Dark Love: K Koja, B Copper, R Campbell and K E Wagner

We just read three stories by the great Tanith Lee about disastrous sexual relationships.  This is a theme close to my heart, so let's see what other material of the same bent we can find.  At an antique store recently, I spotted a hardcover copy of 1995's Dark Love, edited by Nancy A. Collins, Edward E. Kramer and the ubiquitous Martin H. Greenberg-- tag line: "twenty two all-original tales of lust and obsession"-- and took a gander at the table of contents.  No Lee, no Malzberg or Wolfe, but still some authors we read.  In the MPorcius tradition of absolute cheapness I decided to save four bucks and read my four selections from Dark Love via the internet archive.  

Dark Love seems to have been a success, winning the 1996 Deathrealm award, which I had never head of until today, and seeing print in Britain and France as well as in America.  Our European friends seem to have gotten the short end of the stick, however, as the US editions of the book have a quite fine Mel Odom cover illustration (check out the even more beautiful original Odom work from which this cover was adapted here) while the French cover is pedestrian and the British cover is embarrassingly lame.  U-S-A!

I guess Stuart Kaminsky is a big deal, but I don't know that I have ever heard of him before

"Pas de Deux" by Kathe Koja

This is a pretty sophisticated piece of work.  The pace of "Pas de Deux" is quick and there is a lot of titillating sex stuff and some violence but Koja also weaves together plenty of compelling scenes that explore multiple engaging themes about life and human relationships, including the relationship of a person to his or her own body--does your body determine your fate?  Does your body, even more than your mind, represent the real you?  

Our main character is a woman who is living in poverty in a crappy apartment in a big city, trying to make it as a ballet dancer.  But she has a troubled relationship with dance--as a kid she wanted to play soccer, but her fat mother forced her to take up ballet, and the woman at the strip mall ballet studio told her "No sports for you, you've got a dancer's body."  Our protagonist left the world of dance for a while and now that she is back in it she is probably too old to really make it.  Many an evening she goes to night clubs where people dance to thrash metal and "steelcore," which I have to admit I've never heard of.  (I'm always learning!)  Her dancing of course is better than anybody else's, and many men hit on her and she brings them back to her apartment for one-night stands; she explains her philosophy to them after having sex with them.  

The dancer's relationship with men is a major component of the story and Koja includes flashback scenes of her with her chain-smoking father in her teenaged years and with her former long term boyfriend, Edward, who himself had a strange relationship with his first wife and his mother-in-law, Adele, a successful dancer who knew Balanchine well, or at least wrote a book purporting such.  Our main character reads Adele's memoir of her relationship with Balanchine, and it has a powerful effect on the dancer's mind, as do her memories of Edward's critiques of her face and fashion choices.  Perhaps the main theme of "Pas de Deux" is to what extent we make decisions and to what extent other people and other external factors (along with the body we got stuck with) determine our choices.  The main character again and again does things she tells herself she doesn't want to do, but asks herself, "what else is there to do?" 

In need of money, she contacts Edward but he wants sex in return for a "loan" she probably will never be able to repay.  She refuses to grant him any sexual favors, in fact strikes him.  So she gets a job at a used bookstore; she steals from the place and gets herself fired.  She then gets a job as a stripper.

At the same time she pursues her doomed quest to become a professional ballet dancer, our heroine is on a quest to find a man, a partner in life--Adele in her book advises women to "find your prince."  This quest is also doomed--the men the dancer meets at thrash clubs won't do (her body, she feels, will tell her which of the men is her prince, but her body rejects man after man, night after night) and she never even considers the repulsive men for whom she strips.

The dancer's sanity slips, and she stops eating, becoming skeletally thin, which does not endear her to her clients or her boss.  The story ends somewhat inconclusively, like a literary story--there is a climax, in which the dancer encounters Edward again and she beats him up and wrecks his house, but we have to assume this is not going to improve her life and career prospects and that if she doesn't take Edward's unwanted advice ("You're very sick, you ought to see a doctor") she is going to die soon.

Maybe like the Lee stories we read in our last episode, "Pas de Deux" is about women who seek love and when men aren't willing to give it to them they lash out at the man who let them down and/or society at large.  But this is no wish fulfillment fantasy that celebrates a woman empowered--it is all about how women are at the mercy of others, men and women both, and factors over which they have no control.

A good mainstream story about a creative person crushed by the world that has enough sex, violence and creepiness that it also provides the thrills we look for in genre fiction--thumbs up!  "Pas de Deux" has been reprinted in Koja collections in English and in French, the language of (noir?) love.

(An odd little note: the artist Patrick Nagel is mentioned twice in "Pas de Deux," but both times here in Dark Love his name is misspelled "Nagle."  I found an electronic version of Velo/cities, and in there the name is spelled correctly.)

"Bright Blades Gleaming" by Basil Copper

We've reads three stories by Copper during this blog's chevauchee across the interwebs.  I liked "The Knocker at the Portico," and "Voices in the Water" but gave "Beyond the Reef" the old black ball.  making sure to keep in mind the law of small numbers, we must acknowledge that "Bright Blades Gleaming" will determine if Mr. Copper has a 75% or 50% hit rating here at MPorcius Fiction Log.  Fingers crossed!

"Bright Blades Gleaming" is well-written on a page by page and sentence by sentence basis, with Copper constructing an interesting character and offering strong images.  Of course I am a sucker for stories in which a sensitive young man lives in a big city in a tiny apartment and spends a lot of time on the crowded streets wistfully looking at young women--there was a time when I was such a young man!  But the plot of "Bright Blades Gleaming" amounts to little and the twist ending is pretty disappointing.  It is frustrating when a guy like A. E. van Vogt comes up with a plot full of crazy ideas and astounding events but his poor writing style limits how much you can really enjoy the wild ride, and it is also frustrating when a guy has a good style but only applies it to a plot that lacks any sort of emotional or conceptual punch or any thrills.  We'll call "Bright Blades Gleaming" acceptable.

The text of "Bright Blades Gleaming" is the diary of a late 19th-century young man who has just moved to Berlin.  He describes in detail his new room and his fellow tenants and hints that he is some kind of weirdo with "inflammatory views" who is often in trouble with the police.   As the story proceeds we learn he is an atheist who loves animals and refuses to step on beetles he finds under his seat at the restaurant but hates human beings, a failed medical student who finances his slacker's lifestyle of sitting in restaurants and parks staring at the girls who go by through clever thievery. 

The diarist studies the slaughter of cattle at an abattoir, buys surgical instruments and practices the art of dissection on some dolls.  He starts having horrible bloody dreams and wakes up one morning to discover indications that last night, presumably while out of his mind, he killed somebody.  He flees Germany for England, where Copper provides the in-your-face clues that confirm readers' suspicions that the diarist is Jack the Ripper.

We follow this dude for page after page as he tidies his room, follows a girl on the street, has tense conversations with his land lady, and denounces aged veterans, slowly learning how truly odd and sinister he is, but instead of some kind of climax in which he achieves some dastardly perverse goal or he is foiled by the authorities or some brave civilian, our supposed pay off is being told he is Jack the Ripper?  Copper's attempt to appeal to the audience's supposed fascination with Jack the Ripper is cheap and unsatisfying, a cop out--it is like he wrote only half a story, just the setting and the character, leaving the reader to supply his own climax and resolution.    

