In the last exciting installment of MPorcius Fiction Log we read three stories from the fifth volume of Terry Carr's critically acclaimed Universe series of all-new anthologies, those from Fritz Leiber, George Alec Effinger and F. M. Busby.  We weren't too happy with those three tales, but there are twelve stories in the 1974 book (we own the 1975 paperback with a surreal feline and statuary focused cover) and maybe some of them really are "dazzling"?  Let's give Terry Carr a chance to win us back and try three more, those by J. J. Russ, Edgar Pangborn and Stephen Goldin.

Back in 2017 I blogged about David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's anthology Generation, an adventure that occupied us for four blog posts.  That same year I also blogged about their anthology Alternities, an expedition which exhausted three posts.  This grand tradition continues in 2022, as MPorcius Fiction Log takes a long gander at Gerrold and Goldin's anthology Protostars, a caper which, barring sudden death on the road, will occupy four blog posts.  Today, our second foray into Protostars, we'll be wrestling with the fifth through eighth of the book's sixteen stories, those by Gerrold himself, Edward Bryant, and Leo P. Kelley, as well as Goldin's second included story.  Collectively, these pieces take up fewer than 40 pages, so maybe we'll be getting out of the office early today and can beat that rush hour traffic.

"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" by David Gerrold

This is a joke story and a total waste of everybody's time; Gerrold takes a mundane metaphor about how a big rusty old bus is kind of like a large mammal enfeebled by age, and expands this one sentence idea to seven pages, describing automobiles attacking the bus the way you might describe a pack of wolves attacking an elk who just cashed his first social security check or a feeding frenzy of sharks tearing away at a whale with a broken hip as well as each other.  Many of the jokes are what I guess you might call puns, like saying a Mustang whinnies or a Firebird screeches.  Ugh.

Lame.

"Afternoon with a Dead Bus" was included by Leo P. Kelley in his 1974 anthology Fantasy: The Literature of the Marvelous, and would also show up in a French anthology published in 1976.

"Eyes of Onyx" by Edward Bryant

I can tell you're the kind of guy (or gal--that I can't tell!) who likes to get in on the ground floor.  Wants to be the first on his block.  Likes to be ahead of the curve.  Lives on the cutting edge.  The bleeding edge!  Ahead of her time!  The vanguard of the revolution!  

Protostars is for you!  Published in 1971, the year of my birth, edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin, it presents stories, never before published, by "the New Stars of Science Fiction," men and women "that you will be hearing much about in the future."  At least that is what the text on the cover says.  Here at MPorcius Fiction Log, over the next four blog posts, we'll be reading the sixteen stories that debuted in Protostars.  I bought a copy of Protostars in 2019 at the Dupont Circle location of Second Story Books as part of my tireless campaign to support local business (who could resist that Gene Szfran cover when it is going for 50 cents?), but you cheapos can read along at the internet archive. 

In his two-page italicized introduction to Protostars, editor David Gerrold pokes gentle fun at the pretentious introductions and lofty ambitions of some recent SF anthologies, Harlan Ellison's in particular, and he doesn't echo any of that goop about the authors in the book being "new stars in formation" that "you will be hearing about much in the future" that is all over the covers.  He just says the stories are entertaining and have no central theme beyond hopefully being thought-provoking on the question of man's role in the universe.  But he does wax ambitious about the glories of the science fiction field: science fiction, he tells us, is "the only literature of the twentieth century that consistently dares to speculate on the nature of reality and man's place in the universe;" science fiction is "theology for the modern man," that, unlike traditional religions, doesn't expect you to accept claims on faith--science fiction writers embrace the scientific method of presenting hypotheses and putting them to the test!  Alright!

After this stirring introduction, let's get right to it and read the first four stories in Protostars, contributions by Scott Bradfield, James Tiptree, Jr., Laurence Yep and Stephen Goldin.

"What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" by Scott Bradfield

Gerrold writes an introduction to Bradfield's story that is over four pages long, in which he talks about reading the slush pile at Galaxy, which is sort of interesting, and then tells us that writing is a job that requires training just like flying a jet plane requires training, and I'm like, OK, and then on the last page of the intro reveals that Scott Bradfield is fourteen years old and has a long way to go but takes science fiction seriously and "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" is "readable."  Hmm.

This story is not very good.  Luckily it is a mere three pages long.  (It is shorter than Gerrold's introduction to it!)  A baby is poorly treated by his parents, the mother who neglects to feed him, the father who hits him so he'll be quiet.  Then, apparently, aliens kidnap the child, burning down the house and killing the parents, I guess to hide their tracks.  The aliens put the kid in a cage like the cage you might keep a gerbil or something in; I guess we are supposed to reflect that the aliens are treating the kid like an animal, which is better than its parents did?  That a physical cage may not be as bad as a psychological cage?  

