"There is no science in it at all, merely cheap jargon, cheap tricks, old shuffling; a wink here, a dance there, all of it shaped only toward one end and that the most drastic of all because we give it no name.  But enough.  Enough of this."

Joachim Boaz blogged about The Empty People back in 2014 but I promise I don't remember what he said; after I've drafted my own take here I'll read his and respond to it at the end of this post.

Malzberg, of course, is a failed literary writer who, initially at least, wanted a career more like Saul Bellow's or Vladimir Nabokov's than Robert Heinlein's or Isaac Asimov's, and chapter one of The Empty People is all about typical mainstream mid-century literary concerns--we've got unfaithful childless suburban housewife Della Archer who feels unfulfilled; everybody tells her she is very smart, so she could have had some big career, but didn't, and maybe if she had children they would give her life meaning, but she is sterile.  Malzberg is also a critic of science fiction with a broad and deep knowledge of the field, and chapter one is very "meta," with our housewife being captured by saucer-flying aliens during their invasion (which leaves New York City in flaming ruins) and thrust into a cell stocked with a fulsome supply of sleaze and science fiction paperbacks.  The captive Della has nothing to do but read the books, giving Malzberg a chance to voice the opinion (his own or a parody of critics'?) that science fiction is a bunch of nonsense.

At least one other person has been put in solitary confinement with stacks of books by the invaders, whom one prisoner believes are called "Keepers" because they are keeping all the human race imprisoned, or because they are the most clever and advanced of the many races throughout the galaxy and are dedicated to keeping the peace.  (And don't overlook the possible Biblical reference.)  Others come to believe that the invaders are known as the X'Ching (Malzberg spoofing the I'Ching?), sadistic natives of our solar system who mercilessly crush any other rising civilization in the system.  

The guy who calls the invaders "the Keepers" Malzberg calls "the Poet;" his memory has almost entirely been erased by the aliens.  His cell is chock full of poetry books, so he figures E.T. wants him to write a poem.  The man struggles to come up with some good verses, but the Keepers don't care--what they want is for him to terrorize a human woman, to pursue her and let her escape again and again before finally murdering and perhaps raping her--I suspect this is Malzberg parodying crime and horror fiction.  When the poet refuses, the aliens torture him until he agrees.

We get entertaining flashback chapters about Della's husband William...or is it James?  William/James is found to have an inoperable brain tumor by family doctor Perkins, one of the men Della is having an affair with.  Della contacts a sort of mad scientist figure, an American scientist who fled to Switzerland when the authorities felt his techniques too radical (like our beloved Peter Cushing in a Frankenstein movie, this mad doctor and Perkins bitch and moan that the medical establishment is reactionary and blocks progress) and he arrives to try experimental treatment on Della's comatose husband.    

As we expect in a Malzberg story, there are many suggestions the science fiction elements of the story are not real but the products of the characters' dreaming or suffering mental illness or brain damage.  The different chapters seem like they are from different universes or timelines, or different dreams or delusions--why is Della's spouse sometimes called William and other times James?  In one chapter we are told Della is sterile--in another, that her husband is the sterile one.  Is the mad scientist of chapter six the same guy as the gynecologist in chapter seven?--both these jokers lack an ear and have some kind of robotic leg, after all.  

The tone and themes of The Empty People are hopelessness and disappointment; again and again it is brought home to us that life is inexplicable and without meaning and your plans and desires will be frustrated and any reliance on others is a mistake, that those with authority and influence manipulate you for their own impossible-to-comprehend purposes.  You are alone and nothing will work out for you.  Even the Keepers/X'Ching, who at times seem capable, both technologically and morally, of anything, hint that they are at the mercy of forces beyond their control.

"Despite its ambiguity to you, the energetic way in which we have forced purposes on you has a meaning.  But you would not have the patience.  You want easy answers, easy turns.  There are no easy answers, you see."

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"No one ever does.  But what can you do?"

In the second half of The Empty People (besides the resolution of the Rogers bit) we learn the poet's name is James after the Keepers release him into a simulacrum of beautiful New York City with an automatic pistol and instructions to chase down the woman, who of course is Della.  Della, for her part, has been told by the X'Ching that she is to be released into NYC to find and help (or destroy?) one man while avoiding the interference of a second man, an enemy.  Malzberg's descriptions of Coney Island and Manhattan struck a chord with your humble blogger, who every day regrets leaving Manhattan, and Malzberg's portrayal of the thoughts and feelings of James and Della, at odds for no reason they can discern, is also very effective.  Malzberg really is capable of writing crime and horror material, getting into the minds of people obsessed and despairing.  

