Our tireless exploration of 1930s pulp magazines continues with three stories from 1935 by our friend Edmond Hamilton.  These are deep cuts--two stories from Hugo Gernsback's Wonder Stories that have never appeared in book form in the United States and one from Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales that would wait until 1998 for book publication.  As usual, I am reading these stories in scans of the original magazines at the internet archive. 

"Master of the Genes"

The issue of Wonder Stories that printed "Master of the Genes" also prints in the letters column an epistle from Virginia Kidd, future wife of James Blish and major literary agent--among her clients were MPorcius faves Gene Wolfe and R. A. Lafferty.  Kidd attacks the Frank R. Paul cover of the November 1934 issue, which includes imitations of multiple Charles R. Knight paintings of dinosaurs.  Kidd praises Stanley Weinbaum, who seems to be universally beloved--H. P. Lovecraft in 1935 letters to Robert Bloch proclaims Weinbaum the only admirable writer of "pulp interplanetary stuff."  Forrest J. Ackerman and Wilson Tucker also have letters printed in the issue, the former describing a non-invasive method of looking at your own brain (!) and the latter attacking the Paul cover of the '34 August issue.  Tucker's entire letter is silly, and he also has a silly poem printed in the letters column (under a jokey pseudonym), so maybe he is joking about that August cover, which to me seems pretty good.

(Seven years ago I read Kidd's satirical story "Balls" and thought it weak, and five years ago I read Kidd's 45-page story "Flowering Season" AKA "Kangaroo Court" and denounced it as "bad."  In 2016 I read Wilson Tucker's novel Resurrection Days and found it pretty disappointing.  Frank R. Paul, thou art avenged!) 

Hugo Gernsback was seriously into using his magazines to teach people about science, and in his intro to "Master of the Genes" he tells us that Hamilton will be providing us an opportunity to learn about genetics, as well one to be chilled with fear!

Our story begins in a Brazilian prison!  I am already chilled!  Thorn Haddon and Jerry Lanham are Americans who became leaders in the revolutionary army trying to overthrow the Brazilian government, and were captured.  They are scheduled to be shot at dawn, but then a geneticist convinces the government to pardon them so they can act as his bodyguards at his lab in an Indian village on the Amazon.  On the canoe ride to the village the scientist gives a lecture on genes and chromosomes to Thorn and Jerry, and to us readers, and then explains that for years the Indians in the village have been giving birth to deformed babies, and he is trying to figure out what is causing this tragedy.

In the village Hamilton describes various deformed children, kids who lack various limbs or organs or who have extra limbs.  Jerry immediately develops a crush on the scientist's daughter, Concepcion, but she has a boy friend, Thomaz, the man who manages her father's plantation.  Thorn, on the other hand, gets busy doing a little detective work and figures out why the Indians of the village are giving birth to cyclops babies with one eye and blob babies with no bones and headless babies with eyes and mouths in their chests--the scientist is using a machine to bathe the whole area in dangerous radiation!  This villain periodically alters the type of radiation he is projecting from his lab and keeps track of which radiation causes which deformities.  A true mad scientist, Concepcion's father thinks that his atrocities are justified because they advance the cause of knowledge.     

But then the tragedy gets personal!  Concepcion and Thomaz were married secretly months ago, and Concepcion is pregnant!  When she learns her baby will be deformed she shoots herself dead, and Thomaz runs to raise an Indian mob to destroy the geneticist and all his works.  Thorn and Jerry escape, but the geneticist, after giving the Yankees his notes and imploring them to "get them to someone of scientific eminence," allows the mob to slay him.

This story is OK.  Thorn and Jerry are sort of superfluous, as they do very little besides act as spectators.  The story would work just as well or better if Concepcion and/or Thomaz had figured out what was going on--the horror and tragedy elements don't require the Americans' presence at all.  I guess Hamilton thought it useful to have American protagonists with whom American readers could identify, and that by making them fighting men he would dangle before readers the possibility of future action and adventure scenes, keeping readers who were bored by the science lectures from giving up on the story; this is just a tease--Thorn and Jerry don't fight anybody.

In 1946, "Master of the Genes" was reprinted in a 36-page British pamphlet alongside a story by Harl Vincent; it seems that this has been the only additional appearance of the story.    

"The Truth Gas"

This is another Hamilton mad scientist story.  Our pal Ed wrote lots of these.  "The Truth Gas" is a little different in that there is an element of humor in this one, and none of the death and horror of stories like "Master of the Genes," "The Mind Master," "The Death Lord," "The Man Who Evolved," and many others.

John Daly is the assistant to chemist Jason Rand.  One day Daly is late to work because he is chatting with his fiancé, Lois Lane (!).  When Daly lies to his boss, blaming his tardiness on a subway break down, Rand catches him, having seen Daly with Lane from his cab.  Oops!  Rand declares that most of the trouble in the world is due to lying, and that if people could be stopped from lying, we'd be living in a utopia!  Making conversation, Daly reminds the boss of those stories they saw in the papers a while ago about efforts to develop a truth serum.

Soon after this conversation, Rand tells Daly to man the lab for the next few months because he's going on an unexpected trip.  A few weeks later everybody--in the world!--starts telling the truth, with disastrous results, as salesmen fail to conceal the shortcomings of their products and spouses admit they are sick of their husbands and wives and politicians openly admit their corruption and dishonesty and Hollywood stars express their true contempt for the cinema goers who lap up their lame films.  Lois Lane asks Daly if he likes her new dress and he tells her the truth and the engagement is off!  

The economy teeters on the brink of total collapse and international relations teeter on the brink of total war!  Daly figures out Rand must be to blame, invents nose filters to protect himself from the gas Rand is producing and emitting up in Vermont, and hurries up to the Green Mountain State to outwit Rand, destroy his machine, and restore the dishonest status quo ante.  Lois and Daly even get back together, and Rand lets Daly keep his job--no hard feelings!