I guess Gerrold printed this story to encourage or support Bradfield or something, sort of an act of charity or an investment in the future of SF or whatever.  And you'll be happy to know that Tiny Tim didn't die, I mean, Scott Bradfield went on to have a successful writing career, with four novels and some 40 stories listed at isfdb--Jonathan Lethem, a famous guy I know nothing about, says Bradfield is one of his favorite living writers.  I, too, can afford to be charitable, and call "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" barely acceptable filler.  

It seems that "What Makes a Cage, Jamie Knows" has never escaped confinement in the nourishing cage that is Protostars. 

"I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" by James Tiptree, Jr.

Gerrold's intro here expresses frustration that Tiptree remains hidden from view because he would like to meet this person, "one of the finest new science fiction writers in America today."  Gerrold admits the possibility Tiptree is a woman, a smart bet.

"I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" is a joke story, in part, I believe, a spoof of sword and planet stories and other stories in which a guy from Earth meets the people of a technologically or culturally inferior planet and becomes their leader and improves their society.  The story includes lots of contemporary references, to Montessori schools and to "Make Love, Not War" and stuff like that.  Notably, the tale contains so many dismissive references to the male organ that it seems obvious that this was written by a woman, but I guess that is easy for me to say because I already know Tiptree's real identity.

On a more elevated level, "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty" might be seen as a jocular exposure of the contradictions and hypocrisies of much of respectable liberal thought.  The protagonist is an upper-middle class Terran, a wealthy and highly-educated mama's boy, who, finding himself on a planet inhabited by low-tech and bellicose people, is reluctant to pass judgement on their culture or interfere with their traditions, but nevertheless gets them to stop fighting wars for territory and cease sacrificing babies to appease the rain gods, and quickly transforms their warlike agrarian society into a modern industrial civilization, despite the efforts of the native elites to preserve the status quo.  The joke ending of the story, which like all the story's jokes isn't particularly funny, is that after the Terran leaves, the people of this planet follow his example and travel to every inhabited planet in the galaxy and turn every society, 4384 in total, into a modern capitalist civilization.  Having done this, the peoples of the 4384 planets wonder what to do next--maybe Tiptree is suggesting that modern secular society in which there is no war and no religion is somehow unsatisfying, that people need some kind of driving mission to be happy?  Or maybe I am trying too hard to see some kind of point in this story which is full of simple and straightforward jokes, including lots of tepid sex jokes?   

Alice Bradley Sheldon (Tiptree's real name) has a reputation as a genius, but this story is just competent filler.

The SF community doesn't seem to agree with my dismissive assessment of "I'll Be Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool is Empty;" the story has appeared not only in many Tiptree collections, but the 1972 edition of Lester del Rey's Best Science Fiction Stories of the Year and a Russian anthology with a pretty crazy cover.

What is with the spacing and the punctuation in that Asimov quote?

"In a Sky of Daemons" by Laurence Yep

Isfdb calls this gentleman "Laurence," the table of contents of Protostars abbreviates his first name as "L.," and the back cover of Protostars calls him "Larry."  In his introduction to this "novelette" (like 38 pages,) Gerrold also familiarly refers to the author as "Larry" and says that Yep achieved the "unheard of" feat of receiving a Nebula nomination for his first published story.  "In a Sky of Daemons" is Yep's second sale, and it seems to have only been reprinted once, in a Dutch anthology.  Do Rembrandt's countrymen, a people famous for their dykes, windmills, wooden shoes and chocolate, know something we Anglophones don't?  

In climactic moments in Rudyard Kipling's The Light That Failed and Somerset Maugham's Of Human Bondage, two novels I strongly recommend, treacherous women destroy the main character's art work.  Well, just such a crime kicks off "In a Sky of Daemons."

Yep's story is set in the far future, when humans have colonized alien planets and there are machines called mass converters that can make most anything--you toss in a handful of sand and rocks and the machine can make you gemstones, you toss in some dead organic matter and the machine can make you an apple or a pear.  The government can control the weather.  The people in the story wear "soma suits" (you remember your Brave New World, don't you?) that induce euphoria and live a largely communal life in a society of "Cells," though pairing off as couples is not uncommon.  

