It feels like it was just last month that I was reading and passing a merciless judgement on stories selected by Judith Merril from New Worlds, the flagship periodical of the New Wave, brought to you by the British taxpayer. Let's do it again, this time with stories chosen by New World's famed editor and creator of Elric of Melnibone and sundry other doomed heroes, Michael Moorcock, as representative of the best work published in that magazine.


I read all of the tales described below in my 1971 copy of Berkley Medallion's Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  The anthology first appeared in 1969 in the UK, published by Panther.

"Linda and Daniel and Spike" by Thomas M. Disch (1967)

The US edition of the anthology declares this story "a disturbing fable" and when it appeared in New Worlds the title was written on a woman's bare back!  I actually bought this whole book for two smackers at Half-Price Books because I didn't already own this story and I am a Disch fan.  That's a lot of hype and hope to live up to!  Can Disch do it?


This is a sad story!  Disch, you are going to break people's hearts with this thing!

Linda is an unattractive secretary living in New York City who thinks of herself as an intellectual type but never went to college and is in fact a little dim.  (Disch, a smart guy who was very well-read, likes to laugh at dolts; remember "Problems of Creativeness"?)  She is so lonely that she has an imaginary boyfriend, Daniel.  Linda develops uterine cancer, but, in her delusions, thinks she is pregnant with Daniel's child. She gets a dog (that's Spike) and pretends/believes it is her child.  (Spike bites people, including Linda.)  When she dies of her cancer, the hospital puts Linda's tumors on display--they are of record-breaking size.  As all parents hope, Linda's memory will live on thanks to her offspring!

Sad, but with some laugh-out-loud moments of black humor, Disch scores a hit with this brief (seven pages) story and justifies my purchase and all the hype.

"Transient" by Langdon Jones  (1965)

This was a New Worlds cover story.  (Look how classy and serious this '65 cover is compared to the '67 collage cover by Charles Platt and Christopher Finch.  One looks like the bulletin put out by a staid art museum and the other looks like a zine handed out on a street corner by stoners.) Moorcock in his intro to the six-page piece says it is "transitional," a break from Jones' earlier work that shows some similarities to his later work, like the triptych "Eye of the Lens," which I (and Joachim Boaz before me) wrote about recently.

Our narrator wakes up in a hospital bed.  Jones has cleverly primed us to think that the narrator has been revived from death, but this is only metaphorically true--halfway through the story we learn that the narrator is a chimpanzee who has been operated on so as to have human-level intelligence and has had implanted into his brain facility with spoken English.  The story is a tragedy, because the treatment only has effect for two hours, and our narrator spends those two hours in misery, knowing he will soon lose his miraculous intelligence and return to his natural "state of mindless half-life."

(Compare with Daniel Keyes' famous Flowers for Algernon, which I had to read in school.)

Like the Disch story, "Transient" is a short and touching story about the mind and psychological anguish.  So far this collection is living up to its back cover promise to "blow the mind."


"The Source" by Brian Aldiss (1965)

In the far future mankind has colonized the universe and founded innumerable complex and sophisticated cultures.  People live so long that their brains fill up with trivia and periodically "the Machines" have to "expunge the dross" from your brain or you will start going a little bonkers.  In this story Kervis XI leads an expedition of "Seekers" to Earth, cradle of humanity, in quest of "the peak of man's greatness."  The Seekers are disappointed to find Earth's cities in ruins, and Earthlings living like primitives.  But Kervis XI, who has been skipping his brain-cleaning treatments, isn't ready to give up on Earth yet.

In a series of increasingly surreal scenes (it is often not clear if he is seeing reality, having spiritual visions, or just going cukoo) Kervis XI crosses a forest, enters a walled city, navigates a maze, and meets a woman who (I think) warns him that technology and sophistication are yokes that limit you even if you don't realize it.  In the end of the story Kervis XI decides to stay on Earth with the primitives and live the simple life of subsistence agriculture, playing pipes and dancing around a fire.

This story is just OK.  The start is good, but I find long dreamy sequences boring and I feel like I've been exposed to this "back to nature" message way too many times, and it is a message that is not that convincing.  Sure, I like to go to the woods and see birds and turtles and all that for a few hours, but then I like to go home to the air-conditioning, running water and my books.

