MPorcius Fiction Log: Pumilia

Showing posts with label Pumilia. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 15, 2024

1974 stories by J F Pumilia, F C Gotschalk, R Cain and R Borski

The current tribulations suffered by the internet archive having put a kink in my reading plans, I am resorting to going old school and reading a physical book I actually paid good money for--let's hope this works out better than the last time I read a paperback bargain!

Remember when we read David Gerrold's Alternities, billed as "All New Electrifying Stories of Original Science Fiction"? And then when we read Gerrold's Generation, promoted as "24 Great New Voices"? And who could forget Protostars, Gerrold's anthology of stories by "The New Stars of Science Fiction"? Good times, good times. Well, thank your lucky stars, because we have a chance to relive those happy days! Today we take down from the anthology shelves of the MPorcius Library a copy of 1974's Science Fiction Emphasis 1, an anthology edited by Gerrold that is touted as "Eight All-New Stories by Tomorrow's Stars." (Despite the "#1" on cover and spine, and the stated hope on the back cover that Emphasis would become an annual series, Science Fiction Emphasis #2 has proven even more elusive than The Last Dangerous Visions.) I bought Science Fiction Emphasis 1 in the last year or so, I forget where, for $3.50; my copy was owned by an Elaine (or maybe "Eline?") and on the title page we see that Stephen Goldin performed the role of Associate Editor in the production of this anthology. My experience in academia suggests that the lower your name is on the list of contributors the more labor you actually put into the publication, and while I wouldn't want to compare David Gerrold, whose writing I have enjoyed, to a college professor in one of those disciplines whose findings are unfalsifiable and unreplicable, if we like anything in Science Fiction Emphasis 1, let's remember to give some credit to Goldin, whose Assault on the Gods and A World Called Solitude I enjoyed back in the 20-teens.

Gerrold starts the book with a two-page introduction that is sort of all over the place. We get a knock on science fiction--science fiction, Gerrold says, has to grow up, no longer be space operas about Anglo Saxon heroes fighting aliens, not that Gerrold dislikes such stories. But Gerrold also knocks "mainstream literature," saying it "is merely gossip about people you don't know," while science fiction is about ideas. Of course, science fiction also has to be about people, as well as ideas. Gerrold adds that, in fact, mainstream fiction is coming to resemble science fiction, and notes that many science fiction ideas have become mundane reality. This is not what I would consider a strong essay with a clear point and plenty of supportive evidence, though I guess you can't really disagree with the individual things Gerrold says.

Anyway, Gerrold tells us that the eight stories in this book, chosen from among over one hundred submissions, are mature and moving. We'll see.

"Willowisp" by Joseph F. Pumilia

Back in 2016 we read a story Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley about a guy who wakes up to find his gonads have been replaced by the head of a miniature elephant. (It takes two guys to write such a story, it seems.) In 2017 we read a story by Pumilia about an energy creature. In 2022 I read another Pumilia-Utley co-production, a tragic tale about time travel and the environment. None of those stories was great, but maybe 2024 is Pumilia's year, maybe "Willowisp" is where Pumiulia is going to shine!

Stories about Anglo Saxon heroes fighting aliens are escapist wish-fulfillment fantasies, no doubt, but so are stories in which the kid who was always chosen last for sports and who was never invited to parties has grown into a guitar-carrying drifter who hitchhikes around the country composing poems and songs and meets a pretty bookish girl who lives in a dilapidated country house and is invited into her bed for a little bit of the old in-out. Like this one.

Our singing narrator moves into the house with no electricity with the long-legged philosophy major. In a woods nearby they often see a mysterious drifting light. Eventually our narrator insists they investigate the light, even though the young woman is scared. He figures out that it is a lost space alien, a translucent tentacled creature that carries around a swarm of fire flies in an invisible container, I guess a forcefield or something. Our guitar-picking hero identifies with this creature, as he too is lost, his first girlfriend being dead and he being estranged from his abusive father.

The alien coaxes our hero and the college girl into a particular spot in the woods, within a circle of trees, and then persuades an army of spiders to build a circular wall of webs stretching from tree to tree around our young couple. The alien then places his lightning bugs on the web wall in specific spots. The narrator figures out this is like an all-natural and organic network of circuits. He and the girl have sex--the best sex they have ever had!--within the web circle, and this activates the device and somehow facilitates the alien's departure from Earth.

Loneliness is a pervasive theme of the story and having accomplished this good deed the narrator leaves the college girl.

"Willowisp" is on the high end of acceptable. The style and pacing, stuff that you take for granted when it is fine and only really notice when it is bad, is good here, and of course I am all for having sex with long-legged bookish girls. Doesn't look like "Willowisp" has ever been reprinted, though.

"Bonus Baby" by Felix C. Gotschalk

Another sexy college girl story. Hubba hubba. Gotschalk's story has a mundane wish-fulfillment plot, that he is sort of poking fun at, I guess, and he places it in a far future post-nuclear-war setting in which there are all kinds of robots and forcefields and mutants and the government has assessed everybody on multiple attributes and assigned them scores on a 100 point scale and categorized them as "alphas" and "betas" and so forth; those with high scores are granted all kinds of prostheses that give them special powers, but also laid upon these aristocrats of the cybernetic future grave responsibilities. Gotschalk renders his story something of a challenge to understand with a high volume of semi-opaque neologisms and by keeping the basic facts of this world a mystery to us until the end so their revelation serves the role of a plot twist. I'm not sure if we are supposed to think all the characters are essentially robots just playacting in a cartoonish simulacrum of 20th-century life, but maybe we are.

