Almost all of my books are in cardboard boxes back in Ohio while I am in Maryland preparing our foul-smelling apartment for occupancy.  Luckily, I had the foresight to bring with me to this border region between America's Crime Capital and The Belly of the Beast both my DAW paperback of Tanith Lee's Volkhavaar and my hardcover copy of Barry Malzberg's Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  We discussed the Lee novel in our last episode; today let's continue our look into the 1976 Doubleday collection by the man who brought tears to my eyes with the hilarious "Vidi Vici Veni" and the moving "Conversations at Lothar's."

"After the Great Space War" (1976)

This story has a separate entry at isfdb, but it appears to be simply a retitled version of "Before the Great Space War," which appeared in Alternities and which we read in late 2016 when we read that original anthology.  It is possible that it is a revision of that story, but with my copy of Alternities 400 miles away, I am in no position to check.

In the afterword to "After the Great Space War" Malzberg talks about how hard it was to place the story, and speculates on why Analog, Galaxy, and Ed Ferman all rejected it before it was accepted by David Gerrold for Alternities.  Malzberg also reminds us (as if we, his fans, needed reminding!) that he doesn't think the human race will ever reach "far space."  "After the Great Space War" would in 1980 appear in Space Mail, an anthology with Isaac Asimov's name on it, one which has been reprinted numerous times over the years, including in German; do the authors of the stories get a payment every time one of these anthologies gets reprinted?  For Malzberg's sake, I hope so!


"Trashing" (1973)

"Trashing" first appeared in Infinity Five, edited by Robert Hoskins.  It is a three-page story, the reminisces of an insane man who stalks and murders the President of the United States.  Our narrator, a madman and an assassin, in the way of a mentally ill person, calls the President "the madman" and his bodyguards "his assassins" and after shooting down the President expects the crowds assembled to hear the chief executive speak to thank him as a liberator.

This is a decent story, and, with its insane narrator and topic of political murder, very representative of Malzberg's body of work.  The afterword is also very Malzbergian.  Barry relates that, at the invitation of a female friend who teaches creative writing, he read the story to about one hundred of her community college students, and only one of them (1 percent!) understood the story.  Malzberg worries that his career is a waste of time because, if ordinary people can't understand this brief and straightforward story, either Malzberg himself is a poor writer, or, ordinary people are almost all dim-witted (or, as Malzberg diplomatically puts it, "incomprehension is almost absolute out there.")  Barry addresses us readers directly, expecting us to share his pain: "either way, this afterword must depress you."

Malzberg's friend, the "lovely lady" college instructor, tried to salve his feelings by telling him that the community college students were members of the "underclasses" who would "never be heard of again," which is pretty funny and of course a fair sample of how academics, even those relegated to teaching at community colleges, think of the hoi polloi.  Malzberg, ever cagey, always teasing and laying puzzles and traps for us, his loving fans, doesn't tell us his friend's name, but gives us a clue: "she is a marvelous writer who wrote a splendid novel, Living and Learning," which, he tells us, was a paperback original which received little attention.  A few minutes on WorldCat.org and then ye olde search engine leads me to believe the lady in question is Karen Jackel.  The cover of Living and Learning describes the novel as "an extraordinary and disturbing portrait of a young woman in love," and its sole reviewer on Amazon gives it five of five stars.  This book is available for ten dollars as of this writing at Amazon and 12 bucks at abebooks --I suggest you order a copy if only to prove to yourself you are not a mere member of the underclasses but can appreciate real literature.

"Vox Populi" (1973)

This one was first published in Edge, a magazine edited by Bruce McAllister that apparently only had one issue.  "Vox Populi" appeared alongside stories by Malzberg's peers in SF's literary smart set like Gene Wolfe, R. A. Lafferty and every college professor's favorite SF writers, Stanislaw Lem and Ursula LeGuin, a bunch of other famous SF figures, and a horde of people I've never heard of.

"Vox Populi" is two pages long, a lame bit of 1970s angst based on Malzberg's encounter on the street with congressman Leonard Farbstein, who was running for reelection, challenged by Bella Abzug.  (Malzberg tells us all this in the afterword; though I am flattered that you thought I figured it out by myself!)  On the first page of the story the narrator, a political and demographics junkie, is among a crowd of people shaking his congressman's hand, and then a few blocks away sees students rioting against American participation in the Vietnam War.  On the second page the narrator has a dream (ugh) about "members of the underclass" rioting and murdering people, including the congressman, at a campaign event.  The point of the story is that politicians just promise whatever constituents want--the congressman in the story blindly follows public opinion, for example supporting or opposing U. S. intervention in foreign wars not based on strategic or moral principles, but based on what will help win election.

The war business takes up more words, but the most interesting part of the story is the Jewish angle.  The congressional district in the story is largely Jewish, and the congressman (in the dream) while on a campaign stop trumpets his support of Israel and even plays the Israeli national anthem as a way to woo local voters.  (This wooing doesn't work on the "members of the underclass," who presumably are gentiles.)  I feel like nowadays only people on the very fringes of acceptable political opinion broach the topic of U.S. Congress members' support for Israel, so this element of the story struck me.  Presumably Malzberg is suggesting that the congressman's talk about Israel is insincere opportunism, but those passages in the story sound a lot like the kind of satire you might expect from anti-Semites or supporters of the Palestinians who think Israel has too much influence on Washington's foreign policy. 

