THE REFERENCE LIBRARY
P. Schuyler Miller
Painters who launch a new school of art may never sell a painting in their lives. Great musicians may never hear their compositions played in public. But writers — at any rate, writers of fiction — need to be published. They need an audience. And Harlan Ellison's massive series of "Dangerous Visions" anthologies is providing a very effective outlet for new, experimental stories of what had better be called "speculative fiction."
The original, 1967 "Dangerous Visions" anthology contained thirty-three new stories, two of which won Nebula awards, two "Hugo" awards (one took both), while the book itself got a special plaque as "the most significant and controversial SF book" of 1967. "Again, Dangerous Visions" (Doubleday & Co.; 760 pp.; $12.95) has forty-six original stories by forty-three authors, plus a rich store of Ellisonian comments and repartee (as much a part of an Ellison book as the stories) and some remarks by the writers. We are told that there is a third volume to come and it may be even more successful than the first two.
I don't think the book is the blockbuster that "Dangerous Visions" was. In part that is because it has to be measured against its predecessor; in greater part because the SF field has changed a lot since 1967, with experimental writing, & "relevant" themes, four-letter words, vigorous and sometimes experimental sex, now relatively common in paperbacks, if not in "family" magazines. It's a truism among, walkers-up-mountains (and I suspect among true mountaineers) that you get the most impressive views from part-way up to the peak.
I can't possibly, in the space at hand this month or over two or three months, say very much about forty-six stories — quite a few of them novelettes or novellas — not even omitting the fantasies and purely experimental stuff with no real science fiction content. What I will do is talk about the dozen or so that impressed me most. The order in which I list the stories hasn't very much to do with my order of preference: in an anthology as varied as this, there are enough different kinds of stories to make up several books with different themes. Harlan says his own favorite is Richard Lupoffs 36,000-word novella, "With the Bentlin Boomer Boys on Little Old New Alabama." This is a real tour-de-force which keeps three balls in the air at once in much the same way Isaac Asimov did in "The Gods Themselves," but more trickily. It is the story of interplanetary war between the Southern-descended white supremacists of New Alabama ("Kill-anigra once a day. Gyrene has to earn his pay."), the relatively well educated but bureaucratically constipated "papadocs" of New Haiti (who reinvent zombies to fight their wars), and the fantastic adapted S'tschai of the seaworld, N'Yu-Atlanchi (who are implanted in cobbled corpses to activate the zombies). The N'Alabama episodes are cruel satire, told in a dialect that is not as successful as the invented jargon of "Clockwork Orange" but is cumulatively telling. The N'Haiti bits are subtler, but just as telling. Only the folk of N'Yu-Attanchi are wholly sympathetic.
I think my choice is Ursula Le Guin's equally long "The Word for World is Forest"—one of her fascinating far-world constructions which create and dissect a world, an ecology, a society, and all their components. Men have been like this in Earth colonies, and they will be like this in planetary colonies, especially when they have a manifestly inferior subrace like the "creechies" at thejr disposal. It is a story of how creatures become "human" and how humans become inhuman. You'll remember it.
You'll also remember a pair of stories by the prestige author of the book, Bernard Wolfe, whose "Limbo" was an unintended dark-horse classic of years ago. (Rumor is that he wrote it as a parody of science fiction.) Only one of the pair, "The Girl with Rapid Eye Movements," is science fiction; it tells of a girl and a man, participating in a college sleep experiment, whose dreams become more and more alike until they are telepathically united. "The Bisquit Position," the second story, probes and jabs into tender places in our own intellectual circles — psychological SF, if you like, but as "straight" a story as you'd find anywhere. They are also probably, the best writing in the book. Read them and see what mainline-with-content means.