Jonas is a college student with scores in the 80s, a beta. Some jealous and mischievous girls he is dating play a trick on him, spreading the false rumor that the hottest girl on campus has a crush on him so he will approach her. Jonas does approach this beauty and she actually welcomes his advances, agreeing to go on a date with him; they dance and have sex. It turns out she is one of the "supra-humanoid alpha pluses" and has scores exceeding 99 and all manner of body modifications that allow her to fly and teleport and make sex with her a mind-blowing experience. As a supra she has obligations and must formally date people closer to her rank, but she finds people in her strata tiresome and Jonas' innocence charming and so will continue to teleport to him on occasion for some clandestine sex. There is an element of class-conscious cuckold fetishism to Gotschalk's story--the supra girl is enjoined to wear the frat pin of her public boyfriend, and she puts some of Jonas' ejaculate on the pin before donning it. "Bonus Baby" is like a women's romance novel or a pornographic story in which a peasant has an affair with a lord or lady or an ordinary citizen has an affair with a Hollywood star, a story that both romanticizes the people at the top of the hierarchy and encourages readers to covet the notion that common people are, secretly, better than their social superiors and might get some kind of revenge on them (You may be rich, but I'm banging your spouse behind your back!)

This story is alright; again the nuts and bolts are good, at least if you don't mind having to unravel all the futuristic lingo. And of course I am all for having sex with your social superiors. Are all the stories in Science Fiction Emphasis 1 going to be erotica? Is that what constitutes maturity to Gerrold?

"Bonus Baby" has not been reprinted according to isfdb. It is the fifth story by Gotchsalk I have read, following "The Day of the Big Test," "The Wishes of Maidens," "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" and "And Parity For All."

"Telepathos" by Ronald Cain

Cain only has two entries at isfdb, but "Telepathos" was included in Thomas F. Monteleone's 1977 anthology The Arts and Beyond: Visions of Man's Aesthetic Future, so there is that.

Kunst is an American of the middle of the 21st century, living in a small German town, in a neighborhood inhabited by artists. He is the practitioner of a new form of art, telepathos. Not long ago a new substance was discovered, one that absorbs and then radiates human emotion, and artists like Kunst take a blob of this goop and by focusing and concentrating imbue it with a particular feeling, and then other people experience this art simply by being near it and having the emotions of the artist wash over them. Cain explores all the facets and ramifications of this new art form--how the blobs are stored prior to and after being molded by the artist, for example--and uses Kunst and this new art form to comment on the life of the artist and the experience of creating and consuming art, for instance, how artists feel misunderstood, how viewers of art bring their own attitudes and preconceptions with them when they experience a work of art and make their own interpretations of the piece which are often at odds with the artist's intent, but which, regardless, serve to influence the interpretations of later viewers to the point that over time a work of art may come to mean, in the public mind, something very different from what the creator intended. To produce good telepathic sculptures the artist must became an expert in the particular emotion he is trying to instill in the goop, and Cain discusses how by studying an emotion the artist can become immune to it, can observe it clinically without being affected by it, can know he is scared or lonely but prevent his conscious mind and his actions from being influenced by his own fear or loneliness.

"Telepathos" is a lot closer to my idea of "maturity" than "help E.T. phone home by banging a hot chick in the woods" or "the princess with the magic vulva has sex with you and then leaves you alone and has some other guy shoulder the burden of all the boring time-consuming non-erotic boyfriend duties." Cain's story explores ideas for page after page ("Telepathos" is like 37 pages long) and it includes literary images, the effect of changing light on furniture in a spartan room and that sort of business. I am willing to give the story a mild recommendation, but it is perhaps one of those stories easier to admire than to actually enjoy--for one thing, it is not very plot-heavy.

The plot. Kunst is ill and coughs and vomits and eats little and looks older than his age and so forth, and as we read we wonder if he is going to keel over before he finishes the book he is drafting in longhand; Kunst has the self-importance we expect of an artist and thinks, though his work is not popular or critically acclaimed, that he is far better than the telepathic artists who are rich and have their work on display in museums, and so is writing a book on telepathic art that truly captures the essence of the field, which nobody has yet done. He spends his days in his little apartment and in a cafe, where he talks to a woman artist, an American with whom he is simpatico--like he, she has the dedication of the true artist, "the fervent desire to devote himself whole-heartedly to his work without a thought for personal welfare"--and to a sort of dilettante who serves as a contrast to Kunst, a Canadian who is an able artist but a shallow one who flits from one medium to another. Kunst uses the telepathic powers he has developed to help the Canadian become a better artist and to help the American woman become better able to face the sadness of life. In the climax of the story Kunst masters the emotion "the Fear of Death" and creates a sculpture which projects this fear--having mastered his fear of death, he can live the rest of his life, doomed to end within the year, calmly.

Ambitious and novel; it is too bad Cain didn't write more in the SF field.

"In the Crowded Part of Heaven" by Robert Borski

Yet another story about a guy who gets to bang a hot chick and then move on with his life. What is going on with this anthology? Was Gerrold soliciting manuscripts that had been rejected by Playboy?

It is the near future. A few decades ago, young women who insisted they were virgins were somehow winding up pregnant. Their kids have super powers--they can see in the dark, are immune to disease, are probably going to live for centuries, etc. The authorities figure space aliens are somehow secretly impregnating these girls. Governments encourage breeding between these hybrids and mundanes in order to strengthen the gene pool and improve the health of the human race. For one thing, the superpeople are compelled to donate eggs or sperm twice yearly to the government gamete banks.

Our narrator is one of the half-alien supermen; he travels the world, performing like a prostitute or gigolo or something of that nature, regularly being hired by women for two-month contracts as their live-in lover. If one of his clients gets pregnant the government will pay for all her health care costs during the pregnancy.

The plot of this brief story follows how our narrator is hired by an attractive woman and they fall in love but he has to leave her because he is committed to the mission of spreading his seed widely, to his duty to improve the human race. Also, since he will live for hundreds of years, he knows a marriage will not work--he will be broken hearted to outlive his wife and his quadroon kids by centuries, and she and the kids will grow to resent his superior health and longevity. A brief passage describes how the narrator is opposed to hybrid rebels who are trying to either build a separate hybrid-only society or disguise themselves and live among pure-strain humans. "In the Crowded Part of Heaven" is yet another of the many "sad life of homo-superior" stories we SF readers encounter regularly.