In the afterward Malzberg reiterates his complaint about "liberal Democrats" (the scare quotes are used by Malzberg himself) who just cowardly chase votes and also complains that the country is "going down," saying "our life is being sucked away from us."  I hate vague political rhetoric like "going down" and "our life is being sucked away from us"--it is essentially meaningless, the kind of complaint any person who pays any attention to politics or culture at all and has any kind of ideology or attitude could voice:

Free market type:  "There are so many regulations and so many taxes there is no point in expanding my business and hiring more workers--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Government employee:  "They are cutting taxes and easing regulations, I'll be out of my cushy job and lose my monumental pension and the soft drink companies will sell arsenic soda--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Welfare recipient:  "They are cutting my food and housing benefits so I will starve in the gutter--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Union member (and factory owner):  "They are allowing too many foreign imports so nobody is buying our crummy overpriced MADE IN THE USA products--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Religious person:  "Thanks to the attacks on religion and traditional values from academia and Hollyweird nobody goes to church anymore and our social fabric is collapsing--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Luddite:  "All these computers and machines are taking our jobs and diminishing social interactions-- our life is being sucked away from us!"
Identity politics activist:  "The words people use and the way they look or don't look at my identity group are hurting our feelings--our life is being sucked away from us!"
Free speech advocate: "People can't speak their minds or even attend talks at college campuses without being shouted down or physically assaulted by these entitled snowflakes--our life is being sucked away from us!"

I think you get the picture.  Either Malzberg's amorphous complaint is evidence that he is driven not by serious reflection on political and social issues but an unspecific and visceral sense of unease about change, or, he is just too scared of diminishing his audience by specifying his gripes about the political and social issues of the day.  Either way, it results in vapid and irritating writing--it is much better when Malzberg makes clear his complaints, that the space program is a distracting waste of money or that machines are stealing our humanity or whatever.  Gotta give "Vox Populi" and its afterword a thumbs down.

"Fireday and Firenight" (1974)
 
"Fireday and Firenight" appeared first in one of Roger Elwood's anthologies, The Far Side of Time: Thirteen Original Stories.  As I have noted on this blog before, Elwood gets a lot of flak from some people who hate his anthologies or think they ruined the SF economy or something, but The Far Side of Time includes new stories from pillars of the SF community like Fritz Leiber, Robert Silverberg and Ben Bova, and a story from genius Gene Wolfe, so it is hard to take such criticisms of Elwood very seriously--don't SF readers want more stories from Leiber, Silverberg, Bova and Wolfe?

We've seen a number of Malzberg stories in which the government takes control of family structure and sexual life, such as "Culture Lock" and "Getting Around," and "Fireday and Firenight" is another.  In the future the story depicts, the family has been replaced by "the unit;" the narrator's unit consists of seven people who "go together everywhere under statute."  The units are set up by "the Protectors," and each member has an assigned role; for example, each unit includes a learned individual, "the pedagogue," who explains everything to the rest of the unit.  The narrator would like to have some alone time with the female member of the unit with whom he has been "sex-paired," but this is impossible.  (Since there are seven people in a unit, one of them is doomed to celibacy; this person's role is that of "the antagonist," and he is very unhappy and caustic, always casting doubt on everything.  Each unit is supposed to be a microcosm of the old society, which of course included skeptics, rebels, conservatives, etc., who challenged beliefs, institutions, and new ideas, creating friction, and the role of the antagonist is to remind everyone of the problems of the past called by such dissension.)

The plot of the story concerns the annual Day of Burning, when the units all go to the Arena to watch actors and robots reenact such historical phenomena as 18th-century pistol duels and World War II terror bombings--the point of the Day of Burning is to remind the people of how horrible life was before the unit system was imposed.  The end of the story hints that the unit society is just as horrible as the societies that went before it.

In his afterword Malzberg describes his abortive attempt to expand "Fireday and Firenight" into a novel, which he says would have been a useless, even disastrous, rehash of the innumerable SF novels already published about rebels overthrowing an oppressive robotic government.  He also tells us that the story is a "satirical rejoinder" to Theodore Sturgeon's many sentimental stories romanticizing or advocating collective consciousness and corporate identity, showing such collectivism's "dark side."  Malzberg doesn't use simple words like collective" and "corporate," though, but instead challenges our little minds with "syzygy" and "the gestalt effect in human relationships."  Oy!  Now whose acting the pedagogue?

"Making the Connections" (1975)

Here is another piece first published in a Roger Elwood anthology, Continuum 4.  isfdb indicates that this story was the fourth and final installment in a collaborative cycle whose earlier parts were produced by Dean Koontz, Gail Kimberly, and Pamela Sargent with George Zebrowski.  (The idea behind the Continuum series was that it presented serial fiction.)

Malzberg often presents us with first-person narrators who are insane and suffer from hallucinations, but he mixes things up this time by giving us an insane narrator who is a robot!  It is the post-cataclysm future, and the world is run by a powerful computer named Central.  Central is trying to exterminate the human race, and to that end has an army of robots patrolling the world, one of which is our narrator.  Our narrator has been killing lots of humans lately, many more than were expected, and he suspects that his old and worn out sensors are providing false data, that he is not crushing and lasering real people, but hallucinations.  Central has problems of its own, and must deny our narrator's many requests for repair.

Our narrator hits on the idea that he could build a comparatively simple robot to do his work of hunting down the remnants of humanity for him.  (It is a little hard to believe that building another robot is easier than just repairing yourself or shooting defenseless people yourself, but we'll have to overlook this.  Anyway, this robot is insane and who knows what is really going on?)  In the final scene the narrator totally breaks down and has a comforting dream (!) that his creation comes to put him out of his misery and then continues his mission of wiping out the human race.  Presumably the narrator's career as creator of a simulacra is supposed to parallel humanity's own history of making machines to do our work for us and finding they have the power to murder and replace us.

Zoinks!  This thing goes  for 21 bucks online!

In his afterword Malzberg tells us baldly that he thinks that the human race is now the creature of technology instead of vice versa, and that it was doomed to be thus, that nothing could or can be done to halt this process.  (I personally find this attitude totally ridiculous.  Would Malzberg really be happier in a world with no typewriter, no telephone, no recorded music, no printing press, no automobile, no skyscraper, etc?  The guy has chosen to spend his whole life in New York City and Northern New Jersey as a writer!)  Then he praises David R. Bunch's Moderan stories, and laments that they have been "almost completely ignored."  (Well, Joachim Boaz has not ignored them!)   

