Future Corruption 3: Elwood, Goldsmith, Sohl & Dozois

Here comes the third and final installment of our examination of corruption and evil with Roger Elwood and ten other toilers in the salt mines of the speculative fiction world of 1975. Four stories today, one each from editor Roger Elwood, Howard Goldsmith (of whom I've never heard), Jerry Sohl, and Gardner Dozois.

Look!  I'm not kidding!

"Feast" by Roger Elwood

This is a boring literary exercise, five pages of images, little prose poems set apart from each other by employing different fonts and strange enjambments and odd punctuation.  The images are of people, in a world facing food shortages, resorting to cannibalism. Who is to blame?  The last line tells the tale: "And we begin the feast that society has forced upon us."

I understand that editors are expected to buy a story from themselves when they put together these anthologies, but at least try to write something that isn't an actual insult to us, for Christ's sake.

A waste of time--I'm not even breaking out the evilometer for this one.
 
"The Last Congregation" by Howard Goldsmith

This story is two pages long.  A robot cleric laments to his robot congregation that religion and secular philosophies have all failed to keep mankind from engaging in a nuclear war that has destroyed civilization.  Then a "neo-Neanderthal" smashes the robots with a club.

Another waste of time.

"Before a Live Audience" by Jerry Sohl

Back in June of last year I read a story by Jerry Sohl, "I am Aleppo," in another anthology edited by Elwood, and didn't care for it.  This will be my second exposure to Sohl's work.

This story was a relief after the crummy Elwood and Goldsmith stories, like coming upon a Greek vase or a Roman sculpture in the art museum after walking by a Jackson Pollack and a Jasper Johns.  Here we have an actual story with characters and a plot that tries to say something about worthwhile topics, like how we may achieve happiness and psychiatric methods.  The story also delivers when it comes to what this anthology is ostensibly about: the characters make moral decisions, and many of them are corrupted by temptations.

Sohl tells the story in flashbacks and journal entries and that kind of thing, but, in brief, here is the plot.  A man arrives in the late 20th century from a utopian future, but accidentally materializes in front of a moving automobile and lands in the hospital. He heals up, but because he doesn't know what the hell is going on (like what year it is or who the president is) he ends up in a mental institution.  The institution is run by a woman who employs novel methods; a follower of Thomas Szasz, she thinks that there is really no such thing as mental illness.  She feels that people who appear mentally ill are simply acting irresponsibly, and through a system of punishments and rewards, she tries to get her patients to change their behavior.  Her methods often achieve success, and she has a high reputation.

The director of the mental institution comes to believe that the time traveler is telling the truth about his origins, and she becomes obsessed with the possibility of travelling to the utopian future, of being happy there.  She resorts to using her methods of punishment to torture the secret of his handheld time machine out of the man from the future, but he refuses to succumb, and dies from her mistreatment.  Later, tinkering with the device, the psychiatrist is transported to ground zero at Hiroshima, seconds before its destruction.

There's more to the story, more details and characters, and none of that material is extraneous or gratuitous, it is all entertaining or adds to the theme of the story. "Before a Live Audience" is seventeen pages long, and each page deserves to be there.

A good story, bravo to Sohl.  After the irritating Elwood and Goldsmith contributions, "Before a Live Audience" has restored my faith in the written word!      

"Before a Live Audience"     Is it good?:  Yes!    Evilometer Reading: High. 


"The Storm" by Gardner Dozois

Dozois is famous as an editor, and also has a good reputation as a writer; SF fan and R.A. Lafferty enthusiast Kevin Cheek has praised him in the comments to this very blog, and I certainly enjoyed Dozois' collaboration with Jack Dann, "Down Among the Dead Men."