(Defenders of "Bright Blades Gleaming" might call it a mood piece or a character study.  Let's also note that Dark Love is dedicated to Robert Bloch, so maybe this story is an homage to the Jack-obsessed Bloch.)  

Besides in Dark Love, you can catch this rump of a story in the Copper collections Darkness, Mist and Shadow: Volume Two and Cold Hand on My Shoulder.    

"Going Under" by Ramsey Campbell 

This story feels long and glacially slow, with long meandering sentences that fail to engage the reader's interest or inspire any emotion and a tedious pace that leaves the story seeming to move in slow motion.

"Going Under" takes place in a tunnel that goes under a river.  The tunnel is part of the highway system, and to celebrate an anniversary of its opening it has been closed to automobile traffic to serve as the route of a charity walk--a crowd of people has come to buy a ticket, the money going to their favorite cause, AIDS or whatever, and then walk the length of the tunnel.  Blythe is doing this charity walk by himself, having had a fight with his wife.  Blythe is one of the first people to own a cell phone or mobile phone or whatever English people were calling them in 1995 and while doing the walk, crammed cheek by jowl with strangers in the dense crowd, he leaves wifey a voice mail and then takes an incoming call--these calls are critical, as Blythe has to get his alimony check to his first wife (I think it's alimony--the word "maintenance" is used) in the mail or he will be imprisoned, and he wants his current wife to put the check in the mail, which he stupidly didn't do himself.  The tension of the story is meant to come from the fact that he has trouble getting a signal and then the answering machine malfunctions and then he drops his phone and it breaks blah blah blah.  Campbell tries to make his story funny and/or disturbing by describing how fat everybody doing the charity walk is and how their bodies radiate heat and by having people make fun of Blythe for using a phone in public.  Blythe then goes insane and starts harming people in his feverish quest to retrieve his phone or borrow or steal some other person's phone.

Bad.  Maybe this crummy story serves as a historical document of a time when it was fashionable to envy people who had cell phones and used them in public.  Didn't Stephen King write an entire book about how cellphones are bad?  "Going Under"'s defenders might say that it seeks to evoke the claustrophobic stress of being in a dense crowd at a public event.     

People love Ramsey Campbell, and Stephen Jones included "Going Under" in a best-of-the-year anthology.  You can also find it in multiple Campbell collections.

"Locked Away" by Karl Edward Wagner

Wagner brings to our exploration of Dark Love the gross explicit sex we were perhaps sort of expecting, plus little jokes for genre fans, like a mention of David Drake (a romance novelist in this story's world) and to Bambi and Thumper from the James Bond film Diamonds are Forever.  

Pandora is an Englishwoman in her late twenties, a divorcee and owner of an antique store in North Carolina.  She wins a box of jewelry at an auction, and fancies for herself a heart-shaped Victorian locket she finds among the lot.  Pandora puts on the locket, the clasp of which she initially finds difficult to open.  When she does manage to open it, it triggers immersive dreams of rough sex in which she is the subordinate participant; Wagner graphic blow-by-blow descriptions of these episodes are like something out of a porn story.  Soon the locket clasp is opening freely, practically on its own.  Some of the dreams are essentially rape and torture fantasies.  When Pandora wakes up from the dreams she finds underwear or sex toys from the dreams in her possession, ejaculate on her face and blood leaking from her anus--was she having sex in another universe or with ghosts?  

It turns out the locket was owned by a spinster, a very religious woman, and, perhaps, the dreams are that old woman's sex fantasies, which she never expressed or experienced, but kept locked away in the locket.  (SF stories and porn stories often ridicule religious people, suggest religious people are hypocrites; I guess people who put science or sex at the center of their identities see traditional religion as a rival school of thought, a way of organizing the universe which they must supplant or perhaps just resent.)  But Wagner also suggests that Pandora is just a pervert, her sexual desires warped by abuse at the hands of her ex-husband, maybe even the result of brain damage from blows to the head.  As the story ends Pandora tosses away the locket, puts on revealing clothes, and arms herself with a knife--she is going to have rough sex with men she meets at a bar, or maybe her young employees, an attractive woman and a handsome gay man (there is a lot of lesbian sex and lots of gay vibes in this story), and unlike in her magical locket-triggered fantasies, she is going to be the aggressor, is going to leave the other participants bleeding.

A nasty exploitative thing, the supernatural elements an excuse to describe brutal homoerotic scenes of men abusing a woman, abuse the woman ultimately enjoys.  But competent, I suppose.  We'll call it acceptable.

"Locked Away" would go on to be reprinted in three different Wagner collections, all of which sport covers that leverage Wagner's biker image.

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Well, only one of these stories, Koja's, is actually good, though Wagner's seems to accomplish its (modest) goals.  Copper's shows ability but was disappointing, while Campbell's was emphatically not my cup of tea.  Of course, I'll probably read all there people again next time they pop up in some anthology that has caught my eye, maybe soon, maybe years from now.

Tanith Lee: "You Are My Sunshine," "The Unrequited Glove," and "Mirage and Magia"

There are a lot of Tanith Lee collections out there.  Let's read a few stories from 1989's Women as Demons, published by The Women's Press as part of their science fiction series, which is meant "to present exciting and provocative feminist images of the future" that "offer an alternative vision of science and technology" and "challenge male domination of science fiction itself."  On the title page the collection has a long subtitle, as might an academic treatise: "The Male Perception of Women Through Space and Time."  Of the book's sixteen stories, I've already read, I believe, four: 1978's "The Demoness," 1979's "The Thaw," 1981's "Gemini," and 1982's "Written in Water."  Let's read three more tales from the book, those  with titles that are striking me: "You Are My Sunshine," "The Unrequited Glove," and "Mirage and Magia."

"You Are My Sunshine" (1980)

"You Are My Sunshine" debuted in Roy Torgeson's Chrysalis 8 alongside Barry Malzberg and R. A. Lafferty stories I don't think I have read.  Two years after being reprinted in Women as Demons, "You Are My Sunshine" would reappear in the Lee collection Space is Just a Starry Night.

"You Are My Sunshine" begins and ends with excerpts from a transcript of an interrogation by some officials of the only survivor of a space ship disaster.  The middle, the lion's share of the story, is the story of the disaster, told in the third person but only depicting events the sole survivor, a good-looking thirty-something guy named Leon Canna, experienced.

It is the future of interstellar civilization, in which solar-powered starliners carry thousands of passengers at a time between star systems.  These huge ships closely orbit stars for a few days before an interstellar jaunt to charge their batteries.  The vessels' shields filter out all dangerous radiation, so only beneficial radiation reaches the crews and passengers of the ships--this beneficial radiation provides tremendous health benefits, and people who can afford it flock to the "Solarine" ships to bask in this health-giving radiation while they are charging up.  

Canna is a "Passenger Link," a sort of morale officer, geisha man and liaison between the technical crew who operate the ship and the civilian passengers; he makes sure everybody on the cruise is having a good time and if anything goes wrong makes sure the passengers don't panic or get too angry.  It seems that he regularly has sex with female passengers as one means of keeping their spirits up.

Canna notices a shy and plain girl passenger, Apollonia Hartley, boarding the ship right before one of these popular charging-up periods.  He encourages her to come out of her shell, go tan in the solarium, and he flirts with her.  Lee portrays his dealings with the girl as somewhat predatory, but also suggests Canna himself is being manipulated--Canna is not sure why he is attracted to this girl who is not very good-looking or interesting.

