334, Part the Second: "Bodies," "Everyday Life in the Later Roman Empire" & "Emancipation"

Having read "The Death of Socrates," the first story in my edition of 334, I have decided to just read the entire thing.  Today I read the next three stories from my 1987 edition of this 1972 book.

"Bodies"

"Bodies" first appeared in 1971 in Quark/4, edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  "Bodies" appears in two books I own, 334 and Fundamental Disch, and a quick glance suggests that the texts (except for typos) are the same.

Ab, a white man with an invalided wife, and Chapel, a black man with a criminal record who loves TV, work in Bellevue Hospital.  I guess you would call them orderlies; they do things like push carts around.  Ab is based in the morgue, and makes some extra money on the side by selling cadavers that he is supposed to cremate to a criminal who caters to necrophiliacs.  A disaster occurs when Ab sells a body before the required 24-hour waiting period prior to cremation has ended.  Ab received the body erroneously, the body was not supposed to be cremated, and the deceased's insurance company is expecting the body.  Ab, Chapel, and other not-quite-honest people at the hospital have to scramble to get a replacement body or there will be hell to pay.  Chapel, whom the more intelligent and ruthless Ab is able to manipulate, is persuaded to do the dirtiest deeds and take the biggest risks to bring the caper off.

You could say that this is the second story in 334 in which a black person is abused and taken advantage of by more intelligent white people.
        
In some ways the sections of "Bodies" on Ab's and Chapel's home lives are more memorable than the main body-stealing plot.  Ab has sex with his obese invalided wife who is always angry, a scene Disch means to be disturbing.  Chapel watches TV.  Chapel loves TV, and here Disch seems to be talking about the theory of fiction he describes in his essay "The Uses of Fiction," which I read recently.  Chapel learned how to read and how to respond to life by watching TV, and Disch argues that TV serves for Chapel the purpose which religion served for so many people in the past.  As in Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, TV also seems to be a sort of family for Chapel.  (A favorite Ford commercial, we are told, is like an old friend to Chapel.)

Lots of interesting character stuff going on, some good images, and a solid horror/crime plot; a quite good story.

"Everyday Life in the Roman Empire"

I believe this story first appeared in 334, though less than a year later it was included in an anthology which Disch edited, Bad Moon Rising.  Bad Moon Rising has perhaps the most disturbing book cover I have ever seen, a photo of a dead bird. 

Unlike the previous stories, which had welfare recipient and working class protagonists, this story concerns middle class professionals.  Alexa is a case worker with a humanities degree, and her husband is an engineer.  Alexa is unhappy with her life, and envies her sister, who lives a simpler life in Idaho, even though she has contempt for her sister's religious beliefs.  Alexa spends a lot of time in elaborate drug-induced fantasies in which she lives in the Roman Empire; this is a form of psychological therapy.   

The story seems like a parody of typical New York middle-class life: When Alexa is not at her therapist or undergoing therapy at home she is obsessing over what private school to send her son to. 
 
Disch includes in this story digressions from Marcus Aurelius, Oswald Spengler, and others, that indicate that the period of 334 is a period in which the elite are taking advantage of the poor, a period of cultural stagnation, and the prelude to some kind of collapse or cataclysm.  Perhaps more interesting, Disch hints that he thinks that the arts and humanities are a vain pastime (or waste of time) for the well-off, that people concerned with culture are not contributing to society the way, say, engineers are.  Or it could just be that Disch is reminding us that there are people who feel that way.     

This story is one of the weaker Disch stories I have read.  The characters are not very interesting, the plot is not funny or shocking, and the digressions distract you from the story.

"Emancipation: A Romance of the Times to Come"

This story first appeared in 1971 in the anthology of original stories, New Dimensions 1.

"Emancipation" is about sex and gender roles, and stars Boz and Milly.  Milly has been mentioned in earlier 334 stories; she was Birdie Ludd's girlfriend before Birdie joined the Marines, and she is Ab's daughter.  During the period of those tales Milly was a stewardess for PanAm; at the time of this story she works for the government, demonstrating sex in high school classrooms.  Boz is a house husband.  We are told repeatedly that Boz and Milly are very good-looking.  However, their marriage is on the rocks.