In what we might call the climax, James the poet throws away the weapon provided him by the Keepers and tries to make a human connection with Della, with only brief and limited success--Della has lost all hope and wants to die.  We get some imagery that reminded me of The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway that suggests all human beings are one, but then comes the resolution in the final chapter which is only half a page--all the business we have seen involving aliens is merely dreams suffered by Della's husband as he lays in the hospital dying of his brain tumor--James the poet and Della have the same face because they are just aspects of the cancer victim's own personality, not because we are all one in the eyes of God or share a destiny because of our common humanity or anything nice and uplifting like that.

Before we check to see what Joachim thought of The Empty People lo eleven years ago, let's play a little devil's advocate and see what gripes people might have about the book.  The superfluous Rogers section is the weak link of the novel--Rogers is essentially alone and so there is little human drama; the Della and James/William Archer sequences are good because they are about Della's relationships with her husband, with her captors, with the mad doctor and with her lover.  I guess we might see the Rogers chapters as an attack on religious people but Malzberg only gestures in that direction, doesn't do much with that theme.  I'm not saying the Rogers material is bad, as it is kind of funny, but while reading it I wanted to get back to Della and the men in her life.

Others might find the "it was all a dream" ending frustrating.

Another possible complaint is that the novel is misogynistic or at least not feminist.  It is hinted that Della is an everywoman--the final line of one chapter is "She was a normal woman"-- and compared to James/William and the mad scientist she is selfish and also weak, crumbling under pressure rather than energetically pursuing a goal.  This doesn't faze me, but you know what it is like out there, my droogs.   

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I think Joachim and I are essentially on the same page when it comes to The Empty People, though I probably enjoyed it more than he did; he also focuses more on the novel as a vehicle for hostile criticism of SF than I have.  It is likely these differences are the result of the fact that I genuinely like pulpy old ideas like alien invasion and mad scientists.  But I can't really disagree with anything Joachim has to say, so no fireworks.

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I think we'll be headed back to the early 1940s and Weird Tales next time we convene, so if that is your bag, see you then!

Our narrator, Gerrold Watkins, is a Union spy during the American Civil War.  He has infiltrated Atlanta society and is having sex with Elizabeth, the nymphomaniac wife of a Confederate intelligence officer, Eric, in hopes she will drop some valuable information during their trysts.  The text of Southern Comfort consists of the spy's reports back to Washington, which for some reason include detailed descriptions of his sexual activities as well as his musings about how much he wants to have sex with a black woman ("a Negress" or "negress") even though he considers blacks to be members of a "damnable race" and finds black people "loathsome."

I agree with the libertarian purposes of the President's declaration but there must, after all, be limits to such things. I find them almost entirely loathsome. 

There are seven such reports covering four days.  Malzberg engages in only the most limited efforts to make any of the characters sound like they are living in the nineteenth century or hail from a specific region of this great nation of ours or a particular social class or anything like that--all the white characters talk like Malzberg characters generally do: they ramble, equivocate, ruminate in circles about their own psychologies and the fact that knowledge of the world is hard to come by and probably not useful even if you manage to acquire it.

“I certainly don't remember. Eric tells me so many things and they all go right outside of me. Who can keep up? Who knows what's going on anyway?"

.... 

“Well, I guess that it wouldn't do me any good even if I did know. After all, I'm only an unsuitable. I'll never know a thing about military tactics and it's all very depressing.”

Like much of Malzberg's work, Southern Comfort is "recursive" or "meta" and is full of commentary and jokes about being a writer and the act of writing.  The second report ludicrously begins with a flashback in which Watkins describes his meeting with the intelligence chief who blackmailed him into taking this assignment--Watkins quotes the chief at length in a report destined to be read by this very chief.  The second report also includes a long scene describing Watkins having sex with a woman, Dorothy, who just comes into the narrator's hotel room, claiming to have been rented the room by mistake--this woman is a masochist who wants to be hurt, to be whipped with a belt, and we readers wonder if she is a Southern counterspy who already knows of Watkins' S&M proclivities.           