This story is acceptable.  The jokes don't make you laugh, being obvious, but they make sense, so you don't find them irritating.  They also reflect, behind a light-hearted veneer, the sad reality of our lives, that we are all jerks who are constantly lying to each other; Hamilton addressed this same topic--with more death--in the 1933 tale "The Man With X-Ray Eyes" and the 1934 story "The Man Who Returned."  "The Truth Gas" has never been reprinted.  (Thank God for the internet archive!)  

The issue of Wonder Stories that includes the one and only printing of "The Truth Gas" has an ad in its "The Science Fiction Swap Column" from Clark Ashton Smith:

We've blogged about the title story of the advertised booklet, "The Double Shadow," as well as two more of its half-dozen "imaginative and atmospheric tales," "The Devotee of Evil" and "The Voyage of King Euvoran."  You can listen to people read the poems from Ebony and Crystal at the internet archive.

As for this Lois Lane business, the famous character of that name first appeared in June of 1938, wikipedia is telling me.  Is there any chance she was named after this minor character in this minor Hamilton story?  Even if there isn't, it is an interesting twist of fate that Hamilton would go on to write many stories for DC Comics, including dozens that appeared in such titles as Superman, Superboy, Superman's Pal Jimmy Olson, and Superman's Girl Friend, Lois Lane, among them "Lois Lane, The Super-Maid of Krypton!" and "The Monster Who Loved Lois Lane!"     

"The Great Brain of Kaldar"

The first two stories of Kaldar, a planet in the Antares system, appeared in Farnsworth Wright's Magic Carpet magazine and told the tale of an Earthman, Stuart Merrick, who was sent to Kaldar via super technology and who there became ruler of the city state of Corla.  Well, Stu is back, in a story about people getting captured and escaping that is also a story about that old SF standby topic, the collective consciousness!

It turns out that not every citizen of Corla is thrilled to have as their ruler a man who has no roots in their fair city or even on their planet!  When Stu, accompanied by his beautiful wife Narna and his two closest advisors, sets out on a diplomatic mission to another city, the nativist anti-Stu faction makes sure the entire air boat's crew is of their number and when our four heroes are asleep they are bound and taken prisoner!  Merrick and his two friends are thrown overboard while Stu's gorgeous wife is carried away for the obvious reason.

Stu and his two buddies survive their fall from on high because they have the great good fortune to land on a huge springy fungus tree.  Before they were ejected from the flying machine, Stu and company were told by the braggadocious leader of the rebels that he and his traitorous crew were going to form an alliance with the rumored "great brain of Kaldar," said to lie to the northeast.  So our guy Stu and his comrades, after loosing their bonds and fighting some oversized blob monsters, strike out in that direction.  They meet some local humans, the Talas, people who are invisible and whose city is also invisible.  There is some confusion and the Corlan delegation gets tied up and taken prisoner again, but the invisible people quickly realize they are cool dudes and release them and even invite them to their invisible walled town for a visit.  Stu and his cronies can't stay long because Stu is eager to chase after Narna, but they tarry long enough to hear the transparent Talas' capsule history of the great brain.

Once there was a city in which everybody was very community-minded: "In that city co-operation for the good of all was the supreme aim."  This collectivist spirit naturally led to them figuring out a way to remove their brains from their bodies and connect them all together into a single huge superbrain, which was ensconced in a great chamber in a tower.  These efficiency-minded collectivists didn't just dispose of their bodies, but filled their vacant skulls with receivers so the super brain could control them remotely.  Hamilton's characters compare the city of the great brain to a huge human body, with the amasses brain as the brain (of course) and these remote controlled meat drones as the hands and fingers.

Like revolutionaries throughout history, the superbrain was not content to call it a day after having revolutionized things at home--it desired further augmentation, additional brains and additional flesh robots!  So for ages the brain has been sending its robot bodies afield to capture ordinary humans whose brains are harvested and added to the super brain and whose bodies join the brain's legion of mindless drones.  It was in response to this menace that the Talas developed a means of rendering themselves and all their belongings permanently invisible.

Two Talas join our three Corlan heroes in their commando raid on the city of the great brain.  They manage to sneak in and find Merrick's wife, but, horror of horrors, her brain has been removed and Narna is a mindless robot controlled by the collective consciousness that is the superbrain!  (The Corlan traitors suffered a similar fate, the brain not being interested in an alliance with them.)  Through her eyes the brain detects the intruders and a platoon of guards comes after them.  

Neither the Talas nor the brain has developed any firearms, it seems, as everybody fights with swords.  Hamilton has a fun time describing how the invisible swords of the Talas become visible when covered in blood.  Being invisible, the Talas have a big advantage over the robot guards, and our heroes fight their way into the great brain's chamber.  Merrick negotiates with the brain, which sits in an exposed tank where he could easily cut it to ribbons.  The Earthman expatriate agrees to leave in peace if the brain restores Narna's brain to her pretty skull--luckily it hasn't been integrated into the superbrain yet, there being a prep period that has not yet elapsed.  Stu watches while his wife's head is cut open, a mechanical apparatus removed, and her brain put back in.  When Narna is conscious they head out--the brain tries to double-cross them, but the invisible Talas cut the collective brain into mush and every zombie in the city falls over, inert.  The day is saved!

"The Great Brain of Kaldar" is an acceptable sword and planet story, largely reproducing the plot of the second Kaldar tale, "The Snake Men of Kaldar," in which a traitor seizes Narna and tries to join up with some monstrous foreigners and Merrick allies with a race of humans the Corlans have never met before to defeat the traitors and monsters and save Narna.  Making a living as a pulp writer in the 1930s meant doing repeated variations on the same themes; at least that was Edmond Hamilton's experience.