Lee Hoffman's "Soundless Evening" and Piers Anthony's "In the Barn" should be read together and are printed together. They are cruel satires in the manner of Swift and his Yahoos. In the Hoffman future, surplus children are kept like pets — tiger cubs, perhaps — and disposed of when they grow too large to be convenient. In Anthony's alternate Earth, surplus adults are bred and conditioned as farm animals. His agent-of-Earth finds himself a farmhand in a stable where women are kept as milk producers, to be tended and serviced like cows. Today being today, he exploits the traditional farmhand's privileges.
Veteran readers may remember Ross Rocklynne's science problem stories in the old, old Astounding Science Fiction, He reappears with "Ching Witch!", a fascinating tale that evokes Haight-Ashbury of 1966 (when it was written), extrapolates it to world jet-set, transports it to a far planet, and sets an opportunist on his can.
Edward
Bryant, quite new, suggests what the
television industry may someday have to do to hold ratings for its
newscasts.
"The
Kate Wilhelm certainly is no novice, but "The Funeral" is very much in the new mode. Can you see today's schools in the educational conditioning boxes of her future? Joanna Russ is another feminine writer who accepts and needs no favors from the males. "When It Changed" shows us a future on a planet where women have made men unnecessary. Josephine Saxton pours salt on male pride with "Elouise and the Doctors," which projects our protection and preservation of the lame, the halt and the diseased into a future where a healthy girl is an enemy.
I certainly mustn't end this without giving Ben Bova a star for one of the book's few, and good, "hard" science stories, "Zero Gee." In a way, it is an even straighter story than Wolfe's "Bisquit Position"— a near documentary about a spaceman in an orbital lab with two women, one a glamour girl whom he has promised to ball in free fall. But that's not really what the story is about . . .
Burt K. Filer is new to me. His "Eye of the Beholder" weaves a fascinating picture of art as mathematics—or mathematics as art. If calculation can improve on creation, what is an artist's purpose?
Dean Koontz delves into dark corners of the McLuhan world in "A Mouse in the Walls of the Global Village." Like the Saxton story, it's a variant on Wells' "Country of the Blind," when empathic circuits have made most people telepathic— one huge, happy family;" those for whom the circuits don't work are freaks and perverts.
Thomas M. Disch's "Things Lost" takes us into space with a shipload of intellectual elite—a crew of Renaissance men and women, multitalented, bound for the stars, with their only common trait their utter self-centeredness.
This is a third of the book—I think the best third, but only a third. You have a not very good poem by Ray Bradbury (I am poem-deaf). You have an indescribably, blob-story by Gahan Wilson. You have Kurt Vonnegut . . . James Blish ... James Tiptree . . . Terry Carr . . . James Sallis ... and many, many more.
The only way you'll really learn about this book is to read it which has been Harlan's idea all along.
THE GOLD AT THE STARBOW'S END
by
Frederik Pohl • Ballantine Books,
Frederik Pohl has had about as varied and effective a career in science fiction—author, editor, lecturer—as anyone in the field, and he is still writing good SF. The title story, one of five in this new collection, was published here in Analog last year; the others are all from 1970 and 1972.
You may recall "Starbow's End" as the story of a cynical experiment in forced evolution, in which a crew of talented men and women is sent off to a hypothetical planet of Alpha Centauri, which doesn't really exist. The whole project has been set up to create an atmosphere of intellectual interplay, which its originator hopes will produce marvels of invention and discovery. It does— not quite convincingly— as they all become supermen (or should I say super-persons?). Fred Pohl considers this his best recent story. I prefer the one that closes the book, "The Merchants of Venus."
This is Pohl playing Heinlein, in the style and mood of one of his Moon stories, and doing it very successfully. It may be the hardest "hard science" story the author has written. Its setting is the "new" Venus—the horribly hostile, corrosive and arid world revealed by the Russian probes and by our own. Its theme is really the fragile economic existence of the Venus merchants, living off the various status-levels of tourists who can afford the inter-planetary trip. One of them, Audte Wathers, is a professional guide who takes the visitors to look for treasure in the abandoned tunnels an ancient nonhuman race has left under the planet's surface. His last millionaire, unfortunately, is a deadbeat.
