Suspense from F Brown, H Ellison, B Pronzini, R Silverberg & R Bloch

This weekend I was looking at the books at a church sale and came upon 2001's A Century of Great Suspense Stories.  There were four stories in there by writers who are associated with SF and about whom I am interested, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, Anthony Boucher and Fredric Brown, so I thought I'd track the stories down at the internet archive back home and see how great they really were.  Back at MPorcius Fiction Log's Mid-Atlantic HQ, I realized I'd already read Bloch's "Life in Our Time" and Boucher's "The Girl Who Married a Monster," leaving me with only Ellison's "Killing Bernstein" and Brown's "The Wench is Dead."  I didn't think two stories was really enough for a blog post, so I started hunting around the internet archive and soon discovered Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense, a 1985 edition of 1981's The Arbor House Treasury of Mystery and Suspense, edited by Bill Pronzini, Barry N. Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg, and 1993's Blood Threat and Fears (oy, with the puns) edited by Cynthia Manson, the subtitle of which is Thirty-Three Great Tales of Psychological Suspense.  The Arbor House volume includes stories I've already read by Malzberg ("Agony Column") and Mickey Spillane ("I'll Die Tomorrow" AKA "Tomorrow I Die") but also stories new to me by Pronzini ("A Craving for Originality") and Robert Silverberg ("Many Mansions"), while the Manson book had one by Bloch ("See How They Run"), bringing us to five--count them, five--allegedly great suspense (and/or mystery?) stories.

"The Wench is Dead" by Fredric Brown (1953)

This one debuted in Manhunt, and in 1961 would reappear in Bloodhound, a British magazine that reprinted stories from Manhunt.  Brown expanded "The Wench is Dead" and it appeared as a novel with the same title in 1955.  I'm reading the 1953 Manhunt version.

A few months ago our narrator, Howie, who has a BA in Sociology, was sitting at a desk in his father's Chicago investment firm wearing a white shirt and a tie.  But then he became a drifter and today he's in L.A. washing dishes (TIL that slang for a dishwasher is "pearl-diver") and getting drunk every day.  And it gets better--he has also charmed a whore, Billie the Kid, who wears her "sleek" black hair in a "page-boy bob" and has breasts the "size and shape of half-grapefruits" so he can bang her for free!  He might even be in love with her!

Uh oh, things just got worse!  The overweight heroin-addicted whore upstairs was just murdered!  Who cares, you ask?  Well, Howie and Billie care!  Howie was the last person to see her before she got shivved, Billie having sent Howie upstairs to ask the lady of the night with all the tracks on her arms if she could spare some booze!  The milkman saw Howie go into the heroin-addict's apartment and he told the fuzz, making Howie suspect Number 1!  And Howie can't just tell the cops the truth because while Howie was at work Billie had to talk to the boys in blue and she lied to them about her and Howie's whereabouts at the time of the murder!

Howie goes on the lam with the idea that he will make his way back to Chicago and resume the life of a respectable office worker from a prominent family who only drinks socially.  A series of coincidences and chance occurrences ensue that end up with Howie figuring out who the murderer is and at the same time getting himself even deeper in trouble.  Finally we have a twist ending that gives us every reason to believe Howie is never going to return to responsible middle-class life, that he has found a way to live like a drunken bum the rest of his days, and all he has to do is abandon all sense of decency, all his inhibitions, any reluctance to commit the most heinous of sins!

This is a good, fun story about underworld scum whose lives revolve around drugs, booze, prostitution and petty crime, and the risk and opportunities that arise when by chance they get mixed up with serious big time criminals.  Is it a horror story about the dangers of hitting the sauce and associating with human trash, or a wish fulfillment fantasy for people sick of living within the straitjacket of bourgeois norms?  Brown's writing is economical, smooth, and fast-paced, but still atmospheric and full of psychological insight.  Thumbs up for "The Wench is Dead."

"Killing Bernstein" by Harlan Ellison (1976)

The last time we talked about Ellison I was explaining the many ways that his cover story for the November 1980 issue of F&SF was terrible.  But I'm not an Ellison hater on a jihad against this successful son of Ohio and his horde of worshipful fanboys--I always start these stories hoping I will like them, and maybe I'll like this June 1976 cover story for the first issue of the short-lived magazine Mystery Monthly, which I am reading in a scan of the 1978 collection Strange Wine, which has a great cover by the Dillons perhaps meant to entice fans of Lord of the Rings.  (Is there a story about an elf maiden in this collection?)

"Killing Bernstein" is OK, kind of slight.  The narrator is a big executive at a big toy company, and Ellison indulges in his love of lists and his love of famous names, listing off all the big toy company names, nine of them.  He also has a riff on Jaws, a theory of why a movie about sharks might be so successful at scaring people.

The narrator is having an affair with a beautiful woman executive, last name Bernstein, but her behavior towards him is erratic.  One night she'll have sex with him and say she loves him, then the next day she'll be cold, or even, at the big meeting, shoot down all his ideas for new toys, basing her blackball on the results of her test research.  (This meeting is the central scene of the story, and the longest, and, in the intro to "Killing Bernstein" in Strange Wine, Ellison claims the toys and the reasons they were rejected are all based on toys proposed and abandoned in real life.)  The narrator comes to think Bernstein is out to destroy his career (he compares her to a shark--this is where the Spielberg movie comes in.)  So he kills her in her apartment, but the next day she is back at work.  Is he going insane?  Did he just knock her out so that she could recover and return to the office to play mind games with him?  He kills her again, but she reappears at the office again!

Eventually the narrator figures out what is going on.  Bernstein has multiple clones, and different ones come into the office at different times.  One of the clones fell in love with him, but the others didn't, which explains why the narrator has been treated erratically.  Broken hearted, in a daze, the narrator abandons his career and stays in the research facility where the clones are hiding out, hoping one of them will fall in love with him like that one he murdered.

Acceptable.  One of the problems of the story is that the ending sort of requires you to think the narrator was really in love with Bernstein, but you get the impression throughout the story that he killed Bernstein not out of passion over his rejected love but because she was threatening his career; it is like Ellison wanted this story to not only be a tale of rage over rejection or unrequited love, but also an attack on middle-class money-grubbing careerists.  I also have to wonder if that whole Jaws-related passage about our racial memory going back to the time our ancestors were aquatic animals adds something worthwhile to the story or just pads the word count.  In an interview in the December 1981 issue of Twilight Zone magazine, Ellison seems to be suggesting he doesn't revise his work, that as a "professional" he can produce copy on a first go that is salable (or as he puts it, "not just readable...but...a hell of a story") but maybe "Killing Bernstein" would have benefited from some polishing so its disparate ideas--clones, selling toys, ancestral memories of sharks, rejection by a woman, and competition between executives--were more united into a coherent whole. 