A marriage counselor tells them the solution to their problem is to have a baby.  Milly wants a baby, and the feminized Boz will not be happy until he has embraced his maternal instincts.  So Boz and Milly have a test tube baby, and Milly's breasts are removed and implanted on Boz's chest so he can nurse their baby, which comes out of its artificial womb on December 24.

This story actually has a happy ending; Boz enjoys being a mother, Milly rises in the ranks of her public sector union, and their marriage problems ease.  The final scene is a charming one in which Boz and Milly sit together on the balcony of their apartment, look out over the city, and reminisce about the early days of their marriage.

"Emancipation" makes clear something that what was hinted at in "Bodies," that in the world of 334 the Democratic Party is the party of heterosexuals and the Republican Party the party of homosexuals.  (In "Bodies" Ab expresses a hatred of Republicans, hinting that he would enjoy castrating them, and later he walks by a sort of erotic amusement park called "The Democratic National Convention" whose entrance is a 70 foot high neon vulva.)  It is hinted that the public schools are full of homophobic propaganda.  Boz, who likes to strike poses and has sex with men and women, is accused of being a Republican, and one gay character self-identifies as a Republican (even though he has to recite the government propaganda that says that "a preference for cunt is an inescapable consequence of having a cock.")   

A good story, with bizarre elements, but a sweet conclusion.

Thomas M. Disch's "Problems of Creativeness" and "Death of Socrates"

My copy of 334

In 1967 Thomas M. Disch's story "Problems of Creativeness" was first published. In 1972 a revised version of the story, entitled "Death of Socrates" appeared in 334.  Yesterday I read both versions of the story, curious as to what was different about them, and why Tom Shippey, editor of the 1992 anthology The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories, might chose to publish the earlier version.   

"Problems of Creativeness" (1967)

"Problems of Creativeness," published in 1967, is the story of Birdie Ludd, college student and resident of a 21st century New York City full of public housing projects.  (Could his name be a reference to Ned Lud, the mythical leader of the Luddites, Georgian artisans who turned to violence in response to the technological advances that were threatening their livelihoods?)  Birdie is a dolt and an ignoramus who claims he does badly on one test because he was nervous (it was Friday the 13th!), is proud of getting the modal score on a physical fitness test, and thinks David's Death of Socrates is a Greek painting.

Birdie's lack of intelligence and any interest in art or literature is a problem because under the current eugenicist regime he will be forbidden to marry and have children unless he can pass some kind of intelligence test or earn a BA.  He's already failed the IQ tests, so college is just about his last chance to earn the right to reproduce.  He wants to reproduce because he is in love with his girlfriend, and she will leave him for someone else if he can't marry her and father her children.

In the cradle to grave welfare state of the 21st century a college education is the right of every American citizen, so there is nothing stopping Birdie from getting into college, and college is so easy even Birdie is able to maintain a C average.  But then Birdie starts skipping classes, and even loses track of the time and misses a major test, so is expelled.  His next chance is to produce a work of art or literature or give a performance that will convince the government that he has superior talents which don't show up on IQ tests or college exams.

The government provides Birdie with a stipend to live on and three months to produce his work of art (he chooses to write).   He sits in a public library cubicle with a screen which offers access to all the books in the major libraries of the United States and Europe.  Birdie, for the first time in his life, actually does some serious reading, and he is inspired.  The world, to him, suddenly, is a beautiful fascinating place!  Ecstatically he drafts his essay, redrafts it several times, then sends it off.

The essay, entitled "Problems of Creativeness," is laugh out loud bad, being full of stupid mistakes (Birdie refers to "Wolfgang Amadeus Goethe," for example) and making no sense.  Birdie has failed another test, and now his only hope of being given permission to reproduce is to show great bravery on the battlefield.  The story ends as Birdie joins the U.S. Marines, fated to participate in a war in Southeast Asia.

Disch is a very good writer and this is a very good story; Birdie seems like a real person, and the jokes are actually pretty funny.  But what is Disch trying to say; what is his attitude towards the society he presents in "Problems of Creativeness?"  In some ways, the government in this story seems to be very generous, a sort of left wing dream, with the government guaranteeing food and shelter and access to culture and education.  On the other hand there is the eugenics program, and the war in Southeast Asia, and suggestions that the public housing, food and education are not so good.  There are hints that Disch thinks that family and love are what are really important in life, and that the intrusive and generous government depicted in the story obstructs such things, at least for people of below average intelligence.  The fact that Birdie is so stupid and so lacking in discipline and character (he cheats on the girlfriend he keeps saying he loves, and expresses an irrational hatred of old people) muddies the issues; would a person this incompetent succeed in any society?  Maybe Disch's point is that government programs that ostensibly are meant to help the more vulnerable and underprivileged fail to do so, and destroy the ancient institutions (like the family) that in the past such people have relied on? 