In 1989 "The Great Brain of Kaldar" reappeared in the magazine Pulp Vault, and in 1998 was included in Haffner Press's Hamilton collection Kaldar: World of Antares.

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Unexpectedly, a thread runs through all three of these 1935 stories by Edmond Hamilton: the idea of honesty and "keeping your word," and how the man who tries to be an honest plain-dealer puts himself, and maybe his entire society, at risk.  "The Truth Gas" obviously tells us that our every social interaction is lubricated by lies, and argues that civilization would collapse if we were all forced to speak our minds.  

Both "Master of the Genes" and "The Great Brain of Kaldar" depict gentlemen who keep their word and give others the benefit of the doubt, to their peril.  It seems crazy that the Brazilian government would think Thorn Haddon and Jerry Lanham, violent revolutionaries and foreigners, were so dangerous that they needed to be executed, and then just let them go, and it seems crazy that violent revolutionaries would follow the orders of a weak little scientist instead of dashing off to freedom in America or back to the jungle to continue fighting for their revolution.  But Haddon and Lanham gave the Brazilian authorities their word that they would obey the geneticist, and they do it!  When they find out the scientist is committing a crime against humanity, destroying the lives of a village of Indians in order to gain scientific data, they are full of a righteous desire to kill him, but stay their hands because they gave him their word.

Stuart Merrick, at the beginning of "The Great Brain of Kaldar," is told by one of his advisors that the pilot of the air boat is a leader of the faction that would prefer a native-born ruler, and so he should be reassigned, but Stu insists on treating this man fairly, as there is no hard evidence he is going to break any law, and even makes a show of publicly declaring his confidence in the pilot's loyalty.  Later, he similarly gives his word to the brain--the invisible Talas, however, do not, and save the Corlans' bacon by murdering the brain.

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More 1930s genre literature in the next exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.

After an interlude in which we travelled to the future, to the past, and to another planet to engage in brutal hand to hand combat with both man and beast, it's time to return to science fiction's master of pessimism, mental illness and sexual frustration, Barry N. Malzberg.  These six stories were found in my copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, a 1976 paperback from Pocket whose front bears a fine Robert Schulz cover illo and whose back trumpets the bold claim that:


"Introduction to the Second Edition" (1973)

In his intro to this piece Malzberg notes that the murder mystery genre is "crazier" and "dumber" than SF, but due to superior PR has a much higher class of reader.  When I was quite young my mother, who loves those old mystery stories like Rex Stout and Miss Marple, tried to get me to read one of her Agatha Christie paperbacks.  I couldn't get past a sentence without my eyes glazing over, and Mom was pretty disappointed. "You won't read anything that doesn't have a dragon on the cover, will you!!!???"

"Introduction to the Second Edition" is yet another of Malzberg's stories in which a guy receives psychiatric therapy via a hypnodream helmet which allows him to experience antisocial and illegal activities again and again.  (See "At the Institute," "On Ice," and "Tapping Out.")  In this story the narrator acts out a fantasy of murdering his mother ("My whole attitudes toward sex were entirely warped for thirty-eight years by your pointless moralizing" he tells her before using a knife to "part her like a fish") and being murdered by his father ("this is for ruining your mother's figure," says Dad before pulling the trigger.)  The narrator also plays out a scenario in which he murders a former girlfriend, but when he tries to rape the collapsed victim the attendants turn off the machine--he has not paid for that particular fantasy, they admonish him.

I think there are some boobs in there somewhere

As in other of these stories, the patient is not cured by this bizarre treatment; instead, he uses it as entertainment, and becomes addicted to it, and the therapists are as happy as your local crack dealer to take his money.

"Introduction to the Second Edition" presents some mysteries.  Whose idea was it to include so many of these hypnodream stories in one collection?  Secondly, the publication page in my copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg states that "Introduction to the Second Edition" first appeared in Nova 3, but isfdb lists the Malzberg story in Nova 3 as "Dreaming and Conversions: Two Rules by Which to Live."  Presumably a title change and perhaps a revision not recognized yet by isfdb.  Too bad neither I nor the Columbus Metropolitan Library own a copy of Nova 3. I'll have to keep an eye out for Nova 3 at the used bookstores so I can resolve this mystery the way the son of a Nero Wolfe fan should.  [UPDATE November 5, 2016:  Make sure to check out the comments below, where inspector ukjarry solves the mystery of Nova 3!]

"The Trial of the Blood" (1974)

In his intro to this baby (one of the reasons The Best of Barry N. Malzberg is a must buy for us Malz-heads is that every story has a long digressive intro) Malzberg tells us this story, which first appeared in the anthology The Berserkers, is meant to be something like Count Dracula's diary.  The character who narrates the tale is really not much like the Transylvanian vampire we all know and love--he doesn't seem to have any supernatural powers or vulnerabilities, for example--but the story is still a pretty good piece of horror fiction, the diary of a maniac who kills women and children and is driven  not only by a lust to drink human blood, but by a desire to be understood by a callous world.  Unlike so many of Malzberg's stories, this one succeeds when judged by conventional measures of what readers expect out of fiction: plot, character, human feeling, etc.  This success is reflected in the fact that, as the author himself reports, it is one of the few of Malzberg's works about which Publishers Weekly ("a journal which has not seen eyeball-to-eyeball with me on many occasions") had something nice to say.


"Getting Around" (1973)

"Getting Around" first appeared in Frontiers 1: Tomorrow's Alternatives under the K. M. O'Donnell pseudonym.  Malzberg relates that editor Roger Elwood requested "the ultimate story about perverse sexuality" and Barry delivered this tale, which, through the medium of letters, recorded conversations, and outline notes for an academic lecture, describes a society in which the government discourages monogamy and compels participation in regular group sex sessions organized by government officials.  This system of sexual relations, called "Intermix," is a response to the high productivity of late 20th century Western society; in the past world of scarcity people admired self-denial, and romanticized the exclusive love of two individuals for each other.  To make modern society run smoothly, the authorities believe, both indiscriminate consumerism on the part of the plebs and systemic control from above are necessary.