Over the course of just a couple of days the plain girl seems to blossom, becoming the hottest girl Canna has ever seen and pursuing Canna sexually--now Canna is scared of Apollonia, and he tries to avoid her but she finally succeeds in coupling with him in his cabin.  Parallel to this erotic drama, a technical drama is proceeding.  The levels of radiation on the ship are rising, and the computers and technicians can't find anything wrong with the ship's shields or its other systems--where is the radiation coming from?  Of course we readers know it must be coming from the mysterious Apollonia.  After she has sex with Canna, she goes out to the solarium--the solarium has been declared off limits because it gets more solar radiation than anywhere and the crew assumes if the dangerous rise in radiation is coming from the star they are orbiting so closely then the solarium is the most dangerous place to be, but the Ms. Hartley stole the key from Canna right before losing her virginity to him.  The tech boys detect that the radiation in Canna's cabin is higher than anywhere else on the ship and tell him to get in his space armor tout suite.  Right after he dons his vacuum suit the no-longer-plain girl explodes, destroying the ship and killing everybody aboard except the fully armored Canna.

Lee, as I have told you a hundred times, is a great writer who is very skilled at putting sentences and paragraphs together and creating moods and painting characters, and so "You Are My Sunshine" is an entertaining and exciting story and of course I am giving it a thumbs up.  As for the plot, it works fine if we accept it as a horror fantasy set in a future starfaring civilization and not a serious science fiction story that is trying to teach you science or make an educated guess about what the future will be like; one might complain that Lee never makes clear what is going on with this exploding young woman--is she an alien or something?--but fantasy writers don't need to explain trolls and ogres and dragons and demons, they are just there, perhaps as symbols.

So, this is a good story I recommend.  But, considering where I am reading it, maybe we should assess if "You Are My Sunshine" really is a feminist story that is all about male perceptions of the female and offers an alternative female or feminine vision.

For one thing, early in the story there is a throwaway line that suggests that in the future people will realize women are smarter than men and stop stifling women's superior brains and superior ambition:

...the Solarines had a low percentage of female crew—since women had realised their intellectual potency, they tended to go after the big-scale jobs which pleasure-cruisers didn’t offer.

This female superiority doesn't manifest itself any other way in the story, unless we think that the passenger who seduces Canna and then kills everybody (and herself?) is demonstrating some kind of superior ambition and cleverness by doing so.

The board of inquiry that hears Canna's story accuses him of making up or hallucinating the story of a plain girl blossoming sexually under his influence and then exploding, saying he has "managed to turn a naval tragedy into an exercise in masculine ego."  This sounds like feminist talk, but Lee undercuts this assessment by offering unmistakable clues that indicate Canna really is telling the truth to the investigators.  I'm not even sure "You Are My Sunshine" really works on the simple level of feminist revenge fantasy in which a woman turns the tables on a male aggressor--sure, Canna has contempt for the young woman and manipulates her, and then she turns the tables on him and he suffers, but he lives through the disaster, suffering far less than all the people on the ship who never did anything to hurt her, hundreds of whom must be women passengers.  

In the context of the story, the girl in "You Are My Sunshine" really was something of a demon, a creature who used her sexual wiles to get something she wanted out of a man and then callously or cruelly killed thousands of people--Lee's story doesn't seem to be questioning men's perceptions of women as trouble so much as instantiating it.  The final image of the story is the burns on Canna's back in the shape of Apollonia's arms and hands that Lee compares to those left by branding irons--sex with Apollonia physically injured, perhaps permanently scarred, Canna, which feels like Lee's symbolic representation of men's fears of disease and of permanent attachment should they have sex with a woman.  Well, maybe if we go full "meta" we can say by writing a story in which a woman's blossoming, triggered by a man flirting with her, kills thousands of innocent people and permanently damages the man, Lee is offering a vision of what men think, providing a peek into the male mind.

"The Unrequited Glove" (1988)

In 1988 four issues of the widely beloved Weird Tales appeared, including special issues devoted to Avram Davidson, Gene Wolfe, and Lee.  "The Unrequited Glove" debuted in the Lee issue, which is full of illustrations by Stephen Fabian, so his fans as well as Lee's should seek the issue out.  Besides Women as Demons, you can find "The Unrequited Glove" in the 2017 collection The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee.

"The Unrequited Glove" is a lot like "You Are My Sunshine," and many of my comments about that story apply to this one.  A good-looking, confident guy trifles with a virginal and shy young woman in an exotic locale frequented by the wealthy, and when he loses interest in her she achieves a terrible revenge on him.  While written in the third person, it is mostly written from the perspective of the male lead, with the female avenger "on screen" relatively rarely.  The man had some level of contempt for the woman, but didn't intentionally set out to harm her, so is her use of her supernatural powers to commit murder justified, or is she the villain?  

Jason Drinkwood is a wealthy Englishman who spends long periods of time in some kind of coastal tropical "colony" in the New World where lots of rich or artistic Europeans and Americans hang around.  These jokers all have servants and sit around drinking and attending parties and having affairs with each other and so forth.  Jason has a brief affair with a female painter who owns a gallery where she sells her work, Alys Ashlin.  Jason doesn't take women too seriously, going through them at a rapid pace, and he soon tires of the painter and tries to break off their relationship.  But she has fallen in love with him.  She comes to his place, to tell him she loves him, and then departs, leaving behind a glove.  The glove is animate, and terrorizes Jason for weeks, throwing things at him, cutting holes in his expensive clothes, etc.  It toys with him, I guess the way Alys thinks he toyed with her.  The glove follows him everywhere, and is too magical for him to actually destroy, even though he does catch it once.  Jason begins to lose his sanity.

Finally, by taking a "steamer" back to London and bringing no luggage so the glove has nowhere to hide, Jason escapes the glove.  But Alys figures out a way to get the glove across the pond (a friend of Jason's has a crate of oranges from the colony shipped over to Blighty and the glove hides in the crate--some friend!) and this time the glove is not playing--it murders Jason.

This is a superior horror story that perhaps we should see as the wish fulfillment fantasy of shy sensitive girls who think of themselves as smart and who resent the good-looking but not-quite-as-smart guys whom they desire but who reject them.  Is the idea that, if you fall in love with a guy but he doesn't fall in love with you, he deserves capital punishment, a feminist idea, making this a feminist story?  Or is "The Unrequited Glove" just a reworking of the traditional theme that women are trouble and every time you get involved with a woman you are taking a terrible risk because women are irrational and calculating and play by different rules than do men, or respect no rules at all?

"Mirage and Magia"  (1982)

"Mirage and Magia" debuted in the DAW witch story anthology Hecate's Cauldron, which was reprinted in Germany as Hexengeschichten. The story has been reprinted in multiple anthologies and Lee collections in our own 21st century so all you admirers of the female form have a wide array of hubba hubba sex-sells covers to choose from.

