Summary:
This is one of the best issues of F&SF I’ve read. Not do you get the Hugo and Nebula winning Goat Song by Poul Anderson, but also The Elseones by Dennis O’Neil, and good work by Kit Reed, Pamela Sargent, Dean R. Koontz, and James Tiptree Jr (her first F&SF appearance). Recommended.
[ISFDB link] [Archive.org copy]
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Editor, Edward L. Ferman; Assistant Editor, Andrew Porter
Fiction:
Goat Song • novelette by Poul Anderson ∗∗∗∗+
Dog Days • short story by Kit Reed ∗∗∗
Gather Blue Roses • short story by Pamela Sargent ∗∗∗
The Elseones • short story by Dennis O’Neil ∗∗∗+
Cosmic Sin • short story by Dean R. Koontz ∗∗∗
Painwise • novelette by James Tiptree, Jr. ∗∗∗
Ecce Femina! • novelette by Bruce McAllister ∗
Non-Fiction:
Cover • Bert Tanner
Books • by James Blish
Coming Soon
Cartoon by Gahan Wilson
Films • by Baird Searles
The Asymmetry of Life • science essay by Isaac Asimov
Editor’s Note
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I stumbled upon this issue while reading one of the stories (Painwise by James Tiptree Jr) for my last review (Terry Carr’s second ‘Best of the Year’ volume) and noticed it also contains one of the year’s best stories, the Hugo and Nebula winning Goat Song by Poul Anderson (which Carr overlooked or just didn’t like—it’s not even in his “Honorable Mentions” list). I was curious about the story and, before I knew it, I’d read not only the Tiptree and the Anderson stories, but the entire issue. It helped that they are an almost uniformly good bunch of tales and, in particular, those who liked the mythical parts of Anderson’s previous contribution to the magazine, The Queen of Air and Darkness (F&SF, April 1971), will probably like the Anderson even more, given that Goat Song is even more of a myth-story than Queen (I originally described the story as a Greek myth, until I realised I know little if anything about that subject—but, according to Wikipedia,1 it seems my guess was correct).
The story itself opens with Harper, a poet and bard who is mourning the death of his partner (variously named in the story, “Blossom-in-the-Sun,” etc.) with his friends in the wilderness, while waiting for the Dark Queen to pass by. She is the immortal representative of a computer called SUM, which rules this far-future Earth, and also stores the souls of the dead for resurrection in the far future:
The car draws alongside and sinks to the ground. I let my strings die away into the wind. The sky overhead and in the west is gray-purple; eastward it is quite dark and a few early stars peer forth. Here, down in the valley, shadows are heavy and I cannot see very well.
The canopy slides back. She stands erect in the chariot, thus looming over me. Her robe and cloak are black, fluttering like restless wings; beneath the cowl Her face is a white blur. I have seen it before, under full light, and in how many thousands of pictures; but at this hour I cannot call it back to my mind, not entirely. I list sharp-sculptured profile and pale lips, sable hair and long green eyes, but these are nothing more than words.
“What are you doing?” She has a lovely low voice; but is it, as, oh, how rarely since SUM took Her to Itself, is it the least shaken? “What is that you were singing?”
My answer comes so strong that my skull resonates, for I am borne higher and higher on my tide. “Lady of Ours, I have a petition.”
“Why did you not bring it before Me when I walked among men? Tonight I am homebound. You must wait till I ride forth with the new year.”
“Lady of Ours, neither You nor I would wish living ears to hear what I have to say.”