**********

"Vox Populi" is self-indulgent and anemic, but "Making the Connections" and "Fireday and Firenight" are the real Malzberg stuff, worth the time of us Malzberg fans and people interested in the New Wave and the odder precincts of the SF world.  And Malzberg's afterwords discussing the commercial writer's life and indulging in literary criticism are always interesting.  I'm glad I kept my copy of Down Here in the Dream Quarter close to my heart and didn't trust it to those movers!

Alright, it's the final installment of our look at 1975's Tomorrow, a hardcover anthology of brand new science fiction stories that was edited by controversial anthologist Roger Elwood and was never printed in paperback.  Three stories remain, Neil Shapiro's "Journey of the Soul," Andrew J. Offutt's "Enchante," and Greg Bear's "Perihesperon."

"Journey of the Soul" by Neil Shapiro

I'm always a little surprised that the general consensus favors Disney's 1982 Tron over 1979's The Black Hole.  I may be the only person that finds Tron a snooze and The Black Hole compelling, but it seems to me that The Black Hole is obviously better. Tron has a lame frame story about office politics, a pedestrian quest plot and totally forgettable characters and actors; The Black Hole is about explorers, haunted houses, zombies, mad scientists, and gun fights (i. e., stuff that is awesome) and features actors everybody loves like Roddy McDowell, Ernest Borgnine and Anthony Perkins.  People make a big deal out of the graphic design of Tron, but to me all that glowing shit is just a gimmick; the robots and space ships in The Black Hole are much more interesting. Now, maybe people think the fact that at the end of The Black Hole the good characters go to Heaven and the evil characters go to Hell is stupid, and maybe they are right, but at least it is interesting and a surprise the first time you see it--in the beginning of Tron people magically go inside a computer to find a magical land inhabited by tiny little people, which is just as stupid and is totally boring.

I rationalize bringing up this pet peeve of mine with the excuse that Neil Shapiro's "Journey of the Soul" is all about people who go into a black hole.  Empress Betty Grey has been deposed by democratic revolutionaries, and they sentence her to exile and send her into a black hole.  (The narrator expresses contempt for democracy and assures us Betty Grey was a benevolent dictator.)  On the other side of the black hole she finds a new universe, devised by fellow human Charon, a hermit who moved into the black hole over five hundred years ago.  The laws of physics are different in this universe--for example, space is not a black airless vacuum, but a phantasmagoria of different colored clouds and mists, a primordial chaos which Charon (and soon the deposed Empress) can form into whatever he likes through force of will.  He has built a city, he has created friends and advisers, he can fly, he can breathe vacuum, etc.

What he can't do is create life, and so he is lonely, despite his artificial friends and advisers, and so he falls in love with Betty Grey.  Betty Grey just wants to get back to our universe and get her ass back on her throne, of course.  But then it is explained to her that there is no way to get back to her Empire (if you go back through the black hole you reappear at a random point in our universe) so she embraces a new relationship with Charon.

This story feels long (it takes up 50 pages) and is boring.  There are boring (and unconvincing) technical explanations of what a black hole is and how people can be crushed while passing through one but come out alive on the other side, boring conversations explaining the nature of the malleable universe on the Charon side of the black hole, and boring scenes in which an artificial person explains Charon's psyche to Betty Grey.  The first page has a sarcastic, iconoclastic tone, but that tone is dropped and the rest of the story is straightforward.  Betty Grey's evolution from Charon hater to Charon lover doesn't feel real and doesn't have any emotional resonance, it just happens.  

Hubba hubba!

Gotta give "Journey of the Soul" a negative vote.

In this series of blog posts I have been talking a little bit about the criticisms Roger Elwood has received for his anthologies, which some have claimed flooded the market and made anthologies by other editors less salable, and which are sometimes said to be full of weak authors who published little.  Shapiro probably qualifies as one of these lesser authors.  isfdb lists only two novels by him (one of them, Mind Call, has a striking cover that suggests it is a sex novel) and ten short stories, though several of the stories appeared in F&SF, which I believe is one of the more prestigious SF magazines.

"Enchante" by Andrew Offutt

This five-page story is overwritten, full of fancy adjectives and lots and lots of metaphors.  Offutt crams two "undead fingers" metaphors into the very first paragraph, and adds a third "living dead" metaphor for good measure:

I guess this is intentional, an attempt to emulate or caricature a florid fairy tale.

A wizard turns a handsome prince into a frog, telling him that he will be returned to human form should a fair maiden kiss him.  The twist ending, which I predicted, comes when he finally meets a perfectly beautiful maiden and she eagerly kisses him ("'What a perfect frog,' she breathed"): as he is returned to human form she is transformed back into the frog she once was before the wizard got to her, and both are heartbroken.

Acceptable.  In the last line, the moral, Offutt writes, "...true beauty and true perfection are not for men, for they are the work only of Allah, and sorcerers, and artists," a reminder of Offutt's interest in Islam, which we have detected in other of his productions, like King Dragon.

(It is hard not to suspect some link between Offutt's interest in Islam and both his apparent sexual interests--he wrote lots of pornography about women in bondage or under torture--and his apparent attitude about gender roles, which we noticed in his L. Sprague de Camp-style planetary romance, Messenger of Zhuvastou.)

"Perihesperon" by Greg Bear

"Perihesperon" has the honor of being the only story in Tomorrow to have been reprinted in English.  It would appear in 2002's The Collected Stories of Greg Bear, and isfdb is telling me a revised version was included in 1992's British collection The Venging.  Was the one in The Collected Stories of Greg Bear the revised or original version?  I cannot be sure.  I have only read one other story by Bear, "Webster," though for years I mixed him up with Gregory Benford and thought of In the Ocean of Night whenever I saw his name.