"A Craving for Originality" by Bill Pronzini (1979)

The intro to this story in Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense warns us it is a satire about a hack writer.  Can a satire be suspenseful?  What is it with this false advertising?

Charlie Hackman churns out a dozen or so derivative and imitative novels every year, riding the coattails of trends and fads, making enough money to pay the mortgage on his suburban house and support his obese wife who doesn't like to have sex as well as his three pack a day cigarette habit.  After doing this for fifteen years, on his 40th birthday, he suddenly decides he is dissatisfied with his unoriginal writing and his unoriginal life, and wracks his brain trying to think of something original to write, and when this fails, something original to do.  This part of Pronzini's story is a little annoying, because it is so repetitive--a short paragraph describing Charlie's hopefully original idea, followed by a one-word rejection of it as "hackneyed" or "trite" or whatever, again and again.  The ideas are supposed to be funny, but they are not.

Hackman finally comes up with an original idea while in Manhattan and puts it into action, and Pronzini's story is entertaining for a page or two.  Charlie gets a hatchet and bursts into a bookstore and chops up his many pseudonymously written paperbacks, crying out stuff like "I'm doing hack work!"  Then he runs around town, pursued by a crowd and a cop, to be run over by an automobile, ending the story on another pun on "hack," the car that ends his sad suburban life being a taxi cab.

This story is neither suspenseful nor mysterious, and it is not great, either, but seeing as the chase in my old stomping grounds of Midtown Manhattan made me smile, I'll judge it acceptable.

"Craving for Originality" debuted in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and would be included in Graveyard Plots: The Best Short Stories of Bill Pronzini.

"Many Mansions" by Robert Silverberg (1973)

"Many Mansions" first appeared in the third of Terry Carr's Universe anthologies, and has since reappeared in many Silverberg collections and several anthologies.

"Many Mansions" is a randy time travel joke story--I thought this book was called Great Tales of Mystery and Suspense, not Black Humor Cavalcade or Broken Marriages and Broken Minds.  Good grief.

This thing is like 24 pages and manifests itself as like sixty or seventy paragraphs with double spaces between them; each para represents the thoughts and/or narrates the actions of one of the three characters.  We've got Ted, who is sick of his wife, Alice, and day dreams of her getting killed in an accident so he can bang other chicks; when he despairs because that is unlikely, he daydreams of committing suicide.  We've got Alice, who dreams of Ted keeling over.  And we've got Martin, Ted's grandfather, who is over 80 and has sex fantasies about Alice; he gets so excited thinking about her and telephoning her so he can breathe heavily at her over the line that a medical robot has to administer drugs lest he have a heart attack.

This is the future, 2006, when the government controls the weather and Alice's cooking consists of pressing keys on a console.  (The government manages to screw up the weather and Alice still manages to screw up dinner sometimes--this is a joke story, after all.)  Time machines have been developed, and all three of our unsavory characters day dream of using a time machine to have sex with and/or murder one or both of the other two characters, and some of them even, I think, put their ideas into practice--I think the alleged mystery and alleged suspense of this allegedly great story have to do with whether individual little paragraphs are "reality" in this or that alternate time stream or just day dreams.  The little paragraphs get a little repetitive as we see alternate outcomes of the characters' little expeditions to the past.

"Many Mansions" isn't funny, and the story generates no human feeling not only because it is ridiculous but also since it portrays multiple realities, so nobody's death or love or fear or regret feels real--infinite possibilities means nothing matters.  I'm finding this story particularly disappointing because the whole point of today's exercise is to read suspense stories; if I wanted a sex-oriented comedy I would just read Henjo--Hen na Joshi Kousei Amaguri Senko again.  If Malzberg and Pronzini wanted to throw money at their buddy Silverbob I expect they could have found a more suspenseful story in his vast oeuvre than this.

Thumbs down!  

"See How They Run" by Robert Bloch (1973)

This story from the author of Psycho comes to us in the form of a journal that a comedy writer for TV is keeping at the urging of his shrink.  (More Hollywood, more shrinks.  Somehow, we read a lot of stories about Hollywood and psychiatrists/psychoanalysts here at MPorcius Fiction Log.)  Via the diary entries we learn about the writer's life--his father entertained his pals by telling them stuff the narrator as a child said, his mother had him drinking formula from a bottle for a peculiarly long time and was otherwise abusive, there was an episode in which as a kid the narrator killed a mouse with a kitchen knife, he has lost his TV writing job because he was giving the TV star material that was not family-friendly enough, his wife has become a successful singing star, and now he is hitting the sauce pretty hard--and the shrink's diagnosis of his neuroses and uncovering of the subconscious reasons for his various career decisions.  The [unreliable] narrator thinks psychology is a scam, but the text bears out the doctor's diagnosis.  The shock ending is that the narrator has a "hebephrenic schizoid" episode, in which he "revert[s] to childhood or infant behavior levels" and the final journal entry is written in the spelling and grammar of a child.  This child-like passage, somewhat obliquely, indicates that the narrator murdered his wife in much the same way he killed that mouse long ago.   

Rather weak...maybe barely acceptable.

"See How They Run" first appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and would resurface in Bloch collections and an Alfred Hitchcock anthology.

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So, of our five stories, only one, Fredric Brown's, could conceivably be considered "great," and it is the only one that is truly suspenseful.  The Ellison and Pronzini stories have endings that are surprising, but the surprise was not preceded by the kind of curiosity and uncertainty and anxiety that I think constitutes suspense.  The Silverberg story instilled apathy (and annoyance) in this reader, and the Bloch story wasn't much more engaging (though it was considerably less annoying than the Silverberg.)

Even though today's best story was the most realistic and least speculative, the one that relies least on futuristic technology, abnormal psychology, or absurdist satire, expect the next batch of blog posts here at MPorcius Fiction Log to inhabit our customary milieu of the supernatural and the spacefaring future.

Weird Tales, Jan 1939: Robert Bloch, Edmond Hamilton and Manly Wade Wellman

One of our long term projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log is reading at least one story from each 1930s issue of Weird Tales, and as we speak we are actually in the final phases of this operation!  Having ticked off the list every issue from January 1930 to December 1938, only 1939 remains to be picked over!  Below find links to lists of stories read for each completed year that in turn provide links to my blog posts about each of the individual stories.

 1930   1931  1932  1933   1934   1935   1936   1937  1938

Today the January 1939 issue of the unique magazine comes under our gaze.  We've actually already read an original story from it, "Medusa's Coil" by H. P. Lovecraft and Zealia Bishop, as well as the reprint it contains, Clark Ashton Smith's 1931 "A Rendezvous in Averoigne."  But there are still three stories in this issue of interest to us, tales by people we like that we haven't read yet, so let's devote today to adding them to the list of Weird Tales stories we have experienced.