An acceptable trifle. Compared to our other two male sex fantasy stories, this one is the weakest. The sex scenes in Borski's "In the Crowded Part of Heaven" are not as sexy as those in Pumilia's "Willowisp" or Gotschalk's "Bonus Baby," the human drama elements are better developed in the other two stories, the central gimmick is less novel than that in Pumilia's piece, and the prose is less ambitious and challenging than in Gotschalk's semi-opaque story. Still, the story is not bad.

Maybe because the narrator's human mother was French, maybe because the theme of the story (your mission: impregnate as many women as possible) appealed to French sensibilities, the only time this story has been reprinted (according to isfdb, at least) was in a 1975 French anthology with a topless woman (and Winnie the Pooh?) on the cover. Oh la la, indeed.

**********

None of these stories is bad, and Cain's is actually good, so we have to commend Gerrold and Goldin thus far. We've plowed through like 95 pages of Science Fiction Emphasis 1, hopefully the remainder, like 120 pages, will be as good--it may even be better! Cross your fingers, fellow explorers of SF roads less travelled.

Friday, August 19, 2022

Amazing, March 1977: B Malzberg, J Pumilia & S Utley, R Lupoff, G Cook, R Brown, J Haldeman and V Haldeman

In a recent perambulation around the internet archive, world's greatest website, it came to my attention that the issue of Amazing dated March 1977 includes a story by Barry N. Malzberg which has never been printed elsewhere. I was moved to read this fugitive piece of Malzbergiana. I don't build entire blog posts out of single short stories anymore, so, I decided to check out the entire issue.

The departments of this issue of Amazing are pretty lively. Editor Ted White devotes his editorial to complaining about the 1976 World Science Fiction Convention, held in Kansas City, a city Ted considers quite overrated. The centerpiece of his litany of gripes is the speech by Guest of Honor Robert A. Heinlein. It seems Heinlein was ostentatiously unprepared, and delivered an oration that, in addition to featuring content that offended White's left wing sensibilities, was disjointed and rambling. White suggests Heinlein may be senile, and that his wife has been a malign influence on him.

Ted's complaints do not end with this subpar performance from the inaugural SFWA Grand Master--far from it! The play ("Sails of Moonlight, Eyes of Dusk") was bad. One of the five belly dancers was an incompetent amateur. The panels had too many participants, six or even eight, when the latest developments in panel organizing indicate that a good panel can include as few as two people. And there was no celebration at the Convention of the fact that 1976 was Amazing's 50th anniversary!

In the letters column a guy from Chicago writes in to attack the September 1976 issue and to complain that there is too much homosexuality in SF (or "stf," as everybody writing in Amazing styles it.) A radio technician serving in the Army writes in to point out errors in Gregory Benford's column in that Sept. '76 issue. But a British correspondent heaps praise on Amazing, telling Ted to ignore such critics, as Ted is doing everything right and Amazing shows unique "courage, freshness of approach, and, above all, imagination"!

The column on fanzines by Rich Brown (I think Susan Wood's name on the heading is a printing error) turned me on to fanzines I'd never heard of, like British fanzine Maya (at the link find Maya 12&13, in which Christopher Priest ferociously attacks David Kyle's Pictorial History of Science Fiction (a book I recently purchased) asserts that 1930s SF illustration is garbage (gotta disagree here) and expresses his detestation of the middle classes (again, I object!)) and Nickelodeon, the first issue of which had a Richard Corben cover and apparently included a nude centerfold (I couldn't find any scans of this zine, just the cover, but Nickelodeon's predecessor, Trumpet, some issues of which are available online, certainly features its share of topless men and women.) Darrell Schweitzer's interview of Hal Clement has interesting things in it: Clement admits he doesn't put much work into the characters of his stories, focusing instead on the science; describes his relationship with John W. Campbell, Jr.; and reveals that he has sold astronomical paintings under the pen name George Richard.

Here's a George Richard I found online, Roche Limit

Alright, so the non-fiction sections of this copy of Amazing were a really profitable and entertaining read. I can also recommend the issue's ads for wargames, both of Stephen Fabian's illustrations, and one of Tony Gleeson's.

Now we attack the fiction. I am skipping the biggest piece of fiction, Robert F. Young's Alec's Anabasis, as I haven't actually read Xenophon and assume I will miss all the references, but I am going to give everything else--seven pieces!--a try. Most bloated blog post ever!

"Shibboleth" by Barry N. Malzberg

This is what dun brought us here, a Malzberg available to the faithful in no other venue!

"Shibboleth" has a bit in common with 1974's "Closing the Deal," which, when I read it, I found to be a better than average Malzberg, more clear and with more identifiable, more "normal" characters. (Malzberg's characters tend to be insane.) In "Closing the Deal," a man with a daughter who has psychic abilities negotiates with an agent, trying to get the girl a job for which she can use her mental powers. Here in "Shibboleth," a man with a telepathic son negotiates with a show biz agent, trying to get him to manage his son. In the universe of the 1974 story, psychic powers are relatively common, and the little girl is sort of a third-string talent, but here in "Shibboleth" the mind-reading boy is a one-of-a-kind freak. The boy's powers stir up trouble in school, and Dad is desperate for help, but doesn't want to sonny boy to a medical professional because he is sure the kid will then end up in the hands of the government and be weaponized for use in the cold war. Dad thinks being in show biz will somehow help protect the kid, that everybody will assume evidence of his powers is a trick. But Dad has made a mistake--the entertainment agent immediately calls the Feds, who collect father and son. Father frets that "the enemy" will soon learn of the existence of the boy and launch a "first strike" and this will start a nuclear war and destroy the world.

This is an acceptable story, but not as good, not as nuanced or surprising or sophisticated, as "Closing the Deal."