"Dr. Gelabius" by Hilary Bailey (1968)

Way back in 2014 I declared Hilary Bailey's "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" to be the best story in the wacky experimental anthology Quark/3.  Bailey was married to Moorcock from 1969 to 1978, and seems to be into that thing where you write a sequel to a famous literary work; she has produced sequels to Frankenstein, The Turn of the Screw, Jane Eyre, and Goodbye to Berlin, as well as a book about Sherlock Holmes' smarter sister Charlotte and her colleague, Mary Watson.

In this three-page tale we meet the title doctor, in his lab, surrounded by scores of live human fetuses in jars full of amniotic fluid.  Dr. Gelabius is part of a decades-old joint American-European project to improve the human race!  The babies in the transparent artificial wombs are the product of sperm and ova from the finest human specimens, carefully selected.  After birth they will be placed with equally carefully selected couples.  As adults, they will enrich the world with their good works and by spreading their superior genes.    

Well, not all of them.  The doctor examines each jar in turn, notes ten defective specimens, disposes of them.  Then a woman bursts into the room and, crying out "You killed my baby," blasts him with a pistol.  It seems not everybody is onboard with this whole race-improving program!

Bailey's images and style are good, but there's no real story here, just an idea.  This thing is almost like a prose poem.  Of course, if it been presented to me by one of the poets I know as a prose poem, I would have said, "This is a great poem, it's almost like a SF story!"


"The Valve Transcript" by Joel Zoss

Here we have another of the unspecified "six top authors" mentioned on the cover of the US edition of Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4.  In his intro to the story Moorcock warns us that this comic piece might take two readings to figure out.  It appears that Zoss achieved greater success as a musician and songwriter than as a science fiction author; he only has four entries on isfdb.

This story, four pages, is the transcript of an interview of a guy who works on big underground pipes that carry natural gas. The interviewer's questions are brief and straightforward, while the worker's answers are long and digressive.  It appears that the worker was sent into a pipe to repair a valve, and instead of returning to the surface via the hatch at which he was awaited, he walked further along the pipe, to egress at a hatch closer to his favorite diner.  (There are hints that the worker prefers to walk in the pipe rather than on the surface because it is cooler and the sun hurts his eyes outside.) Because his supervisors could not find him, they assumed he was still in the pipe, and so couldn't restart the flow of gas, with the result that the company lost vast sums of money.

This story is OK, I guess.  I didn't laugh, but I wasn't irritated, either.

"In Seclusion" by Harvey Jacobs (1966)

Moorcock in his introduction tells us that Jacobs works in American television, and this story is a sort of satire of Hollywood.  An actor and an actress fall in love while on the set of their big film, Beowulf, and break up with their spouses to pursue their relationship.  As a publicity stunt, or something, their studio sends them to a secluded building (an abandoned abbey) on the coast for a sort of retreat.  There they bicker and their relationship approaches collapse.  There are lots of jokes about how the main characters are sexually unfaithful to each other, narcissistic, and poor actors who get by on their looks, jokes which are not funny.

A kaiju-sized sea monster attacks.  The monster, an absurdist joke, is like an amoeba with many different pseudopod-like tentacles; some have fins, some have eyes, some have claws, etc, but also has memories and a personality and a sex drive.  The monster envelops the abbey, and reaches inside with its tentacles to try to devour the actor and rape the actress. For reasons that are supposed to be amusing but which are not, the movie stars survive the attack and one of their enemies, a gossip columnist, is killed instead.  (A bigtime Hollywood story has to have a sinister gossip columnist or theatre critic in it, right?)

Weak.  (Maybe people steeped in Hollywood lore will like it?)  

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The Disch and Jones are quite good, actually moving, and the Bailey is good; Best SF Stories from New Worlds 4 was a worthwhile purchase.  The Aldiss and Zoss are not offensively bad, but the Jacobs is the kind of absurdist nonsense that I don't care for, and furthermore is based on a topic (studio-system-era Hollywood) that holds limited interest for me.  (The Leiber, Sladek and B. J. Bayley stories I am passing by for now with tentative plans to read them for single-author blog posts in the unspecified future.)

That's enough highbrow avant garde stuff for a little while; in our next installment I think we'll be seeing some "swashbuckling sword-and-planet adventure."

Here we have the concluding episode of my epic reading of Quark/3, a 1971 anthology of experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Delany and Hacker endeavored to present in Quark/3 stories that were not mere "popular entertainment" or "adventure stories" by "commercial science fiction writers," but rather risk-taking work of speculative fiction that was "politically dangerous" and meaningfully addressed "social, psychological and technological crises" evident in the early 1970s.

The first third of the book contained two good stories, those by R. A. Lafferty and Delany himself, while the second third limped along on the strength of an OK story by Kate Wilhelm and a slightly better tale by Josephine Saxton.  What awaits us in this final third? 