Of the three shorter stories, "Call Me Million" is a fantasy about a soul-eater. Don't let that put you off. "Shaffery Among the Immortals" is a black comedy about a thoroughly modern antihero type— a nebbifh of a loser who wants his name to go down in history, and succeeds in a most unhappy way. The least of them, "Sad Solarian Screenwriter Sam," is a rather old-fashioned yarn with an old-fashioned gimmick: the galactic watchers pick one man whose actions will decide whether Mankind—indeed the entire Solar System—will be destroyed. The man is a familiar show-business type, an opportunist who is a little too slipshod to be successful, and so we are obviously doomed. But there's a snapper at the end.
Good Pohl. Good SF. Maybe the SF Book Club will print a hardback edition some day.
THE STEPFORD WIVES
by
Ira Levin • Random House,
You
didn't read about "Rosemary's Baby"
here, because Analog doesn't concern itself with fantasy, but you can
hardly
have missed Ira Levin's low-key, realistic story of devil-worship in
present-day
Joanna Eberhart is a thoroughly modern professional woman, a successful photographer, with two children, a good husband, and a more than active interest in women's lib. She finds the women of Stepford a bit peculiar, and they grow more so.
They are the perfect suburban wives with no interests outside their homes and families—yet the local papers say that at one time Stepford had a very vigorous and civic-minded Women's Club. She does find one or two kindred souls—but they change, almost overnight, into perfect Stepford wives.
Joanna, of course, sets out to probe. What really goes on behind the high fence and locked gate of the Men's Club, where the Stepford men spend most of their nights? Is it more than coincidental that Stepford has become an enclave of computer experts, microcircuitry designers, systems engineers, optical sensor developers . . . and one of the men who helped Disney build his walking, talking animated figures?
The question, in short, is not who—but what—are the Stepford wives? You'll know, almost from the beginning, but it's creepy fun watching Joanna find out. The uninitiated will have the added pleasure of surprise.
SF BIBLIOGRAPHIES
by
Robert E. Briney & Edward Wood • Advent:
Publishers,
Advent,
one of the oldest of the still-active fannish
publishers - of books about science fiction and fantasy (
The book, nicely printed and neatly paperbound with a handy list of all the Advent books-in-print on the back, is an annotated list of bibliographies on science fiction and fantasy. It is divided in four parts: magazine checklists and indexes; bibliographies of individual authors; general studies with useful book lists; and a few foreign-language works. There is also a functional index; I don't know Briney, but anything Ed Wood does is functional.
The compilers are mainly American, English and Australian. Most of them are active fans. I have been appalled to find how' many really major works I had never even heard of, let alone seen reported here. Some of the best have been circulated without charge to members of amateur press and SF fan organizations, through fanzines or special publications, and have never been for sale. The best place to find copies today is in the "hucksters room" at one of the big national or regional conventions. Next one I attend, I'll take this little book along.
BRASS TACKS
Dear Ben:
Regarding the Personality Profile of Buckminster Fuller in the September 1972 issue . . . Norman Spinrad really brought it together! An excellent, sensitive treatment of one of the intellectual greats of our era. A fitting substitute for the editorial.
Every man a Comprehensivist? Certainly! New management techniques demand it. The cross-fertilization of professional and technical disciplines can't exist without it. The "universal eye" of TV and the mass media generate it, in our young (at the sixth-to-eighth-grade level!).
But no Specialists? Never! Individual thought and application on a broader base, certainly. (The disruption of technology due to the political mishandling of space exploration programs has taught thousands of scientists, engineers and technicians a lesson they won't soon forget!) . . .
JIM PHILLIPS
c/o Jim Hartman & Associates, Inc. 3000 Biscayne Boulevard Suite 303
Miami, Florida 33137 The era we call "the Renaissance" seemed like the end of civilization to many "organization" men of the Middle Ages. Are we now entering a New Renaissance?
