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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"In a Sky of Daemons" by Laurence Yep

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"The Last Ghost" by Stephen Goldin

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

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

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

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

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Let's continue to explore World's Best Science Fiction 1969, edited by Donald A. Wollheim and Terry Carr and adorned with a terrific cover by John Schoenherr and 21 fun illustrations by Jack Gaughan.  Today we're reading stories by authors whose work I have never read before!

"Backtracked" by Burt Filer

This is a solid story that first appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  isfdb lists a dozen stories by Filer, but this is the first story by him I have read.

The premise of the story is a little gimmicky, but it works.  In the near future people can travel back in time and "replace" their earlier selves--you go to sleep in, say, 1968 as a 20-year old, and wake up the next morning in the body of yourself as a 25-year old--in 1973 you must have decided to backtrack to this date.  The big catch is that you lose all the memories you accumulated in those five years.  Why would anybody do this?  To prevent (and/or to forget) some terrible event.

The character in the story is a weak cripple (he was born with polio) with a beautiful wife.  He wakes up one morning in a body ten years older, but very strong, very athletic--he must have spent ten years exercising before backtracking!  Later that day his wife is threatened with death in an accident--our protagonist requires all his  newfound strength and agility to save her life.  He sacrificed ten years of his life to save his wife's, but was it worth it?

An effective and entertaining story, even though the premise probably doesn't make much sense if you think about it.


"HEMEAC" by E. G. Von Wald

Von Wald has eleven stories listed on isfdb.  This one first appeared in Galaxy.

In a post-apocalyptic future order is maintained within the walls of a university by the robots and computers who run the institution.  These machines rigidly control every aspect of the lives of the "students" who have lived within the university for decades and are horrified of the chaos that they are told reigns outside the university grounds. We follow a day in the life of one of these students as he struggles to follow the exact and multifarious dictates of the machines.  But this is no ordinary day--satisfying the machines and avoiding punishment (banishment outside the campus) has become increasingly difficult as the machines deteriorate and malfunction and issue increasingly contradictory and arbitrary commands.  As the story progresses we learn how this bizarre milieu came about, and witness its final collapse.  Will the students welcome the deactivation of their computer masters as a liberation and embrace their freedom, or have they been turned into Big Brother-loving flesh robots fit only to obey?

I'm going to have to give this story a borderline thumbs down.  It is more like the description of a setting than an actual story, and feels longer than it need be to achieve its modest goals.  The ending is more anticlimactic than surprising, and I didn't feel for the characters or laugh at the jokes.  It is possible the story is a satire of academia, a complaint that colleges don't teach kids how to think but instead enforce an intellectual orthodoxy, but if this was Von Wald's intention he or she was too subtle.    

"The Cloudbuilders" by Colin Kapp  

There is a long tradition of science fiction stories which glorify scientists and engineers, and which try to teach you some kind of science stuff.  There are also plenty of science fiction stories which advocate that a small elite of smart people manipulate society so it evolves in the "right" direction.  In "The Cloudbuilders" we get both of these elements.

Europe, many years after some apocalypse, has a sort of Medieval/Renaissance level society, with no electricity or petroleum products or gunpowder.  The hot air balloon powered by methane is cutting edge technology.  (The great monotheistic religions have also been forgotten, and people in the story invoke Zeus, Aphrodite, and other classical deities.)

Jacobi is a member of a Guild with access to artifacts of "the age of miracles," radios for example, which they keep secret from the ordinary populace.  He travels from Guild HQ in a large city to a remote village where lives one of the most intelligent and ambitious of balloon makers, Timor.  Jacobi's mission is to help Timor develop the hydrogen balloon--the Guild's long term objective is to reintroduce high technology to the world, but at a measured pace which they control.  Timor's beautiful daughter becomes Jacobi's lover; she acts as a spy, hoping to get Guild secrets she can pass on to her father.

A major obstacle to Jacobi and Timor's objectives are raiders who have over a hundred balloon vessels and periodically attack Timor's settlement.  Jacobi uses his superior technical knowledge and trickery to sabotage the sky pirates' ships and exterminate them.  This reminded me of one of the early stories of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, in which the Foundation sells faulty space warships to some barbarians.  The Guild in "The Cloudbuilders"is really quite similar to Asimov's Foundation.

I'm afraid this story is getting a marginal negative vote.  It feels long and boring, with a bland style and lots of superfluous description of technical matters and other extraneous topics.  Kapp tries to make a tragic figure out of Jacobi, telling us that he is lonely because he is two centuries of education above everybody else and melodramatically showing us how he is selflessly devoting his life to the good of humanity by making himself the dictator of Europe, but it didn't work on me.  One of my pet peeves is having to listen to mothers and school teachers moan about how they are doing the most important job in the world but not getting the recognition and remuneration they deserve ("I give and I give!")--they chose jobs which essentially consist of dominating vulnerable people, but are always trying to convince you they are the victims, not the people they are ordering around and yelling at all day.  "The Cloudbuilders" gave me that same feeling whenever Kapp took a break from teaching me how to manufacture hydrogen or methane or coke and tried to do a little characterization.