"Ring of Pain" by M. John Harrison

I recently read Harrison's first Viriconium novel, The Pastel City, and thought it alright, nothing special.

In "Ring of Pain" a man wanders through a Central England devastated by war, scavenging food from the ruins.  Not a single building is intact, and not a single live person is to be seen.  Is he the last member of the human race? 

No!  He meets a woman, who is overjoyed to no longer be alone.  She talks of having children with the main character, and our protagonist responds by vomiting and fleeing!  He wants no part of continuing the human race, finds abhorrent the idea of being the Adam of a new civilization which will, no doubt, repeat the grim and catastrophic rise to industrialism and then industrialized, world-shattering war.  The woman eventually catches up with him, and he tries to win her over to his view that they must not procreate.  He fails to convince her, and finds himself unable to resist having sex with her.

The brief final scene I didn't quite understand.  I think a military unit, riding tanks and armed with rifles and bayonets, appears, and somehow this leads to the woman cutting off her breasts.  Or perhaps the main character is reflecting that even the sight of an armored squadron would not discourage the woman from wanting to have children, though if she had her breasts cut off then he would no longer desire her.

This is an acceptable story, even though it is written to be intentionally difficult to follow; there are lots of sentence fragments, I guess to convey the feeling of a world that has been smashed to bits, and get you into the mindset of people who have lived through such a catastrophe.  

"To the Child Whose Birth Will Change the Way the Universe Works" by George Stanley

American-born Canadian poet Stanley won the Poetry Society of America's Shelly Memorial Award in 2006.  "To the Child..." is a two page poem, an adaptation of Virgil's Fourth Eclogue. All you classical scholars out there already know that Eclogue IV was widely interpreted in the Middle Ages as a sort of prediction of the birth of Jesus Christ.

Having been indifferently educated myself, I can't read Latin, but, in preparation for reading Stanley's piece in Quark/3, I took my copy of the Penguin Classics 1980 edition of the Eclogues off the shelf and read Guy Lee's translation of Eclogue IV.

Virgil's poem was written around 40 B. C. (or B. C. E., as we are saying nowadays) to express hope that a marriage alliance between the two successors of Julius Caesar, Mark Antony and Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus), would end the long period of instability and civil wars that had been wracking the Roman world.  Virgil is praising the prospective child of the union between Mark Antony and Octavian's sister: with his birth will come a new beginning which will see the end of fear and the "iron race" replaced by a "golden" one.  

Stanley updates and Americanizes the poem.  The birth of the child will end the "machine age," and where Virgil mentions Achilles, Stanley mentions George Washington.  Virgil suggests that, with the child as his subject, his poetry will surpass that of Linus, Orpheus and Pan; Stanley says his verse will be the superior of Hart Crane's and Lorca's.

Maybe Stanley sees the assassination of JFK as analogous to the assassination of Caesar, and the 1960s, with such contentious events as the Civil Rights movement and race riots, Vietnam War protests and all the trouble around the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, as analogous to the civil wars and other crises suffered by Romans during the Late Republic.  I can't tell if Stanley is referring to any specific person or event as ending the crisis period, the way Virgil does; a clue that isn't getting me very far on google is that this poem is dedicated to a Brian DeBeck.

"A Sexual Song" by Tom Veitch

Veitch has only three credits at isfdb, one of them a story he co-wrote about Greedo of Mos Eisley Cantina fame.  Veitch has written numerous comic books, including Star Wars comics. 

This story is even more surreal and less coherent than Hill's "Brave Salt."  "A Sexual Song" begins "He dressed in moth skins torn from a beaver's diary..." and in the second paragraph we get, "Print culture seems to be dying this morning because the dead men who occupy those zones cannot provide nourishment to tribal electricians...."  The entire story is like this, incomprehensible nonsense, like the product of playing Mad Libs.  I guess the plot is about a sexual encounter in a post-nuclear war world in which everything is mutated and crazy.

Painful.

"Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" by Hilary Bailey

Bailey, when Quark/3 was published, was married to Michael Moorcock.  This is the first thing I've read by her; she seems to have been quite productive, though much of her work falls outside the SF genre.