"The Storm" is the tale of Paul, an aspiring writer.  The story alternates between two periods of Paul's life.  Half the sections of the 25 page story are about Paul's childhood, the day on which he and his mother pack for a move to Ohio, away from Paul's father and their home in a town on the Atlantic coast.  That very day a big storm rolls in.  The other sections of the story depict Paul's disastrous early adulthood in New York City.  Paul lives in Manhattan, holed up in his apartment, depressed over breaking up with his fiance, severing ties with his best friend, and losing his job.  I lived in Manhattan in the late '90s and the 2000s, and I thought it was beautiful and thrilling, but Dozois, writing in the 1970s, tells us that "Manhattan was a place that fed you hate, contempt, bitterness, and despair...."

Dozois does a good job of describing everything Paul sees and feels; the story is vivid and compelling.  Until the climax, "The Storm" reads like a literary story about a sad life, full of rich description.

Trapped in his dilapidated apartment with no food or water, disgusted by an invasion of cockroaches, Paul becomes so ill and depressed ("partially freed from the bonds of ego") that he achieves a new and elevated state of consciousness!  In touch with his "superconscious," Paul can sense all the things that had, would, and could have happened to him, and to all mankind!  His mind travels back to the day of the storm, a major turning point of his life, and he chooses to experience the worst of all the possible outcomes of that day. Dozois describes in detail how the storm develops into a hurricane that demolishes the seaside town and massacres the town's inhabitants, including Paul himself.

This is a solid, well-written, entertaining story, and I am definitely recommending it. However, the expanded consciousness business does feel a little like it comes out of left field, and I don't think the story addressees the issues of evil and corruption.  Paul has a crummy life, but it just seems the result of incompetence and/or bad luck, nobody seems to be preying upon anybody else.

"The Storm"   Is it good?:      Quite good.     Evilometer Reading: Low.

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So there it is, Future Corruption, twelve 1975 science fiction stories.   Can I recommend this anthology? There was some half-assed junk from Goldin, Elwood and Goldsmith, but they constitute a small percentage of the book's page count.  Four of the tales I can heartily endorse--the Gloeckner, Lafferty, Sohl, and the Dozois--and the Pronzini, Russ and Lupoff are worthwhile.  (As for the Malzberg stories... well, we've seen better things from him.)  So I can definitely recommend the book as a whole.

All you New Wave and literary SF aficionados will perhaps want a copy, as one of the Malzberg stories and the Lafferty story have never appeared anywhere else.  People interested in portrayals of homosexuality in SF may also want a copy, as Carolyn Gloecker's "Andrew" and J. J. Russ's "Aurelia" have also never been reprinted.  Many of the stories also have as their springboard fears of overpopulation, so if that is your thing, maybe Future Corruption would be a worthwhile purchase.

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At the back of Future Corruption is an ad for Woodward and Bernstein's All the President's Men.  As part of my Christmas/New Year's obligations I called my mother on the telephone, and she told me she was planning to read All the President's Men soon. Even though my mother has spent her entire life as a suburban housewife who watches TV all day, she likes to think of herself as a member of the 1960s counter culture and a left-wing activist.  When I told her I had been to South Carolina over the holidays to see in-laws (my mother refused to attend my wedding and has never met any of my in-laws) she exclaimed, "I hate the South!"

"Do they have open carry there?" she inquired.

"I didn't read up on the legislation before I went there," I told her.

"You would have seen the guns!  They bring guns to McDonald's!" Mom assured me, exasperated at my ignorance.  Instead of telling me how disappointed she is in me, as she has on Christmas telephone calls of years past, this year Mom enlivened our one-sided conversation by bitterly complaining about "old white men," who are apparently undoing all the work Mom's fantasy self did back in the '60s (while her physical self was in high school.)  My mother is some kind of genius; she says the same things the grad students and professors back in New York used to say every day, without ever having set foot on a college campus.