"Waxworks" by Robert Bloch

This story is graced by an illustration by Virgil Finlay of a subject essayed by artists throughout the centuries, Salome with the head of John the Baptist on a platter, and yet another artistic interpretation of this subject lies at the center of Bloch's story.

Paris, France.  A young man from the provinces, the son of a butcher, lives in a garret.  His parents think he is at university, but he never attends classes, he's just a self-absorbed, self-pitying slacker who thinks himself a poet.  One foggy night he discovers a small out of the way wax museum full of wax sculptures of murderers and other criminals.  One statue represents Salome with the head of her famous victim on a platter, and the romantic young man finds himself fascinated by this sculpture--in fact, he falls in love with it!  He comes back again and again to the little museum to stare for hours at red-headed Salome, unable to help himself, even though he senses an evil emanation from the figure.  Like a woman who teases and toys, he both loves and hates the wax Salome. 

The sculptor of the bewitching figure, an ugly little man, introduces himself to the poet and relates the weird story of how he came to model his Salome after his beautiful young wife after she was convicted of murder and executed by guillotine!  An old man, a colonel and friend of the family, comes to Paris looking for the poet, whose family has realized he is not doing anything productive in the big city and want him to come home.  The colonel also feels the alluring power of the Salome statue, and conducts a little investigation into its sculptor, a man who left the medical profession under mysterious circumstances and who perhaps wasn't telling the whole truth when he talked to the poet--the colonel thinks the sculptor is responsible for a string of diabolical crimes!

Who will live and who will die when the colonel tries to enlist the poet in an effort to liberate them from the power of the wax Salome and end the career of the ugly little doctor turned artist?  

This is a pretty good story from Bloch, whose work is hit or miss; one thing it has going for it is the fact that, after a few sarcastic jibes about the poet's pretensions to being a sensitive artist, Bloch takes the material seriously, so the text is blessedly free from the lame jokes and overwrought social commentary that mars much of Bloch's output.  And of course I am a sucker for stories about guys being beguiled by women and making stupid decisions because they are in love or just horny.  Thumbs up for "Waxworks."

"Waxworks" has reappeared in Bloch collections as well as anthologies in English, German and Italian. 

  

"Bride of the Lightning" by Edmond Hamilton

Here we have an Edmond Hamilton story which, if isfdb is to be believed, has never been reprinted.

Sheila Crail is a slim black-haired beauty who lives with her uncle in rural Wisconsin.  All her young life she has loved thunder and lightning, and when there is a storm she runs up Lightning Hill to dance amid the bolts that habitually strike it.  She has even come to believe that a creature of electricity that she calls The Lord of Lightning comes to dance with her during these storms.  This Lord is a jealous one, and two young men who courted Sheila have both died from lightning strikes!  Her uncle says this is just a coincidence, but the farmhand who manages the farm has himself seen the Lord of Lightning dancing with Sheila and believes.

The main character of our story is a young banker who comes to stay with Sheila's uncle to assisting with sorting out the finances of the estate.  The banker can't help but fall in love with Sheila, even though he has been told about the Lord of Lightning and the fate of Sheila's prior suitors, even though he himself saw Sheila dancing with the Lord of Lightning--he is sure that was just some odd ball-lightning phenomena or something.

Sheila finds herself falling for the banker, and there is talk of marrying.  But then a storm comes along, and Sheila is certain the Lord of Lightning is going to kill the banker and that the only thing she can do to save him is to give herself to the Lord and thus dampen those seven gigajoules of jealousy!

This is a decent weird story with a tragic ending.  Sheila, blasted by lightning and turned into an electrical being herself, is considered dead by the authorities, though no trace of her body is ever found.  And now the banker goes outside every time there is an electrical storm, stands amid the falling lightning bolts, talking to them!    

"These Doth the Lord Hate" by Manly Wade Wellman (as by Gans T. Field) 

This brief piece was reprinted in a 1951 issue of Weird Tales, as well as in a 1987 issue of the magazine The Horror Show, in addition to the expected Wellman collections.  In both its Weird Tales appearances it is printed under a pen name, Gans T. Field, a pseudonym used by Wellman on a number of occasions.  

"These Doth the Lord Hate" is an odd literary experiment.  Wellman takes a short section from a real book about witchcraft and demons, the 1608 Compendium Maleficarum, an anecdote about a French peasant who accused his wife and daughter of sorcery and handed them over to the authorities, and adds to it a wealth of cinematic and psychological detail.  Wellman quotes an English translation of the original Latin text in brief italicized snippets, and between these quotes we find Wellman's own relatively lengthy extrapolations and speculations. 

"These Doth the Lord Hate" works, being sort of interesting and successfully conjuring up images and emotions.  Thumbs up, then.

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And so we put behind us another milestone in our sacred journey through the 1930s run of Farnsworth Wright's magazine of the bizarre and unusual by reading these three pretty entertaining stories.  Hopefully the road will be this smooth throughout the rest of 1939.  

F&SF, July 1957: R F Young, P Anderson, and A Davidson

In our last episode we read a story by Richard Matheson from the July 1957 issue of F&SF, and I noticed some other stories in the issue that interested me, so let's check them out.

"Your Ghost Will Walk..." by Robert F. Young 

This is a satire of suburban Americans who like TV and automobiles, as if we needed another of these.  We often see SF in which space aliens serve as a foil for us humans, the aliens being more peaceful than humans or more in tune with nature or whatever; this story is about how humans (at least middle-class suburbanites) are crass and don't understand love and don't understand poetry, and these deficiencies are thrown into high relief by the presence of robots who love poetry and each other!

It is the early 21st century.  This guy Wade writes advertising jingles for cigarette and automobile manufacturers.  With the money his jingles have earned him he has acquired for himself and his family a big suburban home, lots of TVs and two 2025 Cadillacs.  His domestic staff consists of two robots who have fallen in love with each other; these robots are well-versed in poetry, and recite poems to each other while they do their jobs, like cooking, and get so distracted that they screw up their work, burning the food, for example.  Wade also has a robot to maintain his and the wife's cars.  Whereas the maid and butler robots are converted poetry bots bought on the cheap, the mechanic bot is custom built to love cars.

The maid and butler run away and Wade jumps in one of the Caddies to find them, bringing the mechanic robot with him.  In the course of the search, Wade's cigarette case scratches the paint on the car, and so the mechanic robot murders him with a wrench.  (This is a pretty mean-spirited satire.)  Meanwhile the two poetry robots, it is implied, walk onto a highway and get destroyed by the traffic.