"Death of Socrates" (1972)        
 

I'm calling this the "Hubba Hubba edition"

In 1972 334, a collection of Disch stories, sometimes called a novel, was published, and one of its component parts was a revised version of "Problems of Creativeness," now called "Death of Socrates."  In my edition of 334, the 1987 Carrol & Graf paperback, "Death of Socrates" is the first story.  I read the story yesterday after finishing "Problems of Creativeness," curious as to what changes Disch had made.

Additional scenes added in "Death of Socrates" make Disch's point of view a little more clear.  During a classroom discussion of Dante, a minor character argues that it is wrong for people to be punished for the circumstances of their birth.  A few pages later in this version of the story we learn that Birdie passed one of his tests, but then, when it was discovered by the eugenics people that Birdie's father had diabetes, Birdie's score was lowered.  Birdie is also penalized for his father's long stretches of unemployment.  (The government in this version seems less generous.)  On the plus side of the ledger, Birdie is given a few extra points for being black (or "a Negro," as the story puts it.)

A theme evident in much of Disch's work is the idea that we do not control our own destinies, and these changes make the story of Birdie Ludd fit right in with stories like "Assassin and Son" or "Slaves."  In "Problems of Creativeness" we watch as Birdie's stupidity and irresponsibility doom him, despite the chances the government gives him.  In this new version of the story we see that Birdie's fate is largely determined by things he has no control over, like his race, genetic predisposition to diseases, and his father's behavior.

Birdie is a somewhat different character in this version.  I don't think he was black in "Problems of Creativeness;" at least there was no evidence that he was, and other characters who were black were specifically described as "Negroes."  One such Negro in "Problems of Creativeness" was a thirteen-year-old girl whose ass twenty-year-old Birdie ogled.  There is no thirteen-year-old girl in "Death of Socrates."  Birdie is more violent in "Death of Socrates," and his antisemitism is also more obvious.

The 1972 version of the story is more explicit in several ways, with the words "fuck" and "cunt" making an appearance, and scenes of Birdie masturbating.  Maybe these scenes, as well as the implicit criticism of affirmative action and implications of African-American antisemitism, are why "Problems of Creativeness" was included in the 1992 Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories instead of "Death of Socrates?"  Or maybe legal issues regarding copyright were the reason.  Or maybe Tom Shippey just preferred the earlier version; I think I may prefer the earlier version myself.  The Birdie in 1967's "Problems of Creativeness" is more sympathetic, and the jokes in the story are funnier.  Disch even took out the "Wolfgang Amadeus Goethe" joke!

Two dystopian stories from the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories: Harry Harrison & Gene Wolfe

Cover to a recent edition

Today I read three stories from Tom Shippey's Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories which I knew ahead of time I would like, Harry Harrison's "A Criminal Act," Gene Wolfe's "How the Whip Came Back," and Thomas M. Disch's "Problems of Creativeness."  In this post I will talk about the Harrison and Wolfe stories, which I read two or three years ago; in a later post I will compare the Disch story to its revision, "Death of Socrates," which appears in 334, which I read about ten years ago.  All three of these stories were worth a reread and I strongly recommend all of them.  

"A Criminal Act" by Harry Harrison

Harrison is well known for his broad satires and humorous novels, and this story is also satirical, but I appreciated the fact that it is not too silly - the action sequences, for example, are written straight and I thought quite well, like something out of a good war or adventure story.

This story, like Ballard's and (to some extent) Aldiss's from this collection, is about overpopulation.  It could also be an indictment of democracy and mob rule, like the Kipling story.

In 1993 (over 25 years after the story was written in 1967), the government of what appears to be a socialist and/or authoritarian state where everyone lives on government rations and the people have no right to question the laws, legislates a limit to the number of children a man can father.  Bizarrely, instead of the police enforcing the law, should you father a third child and fail to take advantage of a government abortion or euthanasia clinic, a civilian volunteer is given permission to kill you. (This reminds me of the proscription lists of the Roman Civil Wars and the legal concept of outlawry and "the wolf's head" in medieval England.)