Dear Mr. Bova:
Regarding the September 1972 issue?
First, the Personality Profile on Buckminster Fuller was fascinating—more books could probably be written about that man than he has written himself. But I hope the feature won't entirely replace your own editorial every month. I think that some of the negative letters on your prison editorial are symptomatic of a general attitude regarding criminals that has resurfaced in the face of a rising crime rate. (Have you noticed the plethora of anti-crime paperbacks on the stands— the "Executioner" series, "Destroyer," et cetera? Just like the pulps of the '30's and '40's.)
Second, Gerald L. Hewett's letter, while raising some interesting points about fiction, makes some frightening statements about professional crooks making good- heads of government. From what I've seen, locally and nationally, they're not as concerned about protecting the property of the city (or country) as they are with tapping public finances and facilities for their own gain. And the overhanging threat of medieval prisons is a poor substitute, for a well-developed superego ...
GARY ALAN RUSE
Creative Media 2131 S.W. 62nd Avenue Miami, Florida 33155
The editorials will continue, with occasional breaks for guest editorials and personality profiles.
Dear Mr. Bova:
I am afraid you get only a C + for your new feature, Personality Profile (September 1972 issue). Your big problem was trying to decide just who was being profiled: Buckminster Fuller or Norman Spinrad. Especially during the discussion about the Chinese language, Mr. Spinrad was so intent on explaining a "long-term crank notion" of his own that Mr. Fuller could hardly get a word in edgewise! This brings me to the subject of this letter.
Mr. Spinrad believes that the "root basis of any given culture is the basic linguistic viewpoint of its language, which both reflects and molds the world view of the people speaking it." (Emphasis mine.) He then draws all sorts of conclusions based on how Chinese is written, not on how it is spoken. Whatever merit his argument has, he has failed to show any connection between how a language is written and how the people who write that language are influenced by it in their thinking. If the Chinese think a certain way because of their language, it must be so because their language is tonal and disyllabic, with little grammar, no inflection, and emphasis on word order to express meaning. The way they write that language is beside the point. It must be this way, otherwise we must conclude that an illiterate Chinese undergoes some radical transformation when he learns how to read and write. Chinese can be written in an alphabetic script: the government is actively promoting its use. English can be written in Hebrew characters, too. Do the peoples of India and West Pakistan think differently because in India they use an Indian script to write a language they call Hindi and the Pakistanis use an Arabic script to write the language they call Urdu? It is really the same language: Hindustani. There can be no necessary connection between the way people think and the way that culture records thoughts (writes) because thinking starts in childhood before writing is learned and in fact is a prerequisite to learning to read and write ...
GEORGE A. GAUTHIER 111-34-5055 HQ 31st USAAD AJO NY 09221
'But a child's thinking—even his input perception of the world around him—is heavily influenced by his training in infancy. That's where cultural factors make their first, biggest, and most important impact on the way we think.
Dear Mr. Bova:
I wish to make some points on a few of the many errors in the "quicky" economic history of the world contained in September's Personality Profile, "Buckminster Fuller: The Synergetic Man."
The first is the notion of a "takeoff point" for industrialization, after which progress is automatic. The only way one could fall for such a fallacy is to never ask, "What is the cause of progress?"
It must truly take an inconceivable amount of effort to evade the fact that progress is proportional to individual freedom.
This simple observation upholds (or is upheld by, depending on your epistemological method) the basic capitalist economics and individualist philosophy. (See Ludwig von Mises and Ayn Rand.)
Fuller's idea of such a nonsensical "twenty-five-year takeoff period" is even more ridiculous in the face of Russia's fifty years of failure. (See "Workers' Paradise Lost" by Eugene Lyons, a fifty-year evaluation of Russia.)
Another point I wish to bring up is the idea that a gold standard economy is "based on the false notion that production had to be limited by the amount of gold necessary to finance it."