I hate these satires that are just an exercise in venting rage and expressing contempt.  The point of "Your Ghost Will Walk..." isn't to convince the reader that watching TV and driving a car is bad, the author just assumes the reader already thinks that and expects him to enjoy seeing a TV watcher and car driver get murdered.  "Your Ghost Will Walk..." is a wish fulfillment fantasy that caters to the bloodlust of urban sophisticates who despise (or is it envy?) suburban families.   

Stinks.  

According to isfdb, "Your Ghost Will Walk..." is the second of two stories about poetic robots.  Maybe the earlier one is also about this same maid and butler.  "Your Ghost Will Walk..." would be reprinted in The Worlds of Robert F. Young.

For more MPorcius assessments of Robert F. Young stories, check out these links:

"The Ogress"
"Thirty Days Had September"
"The Dandelion Girl"
"Ape's Eye View" 
"Starscape with Frieze of Dreams"

"Jungle Doctor"

"When Time Was New"

"Life Cycle" by Poul Anderson

Here we have a relatively rare Anderson story--if isfdb is to be believed, "Life Cycle" has never been reprinted in an Anderson collection.  Robert Silverberg did include "Life Cycle" in his 1968 anthology Earthmen and Strangers, and within that volume both Silverberg and Anderson provide half-page long intros to the story.  Silverberg in his intro stresses Anderson's science credentials and tells us this story is going to be about reproduction.  Anderson's intro, which is headed "AUTHOR'S NOTE," is a sort of apology for and explanation of the inaccurate picture of Mercury painted in "Life Cycle"--in 1957 astronomers thought Mercury had a permanently hot day side and a permanently cold dark side, but by 1968 this had been disproven.  Anderson is one of those guys who really thinks science fiction should be teaching people science.

Like Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson fights racism and celebrates diversity by populating his stories with sympathetic and admirable characters who are non-Anglo, non-white and non-human.  The crew of space ship Explorer, currently stuck on the surface in Mercury's twilight zone, consists of a Basque biologist, a Mohawk engineer and a Martian bird-man mineralogist who came here to trade with the natives.  Why are they stuck?  The local Mercurians, silicon-based life forms that look like insects and share a hive-mind, have deployed armed guards to keep the outworlders from accessing their supply shed a short walk away for Explorer; in the shed is their food and the fuel for their ship.  The three men will starve if they can't lift the embargo, which the previously friendly natives have instituted at the behest of their gods, who have decreed that all aliens die.  The three spacemen only have one pistol between them, so they can't fight the entire Mercurian community of thousands, even though these characters are armed with nothing more advanced than a spear.

The gods of these nightsider Mercurians are the inhabitants of Mercury's dayside, whom the explorers have not yet met or even seen.  The explorers seek to learn more about these gods in hopes they can persuade them to rescind the death order.  The space men acquire the exoskeletons of dead nightsiders--they find them in a big pile of empty exoskeletons just beyond the twilight zone, a short distance into the hellishly hot dayside region.  The nightsiders explain that when they get old, nightsiders walk to the dayside and are killed by the sun's rays.

While the Martian keeps an eye on the ship, the humans don the exoskeletons as a disguise and attend a religious service at which the daysiders appear.  It turns out that the nightsiders are female and the daysiders, who look like lizards, are the males, and this ceremony is a mating ritual/one-night stand where the males impregnate the females.  Even more amazing, the human scientists figure out that the males are former females, those who went to the dayside expecting death--the Mercurians are like oysters, changing sex in mid life!  The females are an egg-laying larval form who, under the influence of the fierce sunlight of dayside, shed their exoskeletons and emerge as males who can fertilize females through sexual intercourse.  The males (who lose their memories in the metamorphosis and thus have no fellow feeling for the females they once were) have set themselves up as gods and conduct an unfair trading partnership with the females, and they want the explorers dead because the offworlders might act as trade competition or even expose the truth to the females.  The males' fears come true when the spacemen explain what is going on to the females--the civilization of Mercury, like so many civilizations in SF stories, is about to undergo a paradigm shift.

The last paragraph of the story is a sort of social commentary sting or maybe just a sexist joke--the Mohawk feels a little guilty that he and his comrades may have triggered the rise of a matriarchy here on Mercury like that which reigns in the United States.

"Life Cycle" is pretty good example of the traditional libertarian science fiction story that promotes science and trade, romanticizes the scientist, the engineer and the merchant, tells you religion is an obstacle and a scam, and tries to teach you biology and astronomy via little lectures.  I like it.    

"Summerland" by Avram Davidson

I don't always like Davidson's work, but this one is well-written so I'm giving "Summerland" a thumbs up.  

Davidson's plot is quite simple.  The narrator's elderly mother becomes friends with a middle-aged couple who are into new age occult fads, like seances.  The husband of the couple, who owns lots of rental properties, falls and dies, and the wife, accompanied by the narrator's mother and sometimes the narrator, goes to many mediums in hopes of contacting her husband via a seance.  Finally, one of the seances gets in touch with the dead husband, and everyone gets evidence that the man is burning in Hell because he gave all his tenants a raw deal, neglecting his properties to the point they were unsafe.

Among the virtues of "Summerland" is its length--a mere four pages, so there is no fat, nothing that will bore the reader or try his patience.  Most importantly, Davidson succeeds in painting believable characters and relationships, and he also structures the story in such a way that it achieves some clever and entertaining effects, like foreshadowing as well as some little surprises.  This is a well-crafted thing.

Quite good.  "Summerland" was reprinted in the Davidson collection Or All the Seas with Oysters and multiple anthologies for which Martin H. Greenberg is partly credited.  One of those is Hollywood Ghosts, but "Summerland" isn't really about ghosts and has nothing to do with show biz--the California angle is the West Coast culture of vegetarianism, hypochondria, beatniks and proto-hippies, of interest in Eastern philosophy and the occult and the way these counter-culture values seep into the precincts of bourgeois business people and their wives.

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The Anderson is solid traditional science fiction, and while the Young story is annoying, it, like the admirable Davidson story, offers some insight into the intellectual and cultural currents of the late 1950s in America.  This is a good issue of F&SF, well worth investigating.

Richard Matheson: "Mantage," "One for the Books" and "The Holiday Man"

After spending some quality time in the year 1980 with Barry Malzberg, Felix Gotschalk and Harlan Ellison, let's go back...back...back...to the 1950s and hang out with the guy who wrote Steven Spielberg's best movie as well as Vincent Price's best movie, Richard Matheson.  On April 11 we started reading Matheson's 1961 oft-reprinted collection Shock!; let's read three more stories from that volume today (we're reading the original versions of these stories via the sorcery of the internet archive, world's greatest website.)