In the story Benedict (which means "blessed," perhaps a reference to such stock phrases as "blessed with a baby"), an old-fashioned man who talks about the "sanctity of life," and "the inviolability of marriage" and feels that a man's place is "out in front, defending his family" has fathered his third child, and so a volunteer, Mortimer (a pun on "mort", the Latin word for death?) comes to kill him.  The conservative father, armed with a revolver, holes up in his apartment and defends himself from Mortimer, who has a government-supplied machine pistol.  During the siege and shootout, Mortimer, who is some kind of anti-population activist, and Benedict argue over the role of the individual in society and the justice of the population control law.  Harrison seems to side with the volunteer's arguments, but at the same time hints that Mortimer's support for the law is just as emotional and personal as is Benedict's abhorrence of the law.

This is a good story, though maybe vulnerable to attacks on feminist grounds.  The law seems to focus solely on the man's role in pregnancy (Mortimer is not allowed to kill the mother, just the father.)  Also, Benedict's wife acts stupidly, putting Benedict in terrible danger repeatedly.  The foolishness of Benedict's wife may be a sign of Harrison's own hostility to religious people and/or conservatives, and his own concern about overpopulation.  Benedict's wife may serve as an example supporting the argument that ordinary people are too stupid to do the right thing by the environment/society, and so elite experts are justified in forcing ordinary people to act as the elites know they should.

"How the Whip Came Back" by Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe, my favorite writer, in this 1970 story presents a dystopian vision of a socialistic 21st century.  The Catholic Church has fewer than a million members.  The Soviet Union has won the Cold War; the United States has abandoned all pretense of supporting the free market and the U.S. government is imitating Soviet policies.  Crime is rampant in America, the national debt is high, and the economy is a wreck.

The plot of the story concerns a woman who is in Geneva for an important international conference; she does not represent a country, but apparently the charitable sector, and has only a symbolic, non-binding vote.  The international community is facing a major decision; the governments of the world, apparently led by the Soviet Union, the United States, and France, want to "lease" the many members of their prison populations to businesses and individuals - essentially this is a reintroduction of slavery.  The woman at the center of the story vocalizes the arguments against such a measure, but decides to vote for the measure because it will give her the opportunity to enslave her former husband, who broke her heart and is currently in prison.  Wolfe implies that her decision, for public relations reasons, is the decisive one that makes the legalization of slavery possible.

This is a well-written and quite good story, but you can see how it could offend people.  For one thing, Wolfe clearly argues that fewer people attending church and/or believing in God is correlated with an increase in depravity.  (Polls indicate that most people support selling prisoners into slavery, and it is argued that people love the idea of having slaves.)  More glaringly, we have the main character, a woman who apparently knows the difference between right and wrong, but dooms millions of people (not just criminals - it is clear that the Communist Party in Eastern Europe will not limit itself to criminals, and implied that the U.S. will follow suit) for selfish, jealous, emotional reasons.  This is not a flattering depiction of womankind!  

The story includes a brilliant and memorable image: a robot in the shape of an old-fashioned writing desk, a Louis XIV secretary.  When you google "Louis XIV secretary" you get zilch, but "Louis XVI secretary" yields many results.  Is this a typo?  Or is Wolfe trying to remind us of King Louis XIV, an adherent of the theory of the divine right of kings whose long reign saw the centralization of the administration of France, oppression of the Protestant French population and all kinds of aggressive wars?

Another theme of the story is how fashions change; the first three paragraphs of the story are all about how red and green are in, are "modern," this season in clothes and furniture.  (It may be significant that the protagonist dislikes the modern style and is fond of antique furniture and the work of Renaissance sculptor Cellini.)  Two characters talk about how it is possible that the Catholic Church, apparently on its lasts legs, may become fashionable again.  Wolfe seems to be implying that beliefs that we take for granted as self-evident (like the belief that everybody in 1970 would have expressed, that slavery is wrong) are in fact just fashions; for thousands of years slavery was a normal part of life, and it could come back into fashion in the 21st century just as easily as it went out of fashion in the 19th century.

An engaging and thought-provoking piece of work, entertaining and challenging.

Three more stories from the Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories: Van Vogt, Aldiss, and Ballard

Cover of a later edition

Three more selections from Tom Shippey's Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories.

