When we were reading David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's anthology Generation we read a story by Evelyn Lief in which she attacked the suburbs and television.  We just read a novel by Andrew Offutt in which Muslims fight genetically engineered pterosaurs over a thousand years in the future. And just a few days ago I tried to use the occasion of Richard Lupoff's birthday to promote two old blog posts about his books. So it seems like a good moment to read the stories by Lief, Offutt and Lupoff to be found in Harlan Ellison's 1972 Again, Dangerous Visions.

"Bed Sheets are White" by Evelyn Lief

In the three-page intro to this three-page story Ellison brags about how tough he is as a teacher at workshops and how it was his toughness which inspired Lief to write this brilliant story.  Then Lief brags that she is a zionist-socialist who lives in a commune in Brooklyn and hopes to spend the rest of her life working a few months at a time and then writing and travelling a few months at a time.

The story, which is mostly printed in italics, mostly consists of the thoughts of a man driving cross country.  He lives in a world in which the government has decreed that everything be white; people must have white sheets on their beds, the highway is painted white, the buildings on the side of the road are white, etc.  This story is some kind of bizarre riff on the Beautification Campaign promoted by Lady Bird Johnson (at this link read a government website that gives a very sympathetic account of this project of Mrs. Johnson's.)  The driver's wife is a member of an anti-White Laws activist group.

The protagonist drives into the night, and is stopped by the cops, who advise him not to drive at night, because at night you see the color black.  Then he looks up at the sky and is arrested for committing this act, recently made illegal.

In her afterward Lief thanks Ellison for buying the story.

Silly, pointless, useless.

"For Value Received" by andrew j. offutt

Offutt's byline is all lowercase here in Again, Dangerous Visions, perhaps a signal this is a serious literary story.  The intro is six and a half pages, and in it Ellison inveighs against "The Corporate State" and suggests you sabotage the telephone company (by overpaying your bill and confusing their computers) and the cereal manufacturers (by claiming you found a fly in your box of cornflakes) and brags about shoplifting books and records.  He brags that he has committed acts of sabotage so radical that it would not be safe for him to reveal them to us readers.  (That's OK, Harlan, your safety is our paramount concern!)

Offutt himself informs us that most of his writing is anti-authoritarian satire and talks at some length about his life, career, and environment, poking fun at his experiences of writer's block and of stereotypes of urban elites and of his own rural Kentucky milieu (while hinting there is some measure of truth to these stereotypes.)

"For Value Received" is a more obvious and more focused anti-authoritarian satire than, say, Messenger of Zhuvastou or My Lord Barbarian, though those sword-swinging adventures certainly have their share of anti-establishment elements.  In this eight-page story a new father refuses to pay a hospital bill, and so he and his wife leave their newborn baby at the hospital and go home.  The little girl grows up in the hospital, Mom and Dad coming to visit during visiting hours every day, taking her to school, etc.  Rather than suggesting that this unusual upbringing will turn the child into a weirdo, Offutt indicates it has beneficial effects: "Mary Ann Barber, M. D., was graduated from medical school at the tender age of 23.  Her Boards score set a new high."

This story gets points for being original and crazy, but I didn't actually enjoy it. Marginal negative vote.      

"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" by Richard A. Lupoff

In his novels Sandworld and Crack in the Sky, Lupoff expressed his conventional liberal ideas about race and filled up space by talking about or imitating genre fiction heroes Edgar Rice Burroughs and H. P. Lovecraft, as well as underground comix. When I realized "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" was an early constituent part of the famous and critically-lauded 1978 novel Space War Blues, and saw Ed Emshwiller's illustration for the story, I figured it would be an anti-racism story imitating/satirizing the kind of space war epics "Doc" Smith, Edmond Hamilton, and Jack Williamson produced, and/or Heinlein's Starship Troopers.  I look to SF stories for fun and for ideas that are new, and a parody of The Legion of Space or Spacehounds of IPC that featured anti-racism lectures didn't sound new or fun, but I decided to give it a shot anyway, to see what all the hoopla was about.