Karen is a teenaged girl on an interstellar passenger ship.  She wakes up to discover the ship has been critically damaged and she is the only survivor.  An old man appears who explains that he came in his own one-man ship to help when he saw a meteor hit Karen's vessel, but Bear provides clues, or red herrings, that lead us readers to suspect he may actually be some kind of space pirate.  Whether he is innocent or some kind of criminal, he has but days to live because, as he was struck by a sudden flux of radiation from the liner's damaged engine struck him, wrecking his ship and his internal organs.  Karen is also doomed, as the liner is in an orbit around planet Hesperus that will repeatedly take it through a cluster of asteroids ("moonlets") and is bound to hit one before help arrives.

I guess the meat of the story is how these two, an old man who (according to his claims, at least) has a full life of adventures behind him and a girl who hasn't really lived yet, face death.

This story is OK, an attempt to marry hard SF (airlocks, force fields, radiation, space suits, calculating orbits) with (the author hopes profound) reflections on life and death. It's not great, but not objectionable.  I'm curious what we are supposed to think about the old man (I can't help but think he possibly torpedoed the liner to loot it) and wonder if the revision clarifies his role and responsibility.

**********

So, we bid adieu to Tomorrow.  It may not be great, but by no means is it terrible; fans of J. Hunter Holly and Sonya Dorman will perhaps want it so they have access to a solid entry in those women's relatively small bodies of work.  The anthology is perhaps noteworthy for its level of diversity, with a hard SF story, a fairy tale, adventure-type stories, a New Wave story, jokey stories, stories that try to pull your heart strings, etc.  I certainly don't regret spending five bucks on Tomorrow, and I don't think it reflects poorly on Elwood.

In our last episode we read three stories from Roger Elwood's 1975 anthology of original stories, Tomorrow. Those three tales took up like 100 pages; today we've got four stories which are quite short.

"Arctic Rescue" by John Keith Mason

One of the complaints about Roger Elwood's anthologies is that they were (this is a quote from Elwood critic Theresa Nielsen Hayden that appears at Wikipedia) "peculiarly long on authors who had slight or nonexistent publishing credentials."  This is obviously not the case with Tomorrow--in this blog post alone we have towering icon Brian Aldiss, the well-known editor Terry Carr, and Sonya Dorman, whose fiction I am not familiar with both whose name I have seen on the cover of F&SF and Galaxy.  (Even if Elwood really did publish lots of stories by relative unknowns, if you spin that as "provides opportunities for new voices to be heard" it doesn't sound like some crime, but a service to the SF community!)  But John Keith Mason perhaps does qualify as a "slight" author--according to isfdb, he published only eight stories; five in the 1940s under the name John Hollis Mason, and then three in the '70s.  "Arctic Rescue" would be his last published story.

A space boat crashes in the Arctic, and an Inuit rescues the alien who is thrown clear and nearly dies of frostbite. The Earthling takes the extraterrestrial back to his igloo where his wife nurses him back to health.  Recovered, the alien, whose species is part of an interstellar union which has abolished war, contacts the space ship which is orbiting Earth studying our civilization, and then talks to the Inuit couple via telepathy.  The alien's family comes down to collect him, and everybody expresses gratitude and brotherliness and all that.

Acceptable, but totally pedestrian.  Maybe it would be interesting to students of portrayals of non-whites and race relations in SF (the Inuit talks about white people and how they differ from Inuits a bit)?

"Always Somebody There" by Brian Aldiss

My feelings about Brian Aldiss's individual productions run the gamut.  I loved Malacia Tapestry, liked Starship (AKA Non-Stop), thought the Helliconia books full of good ideas but nonetheless kind of boring, and was dismissive of his pretentious experimental triptychs.  So I never know how a piece of Aldiss's fiction which is new to me is going to impress me.  But, in general, I find Aldiss an interesting person with interesting views (he is an important SF critic and historian) whose fiction is always worth checking out.

(A few years ago tarbandu had a good blog post about the Helliconia books in which he sets them in the context of their time of publication.)

I think we are going to have to call "Always Somebody There" a New Wave story.  A spaceship left Earth long ago to search for "the Creator," its crew consisting of a man and a computer.  The man has been in deep freeze for what has seemed to the computer almost 60 million years, but due to relativistic effects, the time passed in the outside universe has been much longer.  So long that the universe has collapsed and a new universe sprung up.

(This is one of those stories in which the human is not really like the humans we know, the computer not like the computers we know, and they weren't really searching for God, but an "objective" that could "be expressed only in mathematical symbols," but words like "Creator" have to be used because they are the only crude intellectual tools at our disposal.)

The human is defrosted and the explorers open the viewports to look at the new universe.  All the laws of physics out there are different.  They land on an "octahedral" planet the size of a soccer field inhabited by creatures like blue-feathered kangaroos with heads on their feet.  The human leaves the ship, but the ship shrinks because "in this universe, time was as much a regular dimension as height or length...." so he cannot get back in it.  He realizes that he will have to stand still on this little planet forever--oddly enough, just this misfortune befell him in the dream he had while in deep freeze for 60 million years.

This story is only five pages long, so it is not a big waste of your time, but I can't say it is rewarding.  Barely acceptable?

"Death or Consequences" by Sonya Dorman

As I noted above, I recognize Dorman's name but am little acquainted with her work, which appears to consist of two dozen stories and a fix-up novel, some poems (I actually read one way back when which appeared in the experimental Quark series) and the book reviews in the June 1977 "Special Women's Issue" of Analog.  I mention the book reviews because one of the books reviewed is Barry Malzberg's Down Here in the Dream Quarter.  What might she have said about the collection of mid-1970s Malzberg stories?  I am succumbing to an ineluctable desire to order this magazine from ebay! While I'm at it I guess I should order a copy of Down Here in the Dream Quarter as well, which I do not own (though I have read stories from it, like the amusing "Ballad of Slick Sid" and two pieces that appeared in Elwood's Future Corruption, "On the Campaign Trail" and "Streaking."