She regards me for a long while. Do I indeed sense fear also in Her? (Surely not of me. Her chariot is armed and armored, and would react with machine speed to protect Her should I offer violence. And should I somehow, incredibly, kill Her, or wound Her beyond chemosurgical repair, She of all beings has no need to doubt death. The ordinary bracelet cries with quite sufficient radio loudness to be heard by more than one thanatic station, when we die; and in that shielding the soul can scarcely be damaged before the Winged Heels arrive to bear it off to SUM. Surely the Dark Queen’s circlet can call still further, and is still better insulated, than any mortal’s. And She will most absolutely be recreated. She has been, again and again; death and rebirth every seven years keep Her eternally young in the service of SUM. I have never been able to find out when She was first born. p. 13-14
In their ensuing conversation Harper tells her he wants SUM to resurrect his partner; she tells him that is impossible but agrees to take him to see the computer.
The middle part of the story takes place in SUM’s underground fortress. Here, Harper is put to sleep for a time while the The Dark Queen is subsumed into SUM and her gathered data downloaded. Later on Harper is woken and given an audience with the computer and, after some back and forth, he gets SUM to agree to the resurrection of his lover in exchange for his service as its prophet. There is one condition however: he must walk out of the complex without looking back at his beloved, who will join him at some point in the journey.
There is an excellent and suspenseful passage that tells of this journey and (spoiler), of course, he fails at the last hurdle:
Was that a footfall? Almost, I whirl about. I check myself and stand shaking; names of hers break from my lips. The robot urges me on.
Imagination. It wasn’t her step. I am alone. I will always be alone.
The halls wind upward. Or so I think; I have grown too weary for much kinaesthetic sense. We cross the sounding river, and I am bitten to the bone by the cold which blows upward around the bridge, and I may not turn about to offer the naked newborn woman my garment. I lurch through endless chambers where machines do meaningless things. She hasn’t seen them before. Into what nightmare has she risen; and why don’t I, who wept into her dying senses that I loved her, why don’t I look at her, why don’t I speak?
Well, I could talk to her. I could assure the puzzled mute dead that I have come to lead her back into sunlight. Could I not? I ask the robot. It does not reply. I cannot remember if I may speak to her. If indeed I was ever told. I stumble forward.
I crash into a wall and fall bruised. The robot’s claw closes on my shoulder. Another arm gestures. I see a passageway, very long and narrow, through the stone. I will have to crawl through. At the end, at the end, the door is swinging wide. The dear real dusk of Earth pours through into this darkness. I am blinded and deafened.
Do I hear her cry out? Was that the final testing; or was my own sick, shaken mind betraying me; or is there a destiny which, like SUM with us, makes tools of suns and SUM? I don’t know. I know only that I turned, and there she stood. Her hair flowed long, loose, past the remembered face from which the trance was just departing, on which the knowing and the love of me had just awakened—flowed down over the body that reached forth arms, that took one step to meet me and was halted.
The great grim robot at her own back takes her to it. I think it sends lightning through her brain. She falls. It bears her away.
My guide ignores my screaming. Irresistible, it thrusts me out through the tunnel. The door clangs in my face. I stand before the wall which is like a mountain. Dry snow hisses across concrete. The sky is bloody with dawn; stars still gleam in the west, and arc lights are scattered over the twilit plain of the machines. p. 26-27
Another robot stops him battering his head to a pulp on the closed door. SUM tells him that, now he is the computer’s sworn enemy, he will be a source of useful information.
The last section tells of Harper’s madness, and then the revolution he starts during the Dark Queen’s next visit: he cuts off his resurrection bracelet, smashes it with an axe, and encourages others to do the same.
This lyrically written tragedy is a very good, near excellent piece, and I can see why it won Hugo and Nebula Award—but not why Terry Carr left it out of his anthology. (PS I found it surprising that, as per the introduction above, (a) this was written several years previously and (b) was bought by a men’s magazine. I would have thought it was far too literary a piece for that latter market.)
One of the more offbeat stories in Harry Harrison & Brian W. Aldiss’s Best SF: 1971 was The Cohen Dog Exclusion Act by Steven Schrader (Eco-Fiction, 1971), an ‘if this goes on’ story about dog fouling—so it was a bit of a surprise to come across another piece about the same subject from the same time period: Dog Days by Kit Reed:
He found it hard going; traffic had stopped moving some weeks before, which meant he had to vault rusting Volkswagens and climb over taxi bumpers to get to the other side. Abandoned automobiles took up so much room that the dogs were confined to the sidewalks, and by this time they were thick with ordure, studded with an occasional carcass and whorled with traces of scenes of gallantry or carnage, depending.