Ed Emshwiller's illo for "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama"

"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" (presumably the long title is a mocking reference to those juvenile books for boys about explorers and fighting men, like We Were There with Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys by Robert N. Webb (1956), The Battleship Boys with the Adriatic Chasers by Frank Gee Patchin (1918) and With Washington at Valley Forge by Judith M. Spiegelman (1967)) is about a race war in outer space and consists of 13 chapters totalling 90 pages. Chapter 1 introduces us to Gordon Lester Wallace III (AKA GLW3, AKA GLWIII and other variations) of the planet New Alabama (AKA N'Alabama, AKA Alquane VII and other variations), who has just graduated from boot camp (or a military academy?) and will soon be shipping off to serve in the war against the blacks of N'Haiti.  New Alabama, you see, is inhabited by the descendents of white colonists from Alabama; in the (distant?) past the large countries like the United States and USSR were broken into their constituent parts by the united small countries, and then each of Earth's many countries started colonizing alien planets.  Then the Jews and Arabs ("the Jewrabs") united to take over the Earth, leaving all those extrasolar colonies to fend for themselves.

Chapter 1 is written in a degraded dialect of English with different spellings and punctuation rules than we are all used to, so that reading it is a slow process.  People have "funny" names (a stripper is named "Miss Merriass Markham") and there are lots of minor jokes based on repetition; for example, when looking at the curvaceous Miss Merriass the omniscient third-person narrator says "think of that belly belly-to-belly with your belly...."  Lupoff describes the hair of several different New Alabamans, and the description is always the same: blond hair, plastered flat.  Repetition of every kind is a recurring motif throughout the story.

Chapter 2 is set on N'Haitai.  In contrast to the brute we met on N'Alabama who spent Chapter 1 in a strip club, in Chapter 2 we follow a government office worker, Christophe Belledor; this chapter, to (I guess) demonstrate that in this story the whites are savage and the blacks are sophisticated, is written in clear English prose (though I guess these characters are really speaking French.)  "...you know the blancs, Phillipe," Christophe tells another public employee, "they breed like beasts."  It's the old switcheroo! (Or, as Joanna Russ calls it, "role-reversal.")

Christophe is copy editing a government report drafted by a Deputy Minister; the Deputy Minister has conceived a plan to supplement the N'Haitian workforce with zombies created by injecting an alien parasite into the brains of corpses recovered after space battles.

Chapter 3 is a mind-numbingly detailed description of a planet covered in water, inhabited by a colony of small almost-mindless creatures that are distant descendents of humanity--these are the aforementioned alien parasites.

The rest of the long story alternates between difficult to read and allegedly funny ("Our old sarge he looks, maybe not quite with twenty-twennies (no sprig chicken he no more but he keeps in good shape rest assured) but he gets buy with spectacles at leased") chapters about the racist rednecks of New Alabama and chapters about the scientists and bureaucrats of New Haitai.  The New Alabaman chapters hardly move the plot forward at all, they just show the white characters acting like buffoons and expressing racism and their repressed homosexuality.  The New Haitian chapters are more interesting, covering as they do the Frankensteinian voodoo scheme the N'Haitians have in the works, but these chapters also include committee meetings and voodoo rituals that are not exactly thrilling.

Anyway, Christophe (he got drafted due to office politics) and Gordon meet in hand-to-hand combat in a tremendous space battle (the space battle is actually good, an homage to the exciting fighting in, say, "Doc" Smith or the famous first chapter of Starship Troopers) and Gordon, killed, is resuscitated as a zombie soldier in the service of the New Haitians.  The N'Haitians conquer N'Alabama and reduce the whites to second class citizens.  Christophe hooks up with Yvette, a young woman we witnessed in a masturbation scene and voodoo ritual sex scene.  There is also a subplot about how God is a mischievous child and our universe is a plaything given him by an indulgent uncle.

It is easy to see why critics like this story: there are the anti-racist and anti-war messages and the caricature of Southerners, and Lupoff's ambitious, extravagant and experimental wordplay in the New Alabaman chapters in which he mines every possible pun, phonetic spelling and form of punctuation for potential laughs.  But I found reading the story a chore--during the period I read it, "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" felt like my job, and I turned to Ludwig von Mises' "Planned Chaos" and Night Fighter by C. F. Rawnsley and Robert Wright for my leisure reading.  My reward for grinding through Lupoff's experimental prose and the long tedious sections was a sort of standard plot with a typical message and jokes which are not funny. (Having lived the first 40 years of my life in the Northeast I have heard lots of criticisms and mocking of the South and Midwest, mostly from people who learned about the South and Midwest from TV, so for me this kind of material feels very tired.)