"Our Vanishing Triceratops" by Joe Pumilia and Steven Utley

We read a collaboration between Pumilia and Utley back in 2016, "Hung Like an Elephant," the tale of a man who wakes up one morning to find his penis has been replaced by a small elephant's head. The same year we read a solo story by Utley in which a gynecologist looks between a woman's legs and finds a portal to outer space, "Womb With a View." In 2017 we read a solo Pumilia tale, "The Porter of Hell-Gate," a mediocre production about evil energy creatures invading from another universe.

"Our Vanishing Triceratops" has never been printed again, which is not a good sign, but I love dinosaurs, so maybe I'll like it?

Dow, Daniel, and Jhiminex are from the future, when pollution has killed off most species and radically lowered human life expectancy. D, D & J have been sent back in time to collect specimens for the purpose of cloning and repopulating the Earth. Dow is a big good-looking responsible guy. Daniel is sort of a nerd, imaginative, maybe rebellious. Daniel envies Dow because his wife left him for Dow (well, not exactly; as in a lot of SF, people of the future of "Our Vanishing Triceratops" engage each other in short term contractual sexual relationships it is more fair to say she cancelled her contract Danny boy early and started a new contract with hunky Dow.) Jhiminex is a slug-like fetus creature, a clone of Daniel extensively modified so it can control the esoteric energies that power the time machine (in a sense, he is the time machine) and communicate telepathically with D & D. Daniel and Dow fly around the Paleoscene with their jet packs, scraping samples off trees and whatever to carry back to the barren Earth of the future.

All that stuff I just told you above we learn in fits and starts in a different order as the story proceeds.

The plot of the story concerns how they find dinosaur tracks--a small number of Triceratops must have survived into the early Paleoscene--and Daniel becomes obsessed with tracking the ceratopsian down to collect a sample from it. Dow and Jhiminex tell him there is no time, they can only stay in this period of history for a certain number of minutes before surplus time energy residue or whatever accumulates and they will have to leave. Because the same person can't go back to the same time period a second time, Daniel won't be able to search for dinosaurs again, and insists on searching for the triceratops in a concealing woods. (Time travel stories often have rules that feel arbitrary and seem to have been tailored to facilitate the drama the author wants to create--not all SF authors prioritize the science the way Hal Clement does.) When Dow tries to stop Daniel, Daniel stabs him. Dow hurries back to the time machine to staunch his wound. Jhiminex can't hold back the time machine any longer and he and Dow leave without Daniel, who has found the triceratops; the beast is old, cancerous, the last of its kind, and it dies seconds after Daniel sees it. Daniel, it is implied, commits suicide next to the giant reptile's corpse.

OK, but no big deal.

"The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" by Richard A. Lupoff

In 2014 I read Lupoff's Sandworld and said of it "I am forced to consider that it may be: a rush job done for money that Lupoff padded out with his banal political views; a half-hearted debunking or satire of pulp adventures that fails to be insightful or amusing; or, a sincere attack on criminal justice in America that Lupoff made salable to Berkley by setting it on another planet. Or some combination of these." In 2015 I read his Crack in the Sky and wrote that it "is not very good. We've all seen domed cities, pollution, overpopulation, group marriages, planned economies, etc. before, and Lupoff doesn't add anything new that I can see to these well-worn widgets and doodads from the SF toolbox." And in 2017 I read "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" and said of it "It is easy to see why critics like this story: there are the anti-racist and anti-war messages and the caricature of Southerners, and Lupoff's ambitious, extravagant and experimental wordplay in the New Alabaman chapters in which he mines every possible pun, phonetic spelling and form of punctuation for potential laughs. But I found reading the story a chore."

And yet here I am in 2022 reading another long piece by Lupoff, a sequel to "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama" called "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru." (These two stories, and other material set in the same milieu, formed the basis for the 1978 novel Space War Blues.) Well, I guess I can make my way through 18 pages of puns, phonetic spelling and parody.

'Nifykin look outha porole sreely pretty, sreely pretty, lookna Port Upatoi swinging roun thole mudball, thole goodole place, it's maybe not the prettiest place na whole universe but nobody ever said it was, it was home though m that counted frole lot that swat Leander Laptip saw outha portole:

Oy.

I have the exact same praise and criticism for "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" that I had five years ago for "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama." While I attacked Sandworld and Crack in the Sky for being shoddy and rushed and lazy, Lupoff obviously put a lot of effort into these Space War Blues stories, carefully crafting all the puns and phonetic spellings and novel forms of punctuation that make up the dialect of N'Alabama. Of course, it takes a lot of effort to read this idiosyncratic text, and the question is whether the reward is worthy of that effort. Well, on the red side of the ledger, many of the jokes are obvious and many of the scenes feel long and slow, being overly detailed (it takes half a page for somebody to undress, for example.) But in the black column are some of the SF elements, like the space station and the medical technology and the rehab regime the characters go through, which are good; as for the plot and themes, they are OK, though the characters' goals and the obstacles they face get less interesting as the story proceeds instead of more interesting.

The plot: We've got three chapters. In the first, a man, Leander Laptip, and a woman, Mizzy Lizzy Cadbell, both service members of the space navy of the redneck planet of New Alabama, arrive at a space station orbiting N'Alabama, severely injured in the war with the blacks of planet New Haiti (whom we don't actually see in this story, unlike in "With the Bentfin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama," which was like 90 pages long and featured numerous chapters set on N'Haiti.) They glimpse each other's broken bodies briefly, and then are separated as they go through the lengthy process of rehabilitation, therapy, and installation of protheses for many lost body parts. In the second chapter, all healed up, Leander and Mizzy Lizzy formally meet and become friends. They are mustered out of the service and given a hero's welcome on the surface. They look for work, but for some reason all their job offers involve being prostitutes or actors in porn films (strip clubs, pornography, and prostitution play a large role in these Space War Blues stories, or at least the two I have read.) In chapter three Leander and Mizzy Lizzy begin work as porn actors, and become a worldwide sensation and get rich. But their sex life is not exactly satisfying, as their genitals are artificial and require conscious effort to operate--for example, Leander doesn't spontaneously get an erection when he sees Mizzy Lizzy disrobe, he has to will an erection to occur. Maybe this story is in part about how technology ruins our relationships, separates us from the natural world, including from our own bodies!