"Mirage and Magia" immediately reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith.  The story takes place in some exotic fantasy world in which there are "balloon-ships" and "carriages" that walk on giant insect legs, in a remote city of rococo towers and fantastical mansions terrorized by a witch.  This witch, Taisia-Tua, only appears in public in a mask and wig, never wearing the same mask and wig twice, so nobody knows what she looks like.  She seems obsessed with her own image, carrying a little mirror around with her in which she often gazes upon herself.  TT has the ability to summon men to her; against their will, men she accosts on the street with the phrase "Follow me" walk to her mansion, through its 30-foot-high gates.  When they come back out through those gates their souls are absent, apparently awarded to some demon or evil god--the men are vegetables, unable to clean or feed themselves, and those who look into the empty eyes of one of Taisia-Tua's victims see not their own reflections, but the back of the victim himself!

Over the years, many men lose their souls this way.  Attacks, physical and magical, on the witch and her mansion come to nothing.  Taisia-Tua arrogantly flies a kite over the city trailing a banner that boasts that she is the greatest of all magicians.  The city's greatest thief, in return for a hefty fee, sneaks into the mansion and investigates, finding the place's interior a labyrinth of mirrors of dizzying variety.  The thief witnesses one of the witch's victims losing his soul, apparently merely from looking at his own many-multiplied reflection in all the mundane and magical mirrors.        

Years later another magician arrives in the city, a sorcerer skilled in the making of music and the performance of acrobatic feats.  He advances to Taisa-Tua's mansion and proves immune to her mirrors.  We learn the witch's story.  A man broke her heart and she came to the city of mansions to work her revenge on the world, using men's own vanity to stupefy them.  But this new man falls in love with Taisa-Tua after convincing her to reveal her true face and hair to him, and wins her love.  This love connection causes the mirrors to shatter and the witch's apparently soulless victims to recover their senses.  The lovers leave the city, and in the abandoned mansion the city dwellers, now liberated from her campaign of terror, find a note which bears witness to Taisa-Tua's recognition that love is the greatest magician of all.

An unexpected happy ending, but not necessarily a feminist happy ending!  A woman lashes out at the world because one man broke her heart, and then another man comes along and his love cures her and ends her reign of terror--"Mirage and Magia" suggests that even the most able of women's whole outlook on life and her behavior are determined by the response of men to her!

A quite successful fantasy tale; Lee piles on the extravagant descriptions but "Mirage and Magia" does not feel overwritten--all the descriptions paint a vivid picture in the mind or convey to the reader a powerful mood--every sentence is entertaining.  

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These are three good stories, and the Women's Press has done the world a service making them available to more people by printing Women as Demons.  I'm skeptical that these fantasy stories of women abusing people with their magical powers further the mission of the Women's Press of exposing people to "provocative feminist images of the future" and "alternative vision[s] of science and technology," but I suppose the most powerful and least controversial feminist act is giving a woman an opportunity to demonstrate her abilities, and Lee is a writer of high ability and these stories certainly prove that.  These stories specifically and Women as Demons as a whole are highly recommended to fantasy and horror fans and to those who enjoy speculative fiction that emphasizes traditional literary values over teaching you science or beating you over the head with some kind of obvious political or social commentary.

Merril-approved 1958 stories by M St Clair, T N Scortia and J Shepley

For a while now we've been on a slow-paced tour of the speculative fiction of 1958.  Pointing out the highlights for us is Judith Merril, herald of the New Wave and recipient of a blizzard of critical accolades.  In the 1959 edition of her Year's Greatest Science-Fiction and Fantasy series of anthologies she included at the very end a list of honorable mentions three pages long in quite small type, and we have been going through it alphabetically, picking out authors who interest us and stories that are easy to access and then judging to what extent we agree with Merril that these are among the best SF stories of 1958.  Today we reach the letter S, and investigate one story each by Margaret St. Clair, Thomas N. Scortia and John Shepley which received Merril's blessing.  There are lots of people whose names start with "S" and so we've got a bunch more "S" stories ahead of us.  Behind us we have 1958 stories by all these worthies:

Poul Anderson and Alan Arkin
Pauline Ashwell, Don Berry and Robert Bloch
John Brunner, Algis Budrys and Arthur C. Clarke
"Helen Clarkson" (Helen McCoy), Mark Clifton, Mildred Clingerman and Theodore R. Cogswell
John Bernard Daley, Avram Davidson and Chan Davis
Gordon R. Dickson 
Charles Einstein, George P. Elliot, and Harlan Ellison
Charles G. Finney, Charles L. Fontenay, Donald Franson, and Charles E Fritch
Randall Garret and James E. Gunn 
Harry Harrison, Frank Herbert and Philip High
Shirley Jackson, Daniel Keyes and John Kippax
Damon Knight and C. M. Kornbluth
Fritz Leiber, Jack Lewis and Victoria Lincoln
Katherine MacLean, "T. H. Mathieu" (Les Cole) and Dean MacLaughlin 
A. E. Nourse
"Finn O'Donnevan" (Robert Sheckley) and Chad Oliver
Avis Pabel, Frederik Pohl, and Robert Presslie
John T.Phillifent, Kit Reed, Mack Reynolds, and Charles W. Runyon

"Squee" by Margaret St. Clair

I have avoided St. Clair's work as I acquired the idea she wrote joke stories while perusing the letters columns of Startling (or maybe it was Thrilling Wonder.)  But when on Merril's recommendation I read "Horror Howce" a year ago I liked it, so maybe I am treating her unfairly.  Well, let's see what we think of "Squee," which debuted in Future Science Fiction and was reprinted in 2020 in a St. Clair collection which I believe was published by the Canadian government.

"Squee" is one of those misanthropic stories about how the human race is violent and irrational and will destroy itself, though perhaps it distinguishes itself with its misandry, or, if you prefer, its biting feminist satire.  "Squee" is well-written on a sentence by sentence basis, the pacing and all that are good, and St. Clair produces real characters with legible personalities and relationships, and doesn't go too far into rank absurdity and farce, so "Squee" is better than the general run of these things.  We'll call it mildly good.

St. Clair's story takes place entirely upon a space ship on a desperate mission.  The stress of the years-long trip, in which the crew live packed closely together like men on a submarine, fosters all manner of conflict among the spacemen; luckily among them is a genius mechanic who is also a talented musician and performer who is able to make jokes and sing songs that soothe the spacers' nerves and defuse arguments and fights...so far at least.

Through expository dialogue we learn the horrible predicament the human race finds itself in.  A few years ago ago, a scientist named Neil developed a bacteriological weapon that targeted women; it was hoped the threat of the weapon, or its use, would end an ongoing war, and that the vaccine against the weapon--issued to the enemy immediately upon their surrender--would keep too many women from dying.  But the bioengineered disease mutated and the vaccine lost its effectiveness and soon all the women in the world were pushing up daisies.  Neil was murdered by an angry mob, but his son, also a scientist, survived, and is a prominent figure in the effort to solve the no-female problem by figuring out how to create more people by somehow altering sperm cells.

Neil the Younger is aboard the ship, the mission of which is to collect samples of insects on Ganymede--substances from the alien bugs may be an aid in the process of altering sperm and continuing the human race.  As the story begins, the ship is on it way back to Earth, and Neil the Younger spends all his time in the lab, alone, working on sperms cells with the alien bug goop.  The men of the crew hate Neil for the deeds of his father and because Neil is aloof and even arrogant.