It is perhaps interesting to consider how critics today might respond to the story. Obviously, in portraying blacks as better than whites in just about every way, Lupoff was endeavoring to be a good "progressive" or "liberal" of the late '60s (when the story was largely written) or early '70s (when it was published in Again, Dangerous Visions.)  But, today, his focus on voodoo, the scene in which a young black woman admires her naked body in a mirror and touches herself and then participates in a voodoo orgy, and even the way blacks are portrayed as bourgeois types with a bureaucratic government overseeing an industrial and scientific society, might raise eyebrows for being exoticizing, exploitative, or culturally appropriative, or valorizing Western middle-class values by portraying blacks "acting white" as admirable. (These aren't my criticisms; I'm just speculating on what today's cultural arbiters might think.)

"With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" makes you use your brain and addresses all kinds of issues related to popular literature as well as social issues, but it was just not very enjoyable, so I can't really give it a thumbs up.  People interested in literary SF and SF that addresses issues of race are likely to find it worthwhile, however.  (As the weeks go by, I suspect I will begin to appreciate "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" more as the tedious stretches fade from memory and the naval battle, the Frankenstein stuff, and Lupoff's admirable ambition--he clearly put a lot of hard work into this thing--rise in prominence.)

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Well, these stories, even if I didn't think them very fun, certainly fit Again, Dangerous Visions' purported raison d'etre; they are certainly "out there:" they are crazy, uninhibited and potentially offensive attacks on our society that editors would have every reason to be chary of publishing.  In his 1982 essay "Science Fiction and the Academy: Some Notes," Barry Malzberg lists the dozen books of fiction he thinks should constitute the syllabus of a college course on SF, and Again, Dangerous Visions is one of them.  Well, I feel like I just had a big lump of healthy, if not tasty, science fiction education!

Back cover text of Generation

After a two episode sojourn in the broadly defined World War II period (1939-1954), it's back to the era of flower power and Generation, the anthology of science fiction stories by "new voices" printed in 1972 but written in 1969.  We've already read Generation stories by critical darlings and MPorcius faves like Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg, and stories by prolific big sellers like Piers Anthony and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.  Now let's read stories by people I've never heard of before!  This is the kind of blog post in which I say stuff like "It's a tragedy this person never produced more SF stories" and "It's no surprise this person never sold another SF story."

"Every Fourth House" by Evelyn Lief

This story takes place in a Levittown, one of the prototypical post-World War II suburbs where all the houses look the same (the story's title refers to this fact; every fourth house in this town has red shutters.  This has become an almost cliched criticism of suburban life that we have all heard in pop songs like Malvina Reynolds' 1962 "Little Boxes," Gerry Goffin and Carole King's 1967 "Pleasant Valley Sunday" and Sir Raymond Douglas Davies' 1969 "Shangri-la.")  I guess "Every Fourth House" takes place in the future, because a device is on the market that you hook up to your TV which allows you to smell the smells smelled by TV characters (remember "Smellevision" in 1944's "Old Grey Hare?") and think their thoughts and so on.

Housewife Barbara insisted her husband Harold buy her one of these devices so she'd have something to do all day besides watch the baby.  This brief story consists primarily of Barbara's flashbacks to the day Harold was killed in a car wreck and Barbara had an argument with mother, mixed in with Barbara's dreams about corpses and plagues; any of these "events" could in fact simply be reflective of the crazy adventures of the TV characters whose thoughts Barbara shares.  It is a little hard to figure out what is really going on, and I didn't feel like the reward of figuring it all out would match the amount of time and energy required to do so.  The last paragraph makes it seem like Barbara has either harmed her baby while under the influence of the TV, or has neglected to take the baby to the hospital after the car wreck because she is under the influence of the TV.  Either way, this story is some kind of attack on or lament about the suburbs and the TV, both of which are conventionally thought of by the cognoscenti as a "cultural wasteland."  (Maybe I should mention Ray Bradbury's much more interesting attack on TV in Fahrenheit 451?)

Do we need an unclear and dream-like story that tells us yet again that suburban life and TV are crummy?  Not really.  Is this story terrible?  Not really--I'm putting this one in the mediocre file.  However mediocre I thought it was, it was translated into German and into French (by Belgians, I think.)  No doubt those sophisticated continentals had a good laugh at the expense of our suburbs over a nice plate of kraut, snails and waffles!

Achtung! and ooh la la!