The meat of the story is unsent love letters and a suicide note written by a man who has broken the new society's taboos by falling in love with a woman and suffers the forbidden vice of jealousy. "Going Around" also includes a joke dialogue sequence about a man who is mostly, or perhaps entirely, artificial:

...You mean you were born without arms, legs and vocal cords?
--Yes.
--You must have had a very unhappy childhood.
--Oh, no.  You see, I didn't have a brain, either.
--Now I'm excited.  I'm really excited.
--Let's go to the bedroom.  

Malzberg used the same sort of idea in "Culture Lock," which appeared in Roger Elwood's Future City, but in that story the government was pushing homosexuality; the tyranny in "Getting Around" experimented with homosexuality and bestiality, then settled on enforcing strict heterosexual norms.  It also reminded me of 1984, in which the government tries to crush normal sex drives and the institution of the family, seeing love and loyalty to other individuals as a rival to love and loyalty to state.

I like this one; I am a sucker for unrequited love stories and stories about radical governments trying to reshape human nature and society.

Intro to "Track Two"

I read "Track Two" back in early 2015 in an old copy of Fantastic and wrote about it then.  I now realize that "Track Two" is sort of like "Trial of the Blood": both are journals of immortal figures famed for having supernatural powers, but in Barry's version of their stories they have no such powers and are beset by many doubts, doubts which are not part of the canonical accounts of their lives.

In the intro to this appearance of "Track Two" Malzberg praises down market magazines like Fantastic, Amazing, Thrilling Wonder and Startling for publishing more innovative and exciting work than more prestigious, more popular and better-paying periodicals.  He claims that the stories he was offered when editing Amazing (in 1968 and 1969) were better than stories published in that period in Analog and Playboy.  This reminded me of Michael Moorcock's assertion, in his essay on Leigh Brackett, "Queen of the Martian Mysteries," that the sort of SF stories he liked were more likely to appear in Planet Stories and Startling Stories than Astounding.  It is fun, and useful, to see major figures in the field go against the conventional wisdom this way--it endorses the natural inclinations of the lowly individual reader to follow his own inclinations, to think for himself.  (Though, of course, today's rebels almost inevitably found the stifling orthodoxy of tomorrow.)

"The Battered-Earth Syndrome" (1973)

Barry tells us that Virginia Kidd asked him to fashion a story out of this title.  I guess Kidd liked these kinds of goofy pun titles--she once wrote a story about aliens that look like kangaroos and titled it "Kangaroo Court."  ("Kangaroo Court" was later reprinted under the title "The Flowering Season.")  Malzberg tells us Kidd is a good agent, writer and editor, but I have to admit that, when I read  "The Flowering Season" and another Kidd story, "Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside," I found them quite poor.  Malzberg always seems generous with praise for his editors, and in fact dedicated this volume to them:


Anyway, "The Battered Earth Syndrome" appeared in an anthology of environmentalist stories edited by Kidd and Roger Elwood and entitled Saving Worlds in hardcover and The Wounded Planet in paperback.  (Maybe this is another Kidd hallmark, changing titles of her productions to try to snare the unwary.)  Ecological hysteria is probably my least favorite subgenre of SF, so I was nodding along when Barry admitted that he "cannot imagine how" a book of stories and poems "written with that grim earnestness characteristic of science fiction when it is determined to Save the World" could "be commercially viable."


I spent the first twenty-something years of my life in Northern New Jersey, and so spent many hours in automobiles on Route 46, riding east to Nana's or New York City or west to Hackettstown, and so when I found that 46 was prominently featured in this story (Malzberg has lived in Northern New Jersey himself for decades) it was like meeting an old friend!  Then when I realized this was yet another of Malzberg's hypnohelmet dream therapy stories it was like running into an acquaintance who tells you the same old anecdotes every time you see him.

Actually, Malzberg mixes it up a little this time, to suit the environmentalist topic of Kidd's anthology.  Two men, the narrator and his buddy Nick, are repeatedly put into dream simulations of driving around New Jersey and New York City, getting into car accidents, seeing the Hudson River choked with trash, shooting guard dogs at an abandoned site whose sign promises urban renewal.  It is space aliens, we learn, who are providing Nick and our hero this therapy, in hopes that these Earthmen will face up to how mankind's incorrect attitudes despoiled their planet.  ("Don't you realize? The environment is not discreet; it is bound to you.....You are your world.")  Nick and the narrator resist this indoctrination (the protagonist calls it "babbling") and the aliens eliminate Nick, and we have to assume the narrator's days are numbered.  On the last page of the story it is suggested that Nick and the narrator are not quite real, that they are just simulations or resurrected consciousnesses or something like that.

(This story reminded me of A. E. van Vogt's 1948 "Resurrection," AKA "The Monster," in which aliens come to a desolated Earth and resurrect a human in hopes of learning about the disaster which befell our world.  In Van's story the human outwits the aliens and goes on to conquer the universe--van Vogt has the kind of optimism which many critics see Malzberg's career as a response to and/or a refutation of.)

So, "The Battered Earth Syndrome" is one of those SF stories about how the human race is a basket of irredeemable deplorables and we would be better off if some irresistible nannies from outer space arrived to push us around or maybe just get rid of us. This is another subgenre of SF which I don't favor, and I will admit to cheering for Nick and our narrator when they refused to knuckle under to the "enlightenment" offered by the aliens.  As far as I am concerned, the ambiguity of Malzberg's story, its brevity, and the fact that it has served me as an excuse to reminisce about my NJ-NYC life, put it in the upper ranks of green stories and anti-human/pro-alien stories.