Morale gets worse after Neil reports that he may be able to create new people, but only men, no women.  (St. Clair actually devotes quite a few column inches to describing the science of reproduction and why this is so.)  The genius mechanic invents a robot squirrel to entertain the crew.  St. Clair in this story depicts men not only as violent and irrationally competitive, not only callous and dismissive of women, but also as fool at the mercy of their sex drive, as irrationally attached to the female and driven to act irrationally by their desire to appeal to women.  That genius mechanic puts a skirt on the robot squirrel and gives it a feminine voice, so the men basically fall in love with it.  (One of St. Clair's little jokes is that the robot squirrel keeps saying "I love nuts"; I'm assuming here that "nuts" was already slang for testicles in 1958.  Another is that the mechanic, a talented ventriloquist, not only composes but actually voices the squirrel's lines, so all the flirting between the robot and the crew is homoerotic.)

Neil the Younger feels contempt for the men's simple-minded response to the robot squirrel, and apparently jealousy over how the men hang on every word of the mechanic and his creation, Squee.  So Neil has the robot deactivated, claiming he needs one of its components in his work on saving the human race.  One of the men, I guess the robot squirrel's most dedicated fan, goes to the lab to murder Neil and in the fight both men die and much of the lab is destroyed, setting back the essential work of preserving humanity.

In case we missed the point, St. Clair has some characters explicitly discuss how man's aggression and his rabid competitiveness is putting the survival of the human race in jeopardy, both in the middle and at the end of the story.

These kinds of stories rub me the wrong way because I think the sub rosa purpose of them is to divert responsibility for the Cold War away from the Soviet Union and/or to make the related point that everybody is somehow to blame for crimes and atrocities and not just the individuals who committed those misdeeds.  But "Squee" is not bad, and I suppose Merril is justified in recommending it on its merits, even if she really chose it because it portrayed a guy with a British name and not a Russian name threatening humanity and because of its feminist politics.  The way the story depicts an intersection between international politics and gender politics perhaps makes "Squee" a valuable text for feminist academics in the humanities writing about the Cold War.

"The Avengers" by Thomas N. Scortia

I have used my "Scortia" tag seven times, and I think I have read a dozen Scortia short stories and one novel by the man.  Merril liked "The Avengers," but if isfdb is to be believed, "The Avengers" was never printed outside of the US and UK editions of Science Fiction Stories.  Let's see if Merril was right and the world is all wrong and my thirteenth Thomas N. Scortia short story is a good one.

Scortia's novels, most of them written in collaboration with Frank M. Robinson, seem to be in the disaster genre, and "The Avengers" starts out with a description of a pretty monumental disaster--Earth's cities are "in flames" and the sun has been "murdered"!  A space ship, crewed by aliens who look just like Earth people, lands on the ruined Earth to look for survivors.  These aliens are on a quest for revenge on whoever just destroyed our civilization and set our sun on the path to going nova in a few hours because thousands of years ago this same fiend did the same thing to their home world and has been destroying star systems inhabited by intelligent life on the regular ever since!

(We can't help but be reminded of the Glis, who travelled the galaxy messing with one star system after another in A. E. van Vogt's 1960s Silkie stories.)

The aliens find only one survivor, a man named Joseph.  Joseph doesn't want to leave the Earth, even though the sun is going to explode and destroy the entire solar system in a few short hours.  He escapes protective custody on the alien ship and when the woman sent after him catches up to him, he convinces her to stay on the doomed Earth and share his fate.  The ship leaves, on the trail of the sun destroyer.  

Joseph equates the ship with the Wandering Jew of legend, and himself with Joseph of Arimathea from the Bible.  I guess the monster destroying star systems is God or His representative, and those killed on the planets are not truly annihilated, but transported to Heaven--the destruction of each sun is the local manifestation of The Second Coming.

"The Avengers" reads like a weak Twilight Zone story, one whose hopes to move or entertain an audience rest solely on the effectiveness of its wacky twist-ending gimmick--Scortia's characters are uninteresting while his plot feels contrived and lacks tension and doesn't build to a satisfying climax.  But the gimmick fails to deliver--Scortia does not explore the Christian ideas he mentions nor convincingly connect them to the destruction of the solar system by a nonhuman intelligence.  It is not even clear if Scortia is endorsing Christian ideas or goofing on them, it is like he doesn't take the ideas he is trying to exploit for effect, or his audience, seriously enough to think about them.  Lacking any other qualities, the story lives or dies on its gimmick, and since its gimmick is poorly realized, gotta give "The Avengers" a thumbs down.           

Why did Merril endorse this half-baked clunker?  Maybe as an anti-American leftist she experienced "The Avengers"' lazy and superficial treatment of Christianity as thrilling blasphemy, or liked the way the story portrayed a mission of revenge as sheer folly--if the Soviet Union conquers some place, America should turn the other cheek!       

"Gorilla Suit" by John Shepley 

Shepley has only four credits at isfdb.  A Jewish-American who lived in Rome and New York City, he published literary stories in places like Paris Review and Quixote and translated Italian books like Ferdinando Camon's Conversations with Primo Levi and Roberto Calasso's The Forty-Nine Steps.  As I have told you a hundred times, one of Merril's objectives in her career was to point out how bogus were, or to break down to the extent they were real, the distinctions and barriers between genre literature and mainstream literature, so she loved to reprint and promote what she took be to SF that was written by mainstream writers or appeared in mainstream venues, making Shepley and his work is right up her alley.

"Gorilla Suit" first appeared in F&SF, but for some reason Merril's cite points readers to The Best from Fantasy and Science Fiction, Eighth Series, so I am dutifully reading it there. 

"Gorilla Suit" is a professionally written but bland joke story, "witty" and understated rather than funny or exciting.  The main jokes (I guess) are that people in New York see so much crazy stuff they have become blasé, even immune, to bizarre events, and that Hollywood people, probably people in general, prefer the artificial to the real.

Toto is a gorilla who has human intelligence--he reads the paper and does the crossword puzzle--but cannot speak.  He lives in the zoo; I guess the Central Park Zoo.  When he sees an ad for a one-day job for a man with a gorilla suit or a gorilla promoting the Bing Crosby-Bob Hope film Road to Bali featuring Dorothy Lamour, Toto decides to escape the zoo to apply for the job in hopes of meeting Lamour, of whom he is a fan.  People don't bat an eye as a gorilla walks around Manhattan and rides the elevator to the office where the job interview will take place.  None of the many other applicants for the job notices Toto is a real gorilla.  The job goes to another real gorilla--this ape is canny enough to don a fake gorilla costume in front of the interviewers, who marvel over the high quality of the fake suit's "nylon-acetate." 

We'll call it acceptable.

**********

This batch of "S"s is a little underwhelming, though I suppose these stories, each being satirical on some level, are particularly ill-suited to me--I'm sick of satire.  Still, if my mind and body hold out long enough I will probably be reading St. Clair, Scortia and even Shepley again--in Merril's eighth volume of Year's Best S-F she recommends a 1962 Shepley story.

If, May 1966: A E van Vogt, R M Williams & R A Lafferty

In our last episode we read a Gene Wolfe story from the May 1966 issue of If, a magazine then edited by Frederik Pohl.  There seems to be a lot of interesting material in this issue, so let's check some of it out!

From 1966 to '68, If carried Lin Carter's regular column on fandom.  Carter's column this time around is about amateur press associations, and mentions H. P. Lovecraft, an enthusiastic amateur press participant, and Ted White, among other people.  The column is a jokey light-hearted thing, and kind of boring--it feels frivolous, trivial.      