In the third report Watkins expresses his opinion that by having sex with Dorothy and describing it in his reports he may not be producing intelligence about Atlanta's defenses and Confederate troop movements, but something even more important--the very nature of the American South, which "evidentially, shall be with us forever.  Or at the very least for a very long time."  Dorothy sets up a date with him that coincides with a date he has already made with Elizabeth.  A dilemma!  Then Watkins out the window of his hotel room sees a riot, the men of Atlanta about to beat and maybe murder a young attractive black woman; Watkins rescues her and brings her to his hotel room.  

Watkins and Melinda have sex, and he admits to her he is a Northern spy who in civilian life is a professional philatelist.  Watkins includes in his report not only a blow-by-blow account of his sexual activities with Melinda but reproduces his description to her of the ins and outs of being a professional stamp collector.  Plus, we get some literary criticism that offers Malzberg a chance to lay some contemporary social commentary on us.  Here, and in a few other places, Watkins presents predictions of the future.  In this third report he suggests that in 19th-century America there is little explicit sex in literature because the as yet unconquered west of the continent provides people room to explore and to express themselves, but that in the 20th century, when American civilization and stability stretches from Atlantic to Pacific, people and writers will turn inward and explore themselves and especially their sexuality and explicit sex will become typical of popular literature.  In a later report Watkins seems to predict Hollywood and television:

The largest number of things we will do to one another in the decades ahead will come out of boredom. Boredom will be a commodity as basic and demanding as sexuality. There will have to be industries erected to minister to it, to satiate it but at the same time to leave enough of it left to explore the possibilities of titillation. Ah, America! America! America!

Dorothy arrives and a confrontation ensues when she sees Melinda; both women angrily leave Watkins, who goes to keep his date with Elizabeth.  

The fourth report begins with an interesting sequence that suggests Watkins is going native, is coming to see the point of view of white Southerners who fear blacks will wreak havoc if allowed to slip out of white control and is beginning to suspect that Northern refusal to allow secession is not the product of anti-racist idealism but rather of economic interests.  And while Watkins complains at length about the terrible heat in the South, he also suggests the South is the "last refuge of courtesy" and that the North, specifically New York, has been ruined by industrialization.  Southern Comfort is a pornographic book, but Malzberg uses it as an opportunity to say controversial things about social issues, race relations and sexual relations, to air, in the voice of a disreputable character, beliefs about society and in particular about women and black people, that Malzberg himself probably doesn't hold, or at least would not admit to holding, but which make the book shocking and/or thought-provoking.

Elizabeth has found out Watkins had sex with a black woman (she uses the dreaded "n-word," as do people again and again in this book) and laid a trap for him--her husband Eric is hiding in a closet and she tries to get Watkins to admit in Eric's hearing that he is a Union spy.  Suggesting that all women are really the same underneath, an angry Elizabeth begins speaking like Melinda, dropping those verbs ("You tell me, Mr. Watkins, what you had in mind. Why you rescuing niggers. Why you prancing around here looking for information. Why you always want to know about Eric. Y'hear? Tell me.”)  Women, of course, are all envious, jealous, manipulative, horny, and sneaky, a pack of liars who love to dominate others and love to be dominated, who seek to hurt others and maneuver men into inflicting pain and suffering pain while also craving to be hurt themselves.

Eric, as a spy himself who himself has had to deal with the troublemaker Elizabeth for twenty years, is more or less sympathetic to Watkins, and when Elizabeth keeps egging her husband on to beat up Watkins, Eric actually strikes Elizabeth.  Eric claims that all of Watkins' reports have been intercepted and not read in Washington but instead by Eric and other Confederate intelligence officers.  

Watkins expects to be arrested but Eric lets Watkins leave his house unmolested--nobody can get out of Atlanta anyway, the place is about to be under siege.  Watkins has so come to enjoy writing that he decides to keep on writing his reports, even though he doesn't know who is actually reading them.  At the start of the fifth report he suggests that these reports will be essential, even immortal, works of literature of inestimable value to the people of the future and be long remembered when most people have forgotten who Lincoln, Grant and Lee were.

The rest of the fifth report consists of a description of Watkins having sex with Melinda again and a disquisition on the role of pain in sexual intercourse.