Ebay, here I come!

Alright, back to "Death or Consequences." Like "Arctic Rescue," this story consists of pretty ordinary SF stuff, but I think Dorman's technique elevates it a bit.  Seventeen-year old Sandra, our first-person narrator, wakes up in a space station in 2108--back in the 1970s she was put in deep freeze by her wealthy parents because she had cancer. She has been thawed and cured because of her musical talent--because Earth is overcrowded, lots of frozen people have never been revived, and priority is given to people with special abilities.

Dorman focuses largely on Sandra's emotional reactions, but perhaps more interesting is how she (Dorman) develops a pervasive theme of disappointment in the future--not only does Sandra learn that the Earth is overcrowded and efforts to colonize other planets have come to nothing, but Dorman gives us the idea that everything in the future is fake, phony, fraudulent.  One of the many elements contributing to this theme is when Sandra, who is some kind of prodigy with the flute, classical guitar and piano, hears 22nd-century music for the first time--a recording of an "impertinent, repetitive" "electronic tune" that she immediately recognizes as a mere "popular song."  I always find it interesting when older SF writers like Poul Anderson (Dorman was born in 1924, making her two years older than Anderson), writing in a time when rock and roll and other types of pop music had triumphed, champion classical music.  This is in contrast with such writers as Michael Moorcock (born 1939) who lauds the Beatles in the Jerry Cornelius stories and gently pokes fun at their popularity in the Hawkmoon stories, and Harlan Ellison (born 1934) who publicly welcomed the death of an (unnamed) woman who had the temerity to criticize Jimi Hendrix.

Not bad.

"Castle in the Stars" by Terry Carr

Carr is more famous for his work as an editor, but isfdb lists three novels by him (Joachim Boaz read his third and apparently most ambitious novel, Cirque, last year) and three dozen stories by him.  I don't think I have ever read any of his fiction--Tomorrow is providing me several opportunities to sample authors for the first time.

This is another traditional piece, one about space explorers with a clearly foreshadowed twist ending.  For decades mankind has searched the galaxy, fruitlessly, for signs of intelligent life.  This story is narrated by a member of a three-man team who finally discovers an alien building on a planet where everything is large, because of the low gravity, I guess.  Sand dunes are five hundred feet high, for example.  The three spacemen explore the building, but it seems to lack any real entrance or contents. Suddenly, they realize that it must be a toy or work of art--not a functional building at all, but the alien equivalent of a sand castle, indicating that the aliens must have been hundreds of feet tall.

"Castle in the Stars" is not bad, but it is no more than a trifle.

**********

Four OK stories, though the Aldiss is on the verge of being bad and the Dorman on the edge of "good" territory.  I'm kind of thinking of these as "filler" stories.

We finish up with Tomorrow in our next episode.

The Buckeye Bookshop of Akron, Ohio has a good-sized science fiction section, but almost all the volumes on the shelves are less than twenty years old, and books that new are of little interest to me.  I did, however, discover a hardcover from 1975 with a distinctive typefacey designy cover, an anthology of brand new stories edited by Roger Elwood entitled Tomorrow. The price neatly written in pencil on the book's first page was "$10," but the Buckeye Bookshop people were having a sale so I got away with it for five and tax.

Wikipedia indicates that my fellow son of the great state of New Jersey Roger Elwood had a strange and wide-ranging career that included working on wrestling magazines and writing copious numbers of Christian-themed novels as well as editing a mountainous pile of SF anthologies.  His career was also a controversial one--the Wikipedia page on Elwood is largely given over to describing a hostile assessment of the man's editorial career by Theresa Nielsen Hayden.  Well, here at MPorcius Fiction Log we enjoy looking into the work of unusual and controversial members of the SF community (I think A. E. van Vogt, Harlan Ellison, Barry N. Malzberg, L. Ron Hubbard and Andrew J. Offutt qualify, and perhaps Donald A. Wollheim as well), so let's investigate Tomorrow by reading all its included stories, looking for clues that Elwood perhaps really was a "careless" editor of work that was "low-grade."  Tomorrow is perhaps a good subject for such an investigation, as it appears it was never issued in paperback and most of its stories were never reprinted (not exactly a sign the volume achieved critical or popular acclaim!)

(Back in 2015 the MPorcius Fiction Log staff conducted a similar experiment when we read Elwood's anthology Future Corruption.  I've read parts of other Elwood anthologies, like Frontiers 2: The New Mind, and lots of stories by Barry Malzberg which first appeared in Elwood anthologies.  In 2011 Joachim Boaz read Elwood's Future City anthology--in the comments Joachim and I discuss at some length the included R. A. Lafferty and Malzberg stories.  Tarbandu took a crack at Future City himself in 2013.  In 2012 blogger sanski posted a defense of Elwood which I find very convincing.)

There are ten stories in Tomorrow; today we look at those contributed by Joan Hunter Holly, Alan E. Nourse, and Robert Hoskins.

"Come See the Last Man Cry" by Joan Hunter Holly

Back in 2013 I read Holly's 1960 novel The Green Planet and criticized her editor and made fun of her author's bio and her publisher's line of books about celebrities and kinky sex.  Theresa Nielsen Hayden isn't the only person who can be mean to editors!  I thought The Green Planet a mediocrity, but maybe this 60-page piece will prove Holly, recipient of the Hinman superior student scholarship, was capable of better work!

In the future, the government takes four-year-olds and, using various techniques (like inflicting mild electric shocks on a little girl who reaches for her favorite doll!), conditions them to no longer feel "Affection, Hatred, and Love."  (The government believes "human beings with normal emotions could not survive the superfast pace of change and overcrowding"--maybe we can loosely characterize "Come See the Last Man Cry" as an overpopulation and/or "future shock" story.)  As a result, adults in this future society lack most emotions, almost never laughing or crying.  Because the government scientists want the populace to be aware of the way life was lived in the past, and because people are very curious about the old emotions, the main characters of this story offer thrice daily demonstrations of emotions.