"Mantage" (1959)

"Mantage" debuted in Science Fiction Showcase, a hardcover anthology edited by Mary Kornbluth.  Fred Pohl got her the job editing the anthology after her husband Cyril died of a heart attack in 1958; as Pohl tells it, Kornbluth's heart was worn out during his World War II service and the man ignored doctor's orders to stop smoking, drinking, and eating salty food.  As an active SF fan, Mary Kornbluth was qualified to edit an anthology, and Science Fiction Showcase went through multiple editions, but for some reason she didn't go on to edit any more.  (I got all this info from three autobiographical posts at Pohl's blog which focus on his relationship with the Kornbluths, Cyril Kornbluth's death and cremation, and the genesis of Science Fiction Showcase.  (Links: One Two Three.)  Pohl sort of portrays himself as a hero in these memoirs, putting himself out to save the dysfunctional Kornbluths from themselves, and there is some evidence Mary Kornbluth found this kind of thing annoying.  (Link to some evidence.)) 

Enough with the SF gossip.  "Mantage" is what isfdb calls a novelette, and is like 24 pages in Science Fiction Showcase, a scan of which I am reading.  I sighed when I realized the story was about Hollywood; I'm kind of sick of Los Angeles stories.  (I am always glad when a story is about New York.)

"Mantage" is a total bore, even though it does take place partly in Manhattan.  A writer guy sees a movie about a writer guy, and laments that real life isn't like a motion picture, that you can't rush through the ten years of hard work it takes to become a successful writer in a 30-second montage of brief shots of clocks, cigarette butts, and a guy at a typewriter, but have to live every boring or arduous second.  That night, looking in the mirror, he wishes life was more like the movies.  

We kind of know what is going to happen, but, regardless, Matheson inflicts on us a long tedious mainstream narrative of the writer achieving literary success and getting married and taking a ten-week trip to La La Land to write a screenplay based on his novel where he gets involved in a love triangle with a sexy secretary and a sexy actress and thus jeopardizes his marriage but then his wife takes him back blah, blah, blah.  The gimmick that is supposed to make this cliched goop tolerable is that we read it in a series of brief scenes and--dun dun dun--the writer is also experiencing this stuff, his own life, as a series of brief scenes!  He can only remember the significant high points, not the quiet days of hard work, so it feels like his life is passing by in an hour and a half!  He can't recall swearing, he can't recall having sex--his memories of intimate moments with a woman fade to black before she disrobes, you know, just like in a Hollywood movie!  Suddenly his kids are grown without him having witnessed their formative years, suddenly his wife is old without his having appreciated their time together, suddenly he is dying--and he sees the words "THE END" floating before him!

The gimmick is dumb, the plot is sleep-inducing, there is no tension or surprise, and the story is three or four times as long as it need be.  Thumbs down! 

Besides in Matheson collections, after its debut "Mantage" would show up in a few anthologies, including Peter Haining's The Hollywood Nightmare.    

The Hollywood Nightmare has an introduction by fan favorite Christopher Lee

"One for the Books" (1955)

This is an OK story, maybe too long at 14 pages.  An uneducated 59-year-old man works at a university as a janitor.  One morning, he wakes up speaking French.  He can barely control his own speech, French phrases just come right out, almost of their own accord.

Yesterday he worked in the French department, and today his work brings him to other departments, and soon he has an encyclopedic knowledge of many subjects, and will reel off facts and figures and quotes from books autonomically, in response to questions.  He can't manipulate or even really understand this knowledge, he is like a machine, regurgitating words in a monotone when prompted by outside stimuli.

Matheson provides readers many scenes in which the janitor's wife and friends respond with alarm to stuff the janitor says, and we also get many examples of the kind of trivia the janitor now "knows."  The middle of the story thus feels repetitive.  In the final third of the story, assembled college professors rapid fire many questions at the janitor, testing his knowledge, but never think to figure out how this happened to the guy, 

But then we find out how.  An alien space craft appears and sucks the information right out of the janitor's brain, leaving him a blank slate without memory, a man unable to talk or recognize his own name.  We get a superfluous denouement that undermines the shock ending of the tale in which we learn that a year or so later he has learned to speak again.

I would have preferred a story in which a working-class man suddenly has access to vast knowledge and uses this unique resource to become president or a crime boss or a messianic figure or whatever, and faces moral dilemmas and/or undergoes a radical change in values and personality or something--you know, a story in which a character makes decisions and changes, a story which speculates about life and society.  I guess that would be a real science fiction story or a mainstream story--here we just have a horror story in which a guy doesn't act but is merely acted upon by inexplicable forces and suffers.  Oh, well.

We're judging "One for the Books" merely acceptable.  After its initial appearance in Galaxy, "One for the Books" would see print again in several Matheson collections and a few anthologies, including Untravelled Worlds, which looks like a text book inflicted upon British schoolkids.  

"The Holiday Man" (1957)

"The Holiday Man" debuted in the same issue of F&SF which contains one of the better of Chad Oliver's stories about how much better a primitive life is than a modern one, "The Wind Blows Free," as well as stories by Poul Anderson and Avram Davidson we should check out sometime.  It has been reprinted in anthologies like Robert Potter's Tales of Mystery and the Unknown and a book of stories from F&SF, and of course a pile of Matheson collections.

A man is very reluctant to go to work, but his callous wife tells him he must go, nobody else can do his job.  He walks to the station, rides the train to the city, wastes time in a bar not drinking his beer, then sneaks into his office late.  He lays down on a couch and writhes and screams for hours.  Then he gets up, writes notes on a sheet of paper, delivers the paper to his boss.  It seems that this dude goes into some kind of trance and can see everyone who will die the next day or something like that, that he watches them as they expire, be it peacefully in bed or horribly in a fire.  He works for a newspaper and they print his predictions.  It is sort of implied that this is prediction is done only for holidays, or maybe the prediction for holidays is particularly interesting to the public.

This story felt a little oblique when I read it, but I own a withdrawn library copy of Richard Matheson: Collected Stories Volume Two and took a gander at the little afterword to the story therein, to find Matheson confirming that newspapers, in the Fifties at least (I was born in 1971), would regularly predict how many people would die on each holiday, something I don't know that I have ever heard of before.

"The Holiday Man" is well-written, economical, engaging, and successful in setting a mood, and of course I like the theme of being in a difficult marriage and having to commute to an office job you find humiliating or debilitating (you know, like in the unacknowledged classic masterpiece The Kinks Present a Soap Opera), so thumbs up.

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Well, we've got a balanced mix here, one long and tedious story, one acceptable story, and one short and effective story.  So a score for today of zero.  The last installment had two pluses and two minuses, so also a zero.  So we are over halfway through Shock! and it's a wash; well, with six stories to go, Matheson has a chance to achieve liftoff or sink into the abyss.