The sixth and penultimate report is cataclysmic.  (The epigraph to this blogpost is taken from this report.)  Melinda reveals that she is a prostitute who came from Baltimore to Atlanta not to help relatives as she has been saying, but to work at a party.  At the same time, the Union forces are close enough that gunfire can be heard and the city is in chaos.  We get an interesting character study of the owner of the hotel, a terribly obese racist, and his righthand man, a giant black man who backs up the boss no matter how racist the boss's dialogue.  Watkins hints that these men may be gay lovers.  The sixth report ends with a bombshell, Watkins' confession that he has murdered Melinda.

Throughout the novel there have been hints of some dire event in Philadelphia in the narrator's past; it is this event which gave the Union intelligence services leverage with which to blackmail Watkins.  In the final report Watkins describes this episode, his accidental killing of a prostitute while in a frenzy during a sadomasochist sex session.  Then he describes his murder of Melinda in detail; furthering the novel's theme that accurate information is hard to come by and when acquired can cause trouble, Watkins killed her because she revealed her true profession and reason for being in Atlanta--both she and her murderer would have been better off if she had continued her deception.  Union troops take the city while Watkins is writing, and he completes his transformation into a Southerner, preparing to shoot it out with Union soldiers who are investigating the hotel.  (One of the themes of the novel is the suggestion that Northerners are no better than Southerners.)  We readers presume he is killed.

(It is hard not to see similarities between Southern Comfort and a stereotypical Lovecraftian story--a narrator of questionable mental stability learns a terrible truth that destroys him and he puts the last touches on a memoir moments before he is killed.)

Having summarized this bit of pornography and tried to interpret its more intellectual strands, we come to the question of whether I can recommend Southern Comfort.  As a devoted Malzberg fan, of course I found reading it worthwhile, but I can also say it moves at a decent pace, has a sort of conventional plot structure with foreshadowing in the beginning and twists at the end, and is never boring or frustratingly confusing.  The sex in Malzberg's work is often sad or disgusting, but the sex in Southern Comfort is meant to be arousing, and seeks to appeal to various fetishes--we've got interracial sex, whipping and general sado-masochist activity (there's lots of biting), name calling, and lots of business involving the breasts and nipples.  The jokes I found generally funny; particularly amusing is Watkins' commentary on his own writing, which he ludicrously finds outstanding ("my style alone seems to be rising to a kind of thorough-going professionalism...my ability to see into the very core of purposes is astonishing...I have evinced superb narrative gifts...") and leads to him planning to become a novelist after the war and lamenting that he hadn't devoted his life to literature.

And then we have the book's ideas.  Obviously you should avoid Southern Comfort if you find explicit sex offensive or if seeing the "n-word" a hundred times, seeing women portrayed as masochistic jerks or hearing unpatriotic theories about the motives behind the Union effort to retain the Southern states is going to hurt your feelings.  But Malzberg's depiction of Watkins' equivocal and hypocritical attitudes towards African-Americans is perhaps interesting.  I suspect here we have an artifact that reflects the psychological tensions endured by many urban liberals of 1969, the complex and painful sensibilities of people who were ideologically committed to and/or vocally supported civil rights policies, social welfare spending and affirmative action, but whose direct personal contact with urban crime and/or events like the 1968 Ocean Hill-Brownsville teachers' strike may have caused them to, if only inwardly, question those commitments and that rhetorical support.  Watkins asserts that he believes in equality, and he does rescue a black woman from a violent mob, but at the same time he has a lot of misgivings about black people and when he interacts with them directly he responds to them in ways that are irrational and passionate rather than logical or intellectual and are fundamentally selfish and exploitative.  It is easy to say the socially approved thing and to assert idealistic beliefs, but not so easy to overcome your own prejudices and to put ideals into action if you fear such action will compromise your safety or comfort.  Whatever Watkins says, his actions are fundamentally selfish, and maybe Malzberg is hinting that white people's professed beliefs about black people and how they should be treated, and how they actually behave when interacting with African-Americans, are essentially determined by the pursuit of self-interest, be it defined rationally or irrationally, and that this is equally true in 1969 and 1864.

Have no doubt we will return to Malzberg in the future, but first it is back to the World War II era and Weird Tales.