You see, children of low intelligence (the main characters call them "defectives" or "morons") don't respond to the treatment offered at the "Anti-Emotion Conditioning Center," and such children are taken from their emotionless parents and put to work (unwittingly) putting on performances.  The "moronic" child lives in an apartment with a one-way mirrored wall, and at specific times of day the eggheads manipulate him so that he bursts into tears, bouts of misery which people on the other side of the wall observe with rapt attention.
      
The plot of the story follows one of the young scientists, Dainig, who works with a particular low-IQ boy, Peter, and finds himself feeling for the child and beginning to doubt the morality of the whole anti-emotion regime.  When a technical mishap reveals too much to Peter and he begins to suffer a likely-terminal psychological breakdown, Dainig liberates him from the lab and sneaks him around in disguise.  Under Peter's influence, Dainig begins to feel affection and love again, putting himself at risk of extreme remedial anti-emotion treatment at the hands of his colleagues!  And then there is the fact that, without Peter to provide the cold-hearted populace an emotional outlet, morale all around the world is in decline.

This story is perhaps a little long and slow, but I found the scenes in which the callous scientists make Peter cry (by telling him vicious lies like that his parents abandoned him because he has been a bad boy or that his parents have died) to be effective--they actually made me feel sad and angry.  Maybe I'm a sucker, and maybe we should criticize Holly for cheaply manipulating her audience by presenting us with that most pitiable of creatures, a dim-witted child in distress (just like her main characters!), but I have to give this story a passing grade because it affected me.  Also on the plus side, I wasn't quite sure how the story would end, and I think Holly is laying a little Christian allegory on us, with Peter as Jesus and Dainig as Judas, which was interesting.  Not bad.

"Come See the Last Man Cry" is one of the few stories in Tomorrow to be reprinted elsewhere; it was translated and appeared in a German magazine in 1983.  If you find yourself interested in Holly's work you should check out a Facebook page someone is maintaining in her memory--it is full of photographs and info about Holly's life.  I find it pleasing to see this level of devotion to a minor SF personage--the communications and information revolution which has taken place during my lifetime has been a boon for people with niche interests.

"Nize Kitty" by Alan E. Nourse

Nourse produced a respectable number of stories that appeared in such important SF magazines as Astounding, Galaxy, and F&SF, but I've never read anything by him.

As I perhaps should have guessed from the title, "Nize Kitty" is a cutesy story about cats, exploiting people's love for cats and susceptibility to all those tired jokes about how cats are individualistic and act like they own the house, etc. I would have avoided this story if I had known ahead of time what it was all about and wasn't conducting an exhaustive investigation of this volume.  (Exhaustive, I say!)

Extrapolating from mid-century trends like the radical increase in urban crime and what in my academic days we called "white flight," Nourse envisages a future in which the inner core of major cities like Philadelphia have been abandoned, everybody moving to the suburbs or clinging to an outer ring of urban space. The inner city, where the roads and buildings are collapsing due to neglect, is colloquially called "The Graveyard."

Our narrator is a Brooklyn-born cop in Philly. His superiors send him into The Graveyard on his gyro-car to investigate complaints of disturbances from the poor people who live on the fringes of the Graveyard. He is loathe to go--no cop has ventured into the those ruins for a decade! But he goes, and discovers the source of the disturbance when a cat talks to him.

In a long scene which I suppose is meant to be funny, the talking cat explains that cats are more intelligent than humans but have kept their abilities a secret for thousands of years. The noise people have been complaining of is emanating from nightly meetings of all the cats in the vicinity. The cats (who don't get along well with each other but are trying to work in concert because of the gravity of the situation) have decided that mankind has gotten too close to destroying the world via pollution, nuclear war, etc., and so they, the cats, are going to take direct control over the world. This phenomenal cat demonstrates some of its amazing powers to the narrator when the cop expresses skepticism that cats could somehow outfight humans.

The end of the story includes scenes, again I suspect meant to inspire mirth, in which the narrator's wife and superiors don't believe his story about cats plotting to take over the world.  The cop loses his job and nervously waits for the coming feline take over, obsessively going over his conversation in the Graveyard for clues as to the nature of the coming quadruped regime.

Lame.  If I put on my charitable hat, I can tell you that people who love reading stories about cats may find "Nize Kitty" to be acceptable fare, and that it is perhaps an illustrative specimen of 1970s SF, what with the way it focuses on urban decay and touches on ecological issues and fears about international conflict. (I guess as a joke, or as an indication of how chaotic the international situation has become, the country mentioned in the story as a US rival isn't Communist Russia or Red China, but Brazil!) We might also consider how this story fits into the long tradition in speculative fiction of misanthropic stories in which aliens or elves or whoever are portrayed as superior to humans. Nourse seems to have one foot in this tradition, but to also be subverting it--the cats he portrays are just as selfish and just as prone to fighting amongst themselves as humans are. The felines are perhaps, rather than a foil or role model for humans, a mirror image of our selfishness and squabbling.

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.        

**********

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.

Back cover of my copy

After a short break it is back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, published in 1976 and containing 38 stories, all published in the 1970s, as well as lots of fascinating discussion of SF and the (genre) literary life.

Intro to "Revolution"

Back in 2011 Joachim Boaz and I both read "Revolution" in Future City so I am skipping it today.  You can read our efforts to figure it out at the link; much of the discussion is in the comments.