“The Monster” by A. E. Van Vogt

This 1948 story is one of many examples of a Van Vogt story about a transcendent human with mental powers. I think this story is a little more coherent and easy to follow than much of Van Vogt’s work.

Far in the future, a race of aliens comes upon the Earth. All animal life is dead. These aliens are able to replicate living creatures from even small fragments. Curious as to how Earth life was wiped out, since they want to colonize the Earth, the aliens start revivifying humans. An Egyptian mummy, then a 20th century man, are unable to provide any clue, and the aliens vaporize them with ray guns. A human from thousands of years later, however, is not only able to explain what happened to humanity (a nucleonic storm swept the Earth with deadly radiation) but turn the tables on the aliens, as he has mental abilities which make him immune to ray guns or nuclear bombs. When the story ends the aliens are doomed, and we know that the human will use their technology to bring the human race back to life and conquer the universe.

A fun story.

“Who Can Replace A Man?” by Brian Aldiss

I suppose this 1958 story is an effort to show the absurdity of human traits like the lust for power, class distinctions, belligerence and servility by having robots exhibit these traits, but I found the whole thing to be ridiculous and boring.

Because of overpopulation, the nutrients in the ground are depleted, and the human race dies of a vitamin deficiency. The robots that have been doing all the work stop getting orders, and because this is a story and not real life, instead of just stopping, some of the robots go crazy, and some of them strike off on their own initiative. Even robot tractors and robot steam shovels get anthropomorphized in this story, and express joy at their freedom or ambitions to dominate others. The robots make alliances, argue, go to war with each other, cry out in agony and fear when abandoned, and when humans reappear immediately abandon all thoughts of independence.

This story is pretty lame. The jokes (one of the robots has a lisp) are not funny. The environmentalist, population scare, and anti-war sentiments in the story are just perfunctory; this story reminded me of a cloying children's book, like maybe one of Dr. Seuss's more irritating efforts.

Not good.

“Billenium” by J. G. Ballard

This is probably the most satisfying of the stories I have yet read in The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. It is full of vivid images and human feeling, and the style is quite fine. "Billenium" first appeared in 1961.

Ballard considers how society would respond and what everyday life would be like in an overpopulated world, and depicts for us a brief period in the life of one of the denizens of such a world. The story is engrossing and believable, and I really enjoyed it.

*********

Even though I thought the Aldiss story poor, these three stories all constitute good representative samples of major themes and styles in science fiction and so are good selections for a book like this.  We've got homo superior and mental powers in Van Vogt's sensationalist pulp tale of wicked and hideous aliens armed with ray guns, overpopulation in Ballard's more sophisticated and literary story, which you might consider early "New Wave" in its focus on the everyday citizen, and Aldiss brings the robots and misanthropy.  

Three tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories: Wells, Kipling, and Williamson

Cover of the edition I borrowed

I wanted to read “Problems of Creativeness,” an earlier version of “The Death of Socrates,” the first chapter of Thomas M. Disch’s fixup 334, and so checked out a copy of 1992’s The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories. The collection, edited by Tom Shippey, seemed to have a number of interesting stories in it, so I put off Disch for a space and read several of them, today stories by H. G. Wells, Rudyard Kipling, and Jack Williamson.

“The Land Ironclads” by H. G. Wells

Published in 1903, in this story an unnamed hardy frontier nation of hunters, cowpunchers and “negro-whackers” (Shippey in his intro compares them to the Boers or the Australians) has been invaded by the army of a similarly anonymous urban, sophisticated nation of clerks and factory hands, presumably Europeans.  The skinny city boys easily defeat the rugged country boys by using what we would today call tanks, as well as bicycles.  Wells thinks bicycles are more suited to warfare than horses.

There isn't much by way of character or plot in this one, though the descriptions of the fighting are good.  Wells spends quite a bit of time describing the complex mechanisms of the land ironclads, and those that make their rifles so accurate; there are compensators that take into account the movement of the vehicle, for example, and a device that measures range to target and raises or lowers the gun barrel accordingly.  While Wells condemns war, he celebrates the triumph of science and the brain over spunk and brawn--the city boys in the tanks are described as doing their fighting in a rational, methodical, business-like way, which Wells heartily approves, and they share Wells's contempt for emotionalism, including patriotism.