Our hero, Birth Chile, is a male artist living in the city; he has been in a couple's relationship with a materialistic hot chick, Honey Girl, and when he comes home to their apartment he finds Honey Girl has sold all his paintings and sculptures!  He storms off, walking out on their relationship and walking out to the country, to the shrine run by the oldest man on the planet, Holy Joe, who is kept alive by high technology.  Holy Joe is so old he can remember when this planet was colonized, and the days before the soma suits.  Most of the people on this planet are practically immortal, but the robots that serve the paternalistic and authoritarian entity that rules the planet, SET, regularly take people away to be killed; the people are later rejuvenated or "reborn," but without their memories.  Holy Joe is an exception; he is not immortal, and can truly die, but high technology has kept him alive for centuries.  In return for that technological assist, and for the ability to retain his memories, he has promised SET not to share his oldest memories, or consented to have some kind of hypnotic embargo put on them; SET, it seems, considers knowledge of the past to be a threat to its rule.  Holy Joe is treated as a kind of sage or guru, and people commonly come to his to ask questions, but his answers, for which he demands payment, are often vague or tricky, in the traditional manner of sybils and prophets, and he will reveal nothing about SET or life before the colonization of the planet.

Birth Chile wants to get some answers from Holy Joe, but Honey Girl shows up in her fancy air car to interfere, ostensibly for Birth Chile's own good.  In a fit of rage he immediately regrets, Birth Chile strikes Honey Girl, killing her.  SET's robots, which float through the air via anti-grav technology and are likened to angels, appear and take away the corpse and inject Birth Chile with drugs that paralyze half his body.

Birth Chile uses Honey Girl's air car to go to the place to which people who are to die are taken, and from which they eventually emerge reborn.  There, I think, he encounters the personalities of people who have been killed by SET and not yet reborn; these personalities join Birth Chile in his body, which is healed, and he acquires memories that explain the mysteries of the past.  We readers are treated to a series of flashbacks, first to a space naval battle between an Alliance and an Empire, and then to scenes of the founding of the colony at which the story takes place.  The battle was a raid by a fleet from an alliance of worlds that sought to steal from the Empire the secret of immortality, which the Empire had refused to sell them on the grounds that they were too uncivilized for it.  The Alliance raiders were defeated and captured, given the immortality treatment and then put on a distant planet--the colony where Birth Chile and Honey Girl and everybody else in the story lives is their prison/sanitarium and SET their jailer/therapist.  The best image in the story is a reflection of the fact that the prison colony is on a planet deep in extragalactic space--so far is this world from the Milky Way that the stars in the sky are all concentrated in a single disc, like the accusing eye or hungry mouth of a demon.

In the climax of the story Birth Chile--now first person narrator, when the story for most of its length has been in the third person--deactivates SET (a computer) in a close quarters fight that I guess is supposed to remind you of a fight between a knight and a dragon or between Thor and the Midgard Serpent.  The humans take control over the robots, and in a sense-of-wonder the-resourceful-human-race-has-a-heroic-history-of-adventure-and-exploration-ahead-of-it ending, Yep makes it clear that the people of the prison/sanitarium planet, now liberated/cured, are going to build a vital independent society, cast off the soma suits, build FTL ships and return to the Milky Way.

"In a Sky of Daemons" is an ambitious and challenging; I found it a little hard to understand, much of it being dense, parts of it being fragmented, and the characters' personalities, motives and actions being often surprising and mysterious--I read it twice because I felt I hadn't really got it the first time round.  Yep fills his story with allusions to Christianity and to Eastern religions, and there are lots of what I take to be references to the work of T. S. Eliot (apparent references to The Waste Land include: the first line of the story, which reminds readers of the epigraph to Eliot's famous poem; the prominent appearance of the phrase "Unreal city;" and a sentence which ends "living in the dust and eating roots and grass...."), whose work of course is itself full of allusions to Christianity and to Buddhism.

I found it to be a hard nut to crack, but I think the work was worthwhile, so I'm giving "In A Sky of Daemons" a thumbs up.  Its integration of religious themes, references to high literature, a struggle for human freedom, scenes of warfare and a sword swinging hero remind me of Gene Wolfe's work; maybe Wolfe fans should check this story out.

"The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin

Goldin, who I guess acted as Gerrold's close assistant in editing this book, has two stories in Protostars and this is the first.  In his intro to "The Last Ghost," Gerrold talks about Goldin in a way that feels parental, striking a tone I felt indicated they have some kind of intimate but not necessarily equal relationship, as if Gerrold sees himself as Goldin's mentor or something (Gerrold, in his writing, always seems to "put himself out there"--dude is an open book who wears his heart on his sleeve as we cliché-slinging guys say.)  Gerrold tells us Goldin is good and gentle and is growing as a person and as a writer and this story says something about all of us that most of us don't want to openly admit.  

