other driver, so he leaves the city and moves to the hillbilly country of West Virginia.  Chalker gives us some descriptions of how poor and illiterate and ignorant the people in the hills are, and also how proud they are, how close they are to nature and how they value people and their word more than materialistic and overly sophisticated city folk.

The narrator convinces the state to pay him to be a sort of peripatetic teacher of these country folk who refuse to have anything to do with conventional schooling.  Our ghost story involves a little girl (approximately 12) whom others consider a witch.  Little Cindy Lou Whittler (I suspect this name is a joke because Chalker also directly refers to Dr. Seuss in this story) believes she can control the weather and that her dead father speaks to her, telling her when to make it rain.  And sure enough, one day our narrator hears two voices from the Whittler shack, arguing--a man wants Cindy Lou to trigger a powerful storm, but the little girl says it will cause the dam to burst and kill the local people!

The ending of this story is anti-climactic.  The dam bursts, but nobody gets killed.  Cindy Lou doesn't have to suffer the guilt of wrecking the dam, because (she tells the narrator) her father the ghost, who has responsibility for the weather of the region, enlisted some other witch to make fall the rain, which was mandated by a still higher authority.  The narrator reflects that maybe everybody in this world has a purpose, even drug addicted losers like him (his purpose is to educate these illiterate poor people) and the impoverished people of Appalachia (who control the weather at the behest of Mother Nature or God?)

Lame.

"They Will Not Hush" by James Sallis and David Lunde (1974)

Lunde is new to me, but we've encountered James Sallis before.  I didn't like his experimental story from Quark 3, thought his experimental stories in Again, Dangerous Visions were alright, but could not recommend his experimental stories in Alternities.  The story here has an epigraph from Yeats, four lines from "The Madness of King Goll" about woodland creatures, cluing us in to the source of the story's title.

This is a sleep-inducing prose poem full of sentences like, "A doe, invisible in a dapple of sun and shadow, suddenly bounds down the slope before him," and "A door slapping shit, firmly, like the closing of a fist; a car gearing up, then fading quickly away."  I think it is about a guy who just graduated from college with a physics degree coming home to the forest to his family of witches; the witches are about to face some war or other trial, and the college kid burns his college books and prepares for "the Strengthening" of "the Agreed," who must face "Them"--the college kid is now the leader of the witches and their animal friends.

A total waste of your time.

"They Will Not Hush" first appeared in Whispers #4 and has not been reprinted since Whispers II came out.   

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The Lafferty is very good, but it has been downhill from there, from the successful Davidson to the OK R. C. Matheson to the weak Chalker and finally the pointless Sallis and Lunde production.  Hopefully this trend will be reversed when we read five more stories from Whispers II in our next episode.

The inside jacket flap text of my hardcover copy of Whispers II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

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

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

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

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

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

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

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

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

I can't recommend this, either.

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

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

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

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