Like its predecessor, "The Bentfin Boomer Girl Comes Thru" is a borderline case, admirable but not necessarily enjoyable, a product of ambition and industry that perhaps lacks appeal.

"The Recruiter" by Glen Cook

This is an effective story, a cynical look at the grim dark future of interstellar travel and brain transplants! Earth has fallen into total ruin over the centuries; all the smart and brave people having left, only wretched scavengers willing to live on the meager government dole remain, billions of them. Earth's government is in deep debt to the more vital colony worlds, and so they allow recruiters from the colonies to just shanghai any Earth people they can find into the space navies that wage war on the frontiers of human occupied space.

Our narrator was born on Earth, joined the space marines to get off the planet-sized slum, and was killed while serving, but his brain was intact and he was reborn in a robot body. In that armed and armored metal shell he acts as a one-man press gang among the crumbling ruins of Earth cities, stunning people and bringing them to HQ to be drafted into a space navy...or cut to pieces, their brains used as computer components, their organs as spare parts for more productive people! When the narrator has brought in enough "recruits" he will be rewarded by having his brain installed into a fresh beautiful human body being grown in a vat! Then he can go to some frontier world and live a peaceful independent life.

The background above is basically the whole story; the plot concerns the narrator capturing some kids and then having an attack of conscience, but, reminded that he only has to catch one or two more recruits before he gets that fresh new healthy body, silencing his qualms about consigning poor people to being carved up for use as spare parts.

I like it. Cook is a capable writer of this kind of material. In the period before this blog escaped from the laboratory to roam the countryside and express its bitterness, I read Cook's ten grim dark Black Company books and, though they got less interesting as I made my way through them, on the whole I enjoyed them and can recommend the first four. (I actually wrote a little about the Black Company series in the early days of this blog when I opined about a list somebody put together of the top 100 SF books.)

"The Recruiter" would be reprinted in 2012 in the Cook collection Winter's Dreams.

"Two of a Kind" by Richard W. Brown

This is a pornographic story about racist violence in the grim dark future. America has suffered "the Breakup," whatever that is, and rural people are resorting to cannibalism during a race war in which "Feds" scour the countryside, exterminating black people.

Our narrator is out hunting when he is captured by two Feds--he is technically poaching so the Feds can summarily execute him, but he convinces them that he knows where a black couple and their children are hiding out, and they spare him--for now!--so he can lead them to their shack. The Feds plan to rape the woman before killing her, and discuss all kinds of crazy sexual abuse they have committed in the past and will commit on this woman, like making her eat their excrement, raping her while her husband watches, etc. When they get to the shack, Brown describes in detail how they use their laser pistols, set on low, to torture her, compel her to service the narrator with her mouth, and much much more. To rape her they have to turn off their force fields, and, as we readers have been expecting, the narrator is revealed to be the woman's husband, and once the Feds' energy screens are down he kills them. As the story ends the narrator looks forward to eating the Feds.

This is real exploitation stuff, and I am a little surprised to see it in Amazing, though I cannot deny that "Two of a Kind" is a competently-crafted action story.

Unsurprisingly, "Two of a Kind" has never been reprinted. Richard W. Brown, who apparently preferred to be known as "rich brown" with small initials, has 13 short fiction credits at isfdb and was apparently a very active contributor to fanzines (he wrote the Amazing column on fanzines in this issue and two others.)

"Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear" by Jack C. Haldeman II

Jack is the brother of the Joe Haldeman who wrote the famous Forever War and the three Worlds novels I read in 2020. In 2016 I read Jack's "Sand Castles" and wrote of it "This story is a pointless waste of time, and it is 17 pages long!" In 2018 I read his "What I Did On My Summer Vacation" and wrote of it, "I think we can see 'What I Did on My Summer Vacation' as an example of literary or New Wave SF that fails utterly, abandoning plot but not replacing plot with human feeling or adept writing or good images, just self indulgent rambling."

"Those Thrilling Days of Yesteryear" is a gimmicky story that doesn't really work. An archaeologist gives us a little autobiography, starting with how as a kid he became fascinated with Indian artifacts and then with old coins. In grad school he learns the impossible truth--there is no physical evidence of ancient and prehistoric times, all those Indian arrowheads and dinosaur bones are fakes made in the 20th century by scientists, who then bury them to preserve their own jobs finding them.

Barely acceptable. Nobody saw fit to print this one again.

"An Animal Crime of Passion" by Vol Haldeman

Vol is Jack's wife. She has four credits at isfdb, including a collaboration with her husband and Andrew Offut on the eleventh volume of the Spaceways series of erotic space adventure novels. "An Animal Crime of Passion" has never been reprinted.

"An Animal Crime of Passion" is a light-hearted detective story about a planet in an interstellar civilization upon which live a variety of peaceful herbivorous intelligent species, among whom there is almost zero violent crime. "An Animal Crime of Passion" is also a joke story about rape. Wow, this issue of Amazing is really something.

Stuck on the planet is a cop of a carnivorous race, and he is enlisted to help the investigation when one of the native quadrupeds is assaulted and raped. Because the people who live on this planet are all pacific, the local cops have no experience investigating violent crime and need the help. The victim can't give much of a description of her attacker, as she was so fixated on his huge penis she noticed little else about him.

There is a bunch of detective stuff, you know, looking for clues and questioning witnesses and all that, and then finally the culprit is brought in. It is a human, and he raped the quadruped native thinking she was not a person, but merely an animal, namely a dog. The joke, I guess, is that back home on Earth this guy fucks dogs on the regular.

The writing style of this story is smooth and jaunty, and up to the last page I expected to give "An Animal Crime of Passion" a passing grade, but the ending is so lame I think I have to give it a thumbs down. Missed it by that much!