"The Last Ghost" is a seven-and-a-half page story about death and having your consciousness uploaded into a computer so you "live" forever.  (We just read a story on similar themes by Gerrold.)  Two incorporeal beings meet in a silent black nowhere, but they sense each other and communicate.  One has been in this void for a long time, is male, taciturn and has almost no memory.  The newcomer is female and voluble and mentally acute.  The female's body died five thousand years ago, and she has spent all those centuries as a computer file or simulation or whatever, in robot bodies, having adventures and exploring the galaxy and studying.  She must be in this black limbo because of a computer malfunction.  She tries to figure out what is up with this other entity, who is almost catatonic and unable to express himself.  By the end of the story we learn the tragic truth.  Before the computer uploading system was available, the souls of those who died would come to this blackness, which is a sort of waiting room or staging area from which people would then transition to the afterlife proper.  One soul, this quiet guy, was left here in this limbo to point the way to the newly dead.  But when people stopped truly dying because everybody's personality got uploaded into a computer, he was left alone, and being alone with nothing to do and nobody to talk to for like 5,000 years has made him almost a vegetable.  Being with this woman is reviving him, but then the woman is sucked away as the computer malfunction is fixed.

When you stop and think about this story, it doesn't make any sense (this is the first computer malfunction in 5,000 years?  For 5,000 years nobody refused to have his personality uploaded or was prevented from doing so by an accident or negligence?  Uploading your personality to a computer doesn't move your soul to the computer, it is just recording a copy, so if cancer or a car wreck or a terrorist attack kills you, your soul would still go to the afterlife) but the story still works on an emotional level when you first read it, as Goldin does a good job of presenting it and keeps it succinct.  So I'm giving it a mild recommendation.

"The Last Ghost" was nominated for a Nebula and has been reprinted in several anthologies; it is also the title story of a 1999 Goldin collection.

**********

There are twenty-five stories in Generation, David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1972 anthology of stories by writers lauded as "the most dazzling new stars of science fiction."  Some of these "stars," like Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, Piers Anthony, the mysterious James Tiptree, Jr., and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, went on to have careers highly successful critically and/or commercially.  Others are people I rarely or never hear about.  Let's check out six stories by those relatively minor writers.

"...After They've Seen Paree" by Dennis O'Neil

The wife and I were recently in Dayton Ohio, at Carillon Historical Park, where you can see old locomotives, a plane built by the Wright brothers, lots of old cash registers, and that sort of stuff.  They have an exhibit on World War One which includes a Lewis gun and a 3-inch field gun.  Worth a few hours if that is your thing.

Anyway, the title of O'Neil's story brings The Great War to mind, and, like the song for which it is named, the story is about people who are changed by contact with the big city and with war.  As he does with the title, O'Neil fills the story with literary and historical allusions; Virgil, the Bible, Dylan Thomas, etc.

It is the post apocalyptic future!  Near a ruined city, a tribe lives simply and primitively, having sworn to eschew the evils of the past: the Democratic and Republican parties, TV, booze, etc.  Our protagonist, Norman*, is about to have sex with his cousin Tresa when a Volkswagen microbus with a computer brain kidnaps her and carries her off to the city.

Our hero spends a year reading the forbidden books (combat manuals with silly titles-- this story is supposed to be funny) in preparation to liberate his cousin from the city.  When Norman invades the city he battles the two last remaining U. S. Army soldiers and their battleforce of robot cars; Tresa is still alive, soldiers having kidnapped her for use as a sex slave.  Norman also learns the cause of the apocalypse, a race war which saw a cataclysmic exchange of fire between satellites and ground installations.

Norman brings Tresa out of the city, but she has changed.  Not only did the soldiers' surgical robots fill her breasts with silicone, but contact with the military and with urban decadence has turned her into a saidst who is sexually aroused by violence and a slacker who refuses to work the subsistence farm with the rest of the tribe.  The sweet and innocent Tresa is gone, and Norman considers killing her to expunge the tribe of her corruption (this resort to violence a reflection of his own corruption.)

Acceptable; the story moves at a brisk pace, gives you lots to think about, and the jokes, while not exactly funny, are not annoyingly poor.  According to isfdb, O'Neil has written several novels and over a dozen short stories; most of them seem to be about DC Comics characters.

*Norman is a good name for writers to give an "everyman" character because it sounds a bit like "normal" and "no man."  Ray Davies named the mentally ill office worker in The Kinks Present a Soap Opera "Norman," for example.  

