One of the books that comes up at the world's greatest website, the internet archive, when you type "science fiction anthology" into the search bar is Future Power, a 1976 book edited by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. Let's check out four stories it contains, three by people we have read before, and one by an author new to me, Felix C. Gotschalk.
"The Country of the Kind" by Damon Knight (1956)
This story is very famous, and has been reprinted a million times, including in at least one book I own, but I have never read it, probably because I am often not as impressed with Knight's fiction as others seem to be and so have been sort of avoiding it. But today I take the plunge!
It is a utopian future in which everybody is nice, due to eugenic breeding or genetic engineering or something, and everybody gets free food and free clothes and so on from the government. But our narrator isn't so nice! He spends his time interrupting people's leisure, playing cruel tricks on them, vandalizing their homes, and because there are no police and everybody is too docile to fight back, he has kept up this campaign of harassment for decades! In the middle of the story we learn that, instead of imprisoning or executing this malefactor when it became clear that he was different from everybody else, the authorities wired his brain so that if he actually tries to physically harm a person he will have an incapacitating epileptic fit, and tinkered with his body chemistry so he smells bad, so everybody can easily identify him. Thus are the inoffensive and toothless normies protected from him. As for punishment, people are enjoined to shun him, refuse to speak to him or touch him--he has been excommunicated from the human race.
Then comes the kicker: in this society of easy living where everybody is sweet and benign, everybody is also unambitious and uncreative and has bad taste--only the narrator, he of the bloodlust, has any kind of artistic talent or drive to create. Besides travelling around the globe to terrorize innocent people, whom he calls "the dulls," he also carves from wood little figures and leaves them hither and thither. Attached to his little figures are notes; the narrator's dream is that somewhere there is some other person with some artistic taste and ability, and that such a person will see one of the figures, be moved to examine it and find the note, and become the narrator's friend. What we might see as the second kicker of the story is that the note is a call for the person who reads it to begin a campaign of murder against the "dulls," who are powerless to defend themselves.
It is pretty common for SF stories to point out that a utopian life will ruin humanity, that mankind is at its best when struggling to overcome some obstacle or achieve some goal. The thing Knight does here that we see less commonly and which is interesting is to acknowledge the reality that those of us who have encountered artists at close range know all too well--that artists are mostly selfish jerks who think they are better than everybody else and have no compunction about exploiting and abusing other people. One of the tensions in the story is the fact that the reader may have difficulty deciding who in the story to identify with--the dulls or the murderous artist who is confident he is better than everybody else? Who does Damon Knight identify with? If you have read the interview of Knight and his wife Kate Wilhem in Charles Platt's Dream Makers*, in which the two of them come off as self-important jerks who think they are too good for the world, well, you might have an idea.
"Country of the Kind" is a pretty good story; it is no mystery why all the big anthologists like Judith Merril and Brian Aldiss and Kingsley Amis and on and on have selected it after it first appeared in Anthony Boucher's F&SF.
*I strongly recommend Dream Makers and its sequel to anybody interested in 20th century SF; it is full of fun insights and anecdotes and SF gossip--Knight has interesting things to say about Darrell Schweitzer and Barry Malzberg, for example, and Wilhelm talks is similarly interesting ways about Larry Niven. Check them out at the indispensable internet archive.
"Smoe and the Implicit Clay" by R. A. Lafferty (1976)
Most of the stories in Future Power seem to have been specifically written for the anthology, and Lafferty's is one of these. I think "Smoe and the Implicit Clay" may have only ever appeared in Future Power, so all you Lafferty collectors have to get on the stick and get a copy. (Don't fret, cheapos and povs, it looks like you can get one at AbeBooks for less than ten smackers.) (Another parenthetical comment: it looks like Future Power never had a paperback printing--I guess the hardcover didn't sell too well. This is noteworthy, as the names on the cover include so many critical darlings, from Lafferty and Wolfe to Tiptree and LeGuin.)