"Land Ironclads" is more effective as an essay than as a piece of fiction; while competently written, there is no feeling beyond a facile "Gee Whiz!" response to the technological stuff and a smug confidence in the superiority of the educated elite.

“As Easy as ABC” by Rudyard Kipling

In the future (2065) there is what amounts to a world government, the Aerial Board of Control.  With a fleet of highly maneuverable aircraft armed with nonlethal weapons (blinding lights and deafening sound projectors), the ABC's multinational staff is an irresistible force able to maintain order anywhere in the world. 

(The ABC reminded me of the Space Patrol in Robert Heinlein's Space Cadet, which prevents international war by being ready at any moment to nuke aggressors.)

Kipling describes a post-democratic world in which the average person finds a crowd a disgusting source of physical and mental disease and voting to be an absurdity.  People lack any curiosity and are obsessed with privacy; there are no newspapers and everybody plants around their homes dense stands of quick grow trees to block line of sight.

A bunch of democracy activists has amassed in Chicago, however, and are demonstrating.  The local authorities are shocked at the sight of people standing so close that they brush against each other.  These demonstrations have inspired angry counter-demonstrations, and the ABC has to rush air ships to Illinois before the democracy activists are murdered by the anti-democracy crowd.  The members of the democrat crowd (and their families and friends who aren't even there!) are whisked away without any sort of trial to London, where their bizarre antics of taking votes and gathering in crowds will amuse the theater-going public.  Meanwhile the people of Chicago beg the ABC to take direct control of the town.

I'm not quite sure what to make of this story.  Is Kipling so worried about mob violence and so hostile to meddlesome elected politicians that he is advocating rule by an invincible and unaccountable elite that can carry you off without any kind of due process?  Or is he satirizing such fears?  Maybe he is just speculating that, if those of us in democratic countries don't show restraint and exercise responsibility when enjoying such freedoms as freedom of the press and freedom of assembly, and when voting for our representatives, that some kind of tyranny or other will arise.

All the clues point to Kipling believing that ABC rule is benevolent, however, that this story is a utopian attack on democracy and popular government.  The crew of the lead airship (an Englishman, an Italian, a Japanese, and a Russian) are depicted in a positive way, and it is suggested that all people in the world are rich because the population is low.  Maybe the ABC airship using force to keep the two Chicago crowds from fighting is analogous to a 19th century British imperial force taking up the white man's burden and maintaining order in some unruly Indian or African village.
            
On the "Gee Whiz!" front Kipling is as good as Wells.  Besides the aircraft and the fast growing trees, Kipling has automatic maps that act like a GPS computer, electric paralysis rays, and advanced medicine (people normally live to be 100.)  

An interesting, challenging story.

“The Metal Man” by Jack Williamson

It is perhaps not fair to compare Jack Williamson to major literary and cultural figures like H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, but where "The Land Ironclads" and "Easy as ABC" try to make some point about society and human nature, "The Metal Man," published in 1928, is just a conventional piece of entertainment.

A scientist is searching the South American wilderness for radium.  For some reason he doesn't have any local guides or grad students with him.  He finds a ten mile wide crater full of a weird green heavier-than-air gas.  He blunders into the crater, and discovers that the gas in the crater turns organic matter into metal.  He finds lots of dead metal birds and even a metal prehistoric reptile.  He encounters a bizarre life form, intelligent crystals that have the power to defy gravity.  The crystals help him get out of the crater, but he is doomed to turn to metal.  He writes a letter to his best friend, and pays a guy to deliver his dead metal body to his friend with the letter.  When the friend accepts delivery he puts the metallic corpse in the museum of the college where the scientist taught.  The End.

A barely acceptable trifle.

********

These three stories were more interesting than fun.  I have read more entertaining work by each of these writers in the past: Wells - Kipling - Williamson.  Still, the Wells and Kipling perhaps provide some kind of insight into the thinking of two important British writers. 

This weekend I will read some more tales from The Oxford Book of Science Fiction Stories.

The Storm Lord by Tanith Lee

I have praised Tanith Lee’s short stories numerous times on this blog, and this week I decided to tackle Storm Lord, one of her long DAW epics. Storm Lord was first published in 1976, and the cover with its Gino d’Achille painting promises over 340 pages of guys sword fighting, sexy girls, and giant snakes. Does Storm Lord deliver?