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are tracking down collaborations between Kathe Koja and Barry Malzberg on the internet archive.  Today we've got three stories published in 1995, the year of the foundation of the WTO, the murder trial of O. J. Simpson, and many exciting developments in the campaign to uncover and remove weapons of mass destruction from Saddam Hussein's Iraq.  I don't think any of these stories have been reprinted after their initial appearances (I'm not counting the 1999 paperback printing of the anthology our second story appears in.) 

"The Unchained" 

(There is a passage that seems to ridicule the idea of people abstaining from sex, but the lover in the story seems to somehow identify with those who abstain because he, unlike so many other gay men, hasn't contracted AIDS.  He refers to a "Mr. Play-It-Safe" and to a "sole survivor," and it is not clear whether he is applying these appellations to himself or to a theoretical advocate for abstinence.  Is there any chance this guy, though in a gay relationship, has been avoiding actual penetrative sex and thus preserved his health?  Is the fact that he doesn't normally smoke cigarettes and only does so after his lover dies and the nurse forces a pack of Kools on him a clue that he is health conscious and, just as he has been exercising caution to avoid lung cancer, has been cautious about avoiding AIDS?)   

Another remarkable thing about "The Unchained" is its pervasive presentations of disgusting images and of descriptions of horrible smells.  Again and again in the 20th-century scenes we are told about cigarette butts and other sickening trash, like used condoms, left on the ground, and in the scenes in ancient Judea we hear about how bad the dead Lazarus smells.  I guess the idea is that God created and loves all the universe, not just the healthy and beautiful parts, but the ugly and spoiled parts as well.

What of the title?  Does it refer to the chains of death being loosed from Lazarus, and all Christians?  The sloughing off of a diseased body by those who die in old age?  The chains of law and custom that render homosexuals second-class citizens but which in the 1990s were in the process of being removed?  "The Unchained" leaves us with a lot to think about--it feels like every line strikes a chord or gives us something to chew over--this is the kind of economy I admire in fiction and writing in general.  

A challenging story that pushes the mainstream liberal line on gay marriage but not in a boring tiresome way and offers a lot more as well.  I can't tell you it is fun, but I can give it a thumbs up for being well-written, provocative and engaging.  People interested in thoughtful depictions in SF of Christ and Christianity, and of 1990s depictions of AIDS and other issues of importance to the LGBetc community, should check out "The Unchained."  

"Buyer's Remorse" 

How to Save the World is an anthology of stories in which SF writers offer solutions to social problems, and it has one of those hilariously grandiose and self-important introductions in which the editor--for this book Charles Sheffield--expresses the hope this book will offend people and maybe even be banned--oh, please don't throw me in that briar patch!

There are apparently stories in this thing that offer solutions to  racism and pollution and overpopulation and lots of other real or purported problems facing humanity in 1995, but Koja and Malzberg's story goes the whole hog and suggests, or at least examines the possibility of, abandoning this world entirely--physically, spiritually, psychologically.

"Buyer's Remorse" is a series of letters, or I guess electronic messages, received by what amounts to an advice columnist of the 23rd century, and his or her replies.  One correspondent is spending all of his or her time in virtual reality, even eating and having sex in a virtual world, and his or her friends are trying to get the writer to spend more time in the real world.  Another person talks about how there is no longer any such thing as perversity, there no longer being any moral judgements.  The message of a third correspondent makes clear that people in this future all live in domed or subterranean cities with more or less self-sufficient and carefully controlled environments and ecologies isolated from the outside world; this seeker after advice talks about how somebody has contaminated his or her own dome by cultivating eggs.  A fourth complains of a mate's overuse of aphrodisiacs and other drugs and searches for other partners--it becomes clear that use of drugs is the norm in the 23rd century to suppress some feelings and summon others.  