"The Recreation" by Robert E. Toomey, Jr.

A lame gimmick story, less than two pages.  God is just like a short story writer: he creates planets and tries to sell them, does hackwork to make ends meet, gets depressed and turns to booze.  Earth is a planet he has been unable to place; while under the influence of a hangover he revises the Earth, adding humankind--the joke is that human beings are terrible because God made us when he was out of sorts!

Toomey is credited with a single novel at isfdb as well as seven short stories.  "The Recreation" would later appear in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, a book I borrowed from an Iowa library a few years ago.

"Constitution in E Flat" by Paul E. Carter

Carter has eleven short stories listed at isfdb.  In 1977 Columbia University Press published a nonfiction book he wrote about SF magazines which looks like it is probably pretty cool.

"Constitution in E Flat" is set in a future United States overtaken by authoritarianism and decadence. The air outside is too polluted to breathe without nose clips or some kind of filter mask, and the US is involved in a world war on a broad front in Latin America and Africa.  This story takes place in a  noisy club where there are go-go dancers and all manner of drugs are for sale; a composer has set the text of the Constitution to music, and at the club is meeting two government representatives and the head of the Musicians Union to discuss the new composition.  (This is apparently a fantasy world in which people still care about symphonic music.)  One of the government guys expresses skepticism about the composition, and then the other one has him arrested on the pretext that this is evidence of insufficient patriotism.

I guess this story is supposed to remind you of Soviet Russia where government officials are always stabbing each other in the back and art is under the control of the State (the government guy who is not arrested has a sort of Russian-sounding name, "Rikhoff"), and suggest that the American people are becoming deracinated, divorced from their political and cultural heritage (in the final lines a singer sings "Ave Maria" in Latin but nobody in the club understands the words.)  This sounds like the basis for an interesting story, but something about Carter's style made my eyes glaze over and I kept forgetting which authority figure was which; I don't know, maybe it's me.  Merely acceptable.        

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" by Kathleen Sky

As I think I have mentioned before, Gerrold's introductions for stories in Generation by women come off as sexist by today's standards.  In his intro to "One Ordinary Day, With Box" he tells us that there is "certainly" no woman in the world sexier than Sky, and then shares his theory on what a "truly liberated woman" is: "not one who has forsaken her femininity, but one who has accepted it and wears it without falsity."

(For some reason Gerrold refuses to provide us readers any insights into the earthy masculinity and raw sexual magnetism of Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg.)


isfdb tells us that Sky has published five novels (two of them about the trials and tribulations of the crew of the starship Enterprise) and eight short stories, two of them collaborations with her husband (from 1972 to 1982), Stephen Goldin.

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" is an acceptable Twilight Zone-style story.  A greyish man carries around with him, from town to town, a light but bulky black box.  It contains, we are told, not what people want, but what they need.  For example, when a wretched drunk reaches into the box he gets a healthy sandwich (not the cash he wants) and when a boy-crazy teenage girl reaches into it she gets birth control pills.  People, we learn, always reject what they truly need.

This is a good enough premise, but the ending is a little weak.  When the greyish man reaches into the box himself, he just gets another box (the original collapses.)  "One Ordinary Day, With Box" was translated into German for Science Fiction Story Reader 5, and also appeared (like Roger Deeley's The Shortest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told, also from Generation) in Reflections of the Future: An Elective Course in Science Fiction and Fact.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" by Joseph E. Pumilia

We've actually encountered Pumilia before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, when we read "Hung Like An Elephant," which Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley.  That story was also purchased by Gerrold and Goldin, for Alternities.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" is about an immortal creature of pure energy who guards one of the spots where the different universes touch; if energy should leak from one universe to another then chaos could result, stars dying or exploding, the laws of physics breaking down, etc.  The Porter has to fight evil energy creatures who want to break into his universe and cause mayhem, and he faces his greatest challenge when a female energy creature seduces him and tricks him into opening the gate.

This is one of those stories that isn't actually bad, but just sits there.  Acceptable, I suppose.              

"A Sense of Thyme" by C. F. Hensel

This is one of those stories in which Death is an elegantly dressed man who walks with a black walking stick and drives a black Rolls Royce, who comes to you when your time is up and drives you to the train station to get on the train to the afterlife. Are there a lot of people who actually like these kinds of stories?

My mother used to tell us kids that the Santas we'd see in stores and elsewhere were Santa's helpers, and in this story there are numerous representatives of Death driving around in black Rolls Royces, each with a schedule to keep.  The Death in this story was a normal person horrified of death who joined the "firm" at the age of 19 because such a position confers immortality.