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Wow, these are some pessimistic stories! The Earth is a total wreck! The authorities are corrupt and abusive! Everywhere you look there are violent perverts! Circumstances drive people to degrade themselves and violate others! Damn! Well, our next blog post will be about a 1950s SF novel, and maybe it will bring us out of this Seventies malaise.

Wednesday, February 8, 2017

Another six tales from Generation: O'Neil, Toomey, Carter, Sky, Pumilia and Hensel

There are twenty-five stories in Generation, David Gerrold and Stephen Goldin's 1972 anthology of stories by writers lauded as "the most dazzling new stars of science fiction." Some of these "stars," like Gene Wolfe, Barry Malzberg, Piers Anthony, the mysterious James Tiptree, Jr., and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, went on to have careers highly successful critically and/or commercially. Others are people I rarely or never hear about. Let's check out six stories by those relatively minor writers.

"...After They've Seen Paree" by Dennis O'Neil

The wife and I were recently in Dayton Ohio, at Carillon Historical Park, where you can see old locomotives, a plane built by the Wright brothers, lots of old cash registers, and that sort of stuff. They have an exhibit on World War One which includes a Lewis gun and a 3-inch field gun. Worth a few hours if that is your thing.

Anyway, the title of O'Neil's story brings The Great War to mind, and, like the song for which it is named, the story is about people who are changed by contact with the big city and with war. As he does with the title, O'Neil fills the story with literary and historical allusions; Virgil, the Bible, Dylan Thomas, etc.

It is the post apocalyptic future! Near a ruined city, a tribe lives simply and primitively, having sworn to eschew the evils of the past: the Democratic and Republican parties, TV, booze, etc. Our protagonist, Norman*, is about to have sex with his cousin Tresa when a Volkswagen microbus with a computer brain kidnaps her and carries her off to the city.

Our hero spends a year reading the forbidden books (combat manuals with silly titles-- this story is supposed to be funny) in preparation to liberate his cousin from the city. When Norman invades the city he battles the two last remaining U. S. Army soldiers and their battleforce of robot cars; Tresa is still alive, soldiers having kidnapped her for use as a sex slave. Norman also learns the cause of the apocalypse, a race war which saw a cataclysmic exchange of fire between satellites and ground installations.

Norman brings Tresa out of the city, but she has changed. Not only did the soldiers' surgical robots fill her breasts with silicone, but contact with the military and with urban decadence has turned her into a saidst who is sexually aroused by violence and a slacker who refuses to work the subsistence farm with the rest of the tribe. The sweet and innocent Tresa is gone, and Norman considers killing her to expunge the tribe of her corruption (this resort to violence a reflection of his own corruption.)

Acceptable; the story moves at a brisk pace, gives you lots to think about, and the jokes, while not exactly funny, are not annoyingly poor. According to isfdb, O'Neil has written several novels and over a dozen short stories; most of them seem to be about DC Comics characters.

*Norman is a good name for writers to give an "everyman" character because it sounds a bit like "normal" and "no man." Ray Davies named the mentally ill office worker in The Kinks Present a Soap Opera "Norman," for example.

"The Recreation" by Robert E. Toomey, Jr.

A lame gimmick story, less than two pages. God is just like a short story writer: he creates planets and tries to sell them, does hackwork to make ends meet, gets depressed and turns to booze. Earth is a planet he has been unable to place; while under the influence of a hangover he revises the Earth, adding humankind--the joke is that human beings are terrible because God made us when he was out of sorts!

Toomey is credited with a single novel at isfdb as well as seven short stories. "The Recreation" would later appear in 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories, a book I borrowed from an Iowa library a few years ago.

"Constitution in E Flat" by Paul E. Carter

Carter has eleven short stories listed at isfdb. In 1977 Columbia University Press published a nonfiction book he wrote about SF magazines which looks like it is probably pretty cool.

"Constitution in E Flat" is set in a future United States overtaken by authoritarianism and decadence. The air outside is too polluted to breathe without nose clips or some kind of filter mask, and the US is involved in a world war on a broad front in Latin America and Africa. This story takes place in a noisy club where there are go-go dancers and all manner of drugs are for sale; a composer has set the text of the Constitution to music, and at the club is meeting two government representatives and the head of the Musicians Union to discuss the new composition. (This is apparently a fantasy world in which people still care about symphonic music.) One of the government guys expresses skepticism about the composition, and then the other one has him arrested on the pretext that this is evidence of insufficient patriotism.

I guess this story is supposed to remind you of Soviet Russia where government officials are always stabbing each other in the back and art is under the control of the State (the government guy who is not arrested has a sort of Russian-sounding name, "Rikhoff"), and suggest that the American people are becoming deracinated, divorced from their political and cultural heritage (in the final lines a singer sings "Ave Maria" in Latin but nobody in the club understands the words.) This sounds like the basis for an interesting story, but something about Carter's style made my eyes glaze over and I kept forgetting which authority figure was which; I don't know, maybe it's me. Merely acceptable.

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" by Kathleen Sky

As I think I have mentioned before, Gerrold's introductions for stories in Generation by women come off as sexist by today's standards. In his intro to "One Ordinary Day, With Box" he tells us that there is "certainly" no woman in the world sexier than Sky, and then shares his theory on what a "truly liberated woman" is: "not one who has forsaken her femininity, but one who has accepted it and wears it without falsity."

(For some reason Gerrold refuses to provide us readers any insights into the earthy masculinity and raw sexual magnetism of Gene Wolfe and Barry Malzberg.)

isfdb tells us that Sky has published five novels (two of them about the trials and tribulations of the crew of the starship Enterprise) and eight short stories, two of them collaborations with her husband (from 1972 to 1982), Stephen Goldin.

"One Ordinary Day, With Box" is an acceptable Twilight Zone-style story. A greyish man carries around with him, from town to town, a light but bulky black box. It contains, we are told, not what people want, but what they need. For example, when a wretched drunk reaches into the box he gets a healthy sandwich (not the cash he wants) and when a boy-crazy teenage girl reaches into it she gets birth control pills. People, we learn, always reject what they truly need.