In the intro to "Revolution" in The Best of Barry N. Malzberg the author talks about and engages in SF criticism.  He praises Damon Knight, James Blish and Algis Budrys for their criticism, and laments that most SF readers don't take the genre seriously and don't care about criticism.  (It is not just SF readers who think criticism is a load of crap; flipping through T. S. Eliot's letters recently I found a 1922 quote from George Santayana in the footnotes to a letter from Eliot to Norbert Wiener dated 6 January 1915: "Criticism is something purely incidental--talk about talk--and to my mind has no serious value, except perhaps as an expression of the philosophy of the critic.")  Contra Santayana, Malzberg thinks that SF will stagnate without serious criticism.

Malzberg then lists whom he thinks are the best "modern" SF writers, splitting them into two categories.  Category 1 is "modern SF," and he crowns Robert Silverberg as the absolute best "modern writer of modern S-F."  "Running close behind" Silverberg are Thomas Disch, Brian Aldiss, J. G. Ballard, and Fred Pohl.  Category 2 is "non-modern" SF, which he assures us is "not necessarily an inferior form."  The best "modern writer of non-modern S-F" is James H. Schmitz, with Poul Anderson a "close second."  What Malzberg means by "modern" in the two contexts in which he uses the word is not exactly clear.

I, and most readers of this blog, could probably spend hours disputing or defending these lists and puzzling over how Malzberg arrived at these rankings; readers should feel free to voice their opinions in the comments, but I don't have the energy to attack this thorny issue in this blog post today.

"Ups and Downs" (1973)

"Ups and Downs" was first published in Eros in Orbit, an anthology of SF stories about sex.  Malzberg jocularly mentions that there were two anthologies of science fiction stories about sex published in 1973; maybe he means Strange Bedfellows, which was published in late 1972?  (There is an ad for Strange Bedfellows in my copy of the April 1973 issue of F&SF.)

The year is 1996 and Jules Fishman is the sole astronaut on the first manned (or, as the feminists say, staffed) flight to Mars!  (Always down on the space program, Malzberg hints that the trip is an election year stunt meant to protect the incumbent.  Maybe in 2020 we'll be seeing a rocket of deplorables lifting off for the red planet.)  Jules unexpectedly finds a beautiful young woman is also aboard the rocket; this chick is incredibly horny and they have sex several times a day.  Jules begins neglecting his important duties, he is so busy engaging in what we like to call "horizontal refreshment."

Jules figures some kindly bureaucrat secretly requisitioned a woman for inclusion on the flight, to make the month-long (and that's just one way!) journey to Mars more comfortable.  Of course, we readers just assume Jules is going bonkers and hallucinating this woman.  Jules is sex-obsessed; in a funny flashback when he learns the trip will last two-and-a-half months total he worries that he won't be able to handle such a long period of abstinence--he is accustomed to having sex four or five times a week!

"What about masturbation?" I wanted to ask.  "Is this a plausible activity, or will the sensors pick up the notations of energy, the raised heartbeat, the flutterings of eyelids, the sudden congestion of my organ and beam all of it back to Earth to be decoded to a stain of guilt." 

I was a little disappointed that this one petered out at the end; Jules doesn't crash the rocket into Mars or Chicago or even Deimos or Phobos, which he thinks are artificial satellites built by a lost high-tech Martian civilization.  The real climax of the story is when he tries to develop a real human relationship with the woman on the ship, asking her her name, what her childhood was like and about her dreams and so forth, and she refuses to tell him anything.  Is Malzberg doing that Proust thing (you can never really know another person) or that feminist thing (men only care about women as sex objects and treat them as mere commodities)?  Maybe both?  Either way, "Ups and Downs" is pretty good.

"Bearing Witness" (1973)

In his intro Malzberg compares "Bearing Witness," first published in Flame Tree Planet and Other Stories, to "Track Two," which appears later in this volume and which I read and blogged about in February of 2015.

A man, not a Catholic himself, thinks he has detected signs that Judgment Day and the Second Coming are imminent, so he tries to get an audience with Catholic authorities, hoping for advice.  The priesthood and Catholic administrative apparatus, whom Malzberg depicts as more interested in bread and butter politics than the spiritual world, try to ignore and avoid the narrator.  On the last page of this three-page story the narrator climbs atop an automobile and addresses a crowd of people in the street, believing himself to be the risen Christ.

I'm bored with stories that offer shallow criticisms of Christianity, and this story felt like a trifle to me.  (I am an atheist, and as a youth I took the line that religion was a menace because it filled people's minds with a lot of nonsense.  Then I went to college and realized that people eagerly fill their minds with any kind of nonsense that comes to hand, and of all the nonsense available in the 20th and 21st centuries, Christianity and Judaism are among the most benign.  As I get older and older I find myself more and more in the position of what you might call a Christian sympathizer.)  Acceptable, but perhaps the weakest yet story in this collection.

Intro to "At the Institute"

I'm skipping "At the Institute" because I read it in 2015 (the same day I read "Track Two," it appears.  Reading that old blog post is fun because in it I express my fervent hope of owning a copy of The Best of Barry N. Malzberg, and now, over a year later, I do.  Dreams can come true, kids!) 

In his intro to "At the Institute" Malzberg talks a little about these stories of his in which people get therapy by having a machine facilitate the experience of vivid and crazy dreams, and how such devices are very plausible, considering recent scientific developments.  He cites SF writer Peter Phillips as being one of the first people (in the 1948 Astounding story "Dreams are Sacred") to use this literary conceit.

"Making it Through" (1972)

In the intro to this one Malzberg commends his friend, editor Roger Elwood, and his uncle, Dr. Benjamin Malzberg, author of such works as Mental Disease among Jews in Canada and The Mental Health of the Negro.  For decades Dr. Malzberg was Director of Research and Statistics at the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene.

In case you were wondering, I have an uncle who worked in a machine shop.  I worked in a machine shop myself for a little while; I didn't find all that noise and all those dangerous blades and drills very congenial.