We'll spend our next episode in the 1950s, so stay tuned if that is your thing.

Barry N. Malzberg & friends: "The Last One Left," "Getting Back" and "They Took it All Away"

The last exciting episode of MPorcius Fiction Log was a roller coaster ride through three stories by Felix C. Gotschalk, all published in 1980.  While looking at those 1980 magazines we spotted two uncollected Barry Malzberg stories, and today we'll read them, with a third 1980 collaboration between the Sage of Teaneck and creator of the Nameless Detective to round out the blog post.

"The Last One Left" (with Bill Pronzini)

Let's start with the Pronzini collab, "The Last One Left," which first appeared in an issue of F&SF that includes an installment of Robert Silverberg's Lord Valentine's Castle, the book version of which I read some years ago and found tedious.  Barry and Bill included the story in their Bug-Eyed Monsters anthology and in their collection On Account of Darkness, so I guess they are proud of it.

Unfortunately, "The Last One Left" is a waste of time.  Maybe it is supposed to be a "meta" "recursive" spoof of traditional SF ideas, but it just comes off as a boring rehearsal of those ideas.

The main character of "The Last One Left," a long time patient of a psychoanalyst, has been noticing that the people of New York City are being replaced by tentacled aliens whose eyes sit atop long stalks.  Nobody else seems to notice this.  Could it be that the man is just insane?  Or is he the only man who can see through the aliens' disguises, and for some perhaps related reason the last man to be swapped for an alien?  The man theorizes that the aliens have to leave their planet for some reason, maybe pollution or overpopulation, and are switching places with humans and making the Earthpeople slave in the mines or factories on their increasingly uncomfortable home world.  

At the end of the story we discover the truth; I guess it counts as a twist ending that the guy is more or less correct that aliens are taking over the Earth by switching places with humans.  This is not an adventure story, so we don't see what the man discovers on the alien world; instead we get a little insight into what the aliens think of Earth--"too much sunlight and too much air."  To which I say, love it or leave it, alien bastards!

Malzberg has done this kind of thing elsewhere and made it funny, but this time out the story just seems to be going through the motions. 

"Getting Back" (with Jeffrey W. Carpenter)

Carpenter, we learn in the editor's four-line intro to this five-page story, is a freshman in college.  He has no other credits at isfdb.

This story seems to be based on the fact that some veterans who return to civilian life miss the camaraderie and sense of purpose they had in military life, and the idea that returning service members and people who have been released from prison have trouble "reacclimating" to ordinary life.  Perhaps also the common trope in fiction of the crazed Vietnam vet. 

After three years on a space station, a man returns to the Earth--as part of the reacclimatization program, he will stay with a married couple; the husband has reacclimatizing astronauts as one of his work duties.  Suggesting how much being an astronaut changes you, how life in orbit is worlds apart from life on the Earth, astronauts take a "space name" during their period of service beyond the atmosphere, and while they are expected to go by their original birth names when they return, some chose not to.

The astronaut is horrified by how people on the streets, including his cab driver, act: aggressive, angry, selfish; this is a marked contrast to how he and his comrades behaved up in space, where relationships were characterized by "brotherhood" and "kindness."  The married couple are no better; the husband just wants to watch violent sports on TV, and he and his wife get in a physical fight minutes after the astronaut arrives.  The husband takes as given that life on Earth is terrible, and even finds the idea of life on the space station, where everybody allegedly is "like one big happy family" of men who "all took care of one another" sounds "awful."  The pressure gets to the astronaut, and after the wife has left the room, the spaceman strikes down the husband, who dies upon hitting his head on the TV.  The final stinger in the last paragraph is the suggestion that after he kills the wife the astronaut will truly be reacclimated--he'll be a violent selfish jerk, like people down here generally are.  

Heavy-handed, but somewhat amusing, social satire.  It is interesting to see that, while is so many Malzberg stories space travel drives people insane, in "Getting Back" space seems to be (as the astronaut says) "nice," a refuge from the insanity of modern life. 

"They Took It All Away"

Here's today's solo story, the story that begins on the back cover of the first issue of Amazing to be combined with Fantastic, the issue with the big photos from The Empire Strikes Back and the very sympathetic profile and interview of Harlan Ellison that we talked a little about last time. 

The Earth is suffering some sort of natural cosmic disaster or some manner of alien attack!  All over the world, including New York City where our tale is laid, people and things are disappearing; most photogenically, middle sections of skyscrapers disappear, but the levels above and below suffer no structural damage, so that the upper stories hang still in mid-air.

Our narrator is a civil servant, his job being to help statistically catalog the disappearances.  Some fifteen percent of area and thirty percent of the population of the Big Apple are gone!  Our narrator is an irresponsible fellow; instead of toiling hard in his office, and spending his free time comforting his wife, he is hanging around at the race track!  He finds horse racing fascinating, but never himself places a bet.  It is hinted that he started paying attention to the horses just when the disappearances started, three weeks ago.

From the track the narrator goes home to briefly talk to his wife, then rides a taxi, and his conversations with horseplayers, the taxi driver, and his angry drunken wife present a range of reactions to the cataclysm facing the world.  I suspect the reaction of the men to the bizarre crisis is meant to be a metaphor for how people continue living their lives even though death is inevitable, and how throughout the calamitous 20th-century people have continued living their lives despite wars, revolutions, and radical technological, economic and social change--all the men say things like "Life goes on," and "What can you do?" and they continue pursuing their hobbies and doing their jobs.  As for the wife, she hits the sauce and suspects that the people in charge of society, like her husband, are either doing nothing to solve the problem or are actually the cause of the problem, a Malzbergian indictment of the apathy and incompetence typical of government and elites, a theme we so often see when Malzberg in his fiction talks about the welfare system and the space program and other government endeavors.  

The twist ending is that the wife is, amazingly, on the right track.  The narrator suddenly remembers that he is an alien agent, sent to cripple the Earth, and hypnotized into thinking he is human so he can evade detection with ease.  Now aware of his responsibility for the cataclysm, he reverses it, and all the disappeared property and people suddenly return.  We are given reason to believe that he has undone the damage because there is nothing like horseracing in his society, and he loved it so much he feels Earth worth preserving.

The final two-sentence paragraph of the story reinforces the theme of habitual elite incompetence.  "Headquarters will be extremely angry, yes.  But this kind of thing happens to us all the time." 

Thumbs up for "They Took It All Away," which has interesting images and relationships and pursues the themes we expect to find in Malzberg's work in fun and thought-provoking ways.  What is up with the drawing of a guy in a chair, though--this story was a grand excuse to depict Manhattan skyscrapers and suspension bridges with holes in them and crowds staring aghast at this desecration of the world's greatest city!