More meaty (or maybe it just offers the kind of trivia I prefer) is the guest editorial by Lester del Rey.  Del Rey courts controversy, complaining that the science fiction writers of the mid-1960s do not incorporate current scientific developments into their work the way the science fiction writers of the mid-1930s did theirs.  Rather than being inspired by the hard sciences and technology, current SF writers, if they care about science at all, write about psychology and sociology, and they don't even use recent developments or discoveries in those fields as grist for their stories, but tired old cliches that shrinks and sociologists have been saying since the turn of the century.  Del Rey also suggests that SF writers have fallen under the influence of academics in the humanities, and replaced the bold, optimistic and exciting can-do heroes of past SF with worriers and pessimists who are a drag.  Ouch!

I wish del Rey had offered examples of the writers and stories he is attacking; I always find these kinds of 50- or 60-year-old blind items frustrating.  One of this blog's early posts, issued back in 2013, consisted of me pondering the identities of the targets of bitter attacks on fellow SF writers by Harlan Ellison and Jack Vance.  Del Rey does single out H. G. Wells and Raymond Z. Gallun for praise as people who integrated about both science and human characters in their work.  Del Rey is a big Gallun fan--I noticed a week or so ago when reading Robert Silverberg's "When We Went to See the End of the World" and William Rotsler's "Patron of the Arts" that del Rey had dedicated The Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year, Volume 2 to Gallun.

Enough with the features; now let's investigate three stories from the ish, those by our favorite Canadian A. E. van Vogt, the questionable Robert Moore Williams and the one-of-a-kind R. A. Lafferty.

"Silkies in Space" by A. E. van Vogt

There have been periods when the work of A. E. van Vogt was at the center of this blog's activities, but it has been a while since we have read anything by ol' Van.  Well, let's get back aboard the sevagram steam train with this story.

isfdb lists three Silkie stories, published from 1964 to 1967; "Silkies in Space" is the second.  In 1969 the three stories served as the raw material for the novel The Silkie.  In the past I have found that van Vogt stories are often better in their original magazine form than after being altered for publication in a fix-up novel, and that the experiences of reading the novel version and magazine version of a van Vogt story are quite different, so reading this story is not going to discourage me from reading the novel someday.   

Van Vogt's fiction often concerns a man with special mental powers, powers that are in the process of expanding, who discovers the hidden reality behind his world and becomes acquainted with secret elites who are influencing everything from behind the scenes and are likely in conflict with each other, and "Silkies in Space" follows this pattern.  We also find here van Vogt's familiar clunky style, and his fascination with people's thoughts and thought processes--in "Silkies in Space" we face many lines flatly telling us the main character's emotional response to this or that fantastic event, often simply that he finds it fantastic, and many sentences relating to us the hero's deductions and how he comes to his weighty decisions, decisions that will affect the course of history of not only the Earth but the universe!  There is also quite a bit of incomprehensible pseudo-scientific gobbledygook that serves as a rationalization of all the amazing phenomena that take place in the story.  Here's a passage, the three sentences that make up two paragraphs, that I think exhibit these traits of the van Vogt style:

The hard fight had driven him down to a special logic of levels. He felt an automatic outflow of hatred.

Yet, after a little, another realization penetrated: "I won!" he thought.  

It is of course not van Vogt's style that we fans of the mad Canadian like, but his crazy plots and crazy ideas, and "Silkies in Space" delivers on that score.

It is hundreds of years in the future.  Our hero is Cemp, one of the couple thousand Silkies living on Earth.  Silkies are men who have all manner of powers: by manipulation of gravity, energy fields, electricity, and the like, a Silkie can fly, detect and analyze all manner of natural phenomena (down to the atomic level!), and defend himself with crackling energy; via telepathy he can communicate with other Silkies, and with a superior subset of the human race; with his super brain he can memorize vast amounts of data; and there is more.  To make the fullest use of his powers, a Silkie must change into one of multiple Silkie shapes; van Vogt doesn't describe these in detail here, but suggests they have a shape something like that of a slug or fish--at one point we are told a Silkie's natural shape is "bullet-like" and twice that it in this form a Silkie is covered in "steel-hard" chitin.  Silkies, however, usually take the form of handsome human males.  Our guy Cemp is the most powerful of all Silkies, he having learned additional ways of using his powers from some aliens recently (I guess in the first Silkie story, 1964's "The Silkie.")

The conventional beliefs about Silkies, what Cemp calls "the official story" and today we might call the mainstream narrative pushed by the elites, are that the first generation of these super beings was created in a lab like 220 years ago, that there are only male Silkies, and that all of them are registered with a government bureau and work together to further the interests of Earth's inhabitants, both human and Silkie.  Silkies marry human women who are of the superior type, members of a minority of humans who have some limited form of telepathy.  (A subtheme of the story is the political, social and sexual relations between ethnic majorities and more talented ethnic minorities, a dynamic we see all the time in SF, presumably a reflection of how SF readers are both alienated from others and feel they are smarter than others.)  This entire view of Silkie history and of the place of Silkies in the world and the universe is subjected to questioning and radical revision over the course of the story.

As the story begins, Cemp is confronted by a Silkie who is not registered and who issues an ultimatum: he, and all the Silkies, are to abandon relations with the human race and join "the Silkie nation" on pain of death!  What can that mean?  The loyal Cemp reports this encounter to the federal agency that manages Silkie affairs, and is sent to do some investigating.  He discovers that there is a secret underground of unregistered Silkies--their numbers even include Silkie women!  Then he discovers that these unregistered Silkies came from an asteroid that has an orbit that stretches from the environs of Neptune to the region of Mercury, that within this 10-mile-wide rock resides an independent society of Silkies!  This planetoid approaches Earth every 110 years, and is about at its nearest point to Terra now!  Silkies are not the product of a human lab experiment, but natives of an alien world!

The government sends Cemp to this asteroid and he explores the subterranean world of the space Silkies and eventually meets them.  The space Silkies, like the Silkies of Earth, have a warped view of their own history and milieu, and after our hero learns from them what they believe to be the true history of their race, he finally gets the full truth from the being of pure energy that secretly lives in the center of the planetoid.  This creature, the Glis, controls the space Silkies but has managed to remain absolutely unknown--the space Silkies have no idea the Glis exists and that they are under its control.  (One of the first clues that points to this is how nice all the space Silkies are, in contrast to the way the space Silkie who issued Cemp the ultimatum on Earth behaved when they first met--that space Silkie was temporarily under the direct influence of the Glis and acting against his nature.)  The Glis' paranoid desire for secrecy leads it to try to destroy Cemp, the only being in the universe to know of its existence, but Cemp survives these attacks (thanks to his unique alien knowledge) and opens negotiations.

The Glis has the power to alter and even destroy entire star systems, and over millions of years has travelled from system to system, manipulating them to foster intelligent life.  When the Glis discovers or develops intelligent life, it sends some of the shape-shifting Silkies down to the inhabited planet to integrate into the local civilization.  At first this all seems like a campaign of benevolence, but then the truth is revealed.  The Glis is like a gardener and a collector!  Having molded or discovered a successful planetary civilization, the Glis shrinks the planet, inhabitants more or less intact, down to one hundred feet across and stores it within its planetoid!  The Glis has thusly collected over a thousand planets over the course of history!  Cemp narrowly escapes when the alien collector subjects our own planet Earth to this humiliation! 