Kapp has quite a few books and stories to his credit.  Maybe I'll buy the DAW editions of his Cageworld series if I ever see them; apparently they co-star a sexy girl with grey skin.  "The Cloudbuilders" first appeared in the anthology New Writings in SF 12 and is the title story of an anthology produced by the fun people at Ramble House in 2013.  

"A Visit to Cleveland General" by Sydney Van Scyoc

This story is about maternalistic tyranny--now here is something I can sink my teeth into!

Albin Johns is a young journalist. His mother is constantly nagging and guilt-tripping him via the video phone which covers one wall of his home--in this dystopian future you can't refuse or ignore calls!  Of course Mom thinks she is helping him by constantly telling him what to do, and of course she thinks she is the injured party.  ("'I'm doing everything a mother can,' his mother moaned.")

Every morning John takes pills; he thinks the pills are to aid his memory because he suffered injuries in a vehicular accident which killed his brother, but in reality the pills inhibit his memories of the traumatic accident--sometimes he not only forgets he was hurt in the accident, or that there was an accident, but even that he had a brother!

Johns's first big journalistic assignment is today; he has been put on the hospital beat. (His paper has a regular column about the local hospitals.)  At the hospital he is given a tour by the assertive veteran "senior social worker," Miss Kling, who "remembers vividly the day when doctors maintained private practices...."  Johns finds that this woman unilaterally runs the lives of the patients who come into her care.  In the maternity ward, for example, Kling decides which pregnant women will give birth, which will get abortions, which will put their offspring up for adoption and which will be sterilized.  She takes babies from women she judges unworthy and gives them to other more respectable women.  The patients have no say in the matter, and Kling uses drugs which blot out memory and her own skills of persuasion to give patients illusions that comfort them and conceal Kling's shenanigans.  Mothers whose children have been seized believe their babies have died, while those who suffered miscarriages are fooled into thinking the babies they leave with are their own biological offspring.

One of Johns's colleagues at the paper tells him today's medical system is an improvement over the old days, when people suffered fear and uncertainty.  At the end of the story we realize that the hospital staff (Kling herself, perhaps) writes the newspaper's regular column, which always lionizes the hospital, and uses memory drugs to make journalists think they wrote it.  A lucky mistake made by Kling briefly clears Johns's memory and we learn the truth of his and his brother's air car accident and their recovery in this very hospital.

A fairly good story about how people with power have contempt for you and love telling you how to live your life, and have little trouble convincing themselves they are controlling you for your own good.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" also has a pretty good horror story structure and horror elements.  "A Visit to Cleveland General" first appeared in Galaxy. Van Scyoc has a pretty extensive oeuvre; maybe I should check out more of her work.

"The Selchey Kids" by Laurence Yep

I think this is Yep's first published story; it appeared in Worlds of If. Yep seems to have achieved considerable success as a writer of fantasy trilogies for teens later in his career.

Our narrator Deucalion ("Duke"), ostensibly the son of marine scientists, is one of the few survivors of the cataclysm that saw California sink beneath the waves. After growing into maturity and getting an English degree in flyover country, where he misses the ocean ("I hated every moment of it....I grew up among the corn and wheat fields like a strong weed") he returned to the West Coast to work with a team of marine biologists who knew his parents.  Their leader is a Noe Selchey, and one prominent member is Pryn, an attractive young woman who can read minds.  These scientists have been training two dolphins, Ossie and Ollie, to speak English--they already have vocabularies of ten words!

Duke, Pryn, Ossie and Ollie go on a salvage mission, diving into the submerged city where Duke's parents had their lab.  Examining records from a water tight compartment, Duke realizes his parents were not his parents at all--he is the result of a genetic experiment in which a human sperm (Noe Selchey's!) fertilized a dolphin ovum (Ossie and Ollie's mother's!)  Things get crazier still when Duke has to fight a monster to the death to save Pryn, and it turns out the monster is another one of his half-brothers, the product of Selchey's sperm fertilizing the egg of a giant octopus!

I like the plot and structure of this story, but I think Yep overdoes the angst a little bit (Duke is always trying to commit suicide, for example) and the metaphors and similes; on the first page we get  "Sand grips my back like a myriad of stars moving down my spine.  The sun comes up on tiptoe beneath the sun-burnt clouds and wine-stained sky."  Yep's excuse is that Duke is an English major and failed writer, but I don't think the depression stuff or the purple prose adds to the story.  Still, I give "The Selchey Kids" a lukewarm recommendation.

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None of these stories is abysmal; even the ones I gave a thumbs down to are worth reading and have some good elements.  World's Best Science Fiction 1969 seems like a strong collection so far, and I still haven't read the stories by big league writers Poul Anderson, Robert Silverberg, Brian Aldiss and Fritz Leiber.