Today he is collecting an old woman reputed to be a witch.  She too, he learns, made a bargain to gain immortality and wisdom, many, many, years ago, but then gave up immortality to return to the mainstream of human life:

"It eventually occurred to me, my dear, by virtue of that wisdom gained at such cost, that I was imprisoned.  Trapped....As long as I never aged, I never learned the lessons of age.  I never developed....I became inhuman...."  

This is a sentimental story with lots of descriptions of the witch's beautiful eyes and a long scene in which Death cries and so forth.  I'm kind of shrugging it off, but I suppose some will find it moving and find the story's argument, that being immortal would be lonely and unfulfilling, comforting in a sort of sour grapes way.  Acceptable.

The "C." in C. F. Hensel is short for "Christina," and in his intro Gerrold tells us Hensel is "sexy" and "feminine."  Hensel has three stories listed at isfdb; the other two are collaborations with Stephen Goldin.

**********

All six of these stories feel like filler.  Too bad!  In retrospect, compared to the rest, the O'Neil feels ambitious, full of allusions and social commentary, while the Toomey looks even more like a lazy piece of junk.

In our next episode I will read the two James Tiptree Jr. stories to be found in Generation, and then I can proudly say that I have read every single story in the collection.  (I read Stephen Goldin's "Stubborn" back in late 2014 when I was flipping through 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.)  Stay tuned!

Did the Half-Price Books employee deliberately put the price sticker over the figure's face?

I've been trying to resist the urge to buy more books, but I got a gift card for Half-Price Books for Christmas and, when I went shopping for Kinks CDs to help make more tolerable all the driving that is an inevitable part of post-NYC life, I couldn't resist Generation, a 1972 anthology showcasing "new stars of science fiction" edited by David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin.  (You'll remember I read Gerrold and Goldin's 1974 anthology Alternities, and that I have enjoyed four or five novels by Gerrold and two by Goldin.)  Not only do we have here an absorbing and crazy Robert Foster cover, but rarely-reprinted stories by Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg which I have never read, and numerous stories by other interesting writers.  

On the Acknowledgments page Gerrold gives us a hint of the odd history of Generation, saying it was assembled in 1969, but publication was delayed by unspecified problems (problems he takes care to say were not due to Dell, the publisher) until 1972.

Going in to Generation I assumed I would be facing very "New Wavey" stories.  In his introduction Gerrold takes pains to call the volume a collection of "speculative fiction," tells us that the best SF writers are no longer "preoccupied with science and scientists," but instead write about "what it means to be a human being," and that SF is no longer "content merely to entertain."  Gerrold admits that some "writers are still doing the space operas," but they "don't count," they are "no longer where it's at."  I find this needlessly hostile attitude a little irritating, and especially puzzling coming from Gerrold and Goldin--the books I have read by them, like Gerrold's Deathbeast, Yesterday's Children and A Matter for Men and Goldin's A World Called Solitude and Assault on the Gods, are full of entertaining battles involving monsters, laser guns, robots and space ships.  I also have the strong impression that Gerrold and Goldin are fans of old timey writers like Heinlein, van Vogt and "Doc" Smith.

More congenial is Harlan Ellison's back cover blurb, in which he subtly pooh poohs the idea of a collective "New Wave" and instead focuses on the fact that each writer is an individual talent.  In the past I have commented that one of the things I like about Ellison is that, while he has that angry young man thing going and is associated with pushing the envelope and encouraging innovative writing, he still has nice things to say about the writers of the past, people like A. E. van Vogt (whom he righteously championed as a candidate for the title of Grand Master), Poul Anderson, Edmond Hamilton, and L. Ron Hubbard.  You don't always have to tear down the old in order to build something new.

Enough preamble, let's check out stories in Generation by Wolfe, Malzberg, and Gerrold, as well as Vonda McIntyre and Gardner Dozois, and see if they are good representatives of the "fresh young talent" of 1969.

"It's Very Clean" by Gene Wolfe

Miles is a cultured young man (he reads Gunter Grass) and a virgin who has saved up a lot of money so he can go to a brothel where the whores are robots.  You probably remember that I've said Wolfe is my favorite writer, so you are not going to be surprised when I tell you that Wolfe very skillfully sets the scene and evokes our anxieties about our first sexual experiences and such socially and psychologically fraught practices as masturbation and prostitution.  And that the surprise ending actually surprised me. But what I say is true, this is another hit by the master.