Well, there are plenty of snakes. There is a bit of fighting with swords and knives. There are many beautiful women, and while there are few explicit sex scenes, sex is one of the main topics of the book. The sex is generally between men and prostitutes, or involves men taking women by force, and there are hints of incest; perhaps Lee was appealing to people with unconventional erotic fantasies?

This is one of those novels in which there are lots of royal, noble, and clerical characters, all having sexual intrigues and stabbing each other in the back, seeking power and revenge, and also lots of towns, regions, and rivers. Everybody and everyplace has a wacky fantasy name so at times I had a little trouble keeping track of who was who and where they were from and how they were all related to each other. The little frontispiece map doesn’t help, as many of the places in the text are not marked on it. Embarrassingly, at one point a character was reminiscing about how he felt when he was between Migsha and Ilah, and at first I thought he meant when he was in bed with two whores; eventually I remembered that Migsha and Ilah were villages.

This novel takes place, as the cover says, on an alien world; on pages 21 and 122 it is implied it was colonized by Earthmen over a thousand years ago. The current technology level is ancient/medieval; swords, catapults, sailing ships, chariots.  There are lots of strange beasts with weird names on the planet: the zeeba (a hoofed mount, I guess a zebra), the palutorvus (a big mount that comes from a swamp), the owar (they use its hide to make tents), the kalinx (an aggressive sort of cat used in hunts like the hounds used in English fox hunting), the tirr (a big powerful carnivorous monster) and others.  Some of these animals Lee doesn’t describe; in my mind, palutorvus is a brontosaurs. Rawr.

There are also Earth-derived creatures, like over-sized man-eating wolves, cows, lions, horses, and lots of snakes of all sizes. The people are human, but a little strange; the ruling ethnic group, the Vis, dark-skinned brunettes, are strongly influenced by the appearance of a particular star in the heavens: it makes the Vis men sexually agitated and dulls their judgment. The blonde Plains people are immune to this effect, and more importantly, have the ability to communicate with each other via telepathy.

The Storm Lord is somewhat entertaining, but that’s it. I’m giving it a marginal recommendation. Lee is a good writer, but the book feels cold, distant, I didn’t get a sense of a point of view or much passion. I didn’t care who killed who or who got to be Storm Lord or who had sex with who; none of the characters won my sympathy or interest, partly because there are so many characters and we don't get to know any well, partly because most are jerks and most of the rest are messianic.

What actually happens in The Storm Lord?  If you are curious, read on!

Two more stories from Fundamental Disch (plus the essay "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory")

The back cover of Fundamental Disch suggests that Disch writes like Jerzy Kosinksi, or Jules Feiffer, or John Collier; in Samuel Delany's intro he tells a story in which a book Disch wrote under a pen name was mistakenly attributed to Gore Vidal.  I’m in no position to assess these judgments, but I’m still (sort of) young, and maybe one day I will become familiar with those writers.

The two stories I reread today are conventional mainstream literary fiction, with no SF elements; perhaps it was these stories that inspired critics to make the comparisons to nongenre, mainstream writers we see on the book’s back cover.

"Slaves" (1967) 

I read this years ago, the story of the relationships among three young people living together in a New York apartment on the Upper West Side. There’s Paul, grad student in English, his girlfriend Danielle, who studies ballet by day and dances at a discotheque at night, and “the Baron,” Paul’s childhood friend and college dropout, down on his luck since his father committed suicide. The Baron, unemployed, cooks and cleans and runs errands for the household.

Paul’s father is wealthy, and so Paul pays all the bills, including for Danielle’s abortion and contact lenses. (The money Danielle makes dancing is all spent on an analyst.) Paul is not necessarily faithful to Danielle, and Danielle and the Baron are attracted to each other. Danielle and the Baron figure out how to swindle 50 dollars out of Paul, and Danielle tells the Baron, just before kissing him, that they have turned the tables on Paul, that now he is their slave. In a final scene the three roommates blow up over a hundred balloons they have shoplifted and release them from their balcony.

Of course I am susceptible to these New York stories. At one point Danielle looks out the window of their apartment and watches a tugboat sail upriver, past the cliffs and trees of New Jersey. When she said “I think that’s lovely,” I sadly nodded. And Disch is a good writer, filling the story with interesting images and phrases, so I liked it.