"Buyer's Remorse" is long and slow and accomplished very little.  The advice seekers are all long-winded and pen very flowery letters, but none of them offer compelling images or betray engaging personalities.  "Buyer's Remorse" doesn't have a conventional plot, and much of its text--the replies of the "Courtesy & Advisement Person" in particular, is difficult-to-decipher and eye-glazingly boring philosophical discussion.  I guess the plot and character elements of "Buyer's Remorse" consist of the reader's journey as he uncovers the personality of the C&AP and the nature of this future dystopia, but this material is not satisfying.  "The Unchained" was not an easy read but it was sprinkled with passages which trigger emotion in the reader and argue some kind of point, and trying to figure out the more difficult passages of "The Unchained" yielded something of interest--what was up with the main characters and what were Koja and Malzberg trying to say about religion and the afterlife?  The challenge of "Buyer's Remorse" yields SF banalities--man ruined the environment so everybody lives in hives and uses drugs and video games to make life tolerable.  Koja and Malzberg throw in oblique references to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and name check Immanuel Kant and Thomas Erasmus--and even one of Malzberg's own characters, Harry the Flat from Underlay, one of Malzberg's best books--but these oases of interest in the dull desert don't do much to bring the story to life.  Gotta give this one a thumbs down.

"Three Portraits from Heisenberg" 

I haven't spent much time with Omni, the covers of which always gave the magazine the air of something sensationalist and exploitative, what with all the advertised stories about UFOs and ESP, expanding your consciousness, and sex.  The issue that includes the sole printing of "Three Portraits from Heisenberg" offers articles on Roswell, dinosaurs, and the afterlife, as well as an ad for a CD-ROM of forgotten science fiction novels introduced by Leonard Nimoy.  (Did Nimoy really take time off from counting his quatloos and photographing nude women to read Stanton Coblentz's The Day the World Stopped, Manly Banister's The Conquest of Earth and George Henry Smith's Druid's World?  Doesn't seem logical.) 

As you humped so frantic and juiceless in the wretched bed, so the stars and planets tumble haplessly toward final implosion.

Like the galaxies before time, like the blind, bare animals of her breasts sinking underneath his grunts.

I'm not an observer, the face said, you're the observer.  I'm the particle in remission at the heart of the neutron star whose reaction is your anti-reaction.

"Pipeline to Paradise" by Nelson S. Bond

Bond was in his eighties when Wheel of Fortune was published, and isfdb suggests this story was originally written for Harlan Ellison's The Last Dangerous Visions, which was originally slated to be published in the 1970s.  "Pipeline to Paradise" certainly feels kind of old with its references to switchboard operators at hotels and the death penalty in New York state (the last execution in New York state took place in 1963.)  I recently read Bond's 1950 story "To People a New World" and found it pretty poor; way back in 2015 I read Bond's strong-female-protagonist post-apocalyptic quest story "Magic City" and deemed it marginally recommendable.  Maybe this story here, which would be reprinted in the 2002 Bond collection The Far Side of Nowhere, will be something I can get really excited about?

Well, not really.  "Pipeline to Paradise" is an acceptable filler story with an ending that I fear makes little sense.

New Yorker Blake has been having terrible blackout headaches--he wakes up from them not remembering what he has been up to.  He starts getting telephone calls--from a man he thinks is dead, Marcus Kane, an old war buddy!  Kane claims to be calling from Heaven!  Blake suspects Kane is actually calling from Hell, and when Blake's girlfriend disappears and Kane keeps telling him to go here and go there to look for her, and instead of finding her at these locales he instead finds murder scenes where young women have been killed, Blake is sure his fears are well-founded.  Kane, no doubt, is enacting a terrible revenge on Blake from beyond the grave, from the pit of Hell!  You see, back in 'Nam, Blake and Kane were alone together and when the Viet Cong attacked them Blake fled and left Kane to die.  (Bond tells us that Blake was carrying an M-30 machine gun, a machine gun I never heard of before.  Maybe this is a typo for M-60.  Or maybe Bond meant to say Blake was lugging around a Browning .30 caliber machine gun, which I suppose is not impossible.  Or maybe this is a clue that Blake's memories of Vietnam are hallucinations.)

Blake's girlfriend turns up dead and Blake is arrested, tried, and convicted for the murders of all those young women.  It appears that Blake is insane--he must have slain his gf and the other innocent women during his blackouts, and all this business about a Kane must be false memories and hallucinations--Blake's court-appointed defense attorney can find no records of a serviceman named Marcus Kane serving in Vietnam.  Like the two novels we just read, Slob by Rex Miller and Knock Three-One-Two by Fredric Brown, "Pipeline to Paradise" is a story about a serial killer and abnormal psychology.  Or is it?  After Blake gets the electric chair the staff at the prison receive a phone call from a laughing man identifying himself as Marcus Kane.  So was Blake's Vietnam story real?  Was he really innocent of the murders?  This ending is meant to be shocking or funny, but it doesn't jive with the fact that nobody can find evidence that Kane was real, so instead of leaving the reader amazed or amused the ending leaves him with a nagging sense this story just doesn't hold together.