"It's Very Clean" was published a second time in the 1996 anthology Cybersex, which has a hideously flat and busy computer-generated cover.  From Richard Powers, Robert Foster, Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta to this?  Sad!

"Vidi Vici Veni" by Barry Malzberg

This story is so outrageous that I am reluctant to tell you it made me laugh until I cried.  But I can't lie to my public--this story is hilarious!

"Vidi Vici Veni" (the title is a joke for all you classics scholars out there) is a cold and dispassionate government report about the sex crimes of a "supervising maintenance operator" at a "tool and die plant."  (Full disclosure: Your humble blogger spent some months working on and off in a machine shop doing tool and die work in the late '80s and early '90s.)  The actual meat of the plot is sort of obliquely described, but it appears that the main character's work generated in him an irresistible sexual desire, which he satisfied not only with his wife, not only with a very surprised male stranger (yes, this story is in part a joke about rape) but then with sundry inanimate objects, including pipes and furniture.  The punchline of the story is that his activities become famous and, if I am reading the obscure text rightly, that America is swept by a mass movement of people who have sex with inanimate objects.

Maybe this story is a sort of lament that our modern society has become so mechanistic and we have become so alienated from our fellow humans that we can more readily feel for manufactured items than each other. Whatever the serious intent of the story, if any, it is so funny it gave me physical pain. If you are the kind of person who won't be offended by a joke in which a male rape victim tells the police, "it was more the surprise than the other thing; if I hadn't felt so depersonalized I might have enjoyed it," I recommend it highly.

(It would be great if somebody else who has read this would confirm my interpretation or provide an alternate one--the story really is opaque and tricky.)

"Vidi Vici Veni" has only been printed once in English, but was translated into French and included in a 1976 volume with a cigarette-smoking frog on the cover!  Zut alors!

"All of Them Were Empty" by David Gerrold

Gerrold, in his long intro to this story, says it is "a favorite child," one of his best stories.  He also tells us he wrote it while high on drugs, and didn't revise it--the first draft was the final draft!

"All of Them Were Empty" is a first-person narrative, delivered by Deet, a guy who smokes a lot of pot, drops acid, uses mescaline, and says things like "Doors like hungry mouths pulled at us," and "Cars like giant panthers prowled the night streets, rolling silent-rumbly through dark-lit intersections and wet gutter bottoms."  Deet is looking for a new high, but is afraid of heroin, so when he hears about a place offering "a new kick" he braves the "hungry mouths" and panther-like automobiles and makes his way through the city streets to the source of this new high, dragging his girlfriend Woozle ("She had sucking eyes") along.

In a narrow apartment two girls sell them the new kick.  Deet and Woozle strip naked and spread goop from a jar all over each others' bodies.  (This sounds like one of the oldest of the old kicks, but be patient.)  Thanks to the goop, when Deet and Woozle hold hands they fly out into space, growing bigger and bigger until they dwarf the Milky Way and approach the limits of the universe.  Then they shrink and return to Earth, but somewhere along the way Deet lost Woozle, and when he gets back to the narrow apartment everyone is gone.


This is quite bad, with a pointless plot and a style that is annoying, not only long and tedious, but weighted down by repellant "experimental" techniques which consist of mind-numbing repetition.  But I guess it strikes a chord with some people; "All of Them Were Empty" was not only included in the Gerrold collection With a Finger in My I, but would later appear in an anthology devoted entirely to stories about drug use, Spaced Out.

"The Galactic Clock" by V. N. McIntyre

I thought McIntyre's stories "Only at Night" and "Recourse, Inc." were effective; and had hopes that "The Galactic Clock," which I believe has never appeared in any other publication, would be equally enjoyable.  My hopes were not realized.

"The Galactic Clock" is a long tedious story that consists almost entirely of obvious jokes.  Elroy Farnsworth is an academic who has bad luck.  When he drives he hits every red light.  When he walks he hits every "Don't Walk" sign.  When he puts important papers in the mail they arrive at their destination one day late and so he misses out on an important opportunity.  When he applies for a job the other applicant is a beautiful woman and the person doing the hiring is a lecher; another big opportunity missed. Page after page (21 in total!) of these kinds of jokes, jokes which are not actually bad, but which don't actually make you laugh, either.

As for plot, the plot is just one of the jokes writ large, an example of this dude suffering some misfortune.  I am going to have to give this one a marginal negative vote--it is not a crime like the Gerrold, but it is a pedestrian waste of the reader's time.

"Conditioned Reflex" by Gardner Dozois

Here's another piece which, I believe, has not appeared elsewhere.