"Smoe and the Implicit Clay" starts as an extended joke on the "
Kilroy was Here"/Mr. Chad/Smoe phenomenon, which is mostly associated with WWII. In brief, Allied servicemen would often find distinctive graffiti in unexpected places, places which were previously inaccessible or to which they had expected to be the first English-speaking people to have access, giving the impression that some mysterious character was preceding them and watching them, someone essentially invisible and unknowable. In Lafferty's story, which takes place in a future when Earthmen have explored hundreds of alien planets, the government is investigating the vague suspicion that somebody, nobody knows who, was on those alien planets before the Terran explorers arrived, someone able to usually hide his presence and, if detected, was able to somehow make his memory fade in the mind of those who had spotted him.
Colonel Crazelton, a man who "always seemed like a volcano waiting its turn to erupt" and the super computer Epikt, who is a show off and comedian who manifests itself, in this instance, as a humanoid "extension" in the form of a cigar smoking fat man, are leading the investigation, and Epikt has called in Donners, a man who has been on more initial landing teams than anybody. After an interview, the three take a space taxi to another planet, one that has been explored and been declared uninhabited, and there they discover the truth: Indians and buffalo are the first people and animals, implicit in all clay and on every continent and world, and as they are integral to all masses of land, of course they preceded all explorers. (Native Americans are a particular interest of Lafferty's.) This discovery, and their new relationships with the Indians on this planet, have a profound effect on all three of our main characters.
"Smoe and the Implicit Clay" offers a little of the horrendous violence that is played for laughs but perhaps conveys some sort of deeper meaning, that we often see in Lafferty stories. For example, we are told repeatedly that because Indians are implicit in the soil everywhere, that when we walk around we are, more or less, treading on the faces of people. This knowledge shakes Colonel Crazleton, who feels guilty, knowing that every step he takes is an act of "murder" and "oppression." On the other hand, the self-important and emotional computer Epikt embraces this phenomena--the Indians on the alien planet tore off parts of his mobile extension for their own uses, and, in pursuit of vengeance, Epikt's next extension comes equipped with boots with long spikes!
A characteristic, and characteristically good Lafferty story, full of fun wackiness and thought provoking ideas. Lafferty is known as a conservative (in the last story we read by him he seemed to be regretting that the Renaissance and the Reformation occurred--that is some hard core conservatism!) but the idea in this story that every step a white man takes is an act of oppression against nonwhites seems to prefigure the cutting edge thinking of 2021 lefties! Lafferty is full of surprises and you can't expect him to stay put in any box in which you try to confine him.
Good; Lafferty fans should make sure to read this story, even if it is not available in any Lafferty collections.
"The Day of the Big Test" by Felix C. Gotschalk (1976)
Here is another story that has only ever appeared in Future Power. I don't think I have ever read anything by Gotschalk, whom wikipedia says was a psychologist and an idiosyncratic writer--the brief and surprisingly tendentious wikipedia article compares him to Lafferty and to David R. Bunch.
"The Day of the Big Test" is just what you expect it to be based on the title, a slice of life story from the bureaucratized socialistic future in which you take tests and those tests determine where you live and what sort of consumer goods you get. Our narrator is seven years old, and he rides a self-driving aircar from his skyscraper apartment home in Newark to the test facility in Princeton. The story mostly consists of him describing his conversation with the guy who administers the test and the test itself. The narrator is a self-important jackass--whether we are supposed to find him amusing or annoying, I am not sure. The test questions provide us readers clues as to what sort of society the story takes place in and, I guess, Gotschalk means to shock or amuse us with their implications. For example, the government erases parts of the brains of people who misbehave. The narrator, we learn, is very knowledgeable, but doesn't know who Dwight Eisenhower was, or what Coca-Cola was, or what a house is. There are also hints that boys and men in this future often make use of government-issued masturbation machines that stimulate the prostate, and have cyber sex with girls and women in aircars on similar flight paths via umbilical connections, similarly to how military aircraft are refueled while in-flight. And there's a bunch of other high tech stuff and cultural stuff.
As for the plot, the narrator tests in the 92nd percentile so his family gets to move from Newark, New Jersey to Binghampton, New York, and is awarded other privileges as well.
This story is just OK; it is more like a setting than a full story, it feels like the early chapter of a novel that is supposed to set the scene before the actual plot starts. Lacking in human drama and any point of view, it is not terribly entertaining. And I have to say that the prose and structure of "The Day of the Big Test"" feel like those of typical SF--not at all bad, but certainly not as idiosyncratic as Lafferty or Bunch.