Since the mayor’s announcement, Sanitation had been put on the extermination detail, and there seemed to be no keeping up with the problem after that. The program was in its fifth week now, and the damnable thing was that conditions seemed to be not better but worse. The strays had mushroomed in number, and in addition to everything else, a number of humans had taken to using the sidewalks and the parks as toilets as part of a radical movement designed to prove some kind of point. p. 45
This odd, dark satire goes on to show us more of this dystopian society, and also limns the husband’s ambivalent attitude towards the couple’s dog. In a surreal ending (spoiler) the extermination teams arrive at their house one evening, and the wife has a choice to make . . . .
Gather Blue Roses by Pamela Sargent is a slow burn piece that has the narrator remember her childhood as the daughter of a concentration camp survivor who would occasionally leave her family to be alone for short periods of time:
By the time I reached my adolescence, I had heard all the horror stories about the death camps and the ovens; about those who had to remove gold teeth from the bodies; the women used, despite the Reich’s edicts, by the soldiers and guards. I then regarded my mother with ambivalence, saying to myself, I would have died first, I would have found some way rather than suffering such dishonor, wondering what had happened to her and what secret sins she had on her conscience, and what she had done to survive. An old man, a doctor, had said to me once, “The best ones of us died, the most honorable, the most sensitive.” And I would thank God I had been born in 1949; there was no chance that I was the daughter of a Nazi rape.)
By the time I was four, we had moved to an old frame house in the country, and my father had taken a job teaching at a small junior college near by, turning down his offers from Columbia and Chicago, knowing how impossible that would be for mother. p. 48-49
As the story progresses the narrator and her brother start school, and we find out that (spoiler) she experiences other people’s pain—she is an empath of sorts, to put it crudely.
This is a short, minor piece, but a quietly evocative and effective one.
The Elseones by Dennis O’Neil3 is about a man who meets a woman called Elvira at a religious Crusade at Madison Square Gardens. As their relationship develops we find out that the narrator is an “Elseone,” someone who has the ability to get things from people without payment (as Elvira notes when they get free hotdogs from a vendor shortly after they meet). During the story we also see various people tell the narrator that his “B’raja” is damaged. He also has strange dreams:
Then sleep, and another alien experience, a dream.
Warm sand between my forked toes, I squatted on the marge of a crimson sea, a vista of breakers capped with pink foam dwindling to a horizon hidden in ocher mists. And I was saying in a language native to me a word meaning both serenity and soon, a strange, garbled syllable—chanting it in rhythm with the beat of the waves . . .
I was awake: without being conscious of it, I had been staring at the splash of light on the ceiling from the mercury vapor lamp outside my single window, a bluish rectangle like a phantom television screen. In it, I saw—and recognized—a vast, savage wilderness, and I saw and recognized people I’d never met in cities I’d never been to—Atlanta, London, Budapest, Shanghai: people sitting and lying on beds in dank, anonymous chambers. I blinked: the vision vanished.
I got up, crept into the chill, foul-smelling hall, down the stairs. From somewhere on the bottom landing came a crooning of garbled syllables, meaningless yet recognizable, similar to my dream-chant. p. 56
It soon becomes apparent (spoiler) that the narrator is an alien who has been stranded on Earth for some considerable time, and who is waiting for collection/rescue by “Servants” long after a conflict that exiled him and his kind to Earth (one of his interlocutors remarks at one point that “they’re close, well within this universe”). The story climaxes with a scene of thwarted transcendence.