Intro to "Network"

I read "Network" in an old issue of Fantastic back in late 2014, along with a bunch of other stories from that magazine, which was edited by Ted White, author of  The Spawn of the Death Machine.   

In his intro to "Network" for The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, Malzberg talks about the bright side of the "so-called energy crunch."  Malzberg suggests that high fuel prices will end the flight of the middle classes from urban centers, will keep kids from wasting time "cruising" and neglecting their studies, and will give people who don't like their extended families an excuse for not driving over to visit.

Perhaps more intriguingly, Malzberg tells us "Network" is, in part, a tribute to Harlan Ellison, whom he calls a "remarkable (if remarkably uneven) writer."  This set off a bell in my head: when I read it, I thought "Network" had a stronger traditional plot and more adventure elements than most of Malzberg's work, and am now wondering if perhaps "Network" should be compared to Ellison's famous 1969 "A Boy and His Dog."

"A Delightful Comedic Premise" (1974)

In the intro to "A Delightful Comedic Premise" Malzberg strongly recommends a writer I never heard of (I spent a long period of my life watching TV and playing Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, so when it comes to high culture I am an ignoramus), Wilfrid Sheed, telling us Sheed's The Hack, one of the "most valuable works of the decade," served as inspiration for Malzberg's own Herovit's World.  I haven't read Herovit's World myself, but Joachim Boaz has.  

This one has been more widely published than many of Malzberg's stories, first appearing in F&SF and most recently being included in 2006's This is My Funniest: Leading Science Fiction Writers Present Their Funniest Stories Ever.  It was also included in 1994's The Passage of the Light: The Recursive Science Fiction of Barry N. Malzberg, Space Mail II, and Antigrav: Cosmic Comedies by SF Masters; these titles provide us clues as to what to expect.  

This has to be one of the most recursive or "meta" SF stories of all time, consisting of letters between Malzberg and editor Ed Ferman that mention Jack Finney and Ron Walotsky, all real people.  Ferman asks Malzberg to write a humorous story instead of his usual heavy depressing stuff, and Malzberg responds with story outlines and ideas that Ferman is forced to reject because they are, in fact, also quite depressing, and he has plenty of dark pessimistic stories already from Malzberg and others.  ("We are heavily inventoried, as I have already said, on the despairing stuff....")   The rejected ideas are actually not bad--a guy can time travel as a spectator (not a participant) to the 1950s, and even bring people along with him, but can only witness unhappy events, not pleasant ones; and, a guy can read the minds of race horses, but finds there is no correlation between a horse's mood and whether it will be successful in a race or not.  (Shades of Underlay, Malzberg's laugh-out-loud masterpiece!)

"A Delightful Comedic Premise" is one of Malzberg's better stories.  I can heartily recommend it to general SF readers as well as Malzberg's fans, who will get extra enjoyment out of how the story plays off Malzberg's reputation.

"Geraniums" (1973) (with Valerie King)

"Geraniums" first appeared in the anthology Omega (another Roger Elwood production--I get the feeling Malzberg and Elwood were essential buttresses of each other's careers) and was co-written with a Valerie King; Malzberg says the story is mostly King's own work and is the best piece in Omega.  Malzberg compares her to Dory Previn, a songwriter I've never heard of.  King has only one other credit at isfdb.

This is a very literary, mainstream story, with all kinds of symbolism ("The world was a greenhouse") and criticism of the Catholic Church uttered by someone outside that tradition (a character who is presumably Orthodox and/or very secular); the reader is not sure how seriously to take his criticism, which seems pretty hyperbolic and smacks of ingratitude.  The critic is a Russian, Dmitri, who is working as a gardener at a Catholic Church (in North America, I assume) and is very annoyed at how passersby will reach between the bars of the fence to steal geraniums.  He has cultivated a beautiful rose, The Empress of Russia.  He also has dreams of fat women in black dresses who provide incomprehensible advice.  In an effort to drown a gopher he rams a hose into a hole and turns it on full blast (a sex metaphor?)  When a "small dark thing" comes out of the hole, he faints...I think maybe he dies.

It is difficult to find any of this amusing or interesting.  It didn't generate the level of interest required for me to try to figure out if King is trying to say something about parenthood or religion or the Russian Revolution.  Gotta give this one a "no" vote.        

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I'm making real progress in my journey through The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and really enjoyed this leg of the trip.  We'll be taking a break from our pal Barry in our next episode, however, for what I hope will be some action-packed SF adventures.

Are you ready for some weapons-grade pessimism?  Well, that is what the cover of the 1977 anthology, The Future Now, edited by Robert Hoskins, promises.  Let's crack open the brilliant Richard Powers cover and see if Hugo and Nebula winners Poul Anderson and Harlan Ellison, and literary agent to the stars Virginia Kidd, can deliver the gloom and doom our black hearts crave!


"Home" by Poul Anderson (1966)

This story originally appeared in 1966 in the first of Damon Knight's Orbit volumes, under the title "The Disinherited."  Joachim Boaz wrote about the story last year when he read the entirety of Orbit 1.  I think he liked the story more than I did.

Dutch edition

Each piece of fiction in The Future Now has a new introduction by its author.  Anderson's intro to "Home" is mature, calm, even optimistic.  Sure we got problems, our buddy Poul admits, but people have always had problems.  And people have also always had love, beauty, even heroism, even as we do today.  Poul, this is not the pessimism we are looking for!