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The best of these stories is the one Malzberg wrote all on his lonesome, but the one he wrote with the college kid has some merit, being amusing in spots and having some real human feeling with its failed marriage and bewildered innocent newly (re)birthed into a hostile world.  Sadly, the Pronzini collaboration  is just tired jokes that offer no commentary on life or the world, no emotion or humanity.  Also sadly, the weakest story is the only one that has been reprinted.  Sometimes it pays off to flip through old magazines--there are some rare gems in there!

Felix C. Gotschalk: "The Wishes of Maidens," "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" and "And Parity For All"

In our last episode we noted Barry N. Malzberg's comments in a 1980 book review about Felix C. Gotschalk's story "The Wishes of Maidens."  So today let's read that story, and two other Gotschalk tales from 1980, a year that began with a U.S. grain embargo against the U.S.S.R. in response to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and ended with the murder of John Lennon.

(Back in 2021 we read Gotschalk's 1976 story "The Day of the Big Test" and thought it was OK.)

"The Wishes of Maidens"  

It looks like "The Wishes of Maidens" was only ever printed in New Voices III: The Campbell Award Nominees, an anthology edited by George R. R. Martin.  New Voices III contains stories by the nominees for the John W. Campbell, Jr. award for the period 1973-4, one of whom was Gotschalk (the winner was P. J. Plauger, whom I don't know I have ever heard of before.)

In his intro to "The Wishes of Maidens," Martin stresses the idea that Gotschalk is a stylist, that he has a "voice singularly his own" like Jack Vance, Samuel R. Delany, Gene Wolfe, or Harlan Ellison.  I admire the styles of Vance, Delany, and Wolfe, so if Gotschalk is anything like them, I can look forward to today's stories.  (For the MPorcius take on Harlan Ellison's distinctive style, check out the last installment of this here blog.) 

If I remember correctly, "The Day of the Big Test" was set in a socialistic future in which the government handed out material goods and privileges based on its allegedly scientific assessment of an individual's value, and "The Wishes of Maidens" is set in a similar milieu.  It has been determined that cervical cancer is caused by sex with circumcised men, and so men who have not been circumcised are allotted all kinds of extra goodies...but of course they have to work for their privileges, having sex with multiple women a day in hopes of impregnating them.  Our hero is one such man, Carson C. Kapstan.

This story is long and tedious, with little plot, being an account of a day in the life of Kapstan.  Kapstan is accompanied 24/7 by a robot assistant and guide who manages Kapstan's schedule and meals and observes Kapstan as he has sex with women, telepathically offering advice based on its extensive files about the psychology of all the women involved as well as real time data on their physiology collected by its sensitive scanners.  The robot also administers drugs and employs other techniques to maximize the possibility of Kapstan impregnating the client.  For example, if the woman is unattractive, the robot can stimulate Kapstan's prostate to ensure he can perform.  

On the day in question Kapstan sees six clients, travelling from one appointment to the next in an air car.  Gottschalk describes in some detail Kaplan's appointments, and also finds time to talk about quotidian elements of life in this future, the architecture and decor and entertainment and hygiene technology and so on.  One noteworthy element is the suggestion that the people of the future, several centuries hence, will be obsessed with 20th-century culture and will watch Laurel and Hardy on TV and say stuff like "You look like Steve McQueen" or "You look like Elizabeth Taylor" and have their vehicles fashioned to look like 20th-century automobiles.  This kind of presentism makes me groan, and it is not like Gotshalk has anything interesting to say about Laurel and Hardy or Elizabeth Taylor, he just throws the names in there for no reason that I could discern.  (I love Laurel and Hardy and I like Taylor, so that is not why this irritates me.)

Of the six clients, the fourth is perhaps the most notable.  Her name is Patty Ribald (Gotschalk's  characters have comedy names) and she wants to maintain her virginity, but she has good genes and the government insists that she breed, so Kapstan rapes her, with the help of the robot, who uses a force field projector on her to quell her resistance and also uses a laser to penetrate her hymen.

Besides trying to be funny, I guess this story is supposed to be shocking, what with its goofs on religion, its rape scene, its depictions of a straight man being anally penetrated, et al.  Maybe it was shocking to some people in 1980, but to me in 2024 it is neither funny, nor shocking, nor entertaining.

Thumbs down. 

"Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon"   

"Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" was the cover story of the issue of F&SF in which it debuted.  Was Gotschalk such a big draw, or just the biggest name in an issue bereft of big names?  Our hero Barry Malzberg has a story in here, but it is co-written with a guy who has only this one credit at isfdb.  I'll have to keep that story in mind for a future Malzberg blog post.  Baird Seales in this issue writes about The Empire Strikes Back, saying he was impressed by Yoda and the tauntauns, and using the film as the occasion to praise Leigh Brackett's 1940s stories; he also figures out a way to obliquely praise Tanith Lee, which is nice.

I groaned when the editor's intro to "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" informed me the nearly 50-page long story was a "post-holocaust" piece.  What was I getting myself into?  I am sick of postapocalyptic stories.  Those happy days of reading Robert Silverberg's "The Planet of Parasites" and Fritz Leiber's "Femmequin973" seemed impossibly distant.  Why wasn't I reading Leigh Brackett or Tanith Lee, like the movie critic seemed to be hinting I should be?  But then I shook off this pessimism and soldiered on, telling myself that in the past I've enjoyed stories that seemed forbidding at first and that you can never trust blurbs and editor's intros.

The first line of "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" refers to T. S. Eliot, and amazingly enough this reference turns out to be more than the name-dropping of a show off, but wholly appropriate, a clever foreshadowing of the entire arc of the story that indicates Gotschalk takes Eliot's The Waste Land seriously.  Gotschalk's first paragraph lays some of the groundwork for the bizarre and somewhat confusing and incredible setting of "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon."  (In the middle of the story we get more of this background.)  In the late 20th century, the Soviet Union outmaneuvered the United States on the international stage and blackmailed California into providing the cause of communism 20 million slave laborers--these poor bastards were teleported to Siberia--and California was thus largely depopulated.  The Soviets also sprayed deadly virulent spores all over the San Andreas region, denying its use to Americans.  An earthquake at the San Andreas fault line opened up a canyon like a hundred feet wide at its widest and thousands of feet deep, and people have started living in this canyon in tunnels and caves dug into its sides--scaffolding bridges connect the dwellings on opposite cliffs.  For some reason the killer spores never drift down into the canyon, so people can live down there.     