This latter passage, and the story’s general description of his mental and emotional state (feelings of dissociation and detachment that will probably be familiar to city dwellers) prove to be an effective mix, and I enjoyed this a lot. It has some similarities with Moore’s The Children’s Hour, and if you like that, you’ll probably like this.
After a run of more serious stories there is some light relief in the fast-moving and wise-cracking Cosmic Sin by Dean R. Koontz (a jobbing SF writer at the time, not the superstar he is now). This has as its hero Jake Ash, who has a body chemistry that makes it possible for him to function as a “doorway between probability lines.” The story begins with a Probability Policeman and two aliens jaunting into his bathroom:
They looked like two enormous heads of cabbage, each somewhere near four foot in diameter, though one was slightly larger than the other. They were leafy and gray, with eyes, nose and maw half hidden in greener clumps of leaves. The larger of the two hung from my shower rail by two ropy tentacles while its other two appendages waved quietly at me, like seaweed stirred along the floor of the ocean. Creepy. You know? The smaller one stood on the closed lid of my toilet, its four tentacles bunched and stiffened beneath it, like legs. Both of them watched me with the prettiest blue eyes I’d ever seen and made—as I listened more closely—very soft, gentle mewing noises, like kittens.
They didn’t seem to want to eat me, strangle me, or suck my blood. If anything, they appeared to want to be cuddled and petted.
Just the same, I kept my eye on them. p. 72
The policeman explains that the aliens are two of a breeding quartet, and that the other two have disappeared to make pornographic sensie films. This is considered a sacrilegious act by their species, so they want his help to find the pair. The story continues with an aeroplane flight to the house of another “receiver” like Ash, and the eventual rescue of the cabbages, although they are further complications at the house of a local “sender.” The plot is ramshackle and on the light side, but the enjoyment here is in the story’s breezy style, one liners, and general humour.
Ecce Femina! by Bruce McAllister begins with an Army veteran called Mac returning from the war in “Cam” (Cambodia?) to his home in Emerald Hills. There are various hints that the relationship between men and women has profoundly changed in this future:
I kept walking and staring at the sign. When my neck started aching, and I finally looked down, I was at the tract’s eight-foot cinder-block wall.
It was covered with writing in red spray paint.
.
WHOS GOT OSCAR MEYER CLASS? WE DO! YOUD BETTER!
CHAPTERS UNITE SHOOT E9 TONIGHT!
BEWARE OF DOGGIES AND
.
I kept walking. The writing seemed endless.
.
SEE ORGAN LA FAY ON SATURDAY!
RALLY YOU MOTHERBROTHERS!
WE ARE THE WOMEN’S LEAGUE
THE RIDERS OF THE NIGHT
WERE ORNERY BROTHERMUCKERS
WED RATHER BITE THAN—
Mac is then accosted by a chapter of female Hells Angels, who question him on the outskirts of town, and laugh at his plans to return to the garage/filling station he once owned.
When he finally gets to his destination he meets the new owner, Jack, who turns out to be a physically intimidating, cigar chomping woman who eventually wrestles and bear hugs him into submission (her and the Hell’s Angels apparently use a—presumably steroid—drug called E9).
The rest of this piece is a tedious and overlong tale that has the Hell’s Angel’s gang repeatedly turn up with men they have captured (and possibly castrated—there is talk about “Oscar Meyer” patches gained by the Angels for unspecified acts). One of the men is eventually kept by Jack (after a few more wrestling matches) and (spoiler) the end of the story sees her and the captured man leave the area. Mac later receives a photograph of them together with a baby.
I have no idea what this story supposed to be about or what the message is, and I note in passing that this is the only piece in the issue that squarely fits into “the future as present” category described by James Blish in his book review2 (see below). It is also the worst. When I think about the sub-optimal nature of much current SF (often concerned with the political, cultural and personal concerns of the present), I suspect there may be a link between this subject matter and the general quality of the work produced.
I’ve already read the Tiptree in the Carr ‘Best of the Year’ volume for 1972, so the following comments are a cut and paste for the convenience of anyone that hasn’t read that review previously.