The story, however, is suitably pessimistic.  In the future mankind has achieved the ability to travel to alien planets and deploy long-term scientific teams on them.  After a century or so of exploration the Earth suffers from overpopulation and a stifling government, and the interstellar program is shut down.  The story chronicles the reaction of a colony of scientists on the planet Mithras when an expeditionary force arrives from Earth intent on taking them back.  The colonists, having lived on Mithras for three or four generations, have almost no emotional connection to Earth and refuse to leave.  The leader of the force from Earth argues that the boffins must return to Earth, because if they stay on Mithras and multiply they will abuse the native Mithrans, who, though friendly, have a radically different culture than the humans', making conflict inevitable.  The mission commander employs force to get the human colonists to comply with the order to return to Earth.

This story is acceptable, but no big deal.  The plot and characters primarily serve to get across two of Anderson's ideas: that it would be a false economy to cancel a space exploration program, and that different cultures inevitably come to blows.  To make his latter point Anderson piles on all kinds of historical examples: European colonization of the New World, European imperialism in Africa, the long history of Jews living as minorities among other cultures, etc.  While Anderson's arguments are generally persuasive, the story is bland; there is no excitement and I didn't really care what happened to the opposing factions of humans or the unambitious natives who have no concepts of money or property.  

(An aside: "The Disinherited" seems like a better title to me than "Home."  The human race is being disinherited because the space program is cancelled--we deserve to learn all about the universe, that knowledge is our legitimate inheritance.  The humans born on Mithras lost touch with Earth culture; they were disinherited of the many achievements of their race.  They were also disinherited when they had to leave the planet they grew up on, Mithras, and abandon their friendships with the natives.  And if they had stayed their descendents would have disinherited the Mithrans when the inevitable war broke out, a war the more aggressive and efficient humans would be sure to win.)      

"Silent in Gehenna" by Harlan Ellison (1971)

I currently reside in Ohio, where, it turns out, Ellison was born and spent much of his youth.  Near Columbus is a town called Gahanna, which never ceases to amaze me; apparently "Gahanna" is an Indian word for the confluence of three rivers, but you'd think the founders of the town would have shied away from a name which sounds so much like a word used as a synonym for Hell and which was first applied to a place of human sacrifice.

(Perhaps appropriately, my dentist's office is in Gehenna, I mean Gahanna.)

In his intro to the story Ellison praises Robert Heinlein and brags that he (Ellison) was spied upon by the Johnson and Nixon administrations ("I put my body on the line") for his commitment to social change.  He warns that if we pay too much attention to the common people (they are "frightened masses" who have a "beast mentality") that dissenters will be burned at the stake.  He laments that the 1970s are a period of "Fifties-style apathy."  Now this is the elitist pessimism we are looking for!


"Silent in Gehenna," which first appeared in The Many Worlds of Science Fiction, an anthology edited by Ben Bova, is a sort of polemical fable with jokes and a few experimental literary techniques.  I'm not crazy about fables and satires.  I like a story which has some kind of emotional resonance, and I am rarely moved by a story which is full of absurd exaggerations and surreal nonsense, a story which makes no effort to create a believable world.  I'm the only person who doesn't like Ellison's universally beloved "'Repent, Harlequin!' Said the Ticktockman"--besides being a silly and extravagant fable, it is based on a weak and solipsistic premise, that premise being that Harlan Ellison is too important to have to meet deadlines.  I have a similar attitude about "Silent in Gehenna."  The premise of this one is that nobody really listens to Harlan Ellison as he points out the world's injustices; if they did, maybe they would do something about those injustices!  I think "Silent in Gehenna" is a little more sophisticated than "'Repent, Harlequin'" because it integrates the criticism of welfare state liberalism you hear from hardcore leftists, that efforts to ameliorate the problems of the downtrodden of society (with food stamps and housing vouchers, say) make it harder to radically change society (e.g., by nationalizing and collectivizing farms and real estate) and solve the downtroddens' problems once and for all.  (I don't agree with this view, but I find it thought-provoking.)

In the dystopian future college campuses are like POW camps in which the students are held behind electrified fences, watched over by armed guards, trained only to serve the evil corporations!  One-man guerilla army Joe Bob Hickey sneaks into college campuses and blows up buildings and tries to inspire the students to revolt. But do people want to revolt?  No, the foolish masses do not want to revolt, they are suffering from false consciousness, blinded by patriotic propaganda and a timid desire for law and order!

In the crazy symbolical ending Joe Bob is spirited away by aliens, conscripted to act as the conscience of this alien society, in which one race of creatures lords it over a smaller and weaker worker race.  When the strong abuse the weak, Joe Bob yells at them.  Joe Bob's yelling does nothing to change the iniquitous society; in fact, Joe Bob may merely be helping the oppressors assuage their guilt, unwittingly buttressing the immoral society by relieving the pressure that might lead to radical change!          

Joachim wrote about "Silent in Gehenna" in 2013 when he read the Ellison collection Approaching Oblivion.  I'm sure he liked it a lot more than I did!

"Flowering Season" by Virginia Kidd (1966)

Kidd served as literary agent to some of the most critically acclaimed SF writers, including Ursula K. Le Guin, R. A. Lafferty, and Gene Wolfe, writers who have received accolades beyond the SF ghetto.  This story first appeared under the title "Kangaroo Court" in the first Orbit; Joachim reviewed it when he discussed that volume.   (It seems like I'm stalking Mr. Boaz today, doesn't it? I assure you, and the authorities, that this is purely a coincidence!)

British edition

Joachim and I agree on this one--it is bad. Long (45 pages!) and tedious, poorly structured and paced, full of extraneous gunk but no interesting characters or compelling events, it is a real waste of time.  I try on this blog to make a distinction between stories that are not for me, either because they are not to my taste or offend my sensibilities in some way, and stories which are just incompetent. "Flowering Season" is the latter, a poor piece of work with almost nothing to recommend it to anybody.