"Contentment, Satisfaction, Cheer, Well-Being, Gladness, Joy, Comfort, and Not Having to Get Up Early Any More" by George Alec Effinger (1976)
This story's long title makes you think it must be a joke and check the page count in hopes it will be short. Uh oh, this thing is over twenty pages long. Well, let's hope for the best.
It is over 500 years in the future. The world is united under one government, and split into six administrative territories, each with a ruler called a "Representative": Tom rules North America, Chuck rules Europe, Nelson rules South America, etc. Most cultural and ethnic differences have faded away--we are told of Africa that it is covered in cities that are indistinguishable from Brooklyn or Queens, all the large animals are gone, and that in an effort to maintain some semblance of tradition, people have to be hired to pretend to be desert nomads and goat herders.
The first part of the story describes (in deliberately vague terms) Tom's maneuvers to force Nelson and several other rulers to retire so he can take over South America and other regions. The people of these regions don't really find their lives have changed much with this change of ruler.
The second part of the story is about the supercomputer which contains the sum of all human knowledge and helps the government do most of its work. Terminals in everybody's homes allow them to access books and other information, and buy and sell things in this practically cashless society--the computer keeps track of every person's accounts and transactions; without the government ID that is used for all purchases, one cannot buy food or clothes or even, Effinger points out, "find sexual gratification." Tom and the other Representatives know everything about everybody thanks to the computer, and because all voting is done via the terminals, they can manipulate the programs that do the tallying to make sure they win the elections.
In the third part of the story Tom manipulates all the other Representatives into retiring, so he is sole ruler of the world. Then after a few years he gives all his responsibilities to the computer and retires himself, joining the other retired politicians in California where they play card and have little dinner parties.
It is time to use one of the stock phrases of cultural criticism: "subverting expectations." "Subverting expectations" is the lens I will use to try to see something interesting in this boring and flat story. Perhaps Effinger here is subverting our expectations that the government has a big effect on our lives, that people who pursue rulership of the world are violent and evil, and that letting a computer run your life--and everybody else's life!--will lead to a horrible outcome; in the story changes in government have no effect on people's lives, the guys who rule the world are just quotidian office workers, and letting a computer run everything is no big deal. I guess Effinger does subvert those expectations, but not in a way that is convincing and not in a way that is very entertaining.
Maybe the interesting thing about this story is its criticism of what we might now call globalism, the way a civilization that embraces the entire world, with a single government and a single market, leads to cultural homogenization. Effinger suggests that almost nobody among the citizenry cares about politics and what the government does anymore because all cultures and ethnicites have faded away--everybody everywhere is the same, with the same beliefs and tastes and interests, making people apathetic and boring. Maybe the expectations Effinger is subverting are traditional fears that powerful governments will cause mass murder and mass impoverishment, and suggesting instead that what we need to fear is government that causes deracination and disengagement.
Despite my efforts to find something interesting here, I have to give this story a negative vote--it is just boring, neither the plot, style, nor characters offering anything compelling to the reader.
"Contentment, Satisfaction, Cheer, Well-Being, Gladness, Joy, Comfort, and Not Having to Get Up Early Any More" would reappear in 1978 in the Effinger collection, Dirty Tricks.
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We sometimes hear that science fiction is the literature of ideas, and these four stories are certainly about ideas. The Knight, Gotschalk and Effinger are, at least in part, explorations of what will happen to people culturally and psychologically if the government can (somehow) provide for everybody's material wants and physical safety. (When we read science fiction we have to ignore the fact that, in real life, governments have always been pretty bad at providing for people's needs and safety, in the same way we ignore the fact that in real life there is no hyperspace and no telepathy and no time travel.) Of these three, the Knight is the best because there is some surprise and some human drama, while the Gotschalk is cold and the Effinger flat and boring.
But the most entertaining story of the four is Lafferty's, because instead of being yet another SF story about overweening government ostensibly acting in our best interests and thereby turning us into a world of lameos, it feels fresh and new because it unleashes on you some totally crazy ideas you never even thought of before, taking you by surprise, and manages to make those crazy ideas work together and make some kind of sense. So, bravo to Lafferty.
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More science fiction stories by divers hands in the next episode of MPorcius Fiction Log.