Future Corruption also has a page advertising "more exciting science fiction from Warner Paperback Library." Of these thirteen books, I've only read two.  I believe I read the stories to be found in Death Angel's Shadow in the later collection Midnight Sun, about four years ago, but I can't remember anything about them.  These stories are about Kane, Karl Edward Wagner's immortal wizard/warrior anti-hero.  Kane has many fans, but he never struck a chord with me the way Elric, John Carter, Conan, or the Grey Mouser did.  My favorite Wagner story continues to be the brilliant "Sticks."

Back during my New York days I read the Bison Books 2000 edition of M. P. Shiel's The Purple Cloud.  It felt quite long, but the idea of a guy being the last person on Earth, and deciding to spend his time burning down the world's cities, is pretty cool.

Poul Anderson's oeuvre is so large that I have never even heard of The Virgin Planet.  I also have not heard of Robert Miall or Martin Caidin.  I avoid John Jakes because I thought the first Brak the Barbarian thing I read was terrible, and Ron Goulart because I assume his work is broad satire I will find more annoying than amusing.  I should probably give the famous Philip K. Dick a second chance, but in my New York days I read a novel of his and immediately forgot everything about it, including the title.  I have mixed feelings about Keith Laumer; I thought his portion of Five Fates was alright, but the Retief and Bolo stories I have read have been pretty pedestrian.

The New Mind and new (to me) authors: Bauer, Effinger, and Sohl

Today we are exploring new frontiers at this here blog.  New to me, at least.  I'd read four stories from Roger Elwood's 1973 collection of original science fiction stories, Frontier 2: The New Mind and liked them all, so I decided yesterday to press my luck and read three more, all of them by writers I had never read before.

"From All of Us" by Gerard M. Bauer

In his intro to the book, editor Roger Elwood informs us (warns us?) that Bauer is 19 years old and that "From All of Us" is his first sale.  The story is full of odd word choices that I think an editor should have done something about.  The very first lines of the story are, "I was born insane.  Mad.  Or to use the erudite term, 'mentally retarded.'"  Do educated people ever use "mentally retarded" as a synonym or euphemism for "insane?"  On the second page the word "acknowledge" is used in an unusual and off-putting way, and the third page "repulsively."  This story had me itching for my red pen. 

Jim, our first person narrator, is from the Twin Cities, which, in real life, is home to perhaps the finest SF bookstore in the world, Uncle Hugo's, which I have visited once and highly recommend.  Jim and his parents are on a road trip through Montana; I don't think I've ever been to Montana. 

Jim is twelve years old, and a genius, but, because he is mute and his arms are too weak to write, he is considered mentally retarded.  He receives a telepathic call, and escapes his dreadful and pathetic parents to join a secret community of people with physical birth defects and astounding mental abilities.  Their leader is a biracial ("mulatto" is the word used) scientist who has built a machine that can cure Jim's physical problems, a second machine that can telepathically teach him a library's worth of knowledge in a few week's time, and a third machine that can teleport everybody to another planet.  In no time Jim has the body of a healthy 25-year old and is having marathon sex sessions with a beautiful 20-year-old woman whom the mulatto assigns to him as his "mate."  

The National Guard detects the nuclear reactor the mulatto secretly built and, along with some local ranchers, attacks the fortress of the mute geniuses.  The mute geniuses teleport to a planet with perfect weather and live happily ever after.  The last lines of the story express Jim's contempt for those of us stuck on our "dead and stagnant" Earth.

This is a silly wish-fulfillment fantasy, silly enough to be interesting and amusing, though perhaps not in the way the author intended.  Perhaps it has value as a kind of window into the 1973 zeitgeist, or into the mind of an alienated teenager.

I didn't look up Bauer on isfdb until after I had read the story; when I did, I found this was his only published SF story.  In 2003 he signed a letter from the SFWA urging the powers that be to continue exploring space despite the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, so I guess he was still an active part of the professional SF community 30 years after his single sale.      

"New New York New Orleans" by George Alec Effinger

Every day I find a new reason to miss New York.  I recently learned that the institution that owns the house we are renting expects us to mow the lawn.  I haven't mowed (or mown) a lawn in like 25 years!