This is a good enough premise, but the ending is a little weak. When the greyish man reaches into the box himself, he just gets another box (the original collapses.) "One Ordinary Day, With Box" was translated into German for Science Fiction Story Reader 5, and also appeared (like Roger Deeley's The Shortest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told, also from Generation) in Reflections of the Future: An Elective Course in Science Fiction and Fact.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" by Joseph E. Pumilia

We've actually encountered Pumilia before here at MPorcius Fiction Log, when we read "Hung Like An Elephant," which Pumilia co-wrote with Steven Utley. That story was also purchased by Gerrold and Goldin, for Alternities.

"The Porter of Hell-Gate" is about an immortal creature of pure energy who guards one of the spots where the different universes touch; if energy should leak from one universe to another then chaos could result, stars dying or exploding, the laws of physics breaking down, etc. The Porter has to fight evil energy creatures who want to break into his universe and cause mayhem, and he faces his greatest challenge when a female energy creature seduces him and tricks him into opening the gate.

This is one of those stories that isn't actually bad, but just sits there. Acceptable, I suppose.

"A Sense of Thyme" by C. F. Hensel

This is one of those stories in which Death is an elegantly dressed man who walks with a black walking stick and drives a black Rolls Royce, who comes to you when your time is up and drives you to the train station to get on the train to the afterlife. Are there a lot of people who actually like these kinds of stories?

My mother used to tell us kids that the Santas we'd see in stores and elsewhere were Santa's helpers, and in this story there are numerous representatives of Death driving around in black Rolls Royces, each with a schedule to keep. The Death in this story was a normal person horrified of death who joined the "firm" at the age of 19 because such a position confers immortality.

Today he is collecting an old woman reputed to be a witch. She too, he learns, made a bargain to gain immortality and wisdom, many, many, years ago, but then gave up immortality to return to the mainstream of human life:

"It eventually occurred to me, my dear, by virtue of that wisdom gained at such cost, that I was imprisoned. Trapped....As long as I never aged, I never learned the lessons of age. I never developed....I became inhuman...."

This is a sentimental story with lots of descriptions of the witch's beautiful eyes and a long scene in which Death cries and so forth. I'm kind of shrugging it off, but I suppose some will find it moving and find the story's argument, that being immortal would be lonely and unfulfilling, comforting in a sort of sour grapes way. Acceptable.

The "C." in C. F. Hensel is short for "Christina," and in his intro Gerrold tells us Hensel is "sexy" and "feminine." Hensel has three stories listed at isfdb; the other two are collaborations with Stephen Goldin.

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All six of these stories feel like filler. Too bad! In retrospect, compared to the rest, the O'Neil feels ambitious, full of allusions and social commentary, while the Toomey looks even more like a lazy piece of junk.

In our next episode I will read the two James Tiptree Jr. stories to be found in Generation, and then I can proudly say that I have read every single story in the collection. (I read Stephen Goldin's "Stubborn" back in late 2014 when I was flipping through 100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories.) Stay tuned!

Thursday, September 15, 2016

Return to Alternities: 1974 tales by Jack C. Haldeman II, Robert Wissner, Arthur Byron Cover, and Steven Utley & Joe Pumilia

Let's dive back into that "nova of superb new young writers," 1974's anthology from Dell, Alternities, edited by David Gerrold of "Trouble with Tribbles" fame.

My copy of Alternities was previously owned by a Fred Thivener, who had one of those cool embossing devices. One is led to wonder what Fred thought of Alternities, if he "relished and remembered" the stories we will be talking about today. (Unless I am mixing up one Fred Thivener for another, the man who owned this book was an important person here in Columbus and received a pretty extensive obituary at the Dispatch.)

Fellow SF fan Fred Thivener, we salute you!

"Sand Castles" by Jack C. Haldeman II

This story is a pointless waste of time, and it is 17 pages long!

Two men, astronauts, are stranded on an alien planet after their ship crashes. The remarkable property of this planet is that, while upon it, the men's thoughts are made manifest--the narrator imagines a dish of ice cream and it appears and he eats it. His comrade imagines a stack of Playboy magazines and they appear and he cuts out the centerfolds and pastes them into a scrapbook. The men have to make an effort to make things appear, and have to have extensive knowledge of the thing they are trying to conjure up; it seems that wishing into existence a means of transport back to Earth, or even of communicating with Earth, is beyond their abilities. If attention lapses, things created in this way can simply fade away.

There are friendly natives on the planet, though they may be simply more creations of the narrator's imagination. You cannot trust that anything in this story is real. The natives say things about time ("The concept is fuzzy to us") and facts ("Facts are fuzzy things and are open to a great deal of interpretation....I don't see why you bother with them") that add to the story's pervasive feeling that nothing is real and no knowledge is reliable.

Maybe Haldeman is trying to say something about epistemology and causality, that you can't trust your sense impressions and we have no real reason to believe in cause and effect (maybe this story is Haldeman's response to just having read some Descartes or Berkeley or Hume?) Haldeman doesn't use the scenario to tell a traditional story--the characters don't learn anything or accomplish anything, and nothing happens to inspire any feelings in the reader beyond frustration and boredom (it is not one of those stories in which the mystery is solved in the end.) Haldeman just piles on crazy images (aliens hunting with Duncan yo-yos, a horde of three-inch tall people, a 300-pound black man sitting on a throne surrounded by naked girls and wearing a "Gay Power" T-shirt) and boring jokes (a simulacra of the narrator's sister is conjured up and the narrator tries to prevent his fellow castaway from having sex with her.)

Quite bad. This printing here in Alternities constitutes the sole appearance of "Sand Castles" before the public. This Haldeman, brother of the Haldeman who produced MPorcius-approved novels like Mindbridge and the enduring classic Forever War, has a long list of publications at isfdb and presumably most are superior to this thing.