In the future the Earth has a world government and a class-bound society; this arrangement has brought universal peace, but there is little or no competition or ambition and civilization is sterile, static, stagnant.  Aliens that look like kangaroos arrive, and negotiate with the Earth government.  Kidd's story is, in part, about office politics, and a government official who suspects the aliens are inimical and must be destroyed keeps all data about the aliens from the official who is supposed to negotiate with the ETs; negotiator guy is just coming off a six-month vacation studying Eastern mysticism.  (Talk about Eastern mysticism is some of the extraneous gunk I mentioned earlier.)  I guess it is supposed to be funny when the negotiator bungles his meeting with the visitors, and I guess the six pages of intelligence reports we read along with him are also supposed to be funny.  None of this is funny.  The negotiator gets his act together and we readers endure page after page of human-space kangaroo dialogue that is so boring I wonder how Kidd kept awake at her typewriter while writing it.

We get what amounts to a happy ending when the kangaroo aliens capture the single belligerent human and leave with him, and we are assured that the encounter with the aliens will inspire human civilization to again embrace risk and the adventure of exploring the universe.

"Flowering Season" is a strong contender for the worst story I have read during the period I have been writing this blog.  It is not bad in a funny or spectacular way, it is bad in a way that deadens the soul and makes you consider abandoning the written word entirely and embracing the idiot box as your sole source of entertainment.  I don't know why Hoskins thought it worth including; it only barely meets the volume's "the future is going to suck!" theme.

Kidd's intro isn't bad.  She laments that Earth's space programs were prodded not by pure motives but Cold War competition, and predicts that they will be abandoned in the future due to considerations of cost and safety.  Kidd also lays on us some of the elitist attitudes we saw in the Ellison selection: "The pollster's man in the street cannot see any point in space exploration...."  This introduction provides no warning of how dreadful the story is going to be.

*********

These three stories are about ideas more than they are about people.  I am able to enjoy an "idea story" which lacks good characters and plot if the idea is new and exciting, but the ideas in these stories (space exploration is good, different cultures don't get along, people are apathetic) feel sort of obvious, even tired.  Anderson tries to give us touching characters and human emotion and just reaches the finish line (in fact, compared to the broad allegorical caricatures in Ellison's story and the flat zeros in Kidd's, Anderson's people, which I thought bland, look deep and rich.)  Ellison gives us literary fireworks, but, in my opinion, doesn't quite make it.  Kidd never leaves the starting gate.  I have to admit that I haven't enjoyed The Future Now as much as I had expected.

  
Among its stories The Future Now also includes Edward Bryant's "Shark," which I read in 2014 and liked, and Barry Malzberg's "Final War," which I remember finding limp when I read it long ago.  Bryant's intro to "Shark" in this book is quite fun; he talks about the genesis of this story, about the prevalence of nice dolphins in SF, and derides Peter Benchley, author of Jaws.  Malzberg's introduction to his story is also worth reading; he talks a little about the conditions under which the story, which was pivotal for his career, was written, and about its reception.  "I remain grateful for the sale and the career it made me," he tells us.

**********

Finally, let's take a look at one of the ads in the back of The Future Now, a page which has a fun graphic, promises "The Universe of Science Fiction" and lists twelve books, several of which seem worthy of comment.

Aurora: Beyond Equality, is a feminist anthology; the text on the cover, "Amazing Tales of the Ultimate Sexual Revolution," it seems to me, hopes to seduce potential purchasers with a promise of erotic content.

Joachim warned us against Cloned Lives back in late 2013.

I own Vonda McIntyre's The Exile Waiting but have not read it yet.  I think Joachim owns this, but I don't think he has written about it.

I thought Stochastic Man was a weak Silverberg and said so at Amazon in 2007.

Ghosts, Castles and Victims is a huge (over 500 pages) anthology of excerpts from classics that fit into the "gothic" category (including Walpole, Poe, Dickens, Blackwood, Stoker) plus short stories stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Edmond Hamilton and essays about the gothic by the editors.  I'd probably buy this if I saw it at a store for the prices I usually pay for old paperbacks (2 bucks or less.)

The Late Great Future is another anthology about how the future is going to suck--it has bigger "name" writers than does The Future Now, like Ray Bradbury, Daniel Keyes, C. S. Lewis, John D. McDonald and Roald Dahl.  I'd probably pay a buck or two for this.

And of course I have fond memories of H. G. Wells' Time Machine and War of the Worlds--I believe this Fawcett omnibus edition of the novels has an intro by Isaac Asimov and a cool red cover by Paul Lehr.

As always, readers who have read any of the advertised books, or anything out of The Future Now, are invited to share their insights in the comments!

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"

For some reason (dementia?) I decided to forgo my usual practice of reading one or two stories from an anthology and then consigning the book to the inaccessible recesses of my overstuffed bookcase; instead I am reading every page of Quark Slash Three, the early 1971 issue of a quarterly devoted to experimental SF edited by Samuel R. Delany and Marilyn Hacker.  Unsurprisingly, R. A. Lafferty was the star of the first leg of my journey into Quark/3, though editor Samuel Delany put in a creditable performance as well. I thought Gordon Eklund's contribution was conventionally bad, while college professor Joanna Russ managed to find a special way to inflict a bad story on me.  Who will be today's standouts as I read the second third of Quark/3?

"Field" by James Sallis

James Sallis mostly seems to write crime stories, as well as books about American music (his bio at the end of Quark Stroke Three indicates he was working on a book on country and western music.) I've never read anything by Sallis before.

"Field" is, I guess, a series of prose poems.  First off we get a bunch of bizarre images and sentence fragments in both first and second person.  On the first page we get "Where this morning the charred bodies of all the women I've loved come floating down the stream outside our window," a line I heard in my mind in the voice of poet Jason Irwin.  This flight of fancy made me laugh, but most of the sections aren't that funny, alas.