Lief has a novel and four short stories listed at isfdb.  It is a little embarrassing that I said I have never heard of her before because she has a story in Clarion and another in Again, Dangerous Visions, both of which I own and both of which I have read from.  I guess my eyes glazed over her name as I looked at the contents pages of both books.  Well, I have a bad habit of skimming and a poor memory, no doubt the result of a childhood spent empathizing with Gilligan, Barney Rubble and the long-suffering Fred Mertz!  A Google search suggests that Lief has found success as a psychoanalyst and as a painter and photographer in beautiful New York City, far from any ticky tacky Levittowns.

"The Birthday Boy" by James Stevens

Stevens has a novel and like 20 stories listed at isfdb, and apparently has achieved considerable success in the television industry (don't tell Evelyn!), writing and producing and directing films and commercials.

"The Birthday Boy," for most of its seven pages, is a charming, amusing, and bittersweet story about children and childhood and how cruel and callous kids can be and how the people we envy because they have wealth or some other advantage probably have problems just like we do.  This first part of the story consists of the narrator talking about the seventh birthday of his best friend, a child eager to grow up--this material is witty and fun, reminding me in some ways of that famous Jean Shepherd movie, A Christmas Story.  The last page and a half are a sort of surreal allegorical fantasy, I guess a sort of dream or nightmare?  This bizarre sequence seems to suggest that it is foolish to wish to grow up quickly because decrepitude and death come all too soon.

I enjoyed this one.

"Reprisal" by Alice Laurence

I think "Birthday Boy" and "Reprisal" only ever appeared in Generation--too bad, these are worth your time

Laurence has a novel and thirteen stories listed at isfdb, and has also edited two anthologies, including Speculations, the anthology in which the authors' names were written in code and the reader was expected to try to guess who wrote what story based on style and content!

In his intro to "Reprisal," editor David Gerrold warns us this is a story about an oppressed minority with special powers.  We get a lot of these stories in science fiction, I suppose because of the considerable real estate in the popular consciousness occupied by the topics of anti-Semitism, racism, the Holocaust, and the Civil Rights movement, and because the stereotypical writer (and SF fan) is somebody who thinks he is smarter than everybody else and yet feels ostracized, alienated, or bullied.  Even though Generation is billed as including new voices and being fresh and original and all that, Gerrold admits that Laurence's story is not really new, but yet again hammers home a lesson he thinks we should hear "again and again and again."

This intro made me think reading this story was going to be like eating my broccoli or attending a mandatory diversity training, but it is actually not bad.  Joachim Boaz has suggested I hold off reading these intros until after I've read the story they accompany, but I just can't help myself.

It is the future!  Crime was so rampant in the late 20th century that in the 21st century there was a revolution in criminal justice, spearheaded by a psychologist!  The government abolished the overcrowded prisons and instead of imprisoning malefactors instituted a system of punishment which consisted of public paddling of lawbreakers!  This form of punishment was so humiliating that most people subjected to it reformed, abandoning all thoughts of leading a life of crime!

The plot of this story follows Anne and Johnny, the leaders of a non-violent movement for the civil rights of the newly emerging race of homo superior.  These people, popularly known as witches and wizards, have minor psychic powers, like telekinesis strong enough to move a sheet of paper, but, more importantly, can fly using transparent wings.  (As with the totally absurd idea of abolishing prison and replacing it with spanking, Laurence's description of how the witches and wizards fly is absolutely ridiculous and not meant to be believable; this story is a kind of fable.) Poor old homo sapiens resent and fear the wizards and witches, and besides making them live in ghettos and being reluctant to hire them and the like, they make flying illegal and paddle any of them caught flying.

"Reprisal" actually reminded me of something Robert Heinlein might write, in particular Stranger in a Strange Land.  Much of the text of the story is taken up with philosophical discussions between the narrator (Anne) and Johnny, who is a wise and saintly leader, like Heinlein's Valentine Michael Smith, and these discussions have a libertarian flavor (Johnny hates eminent domain, for example, and instead of agitating for anti-discrimination laws he accepts that refusal to rent to or hire witches and wizards is within the rights of business owners.)  Like the Martian protagonist of Stranger in a Strange Land, Johnny dies a martyr, but not before he has taught his followers a better way to live.

"Reprisal" can also be compared to Lester del Rey's "Day is Done," which we just read, in that it is about a new, superior, race ineluctably supplanting an old one, but while in Del Rey's story the new people are cruel jerks, in Laurence's story it is the obsolete race, driven by fear and envy, who commit all the sins.      