"Conditioned Reflex" relates the thoughts of infantrymen as they await the approach of enemy troops, reminiscing about their childhoods, regretting never having had children, expressing disbelief that death could come in just a few minutes, and so forth.  It is suggested that these soldiers may be among the very last human beings alive, and the impending battle may be the very last of a war that will destroy all of humanity.  Dozois uses the story to muse about the possibility that mankind is reflexively and inherently, destructive, or that society has conditioned people to be destructive.

Back cover of my copy of Generation

This story is vulnerable to the charge that it is melodramatic and overwrought, and that it has no real plot.  I liked it anyway; the soldier's thoughts were all quite believable, even affecting, and the story is well-written, just the right length, and it kept my interest. Thumbs up!

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The Malzberg story in Generation is one of the funniest things I have ever read, and all on its own generously repays my two dollars. The Wolfe is quite good, and the Dozois is solid.  The McIntyre is competent, but it is sterile, having no emotional intellectual impact.  The Gerrold is surprisingly bad.

Generation's 25 stories include pieces by Piers Anthony, David R. Bunch and Ed Bryant, writers I have some familiarity with, and two by the famous "James Tiptree, Jr.," a writer whom I hope to start reading soon. We will definitely be coming back to Generation.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zing!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Cowboys, Indians" by Edward Bryant

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

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

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

Not bad.

"The First Few Kinds of Truth" by James Sallis

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

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

I can't recommend this.

"Delta Flight 281" by James Sallis

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

I can't recommend this, either.

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

***********

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

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

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

"The gods claim to be good, yet I've seen them do some things that even they say are bad.  They claim to be wise, yet sometimes they act foolishly.  I'm learning very quickly not to believe everything the gods have told me."

Back in 2012 I read Stephen Goldin's 1981 novel A World Called Solitude and gave it a positive review on Amazon.  Since then I've read three Goldin short stories, two good, one bad.  So Goldin's name is always rattling around inside my skull, and when I spotted the 1977 Fawcett paperback edition of Assault on the Gods with a striking Don Maitz cover (I love the faces and the weapons) I picked it up.  I was intrigued by what I presumed to be the in-your-face political content of the book, not just the promised "fiercely independent" female protagonist but the anti-religious slant. Goldin, on his website, tells us "we're living in scary times. The Religious Right is trying to form a band of thought-police and turn America into a theocracy. Nothing less than the freedom of thought is at stake, and I refuse to be silent."  Let's see if Goldin strikes any telling blows against the "fanatical Xtians" he envisions are trying to "cram their puritanical dogma down our throats."  

Space Captain Ardeva Korrell is a member of what in grad school we called a marginalized population; not only is she a woman (she provides evidence that fewer than 2% of space captains are women) but an Eoan.  Planet Eos is the most rational and sane human society in the galaxy--Eoans are "beyond morals" because they are so wise.  ("Anthropos [the founding guru of the Eoans] saw morals as arbitrary rules imposed by Society on its less mature members....") This gives Eoans a reputation for arrogance and snobbery.  In the first dozen pages of the story Korrell complains that prejudice has held back her career, that crewmen don't obey her, that she is making less money and getting less respect than she deserves, and that employers are always making passes at her.  Am I reading a SF novel or an article from Ms.?

The cargo ship Korrell is currently commanding is stopped on planet Dascham, where the illiterate natives look like teddy bears and live in filthy huts. (For the record, Assault on the Gods appeared six years before Return of the Jedi, but over 25 years after the first appearance of Poul Anderson and Gordon Dickson's Hoka stories.  I have to admit that if the paperback had a teddy bear instead of gunslinger girl on the cover I would not have picked up Assault on the Gods.)  The natives are mired in poverty and primitivism because of their stifling religion.  When a drunken member of Korrell's crew denies the existence of the gods of Dascham he is struck dead by lightning and a 12-foot tall glowing teddy bear angel with a flaming sword flies down to upbraid the survivors.

The Daschamene "gods" are in fact aliens who maintain a totalitarian rule over the natives, ruthlessly controlling population levels, forbidding technological development, outlawing dissenting speech and exploiting them as slaves.  An extensive network of listening devices keeps the natives under surveillance and the "angels," in reality war robots, inflict swift and merciless punishment.  When one of the natives, disillusioned with the gods, sneaks onto Korrell's ship looking for help in overthrowing them, Korrell's boss, the ship's owner, decides to exterminate the gods and liberate the natives, primarily in hopes of reaping a considerable monetary reward offered by the dissident. Korrell reluctantly goes along with this terribly risky (their ship is not a naval vessel but an unarmed merchant ship, after all) scheme.