One paragraph is a "to do" list with most of the items crossed out, another is the instructions of how to convert your snowmobile into a lawnmower ("Tighten bolts 1-8. (See Diagram 3.)")  There are vignettes about sophisticated writers who live in cramped apartments and can't pay their bills and can't stay true to their lovers.

Not good.

"Vanishing Points" by Sonya Dorman

This is a two page poem about the world being destroyed in a nuclear war: "the world winds up into a cloud...into one massive atom / O man of fire."  At least that is what I think it is about.  There's also a lot about fish and animals, the stars, etc.
  
This poem is listed as "Vanishing Point" on the table of contents, but the title is plural in the actual text. 

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" by Kate Wilhelm 

Years ago I read Kate Wilhelm's The Killer Thing, one of those books in which aliens who share the author's politics force evil humanity to behave, putting an end to our racism, imperialism and strip mining.  I haven't exactly been champing at the bit to read more Wilhelm; this must be the first short story I have ever read by her.

"Where Have You Been, Billy Boy, Billy Boy?" is a series of brief scenes from a dystopic future, with Wilhelm covering all the typical boring complaints like overpopulation, pollution, TV, consumerism, urban terrorism, international war, etc.  The plot is presented to us out of chronological order, and is a little ambiguous, but I think I have pieced it together.

The world is in turmoil, and little Billy's father, a scientist, testifies to Congress that because of overpopulation, humanity will go extinct unless the government kills half the population ASAP.  His plan is rejected by an influential Southern senator, so Billy's dad conspires to poison the water supply (or something of that nature) to prune the population without the government's OK.  Dad gets caught and imprisoned and lobotomized (or something; Wilhelm keeps everything vague.)  Billy grows up and gets a job at a consumer products firm, while things gets worse around the world, with increasing violent crime, war, and overcrowding.  Billy's father is released from prison and moves in with his son, and, before long, hangs himself.  There is also a subplot I didn't quite get about how Bill is hallucinating that he can shift himself to a world without other people.  I'm also not sure if the sections about Billy as a kid caught up in a riot and the parts about Bill leading a pop band are depicting alternate realities or just different periods of Bill's life. 

Not very good, but better than the Eklund, the Sallis and the Russ.

"Brave Salt" by Richard Hill

I've never even heard of Richard Hill before.  A gander at Hill's file at isfdb suggests that he retired from writing SF after he had a story accepted by Harlan Ellison for Again, Dangerous Visions.

This story is a surrealistic farce in twelve chapters (that's right, 12 chapters in ten pages) about a low-IQ hotel pool lifeguard who participates in a sort of Bay of Pigs style attack on Haiti.  It almost reads like Hill made it up as he went along, or perhaps used the surrealist technique of "automatic writing."  "Brave Salt" is full of references to pop culture figures like Jim Backus, Charlton Heston, and Merv Griffin, and feeble jokes about sex and drugs.  The most memorable joke: members of a band are having anal sex on stage while singing "I've Got You Babe," and then somebody bumps into their amplification equipment and the band is electrocuted to death.

Craziest of all, in the intro to his story in Again, Dangerous Visions, Hill floats the idea of expanding "Brave Salt" into a full length novel!

Suddenly Joanna Russ's story isn't looking so bad.

"Nature Boy" by Josephine Saxton

I've read Saxton's odd contribution to The Visual Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, but this is the first fiction I have read by her.

This is a story about a mentally ill 40-year-old man who lives with his wealthy mother on a country estate.  He suffers delusions and unbidden, obsessive "daydreams," and feels driven to make "sacrifices" to woodland deities. We learn that he murdered a little girl some years ago in the woods; the tension in the story comes when he takes a walk into these very woods and meets another little girl--will he murder her as well?  The theme of the story seems to be human callousness and cruelty; the little girl and the mental case both kill small animals.

This is a moderately good mainstream crime or realistic horror story; the fact that the murderer believes in spirits, including the spirit of the girl he murdered, perhaps counts as SF content.     



Advertisement for The Science Fiction Book Club

Bound in the center of the book is an ad for the Science Fiction Book Club, highlighting the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Robert Silverberg, but also offering a dozen other books at low low prices.  One wonders how many of these books would pass the Delany/Hacker test of "meaningfully addressing crises" and "being politically dangerous."  (I have a feeling my man ERB wouldn't be passing this test.)

"Balls: A Meditation at the Graveside" by Virginia Kidd

Kidd is a very important literary agent, but I never have read any of her fiction.   

"Balls" is the biography of a successful Hollywood screenwriter who is obsessed with Walt Disney and Disney productions.  I guess this is a satire of American culture and society, perhaps in particular of Hollywood; at one point the protagonist declares, "I'm a real American success."  It feels tired and tedious, long and boring.  As you expect in a story about a Hollywood habitue the screenwriter has numerous divorces and sees a shrink.  Maybe Kidd is trying to tell us that Americans live in a fantasy world and are disconnected from the real world, that they care more about TV and celebrities than flesh and blood people they know.  Also maybe Americans are obsessed with success and happiness, but work too hard to really enjoy success and achieve happiness.

The SF content consists of the writer having the delusion that the universe is sending him (essentially useless) messages or signals via everyday sounds or hallucinatory images.  For example, the writer tells himself he should be happy, as he has "got it made," and then he sees a vision of a topless girl; this is a "tit maid."  A phone rings unexpectedly in the therapist's office and the doctor answers it, "Hello." Our hero figures this is a message in reverse, that the universe is saying to him, "Oh, Hell."

Weak.

*************

Cripes, doesn't look so hot, does it?  The Saxton story is marginally good, the Wilhelm is OK, the rest are poor or bad.

Well, there are several more selections in Quark/3, maybe in the third and final leg of my journey the anthology will make a comeback.