The first few pages of this story were sort of hard going for me, as the chronology of when the earthquake occurred and when the Soviets sprayed the spores and when people moved into the caves never made any sense to me, and then Gotschalk hit me with one of my pet peeves--phonetic spelling used to reproduce the accent of a rural hick character--when Hiram, one of the hundred or so members of the cliff-dwelling commune, opens his mouth to say "Why, hail yass, ah do, and thet's coverin' a lotta groun'" as he is sworn in at court at a hearing to investigate the death of a poodle.  Hiram has a personal beef with a guy named Clem, and claims Clem murdered the poodle.

Court is interrupted by the daily scavenging mission.  At certain times of day, the giant toadstools on the surface don't expel spores, so it isn't quite so dangerous up there, and during these periods teams of people will climb out of the bottomless canyon to search for food and supplies on the surface, using aircraft and teleporters to get to areas beyond the fungus forest.  Clem is the main character of this section of the story, and he and a comrade fly to San Diego where they have to contend with a gang of "nut-brown Chicanos" and then a company of bandits armed with a mortar as they scramble to salvage supplies from the abandoned naval base.  California is full of such abandoned institutions and businesses, and one of Gotschalk's recurring jokes is telling us from where the cliff dwellers "liberated" this or that item.    

While Clem was in San Diego, Hiram and Dora, who initially seems to be Hiram's girlfriend, were in an oak forest a mile from the canyon, where they discovered a patch of truffles.  When Clem returns, there is a meeting to discuss how to dispose of the truffles, which can probably be traded with outsiders for things the cliff dwellers need.  We witness Hiram's hostility to Clem, and get a clue as to a source of his animus--behind Hiram's back, Dora is also sleeping with Clem.  We readers come to realize that one of the unconventional mores of the communal lifestyle of the cliff dwellers is what amounts to a prohibition on monogamy--because of an imbalance between the sexes women are expected to put their names on a "polyandry roster" and have sex with lots of guys, though some couples get special permission to have a traditional monogamous marriage.  Dora is on the polyandry roster, but Hiram, a prominent member of cliff-dweller society and irascible, insists Dora is "mah woman" and other men generally respect that. 

A more shocking revelation is that Clem really did kill that poodle, while trying to kill Hiram, but has a plausible alibi and is not convicted.  This is shocking because throughout the story Clem is portrayed as a good guy, smart and brave and so forth.    

In the middle of the story we get the history of Gotschalk's wacky future in which the United States government has collapsed and its former territory is now an anarchic system of independent regional entities at the mercy of the Soviet Union, living off solar power and food imported from Japan, Germany and the Arab states.

Scottsdale, Arizona is one of the most wealthy of these independent principalities, and Clem and Hiram are given the job of going to Scottsdale to trade the truffles with the people there, and much of the second half of the story concerns this trip.  Gotschalk does a good job of making this trade mission a tense adventure, as we wonder if Hiram and Clem will end up fighting each other, or getting into a fracas they are doomed to lose with the Scottsdale people, who have high tech weapons, contempt for the cliff dwellers, and sinister cultural practices, like capturing poor people to stock their zoos.  The earlier revelation that Clem attempted to murder Hiram gives the reader reason to believe that anything can happen, any character can get killed or commit a blunder or a terrible sin.  Again and again we readers fear loudmouth hick Hiram is going to piss off the arrogant Scottsdale toffs and get himself and Clem cheated, enslaved or just murdered.

Clem and Hiram make it back to the canyon with high tech clothing.  As it turns out, this clothing offers protection against the spores.  The cliff dwellers, wearing the clothing and using additional equipment and services purchased with the truffles, are able to destroy the Soviet fungus, plant crops on the surface, and move out of the caves.  The love triangle among Clem, Hiram and Dora is also resolved.

Despite my initial misgivings, and a sense this whole story is absurd, "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon" works as an adventure story and a human drama, and as a science fiction story full of speculations about technology and human society under strange alternate conditions.

I can moderately recommend this one, which is markedly better in style and structure than "The Wishes of Maidens."

"And Parity For All"

The November 1980 issue of Amazing includes an article by Tom Staicar that describes his interview and other interactions with Harlan Ellison at a SF convention.  Staicar makes sure to directly quote Ellison when Ellison is fulsomely complimenting Staicar’s own writing.  Ellison also brags about his popularity in France and laments that, in the same way so many don’t really understand the depths of Moby Dick, they don’t recognize the many layers of Ellison’s complex and sophisticated work.  Staicar marvels at how mean people are to Ellison, a guy who is always so nice to everybody.  We learn Ellison doesn’t drink booze and doesn't watch TV (but he knows Charlie’s Angels is bad) and reads very little SF, but likes Kate Wilhelm, Thomas Disch, Robert Silverberg and Gene Wolfe, whose Shadow of the Torturer he calls “sensational.”  

Staicar seems like a very positive guy.  This issue of Amazing also includes his glowing reviews of novels by A. E. van Vogt and David Houston and an anthology co-edited by Barry Malzberg and Bill Pronzini.    

Malzberg also has a story in this issue that I will have to get back to some day.  In a bit of unconventional marketing, the story actually begins on the back cover, under a drawing of a man in a business suit sitting in chair.  I found it amusing that while inside the issue Steven Dimeo gushes about the visuals of The Empire Strikes Back, which are full of spacecraft, aliens, monsters and violence, someone else at the magazine thought the way to catch the attention of people at the newsstand was with a picture of a guy in a suit in a chair. 

Well, we are not here to plot our next Malzberg blog post nor to examine the psychology of Tom Staicar, but to read Gotschalk's four-page story "And Parity for All," which was reprinted in a German anthology in 1985.  

"And Parity for All" is a gimmicky joke story, a total waste of time.  A kid has a model city in a glass box like a meter on a side, inhabited by robotic or holographic fighting men and their artillery, vehicles, etc.  Via a keyboard the kid plays wargames with this elaborate device, and we witness most of the story from the level of the simulated soldiers, who have developed consciousness and complain about the kid's orders and demand their rights when it looks like the kid is going to turn the machine off.  Among the anemic jokes are Gotschalk describing distances and speeds to many decimal places--the city is .9144 meters wide, for example, and the range between two aircraft is described as 45.72 simulated meters.  Another joke is a list of the types of buildings in the model city, a list five lines long.

Ugh.

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All three of these stories have elements of the absurd, and I rarely like absurd stories.  I like stories that have human feeling and a real plot with suspense and/or some kind of pay off.  The least absurd of these stories, "Among the Cliff-Dwellers of the San Andreas Canyon," actually provides a real plot with some suspense and something like human feeling, so it is by far the best.  

Am I going to read more Gotschalk?  Signs are not good, but it is not impossible.  Am I going to read more 1980 SF for our next episode?  All signs point to yes!