I've been to New Orleans.  I wasn't crazy about it.

"New New York New Orleans" is a well-written example of what I call "a Twilight-Zone-style" story.  Two guys living in New York City notice that characteristic elements of New Orleans are popping up in the Big Apple; Louisiana cooking, a huge paddleboat in the Hudson, tourists carrying New Orleans souvenirs who actually think they are in New Orleans, etc.  There has been a wrinkle or warp in the fabric of reality, and it is getting worse all the time.  Eventually it becomes clear that the entire country, or maybe the entire world or universe, is descending into chaos, with people and things appearing and disappearing.  There is no explanation for this, or resolution of the plot; the characters can only accept this strange new state of affairs.

The tone of the story is basically humorous, though with an undercurrent of fear and alienation (of millions of people in New York, only three of them seem to notice what is happening; the changes seem to be affecting most peoples' brains or psychologies.) 

This story is sort of "meta"--one of the two characters reads SF novels--and includes pop culture references--the other character watches lots of TV.   People familiar with Manhattan and/or The Big Easy may appreciate all the references to streets and landmarks from those towns. 

This sort of thing isn't really my cup of tea (there was nothing to make me intellectually or emotionally engaged, and the jokes didn't make me laugh), but I can see it is a good specimen of its type and the style is good.  I'm not averse to reading more Effinger stories, should I encounter any in other anthologies I buy for other reasons.

This story was expanded into a short novel that I do not plan on reading.

"I Am Aleppo" by Jerry Sohl

I haven't been to Syria, so no personal reminiscences this time. 

"I Am Aleppo" is a confusing and ridiculous story.  I also thought some of the sentences were poorly structured.  As I was reading it I kept checking to see how many pages I had left, I was so eager to put it behind me.

Scientists get the idea from some primitive and peaceful natives that crime, war, and mental illness occur because people don't process their dreams correctly.  So they figure out a way to hook people together with wires so a person who is awake can watch a sleeping person's dreams.

It turns out that when we dream, our souls or minds or whatever travel to another dimension, or maybe that when we dream people from another dimension who share a collective consciousness can enter our minds.  Anyway, somehow, these people from another dimension are in our dreams, and can kill us.  In the story, two different scientists die in real life when a weightlifter, in their dreams, strangles them.

Somehow, the scientists rig up a tank attached by wires to the dreaming sleeper, and capture the murderous weightlifter in the tank.  They shut the power to the tank off, so the muscleman from the dream dimension dies.  All the other people in the dream dimension feel their fellow member of the collective conscious die, so one of the dream people who looks like a hooded Arab with a scimitar and calls himself Aleppo vows revenge.  A third scientist gets hooked up and dreams, and he is attacked by Aleppo and fights him hand to hand.  The waking scientists capture the Arab in the tank and unhook their colleague in time to save his life, or so they think.  Somehow, their colleague's soul is in the tank and Aleppo's soul is in the scientist's body-- the dream Arab, animating the scientist's body, massacres everybody in the lab with a butcher knife he found someplace.  The end.

I didn't like the style of the writing, and as for the plot, there was just too much going on that made no sense and was not explained satisfactorily for the story to be at all convincing or enjoyable.  The waking person hooked up to the dreamer doesn't see the same images as the dreamer, he sees a third person perspective on the dream, like he is another person in the dream, but one the dreamer is not aware of.  I didn't understand how the people from the dream world got into the tank either.  It also seems like most of our dreams come from our own minds, that only some of the components of our dreams come from the dream dimension, and somehow the scientists could tell with their instruments when a dream world person had invaded an Earth human's dreams.  There is also a hint that the dream people are the souls of Earth people who have died, and that they can return to the Earth as the souls of newborns.  Maybe all this stuff is better explained in the novel I, Aleppo, published three years after The New Mind.

Anyway, I didn't like "I Am Aleppo."

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Exploring new frontiers is not always profitable.