I didn't think Sandworld was very good, I thought Crack in the Sky was poor, and I found reading the ambitious "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" and "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" to be a chore.  The thing is, while I didn't find reading those works of Lupoff's a pleasure, they have all stuck in my mind because they were all odd and surprising.  So here I am, years later, giving this quite long story by Lupoff with an obvious joke title a shot.

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" is a trifling humor story, not annoying but not good, either.  Almost every paragraph contains or is built around some kind of joke which is not actually amusing but fortunately is not actually irritating, either.  As for the plot, it is weak and serves mainly as a mere skeleton upon which Lupoff can hang little joke anecdotes and indulgent nostalgia talk.  (You'll remember how much of Crack in the Sky was devoted to singing the praises of underground comix and Edgar Rice Burroughs--I guess this is just how Lupoff operates, padding out his work with expressions of love for his favorite pop culture artifacts.)

Israel Cohen is addicted to gambling, and this story describes how he became hooked on games of chance and how that addiction has brought him to a terrible crisis, and how he escapes the crisis.  As the story begins, Israel is in Vegas in a casino and is in real trouble because he owes the house a pile of dough and can't pay it back.  It seems possible he may be beaten up or even murdered.  So from his hotel room in the casino Israel calls his three ex-wives for help, one after the other--no help is forthcoming.  He reminisces about how he fell in love with gambling at a Jewish summer camp when he won a giant Tootsie Roll in a raffle.  (In the afterword to the story the author tells us this element of the tale is based on a real-life experience of his--based on my listening to feel like I've heard lots of prominent Jewish people talk about their summer camp experiences.)  Then he sends a fax begging for aid to a randomly dialed number.  

An eleven-year-old girl comes to his hotel room in answer to the fax--she is Lady Luck!  She has the power to take any guise; to demonstrate her powers, she appears as Gene Tierney and then John Wayne.  (This story has lots of references to golden age Hollywood.)  What this power has to do with being Lady Luck, and how her ability to change her appearance furthers the plot, I don't know; I suspect it just offers Lupoff another chance to talk about old movie stars.  I also wonder why Lady Luck's normal appearance is as a child; maybe this is a reference to an old book or film which I am missing.

Lady Luck helps Israel at the craps table, where he wins money sufficient to pay his debt to the casino and leave.  Will he quit gambling?  Probably not.

Barely acceptable.  

"The Tootsie Roll Factor" would be reprinted in the 2001 collection Claremont Tales.

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Though none of them actually stink, I am not crazy about these stories.  You can't expect to roll boxcars every throw, genre fiction readers.  The only people I can really recommend hie over to ebay or internet archive to access Wheel of Fortune are the most devoted of Zelazny's, Bond's, Koja's, Malzberg's and Lupoff's fans.  

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are scouring the interwebs in search of collaborations between Barry N. Malzberg and Kathe Koja, and today we have three specimens of such collabs published in the good old days of the 1990s, one each from the years 1993 (Muslim radicals bomb the World Trade Center!), 1994 (Rwandan genocide!), and 1995 (cultists poison people on the Tokyo subway!)  These stories have, as far as I can tell, only been printed once, so maybe we have reason to fear these are below average productions from these widely-admired (by critics and genre lit professionals, at least) writers, but we won't know for sure until we've read them.  

"The High Ground" (1993)

"Literary Lives" has only appeared in Mike Resnick's Alternate Outlaws, a paperback with a cover illo chillingly depicting Elvis Presley as a bolshevist terrorist.  Recent events suggest that people don't really take seriously the political advice of celebrities like Cardy Bee and Meghan the Stallion or even Luke Skywalker and Han Solo, but if The King of Rock and Roll himself was on on the side of Moscow or Peking maybe today I'd be wielding a hoe on a collective farm or sitting in an office listening in on conversations via bugs and wire taps--scary.  

"The Witches of Delight" (1995)

Here's the third of our unreprinted stories--we are digging deep today, friends!  The sole appearance of "The Witches of Delight" was in Mike Resnick and Martin H. Greenberg's anthology Witch Fantastic.