The false notion is on Fuller's part in his misunderstanding of the market system. The amount of gold available is irrelevant because the market value of gold determines how much in real goods a unit of gold is worth. It is the amount of these goods (capital) you can raise which does limit production. You cannot increase production if you do not have the capital goods (land, factory, machinery, raw materials, money for wages and patents, et cetera). But the amount of gold in the world could double or halve (including yours of course) and you would be in no better or worse position, for the amount of goods or labor you could buy, would double or halve respectively.
GUY C. GORDON Coe College
Cedar Rapids, Iowa 52402 Evidently the Russians haven't read Rand or Lyons. Their GNP is growing faster than ours, their missiles are bigger and more numerous, and their submarines are off our coasts. That's failure?
Dear Mr. Bova:
I feel impelled to write you and congratulate you for your perspicacity in publishing Norman Spinrad's bio bit on Buckminster Fuller. It is absolutely superb and far far above anything yet done on the man in the media—from The New Yorker right down to the Time cover piece not too long ago.
Spinrad is full of surprises. His analysis of Fuller's omni-verbal prose poem (out as "Intuition") is excellent. His own aside regarding Chinese ideograms is right on. Chinese ideograms are to linear alphabetical words what algebra is to straight arithmetic . . .
This is worthy of wide dissemination. Hope it gets it.
WILLIAM SAMBROT 1839 Oak Street Napa, California 94558 Spinrad—and Fuller—have evoked strong reactions, pro and con:
Dear Mr. Bova:
The "New Wave Mob," says reader Hewett (September 1972 issue). Wow, an interesting image is suggested! These writers are occupying the offices of Conde Nast, filling the air with noxious marijuana smoke, and, perhaps looking and smelling the part, reminding one of the proverbial monkeys picking away randomly at their typewriter keys. They desire to become Shakespeares. Ultimately, they force their work upon Editor Bova.
Hewett's claim that they have no human contacts is, he says, "easily demonstrated." Well, I was at Noreascon last September and met one of the indicated, he seeming quite friendly and even appearing to have a personality.
Also when I was at the convention I bought two old issues of Analog, August and September 1942: issues exactly thirty years old. They were filled with stories Analog readers may have heard of: "The Link," "The Barrier," "Waldo," "Nerves," and "The Twonky."
Analog, September 1972, doesn't exactly measure up. Schmitz offers routine space adventure, Anvil salve for American pride injured by the Vietnam War, Strausbaugh boredom, and Conley sophomoric humor. Clancy O'Brien's short story is only noteworthy for its compression in a very few pages of all the anti-hippy cliches extant.
Nevertheless, I found the issue worthwhile. L. Sprague de Camp's piece provides an interesting glimpse of technology and culture. Norman Spinrad's profile of Buckminster Fuller is an engrossing look at a man with solid achievements and challenging ideas. Note that de Camp was one of the best SF writers of the '40's and '50's and Spinrad is one of the most controversial figures of the so-called "New Wave" . . .
Science fiction admittedly has changed and so has the general attitude toward science. We all realize how much science has done to improve man's lot. But technology, implemented science, has helped to create a world of superdestructive weapons and deadly pollution. "New Wave" writers express great urgency at man's present predicament, but hardly ever nihilism. Read, for example, Brian W. Aldlss' nonfiction book, "The Shape of Further Things," or one of his stories, like "The Soft Predicament." How much I would like to see an Analog in which a Brian Aldlss story could appear, or a Samuel Delany story. R. A. Lafferty could provide true humor, not just a string of schoolboy gags. And, of course, the hardnosed science articles would be kept. With a combination like this Analog would be a splendid magazine. Something unique and perhaps, to use a term of Buckminster Fuller, synergistic.
ROBERT WERNER R. D. 2, Box 164 E Greenville, New York 12083
It has always been the Editor's policy to consider each story submitted to Analog on its individual merits. The emphasis in this magazine is on SCIENCE fiction, which some writers can produce and some can't. It's the Editor's responsibility to .make the choice. And the reader's responsibility to keep the Editor in line.