In a way I didn't quite understand, Cemp exploits the fact that the Glis' molecules are so old they come from a period of history when the laws of physics were different than they are today, triggering an evolution in those molecules that turns the Glis into a sun a hundred or a thousand times larger than Sol and releases the 1800 planets, Earth among them, from captivity to grow back to their normal sizes.  The planets all begin orbiting this new sun, their civilizations are only mildly affected by the processes of shrinkage, preservation and now restoration.  (For one thing, they were in a time stasis, only a single second passing for each day experienced by the rest of the universe.)  Our sense of wonder ending foresees Cemp and the Silkies of all planets taking a leading role in building relationships among these 1800 civilizations--endless adventure and discovery awaits!

The process of actually reading "Silkies in Space" the first time was sort of a slog, as the sentences are not good and there are definitely points at which I was thinking, "What the hell is Van talking about?"  But the ending is kind of mind-blowing, and looking back upon it having read it, the plot is pretty cool, and reading it a second time made clear to my easily distracted mind how everything in the story made sense internally and was connected, with minor details in the beginning of the story, for example, serving as foreshadowing of what happens later on.  "Silkies in Space" is one of those stories that I can easily understand why others might not like it (especially since at 40 pages it represents a real investment of our brief time here among the living) even though I myself do like it.

"Silkies in Space" was reprinted in the French version of Galaxy, and in a British collection titled The Best of A. E. van Vogt, which is distinct from the American book of the same title which has an intro by Barry N. Malzberg and a terrifying white cover.

"The Hide Hunters" by Robert Moore Williams

Here we have a story that has never seen print, as far as isfdb knows, outside the pages of If.  Back in September when we read his story "Death Sentence" in John W. Campbell, Jr's magazine Unknown, I offered links to my blog posts about Robert Moore Williams and pointed out how in my experience his work is a mixed bag, so I won't go into that again, except to say that I have no idea if I will enjoy this story of about 19 pages.

"The Hide Hunters" is an acceptable monster/horror story, kind of like something out of Weird Tales but with a little more science to it.  Williams, for some reason, adds extraneous themes to the story, maybe just to pad out the length of the story (these guys get paid by the word, don't they?) with more or less interesting science and history material.  For example, at the beginning of the story there is a lot of blah blah blah about psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, and passages that are informed by psychological theory like

...it would be only a step away from the latent hostility found by the psychoanalysts to exist at the unconscious mind levels among civilized people, in which the father either killed the son or drove him away from home.

and 

Something about the fetid jungle, the hot, steaming wetness of the place, the gross sexuality of it, troubled him deep in his mind where the old fears of the race still lived.

but this stuff goes nowhere; Williams does not link it to the monster or to the fate of the main characters by having the monster be a manifestation of one of their neuroses or having a man use Freudian theory to solve a puzzle or anything like that.

Grayson and MacPherson are chemists in the Amazon rainforest hunting for roots that can be used to make psychedelic drugs.  An aged Indian, a local chief, comes by with a wild story--a demon has stolen his grandson's skin and is wearing and he wants to borrow a rifle to slay the demon and rescue his grandson's hide.  Obviously the white men think this is a load of crap and the man's request for the rifle is refused.  But later Grayson comes upon the chief and sees he is skinning what looks to be a man, having killed "him "via an ambush.  When the chief is done skinning the figure, Grayson sees it is not a human, but a sort of blob monster covered in cilia that had put on the young Indian man's skin!  

The chief figures he has killed the monster, but it was only stunned, and it wakes up after the chief has separated it from his grandson's hide and runs off.

The middle part of the story is kind of clunky, with a poor action scene (it is too long, too slow and too confusing, so it is not thrilling or even interesting, just frustrating and annoying) and a contrived series of events that Williams needs, or thinks he needs, to set up his climax.  For some reason, natives attack with poison blow darts at the very moment the helicopter that brings supplies to Grayson and MacPherson arrives.  The helicopter pilot is killed, but the white men escape, taking cover in the chopper.  MacPherson thinks he can fly the thing, but he doesn't know what he is doing, and so his maiden flight ends abruptly with a crash landing on a hill.  Right there on the hill are ruins of an Egyptian temple or city or something that no white person has ever seen before.  G & MacP are amazed to find this evidence of an Egyptian colony or trading post or whatever in the new world, and we readers are irritated because this potentially engaging element of the story, just like the talk of psychoanalysis and psychedelic drugs, has no bearing whatsoever on the plot.  In the same way that the Westerners need not have been chemists for the plot to work, but could have been police officers or communist rebels or gold prospectors or mercenaries or anything, these ruins could have been those of Incas or Mayans or space aliens or a previously undiscovered race or civilization or anything--the blob monster is not from Egyptian mythology or anything like that.  A truly satisfying story is like a gem whose facets are all connected smoothly, not just a jumble of disparate things that have been piled together because they are each individually fun or interesting.

Our guys find a bottomless pit by an altar, and the chemists figure the blob monster came from there, and ancient people must have tossed sacrifices down the pit to appease it.  The blob monster, they theorize, is an immortal creature from a bazillion years ago that envies more evolved creatures that have a solid shape, and so it skins people and dons their skins in an effort to emulate their solidity.  The monster shows up clad in the chopper pilot's skin, and they fight it.  It escapes.  Grayson was injured in the crash, so MacPherson explores the bottomless pit alone.  The monster comes back in MacPherson's hide, and Grayson destroys it in its final battle.

The downbeat twist ending sees the Indian chief kill Grayson because he assumes Grayson is dead, and the creature he sees approaching him is not his pal Grayson but the blob monster in Grayson's skin.  Oops!  The Indians throw Grayson's body down the bottomless pit, for some reason.

I like this kind of story, and there are some good horrific passages, but because of the problems I have enumerated at perhaps unnecessary length above, "The Hide Hunters" is merely acceptable.

"Golden Trabant" by R. A. Lafferty

Here we have a fun little story, relatively simple and straightforward, that brought a smile to my face, though it is full of brutality and ends with true gruesomeness.  (The ending brought H. P. Lovecraft's "The Thing on the Doorstep" to mind.)  

It is the near future in which private individuals can buy space ships and prospect around the solar system.  The story follows some tough customers--cold businessmen and ruthless thieves--who bring on to the world market a vast quantity of gold that they mine from an asteroid.  Lafferty offers an amusing account of how the thieves, who have zero compunctions about committing murder, try to double cross each other, and how a massive influx of gold shakes the world economy, and how the establishment finally stabilizes the situation.  Lafferty succeeds in getting you to admire the ingenuity and sangfroid of at least some of these greedy bastards.

The humor works, the gore works, and there is real speculation here about the economy and politics of the future if you want to entertain it.  Thumbs up!  

"Golden Trabant" was reprinted in the various editions in English, Dutch and French of Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add? and then in our own 21st century (in which ingenuity and sangfroid will serve you well) in Mad Man, the seventh volume of Centipede Press's series collecting Lafferty's short fiction.

**********

A good issue of If, so kudos to Fred Pohl.  This issue also features an installment of the serialized version of Keith Laumer and Rosel George Brown's Earthblood (with fun monster and sexy lady illustrations by Wallace Wood), a novel I might get around to reading some day--you'll recall I enjoyed Brown's "David's Daddy" and Sibyl Sue Blue.