"The P. T. A. Meets Che Guevara" by Robert Wissner

Wissner has five credits on isfdb, one of them unpublished because it was to appear in Harlan Ellison's abortive Last Dangerous Visions. That's right, folks, Ellison's indifference and incompetence are keeping 20% of this gentleman's literary output from his fans (if any.)

This story, five pages, is a first-person narrative describing an emergency P. T. A. meeting from the point of view of a father in attendance. The meeting has been called because of an outbreak of vandalism at the school. Feminists will note how much of the five pages are taken up by the narrator's assessments of various female teachers' physical attributes and sexual desirability. There's nothing funnier than jokes about how an old fat woman probably never had sex, am I right? The SF component of the story is the narrator's fantasy that the troublemaking kids, including his own eight-year old daughter, are revolutionaries who may break into the P. T. A meeting and murder the faculty as well as any parents who resist.

This story is not good, but it kept my attention and inspired some kind of reaction in me, so has managed to claw its way into the lower reaches of the "barely acceptable" category.

"A Gross Love Story" by Arthur Byron Cover

A look at his credits on isfdb is giving me the idea that Cover is a writer promoted by Harlan Ellison whose work is meant to be funny. He also has written books in shared universes and TV and computer game tie-ins. (Damn, I haven't thought about Planetfall in years.)

In 2009 tarbandu reviewed Cover's first novel, Autumn Angels, (he awarded it 3 of 5 stars), which he tells us has a long intro from Ellison.

"A Gross Love Story" appears to us as a script or screenplay, consisting mostly of dialogue between characters A and B. The setting is a graveyard at night, with a castle in the background. (Despite the castle, the thing takes place in America.) A and B are graverobbers in the employ of a vampire they call "the doctor" (he also conducts Frankenstein-type experiments.) The dialogue consists largely of juvenile jokes: B is a "retard" from being hit in the head too often by his mother and consistently says "William G. Buckley" instead of "William F.," while A is a homosexual who was born without a penis and laments that the doctor is a prude who won't let him bring "cute boys" to the castle and declares "I was born without a dick but I wasn't born a homosexual! Queers are made, not born!"

There is stage direction, like when A and B have to hide behind a tombstone because drunken Irish cop Clancy is walking by. (Yes, this is the second drunken Irish cop in Alternities. Erin go bragh!)

They dig up a beautiful young woman, recently dead, and B falls in love with her and is inspired to have sex with the corpse, but halfway through foreplay loses interest when he learns the girl was Clancy's sister, a slut. Like the doctor, B is a prude and wants his first time to be with a virgin.

Bad, but so audaciously and single-mindedly childish, vulgar and insensitive to today's protected classes that I think it merits elevation to the "barely acceptable" category. It is sort of like an intentionally crude and offensive underground comic, and I think those who appreciate that sort of thing may appreciate "A Gross Love Story."

"Message of Joy" by Arthur Byron Cover

This is a first-person narrative of an insane person living in a future Earth which suffers overpopulation and mass unemployment and is run by a sort of totalitarian government which pacifies the populace by handing out marijuana. Our narrator is rebellious, and is (or at least he believes he is) wanted by the government for starting a riot during which many people were killed. The story includes copious use of slang and colloquialisms made up by Cover, like "flippers" for feet and "fin" or "claw" for hand.

All of a sudden, while laying in bed, high, the narrator comprehends the secret of perfection and happiness, represented in the story by a brief tune: Dum-de-la-dum. He goes out on the street to try to share the secret of perfection with people. People are not interested. He hires a prostitute and murders her, then starts fights on the street until knocked unconscious. The End.

There's a glimmer of something happening here (I can imagine Malzberg doing something like this), but not enough to be worth your time. Thumbs down.

"Womb, with a View" by Steven Utley

Utley has a long list of short fiction and poetry at isfdb, though I have never read him before.

"Womb, With a View" is about a gynecologist who bent over a patient, "separated her labia and peered up her" and found himself gazing upon the star-spangled blackness of deep space! Is he insane? No, his nurse sees the same thing! Then small flying saucers start flying out of the poor woman! Alien invaders put a space warp in this poor woman's reproductive organs!

This is a gimmicky trifle of a story, but it is competent. Acceptable.

Utley is big in Germany

"Hung Like an Elephant" by Steven Utley and Joe Pumilia

We are used to reading SF stories that ask questions like: What would it be like if aliens invaded the Earth? What would happen if the Earth colonized the Moon? What might life be like on a planet with extremely high gravity or in the zero gee of space? What will government, the family, religion, the environment, war, and crime be like in the future? Well, Steven Utley seems to specialize in asking the question, "What if something impossible happened to somebody's crotch?"

The narrator of this story wakes up one morning to find that his phallus has fallen off and been replaced by the "lemon-sized" head of an elephant. For good measure, his navel has been replaced by a mouth which sings 1950s rock and roll. He discovers his penis crawling around the bed like a bewildered worm, and he puts it in a jar.

(Remember when Rael and John met Doktor Dyper and then that giant bird? Damn, that was really something.)

The narrator's girlfriend, thinking him joking, storms out, and his doctor has no idea what to do. Religious people debate whether he is a miracle, a guru, or the devil, and a freak show tries to hire him. Our hero decides that he is just the latest of the jokes God has been playing on the human race, like the sinking of the Titanic or the Battle of Little Big Horn, events impossible which insist on happening anyway.

Too long and disorganized, this one slips below the "acceptable" criteria to earn a marginal negative rating.

"Hung Like an Elephant" was co-written with Joseph Pumilia. A quick glance at his isfdb page suggests Pumilia has mostly written "weird" stuff, by which I mean Lovecraftian horror, Robert Howard-style fantasy, and erotic horror.

Interestingly, both "Hung Like an Elephant" and "Womb, with a View" were translated into German; they never appeared in English a second time.

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Alternities is shaping up to be a quite odd and quite poor anthology. But we still have five stories to go, including stories by perhaps the biggest name authors in Alternities. Maybe in our next episode, when we talk about those five pieces, we'll find reason to revise our opinion of this unusual project of David Gerrold's.

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