Clearly written (it is nice to get a break from the surrealism of the last two stories!) and including strange ideas and paradigm shifts like so many classic SF tales, I can give "Reprisal" a thumbs up without reservation.

"Psychedelic Flight" by Robert Ray

One of my pet peeves in SF is psychedelic dream sequences which the writer intends to convey the experience of being high on drugs or having amazing sex or listening to mind-bending rock music.  Robert Silverberg includes such scenes in The World Inside and Shadrach in the Furnace, and in my opinion theses scenes are boring and gratuitous and stop the narrative cold.  I feel a little bit like a hypocrite feeling this way, because I love the "Star Gate" sequence in Stanley Kubrick's 2001, but I think my attitude is justified by the vast differences between the different media and because the Star Gate sequence, with its strange sights and sounds, represents a quantitative rather than a qualitative change from the rest of the movie; the entire film consists of strange sights and sounds, the Star Gate section is just the strangest part, not a gratuitous digression at all but a fully integrated component of the work.  Also, the sequence is not simply in a character's head, but is "really" happening, unlike a drug-induced or music-inspired dream which is has nothing to do with the plot.

Anyway, the title of this story had me worrying that it was going to be just a bunch of pointless surreal visions.  (Joachim, there is no way I am going to read these stories without reading the title first!)

Our narrator is a pothead from New Orleans who moves to New York and gets mixed up in a "scene" with wealthy acid heads.  He doesn't want to use acid, but they basically force him to do so.  When he wakes up he is in a prison on another world, his soul trapped in the body of a hideous tentacled monster, a member of the intelligent race which rules this planet.  One of the other tentacled monsters tells him the score: the natives of this planet reproduce via a sort of industrial process in which souls of people from other planets, including Earth, are implanted in native bodies. Usually the souls come as a blank slate, but sometimes the soul is still imprinted with its original personality, as in the narrator's case.  Such people are put in this prison, where they live for centuries before the monster body wears out.

(I wonder if this story is some kind of homage to H. P. Lovecraft... in "The Shadow Out of Time" a narrator's consciousness occupies the body of an alien tentacled monster during dreams, and he talks to other humans who have suffered the same fate.)

To make boring prison life more interesting, the narrator figures out how to make hallucinogenic drugs by ripping off monster skin and drying it.  On one of his skin trips he dreams he is a guy on Earth, a pothead from New Orleans who moves to New York, etc.....

Gimmicky and lame, "Psychedelic Flight" gets a thumbs down.  (Still, it is probably better than editor Gerrold's own drugs-sent-me-to-outer-space story in Generation, "All of Them Were Empty.")   Ray has three novels and five stories listed at isfdb. Like Evelyn Lief's "Every Fourth House," "Psychedelic Flight" appeared, in French, in Cauchemars au ralenti.

"The Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told" by Roger Deeley

Remember "Sign at the End of the Universe" by Duane Ackerson, which appeared in David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1974 anthology Alternities?  Well, here is another one line joke story Gerrold and Goldin saw fit to purchase.  Don't expect the nuance and excitement we witnessed in "Sign at the End of the Universe"'s three words, however; "The Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told"'s three words are a groan-inducing disappointment.


Lame.  Still, it was included in 1975's Reflections of the Future: An Elective Course in Science Fiction and Fact, and was translated for the delectation of our Francophone buddies.

I had trouble finding a good photo of Reflections of the Future

"Here's a Health Unto His Majesty" by Roger Deeley

Deeley isn't finished!  He has two stories here in Generation, and thus a chance to redeem himself!  And I suppose he does; "Here's a Health Unto His Majesty" is a trifling, but competent, time travel story, told from the point of view not of the time traveller but of the 17th century people he meets.

It is shortly after the Restoration, and a guy on his way to London stops at an inn.  The innkeeper tells him the story of a strange man he met back in 1649.  This man, we readers can easily discern, is a 20th-century genius who invented a time machine and travelled to the 17th century on a mission to rescue Charles I from execution.  His mission failed because he caught smallpox and died before he (armed with a supply of hand grenades) could get to London.

Acceptable.

Deeley has six short story credits at isfdb.  In the intro to "Here's a Health Unto His Majesty" we learn that his ancestors were French aristocrats who lost everything in the 1789 revolution.

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Taken as a whole, not a bad batch of stories.  More stories from Generation by people I know nothing about in our next episode.