"Making it Through" appeared in Elwood's And Walk Now Gently Through the Fire and Other Science Fiction Stories and brought to mind Malzberg's "Out of Ganymede," which I should probably reread.  Our narrator is the second-in-command of the crew of a two-man mission to Jupiter.  Jupiter is inhabited by arthropods who emit a ray which drives humans insane; they have already driven batty the crews of three ships.  The Earth wants to take over Jupiter, and so the narrator and his Captain are flying a specially shielded ship loaded with atomic bombs--their mission is to exterminate the arthropods.  The Captain goes insane and wants to turn back and use the nuclear weapons on his fellow humans; when the narrator ties him up, the Captain claims they are on a mission to merely study the arthropods, that the weapons are just a last ditch self-defense measure; the Captain insists it is not he but our narrator who is insane!

The narrator nukes Jupiter, and then wonders if perhaps the entire human race might be insane, and the ray of the Jovian arthropods their charitable effort to cure us!  

I like it.
    
"Tapping Out" (1973)

"Tapping Out" first appeared in Future Quest, an anthology aimed at kids.  In his intro to the story Barry muses that "juvenile" SF may actually have a bigger audience and influence than "adult" SF, and, citing "the phenomenal works by Robert A. Heinlein in the 1950s," considers the possibility that the best SF has been written in the juvenile category.

This story has almost the same plot as "On Ice," but with less rape and incest.  (Nota bene: "Less" does not mean "zero.")  A 17-year old boy has a mental problem, so his parents pay a packet of money to get their kid hypnodream therapy.  In the therapy sessions he murders his father and his therapist and "has his way" with a girl.  The therapist says that, since he is using the sessions as recreation rather than therapy, that hypnotherapy treatment will be ceased and the narrator sent to a conventional hospital.

This story is alright, but lacks the layers of meaning and the extreme sex and violence that make "On Ice" so remarkable.  It's like "On Ice" with training wheels!

"Closed Sicilian" (1973)

Whoa, Barry got the cover illo!

In his intro to this story, which first appeared in F&SF, Malzberg talks about fiction about chess.  He praises Nabokov's The Luzhin Defense (the edition I read was just called The Defense) as a "great work of literature."  He also admits that he'd rather be a professional chess player or symphony violinist than a writer, reminding me of the section on Malzberg in Charles Platt's Dream Makers, in which Platt experiences Malzberg's poor chess playing and painful violin scraping.

(Jokes about violins always make me think of Jack Benny, of course, and the portion of Casanova's memoirs in which Casanova is a violinist--Volume 2, Chapters VI and VII, in the Trask translation covers this period, I think late 1745.  This is also the period of Casanova's life in which he suffers and perpetrates many outrageous practical jokes; in Chapter X, in 1747, Casanova even digs up a corpse as part of a joke.)

I read "Closed Sicilian" in my copy of The Many Worlds of Barry Malzberg back in 2011 and wrote two lines about it in my Amazon review of that collection.  I thought it was one of the better pieces in that collection, and in his intro Barry suggests it is one of his most successful stories, so I decided to reread it today.  

It really is one of Malzberg's better stories, tight and with real human feeling. Professional chess players, former childhood friends, are engaged in an important match before a large audience.  Through flashbacks we learn of the narrator's life, his relationship with his opponent and how, over the years, his obsession with chess lost him his humanity and apparently his sanity--he believes that this big match will determine the outcome of a war between the human race and evil aliens, and that his friend is a traitor to Earth, playing for the aliens.

"Closed Sicilian" would be expanded into the novel Tactics of Conquest.

"Linkage" (1973)

In his intro to "Linkage" Malzberg discusses the fact that (he says) literary critics dismiss science fiction as merely the "grandiose versions of the fantasies of disturbed juveniles;" while SF claims to be investigating possible human futures it is in fact childish "power fantasies."  Barry offers a very tepid defense of SF, admitting that (in his opinion) most SF is severely lacking in "literacy and technique," even if much SF does present valid ideas.

"Linkage," first presented to the public in the anthology Demonkind, is four pages long and feels like a response to such stories as Jerome Bixby's famous "It's a Good Life" and Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore stories like "Absalom" and "When the Bough Breaks," stories about children with super powers who represent the next stage of human development and may very well be a menace to us poor homo sapiens.  The narrator of "Linkage" is an 8-year-old kid who has been put into an insane asylum because he claims to have psychic abilities that allow him to do anything (like the kid in "It's a Good Life") and to have been visited by people from the future who tell him he is the first of a new human species, homo superior, (like in "When the Bough Breaks.")  Of course, this being a Malzberg story, the narrator is obviously insane and obviously has no superpowers.

"Linkage" has what I am considering a shock twist ending--I think it is one of the very few Malzberg stories which may actually have a happy ending!  In the last paragraph we receive hints that the narrator is going to start cooperating with his therapist and abandon his delusions about future aliens and mental powers!  Of course, the waters are a little muddy, with Malzberg leaving open the possibility that the kid is going to pretend he is cured simply to escape the asylum and have sex and start propagating the superior race of whom he is the first, but I think I am going with the happy ending interpretation, because it is such a surprising departure for Malzberg.

Not bad, but not as fun and exciting as the apparent source material, the three stories I cited by Bixby and Kuttner and Moore.  So much of the culture of my lifetime is mockingly or dismissively derivative--South Park and The Simpsons lift memorable elements or entire plots from other works in order to goof on them, classic legends and iconic pop culture stories are retold with a diversity reshuffling of the main characters--but the new work rarely matches the power of the original, and often feels petulant or lazy.

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I respect Malzberg and enjoy his work, but there is a limit to how many stories narrated by insane people I can take in a short period of time, especially since Malzberg isn't the kind of writer who writes in different voices or tones; there is a sameness to his work that can become monotonous.  So, time for an extended break. The next few episodes of MPorcius Fiction Log will cover adventure capers which (I hope) feature dinosaurs and people fighting with swords.  But don't worry, Malzberg fans, barring sudden death on the road we'll get back to The Best of Barry N. Malzberg.