After some kind of catastrophe the British populace resorts to living in government-built underground complexes.  Each complex is isolated from the others.  A female technician in one complex discovers a secret means of communicating with other complexes, and starts a surreptitious correspondence with an old acquaintance living in another complex.  The entire text consists of their letters, and through them we learn how human beings are reacting to being confined in the sterile and depressing complexes.  There are many women who insist on having children despite the discouragement of the authorities and a lack of resources.  Children and adolescents get into all kinds of mischief, creating extra work for the technicians and mechanics.  Family relationships collapse and there are pathetic attempts by lonely people to secure some kind of human comfort; the long distance love affair of our two main characters is one example.

A convincing and interesting milieu, actual characters and emotion, and a smooth writing style; Bailey brings to Quark/3 some things which have been in short supply.  After some of the pieces I've endured in Quark/3 it is certainly a relief to encounter a well-written story with some genuine human emotion and a clever SF premise that hearkens back to the tradition of the epistolary novel.  I am proclaiming the oasis that is "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth" the best story in the anthology!

"The Coded Sun Game" by Brian Vickers 

The isfdb indicates that "The Coded Sun Game," which is the longest story in Quark/3 (over 60 pages!), constitutes 50% of Brian Vickers's SF output.  Under ordinary circumstances I wouldn't devote the necessary time and energy to reading a 60 page story by a guy I never heard of, especially in an anthology which is full of weak stories, but I am on a mission, and I'm certainly not going to give up with the finish line in sight!


"The Coded Sun Game" is convoluted and difficult, and at times I found it hard to attend.  The narrative is a sort of stream of consciousness of a being who is delusional, suffering from "psychotic hallucinations" that are "compounded of past perceptual experiences."  The narrative is full of pop music references (the names of bands and singers, like Bob Dylan and the Beatles, and lines from songs like the Doors' "Light My Fire" and The Who's "See Me, Feel Me," pop up at random) and lists (of oil companies, of modern artists, of cities) and is periodically interrupted by science lectures (psychology, biology, solar astronomy) and medical reports.

Paul is a young man (perhaps an alien, perhaps a fallen deity) suffering from the aforementioned "psychotic withdrawal visions."  He is living with an English family near the ocean: Clive Noland, a doctor, his wife Barbra, an artist, and their sexy daughter Michelle.  Paul watches TV, walks on the beach, swims in the pool, has sex with Michelle.  His mental problems seem to be linked to solar radiation; a medical report says his symptoms reach their peak at midday, and the text is full of references to color, sunspots, and solar flares.

The story gets more confusing as it goes on.  In the second half more characters are introduced, and, like in a time travel story, Paul seems to be reliving scenes but as different characters, talking to and fighting with younger versions of himself from the first half of the story. 

I've spent some time flipping through this story, rereading passages and trying to figure it out, but I don't really get it.  Still, I didn't find it offensively bad.

Fun fact: Until I read this story I wasn't familiar with the British slang term for transistor radio, "tranny" or "trannie."  You can imagine my initial puzzlement at the phrase, "Beatles strangled by a trannie."

**********

So there we have it, Quark/3.  It wasn't an easy ride, but let's look at the bright side.  I read a pile of stories by writers totally new to me, and among them are Hilary Bailey and Josephine Saxton, whom I will definitely read again (also, it is notable that the Bailey and Saxton stories have never appeared in any other book, so I'd never have encountered them otherwise.)  Richard Hill's and James Sallis's stories are so crazy I am spurred to read their contributions to Again, Dangerous Visions.

Taken as a whole, the stories were less propagandistic and more experimental in style and form than I had expected.  Gordon Eklund's anti-war story and Kate Wilhelm's overpopulation story felt tired, but most of the writers really did try to do something strange and/or new.   

Finally, let's rank the fiction to be found in Quark/3.  Hilary Bailey comes in first, with Lafferty and Delany close behind, and Saxton a distant fourth.  Then we have a pack of OK tales, followed by a mass of weak stories, and then three certifiable disasters.

QUARK/3 FINAL STANDINGS
Hilary Bailey                            "Twenty-Four Letters from Underneath the Earth"
R. A. Lafferty                          "Encased in Ancient Rind"
Samuel R. Delany                    "Dog in a Fisherman's Net"
Josephine Saxton                     "Nature Boy"

M. John Harrison                     "Ring of Pain"
Kate Wilhelm                           "Where Have You Been Billy Boy, Billy Boy?"
Brian Vickers                           "The Coded Sun Game"

Gordon Eklund                        "Home Again, Home Again"
Virginia Kidd                           "Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside"
Joanna Russ                             "The Zanzibar Cat"

James Sallis                             "Field"
Richard Hill                             "Brave Salt"
Tom Veitch                              "A Sexual Song"