But what is the point of the story? Who are the slaves? Is everybody a slave? All the characters are morally compromised (except maybe the pet bird), and they are all manipulated, robbed, or dominated by the other characters (especially the caged pet bird.) What do the balloons represent? What does New Jersey represent? (Danielle finds New Jersey ”vaguely frightening,” which could just be a joke about New Yorkers’ attitude about my home state, but many of the balloons head over the river to New Jersey.) It is hard not to suspect that the balloons represent people and/or their souls, and that the winds that push them hither and yon, some to the Manhattan streets, others to New Jersey, symbolize the fates directing them to heaven or hell, or maybe just happiness or unhappiness, if you don’t believe in souls (whether or not people have souls is a topic of the Baron’s conversation.)

A good story.


"Getting into Death" (1976)

This is another story I am rereading after quite a few years. “Getting into Death” was the title story of a collection of Disch stories published four years before Fundamental Disch.

The protagonist of “Getting into Death” is Cassandra Millar, a terminally ill novelist.  The entire story takes place in her Manhattan hospital room.  She is a sort of hedonistic, counter-cultural figure; she took LSD with Timothy Leary, smokes "grass," finds it impossible to take religion seriously.  Her medical issue is with her heart, and she is totally lucid, and spends her time in the hospital reminiscing about her life and career, reading Proust, getting high, masturbating (at least I think that is what that paragraph at the bottom of page 357 is about), drafting new stories and novels, and chatting with visitors.

Cassandra is something of a misanthrope; she doesn't like the daughter-in-law who brings LSD and marijuana to her in the hospital, is bitter about her father, and was relieved when her biological daughter moved to New Jersey to live with Cassandra's ex-husband after their divorce.  When she considers her will she expresses a wish to leave her money (she is a millionaire) to the government instead of her family!  Egads!  Often she pretends to be asleep in order to get rid of her visitors.

Cassandra also has contempt for the reading public.  Under one name she writes spectacularly successful gothic romances (that is where she got her millions) which she herself considers silly, and under another she writes didactic detective novels which were never profitable and tend to not stay in print very long.  It is these mysteries, the product of research and her legitimate interests and feelings, which she considers "her" books.

By the end of the story Cassandra has had a sort of revelation.  Thanks largely to her conversations with a rabbi who started his career as a psychoanalyst and has been telling her lies to make her feel better, Cassandra realizes that what people want is to be lied to, to be deceived.  She begins enthusiastically expressing insincere affection for her father, her numerous ex-husbands, and everybody else.  The story ends right before Cassandra is about to try her loving lies on her most perceptive relative, her daughter.

This is a well-written story about fiction and its value.  People do not want too much contact with the horrible reality that is life, Disch is apparently saying; people crave fiction, which is essentially lies.  As usual, Disch's fine style and his economical way of developing the characters and their interactions makes the story a good read.

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"Getting into Death" is about fiction and what it is for, and so is an essay written by Disch in 1975 that is included in an appendix to Fundamental Disch, "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory."  In my peregrinations around the web over the years I have gotten the vague impression that many SF fans have it in for Disch.  Disch's iconoclastic criticism, I suspect, is the source of some of this ill-feeling, and I think "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory" is a good example of the kind of criticism that might generate animus among genre readers. 

In "The Uses of Fiction: A Theory" Disch suggests that people read genre fiction because of its sameness, that when we buy a western or mystery or SF book we know what to expect and we buy it to fill a particular need.  He compares a predilection for genre fiction to sexual perversion -- a love of genre fiction is a sign of arrested development!  A successful adult will not read genre fiction, because his life satisfies him.

Disch provides examples of what sort of people buy what sort of genre fiction.  Science fiction readers, he says, are smart youngsters and "a particular kind of retarded adult" who worship intelligence and science.  Ouch!

As for mainstream fiction, Disch theorizes that it trains people in how to act, forms their taste and speech patterns.  How do we learn how to attract members of the opposite sex, how to defer to bosses without losing our self respect, and how to manage subordinates without becoming ogres?  Through observing lovers and workers in fiction.

I actually think this is a strong and interesting theory, but you can see why it might piss off SF fans.

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So, Thomas M. Disch, and the collection Fundamental Disch, get the MPorcius Seal of Approval.  I'm glad I bought mine long ago; I'm too cheap to pay most of the prices I'm seeing online today!