More short SF in our next episode.  Until next time, keep an eye out for shape shifters and opportunities to prospect for gold, world economy be damned!

Gene Wolfe: "Going to the Beach," "The Green Wall Said" and "Mountains Like Mice"

Through the Hoopla "app" I have borrowed an electronic copy of the 2023 Gene Wolfe collection The Wolfe at the Door.  Let's read three stories from it that I have chosen because their titles are intriguing.

"Going to the Beach" (1973)

"Going to the Beach" debuted in a 1973 anthology of all-new stories edited by Roger Elwood, Showcase, and apparently languished in obscurity until 2023.  

This is a good surprise ending story about the automated future in which most jobs are done by machines or androids, who it seems are mechanical robots, not artificial but organic and live humans, as they are in some stories.  Our main character is stuck doing a job that hasn't been automated yet, and he is pretty bitter and unhappy about it--while out and about he sees some people whose jobs are automated and who thus have leisure time; these lucky bastards are riding the train to the beach, and he envies them.  (A flashback suggests that what job you get is based on how well you do on tests in your youth--this is another of those socialistic futures, I guess, in which the government manages e every jot and tittle of the economy.)  An android prostitute tries to pick up our guy--he tells her he has no money but she persists and manages to badger him into letting her into his apartment.  She only really wanted to plug into his wall socket for two or three hours to recharge, anyway.  Another android, an engineer, comes by the apartment.  This engineer has brought our guy something to work on, and the two argue a little over when he will be done with it and the engineer will come back for it.  What exactly it is, I had a little trouble figuring out.  The main character turns out to be a writer (this very story we are reading, "Going to the Beach," is the story he begins typing away as the story ends) so at first I thought maybe the engineer had brought him a new typewriter, but now I think the engineer brought him a bundle of paper, of documents, something a computer had written, and the human has to copyedit it.  The writer is participating in the process of automating his own job, of putting himself out of work.  The engineer obliquely points out the irony of the situation, reminding the writer that in the past luddites attacked the machines they feared were going to replace them.  

Perhaps mirroring how workers in this world came to embrace being put out of work, it seems like the main character is warming up to the android sex worker, and may end up starting a relationship with her, even though such a relationship is bound to be ersatz and sterile--she doesn't have real human feelings and cannot bear him children.

In addition to the idea revealed by the surprise ending, that the creative work of a writer cannot be duplicated by a machine (but we are heading there), a theme which feels like something ripped from today's headlines, "Going to the Beach" addresses issues of class, sex, and whether or not robots might have real feelings and deserve some or all of the rights actual humans enjoy.  But the oddest, most original, thing about "Going to the Beach" is the attitude about work of the writer and his society.  It is pretty common, in SF stories that feature societies in which robots do all the work, for the author to suggest that a lack of work has a terrible effect on people; they get depressed or turn to crime or addictions and stop having children and so on, because work--struggle, problem solving, pursuing goals and overcoming obstacles--is what gives life meaning.  And Wolfe maybe means his story to convey the same message, but nobody in the story voices that message directly--just the opposite!  In "Going to the Beach," the guy with a job feels that he can't have a real life, can't have a family, because he has to work, while those on the dole have families and are happily living it up.  While it has been typical throughout history for being on public assistance to bear a stigma, this society's culture and establishment actively frown on work and workers--people who did well on the test and have no work get "Honorable Income," a government handout that is "crisp, clean currency," while those who work get "work money, greasy and dirty."  The writer is even surprised the android whore wants to be with him, as a man who has to work for money is thus of very low status--why doesn't she join the beachgoers and try to pick up one of them?  It is hinted that she feels some class solidarity that reaches across the lone between living worker and robot worker.

Like so many Wolfe stories, this one has a plot that is something of a puzzle and is dense with thought-provoking material besides.  "Going to the Beach" is the most ambitious and complex of the stories we are reading today.   

"The Green Wall Said" (1967)

"The Green Wall Said" first saw print in Michael Moorcock's New Worlds, in an issue with an installment of the serialized version of Thomas Disch's Camp Concentration.  This two-page story was reprinted in the 92-page 1992 collection Young Wolfe.  

Five people who speak English have been captured by aliens and are aboard their space ship.  The five captives introduce themselves to each other and speculate on why they have been seized; as they do so the changing text on the wall of their cell indicates the aliens hope to learn from these humans how to devote themselves to the community, to sacrifice themselves for others, something the aliens, apparently, think humans customarily do but which the aliens, I guess, do not do.  The group does include a nun, a doctor, a soldier who serves on the crew of a rescue helicopter, and an accountant, people we might see as devoted to helping others.  At the end of the story it seems that maybe the space ship is going to crash or otherwise malfunction.  

Among themselves the five humans talk a lot about their ethnic and national origin and their religion, so I am not sure if Wolfe is being ironic in this story, suggesting the aliens are mistaken and Earth people in fact do not sacrifice themselves for others or the community but instead are obsessed with tribal rivalries, or if he is pointing out that Earth people often work together despite differences.  The fact that the alien text has no punctuation and somewhat crude syntax further adds to the confusion.  Also strange is the fact that, while the humans all chatter among themselves, they don't directly respond to the text on the wall.

This story is kind of gimmicky and lacks the sort of emotional moments and character-developing moments, the world-building elements and moments of conflict and tension, that we see in today's other two stories, and is the least of them. 

"Mountains Like Mice" (1966)

Here we have a pretty good adventure story about a guy living in a strange milieu.  Dirk is a student at the fortress-like academy near a desert; he is undergoing rigorous training that will, it seems, afford him the psychic ability to control animals as well provide him great skill at tracking people and beasts, finding water in the arid wilderness, assessing botanical specimens and the composition of soil and the like.  To graduate from his training, Dirk, like all those before him, has to survive some two months alone in the wilderness and evade capture by the freshman of the academy who will be hunting him.  Those who are returned alive before the two months are up are relegated to the servant or slave class.

We follow Dirk's adventure in the wilderness, which takes an unexpected turn when he has to rescue one of his superiors, who has been captured by the half-sized people who are his people's enemies.  As the story proceeds, we learn more about the survival test, and about the history of Dirk's people and the planet they live on--Dirk and his fellows are the descendants of Earth scientists who were trapped on Mars when Earth abandoned them!  The short people are not native Martians, but descendants of humans genetically engineered to live on Mars permanently.  Similarly, odd Martian animals, like the six-foot-long cobra the shorties use as a guard dog, are the product of genetic engineering.  Dirk's superior uses his knowledge of ancient history and science to direct Dirk in how to liberate him. 

The dangerous test (like in Tunnel in the Sky) and the fact that Dirk has been kept in the dark about the reality of his world, the true nature of which he discovers over the course of the story (like in "Orphans of the Sky") and the mentor figures are reminding me of the earlier work of Robert Heinlein.

This is the easiest to understand and the most traditional of today's stories and perhaps the most entertaining.  "Mountains Like Mice," after its debut in If, reappeared in Young Wolfe.              

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In Wolfe's large body of generally excellent work these stories are relatively minor, but "Going to the Beach" and "Mountains Like Mice" are full of material--a mystery plot, human relationships, and multiple SF themes--to enjoy and to grapple with and I have no hesitation about recommending them.  "The Green Wall Said" is a merely acceptable vignette.

More 1960s magazine SF awaits us in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.