Painwise by James Tiptree, Jr. (F&SF, February 1972) has a great hook opening (and one similar to John Baxter’s The Hands in New Writings in SF #6, also reviewed here):
He was wise to the ways of pain. He had to be, for he felt none.
When the Xenons put electrodes to his testicles, he was vastly entertained by the pretty lights.
When the Ylls fed firewasps into his nostrils and other body orifices, the resultant rainbows pleased him. And when later they regressed to simple disjointments and eviscerations, he noted with interest the deepening orchid hues that stood for irreversible harm. p. 350
The protagonist is wired to experience pain as colour and, as he completes his repeated missions to observe aliens (who variously mutilate or torture him), a boditech mechanism called Amanda puts him back together again.
Eventually there is a battle of wills between him and Amanda—he wants her to provide conversation—and he eventually realises that their mission is overdue and she is faulty. At this point Amanda malfunctions and he is marooned in space.
The second part of the story sees him picked up by a starship occupied by three aliens, a bushbaby like creature called Lovebaby, the butterfly-like Ragglebomb, and the python-like Muscle. None of them can stand the pain experienced by the universe’s creatures (they are empaths/telepaths) so they use him to go and get them the foodstuffs they desire. Initially he complies, but then stops helping them when he realises they are not going to take him back to Earth.
In the final part of the story (spoiler) he hears the phrase “snap, crackle and pop” from their descriptions of the sounds picked up on one of the planets. He knows this is Earth, so he recites a long list of enticing foodstuffs to encourage them to go there.
The story ends with him back on Earth, where he suddenly experiences a massive amount of pain. When he empathically transmits this to the other three they all try to get back to the shelter of the ship. For whatever reason, he makes the decision to stay rather than leave with them.
This is an original, entertaining, and trippy piece, but it appears to get off to a false start (the Amanda section), and I’m not sure that any of the rest of it bears close examination.
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This issue’s Cover is by Bert Tanner, another good piece from this impressive artist.3
Books by James Blish opens with a review of Science Fiction: The Future by Dick Allen, and a categorisation similar to one I’ve seen earlier (made by P. Schuyler Miller in his review of Terry Carr’s Best Science Fiction of the Year #2):
Part two, “Alternative Futures,” is subdivided into “The Present as Future” and “The Future,” which neatly separates works exaggerating current dilemmas from stories which, for the most part, offer real alternatives or have no sociological significance. p. 36
He also reviews Tactics of Mistake by Gordon R. Dickson:
I would guess [that Tactics of Mistake and The Genetic General] were responses to the late John W. Campbell’s final new policy for his magazine, which was to emphasize heroes who set out to accomplish something and by gum succeeded at it. p. 37
. . . and The Flame Is Green by R. A. Lafferty:
Like this author’s Fourth Mansions, the intent of the work this far seems to be that of a spiritual pilgrimage through symbolic events, another journey toward the Grail; but unlike the previous novel, the symbolism does not seem to be systematized, the protagonists and antagonists don’t fall into well-defined groups, and their motives are either cloudy or are not given at all. The net effect is that of a writer hypnotizedly beating his way deeper and deeper into a purely private world which threatens in the end to become entirely meaningless to anyone else, and perhaps even to himself. p. 39
I see I’m not the only one who sometimes bounces off of Lafferty.
The final review is of the collection The Lost Face by Josef Nesvadba, which Blish discusses in some detail:
More characteristic is the volume’s title story, the gimmick of which is the discovery and use of a technique of plastic surgery which allows a dead man’s face to be superimposed upon that of a living man. Inexorably, the recipient finds himself driven, mostly but not entirely by circumstances, into living the life of the donor.
Superficially, this might be taken as a parable of the fatal power of the assumption that things are what they seem, but I think also that Nesvadba is re-using here the theme of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, that contrary to Nineteenth Century assumptions, the brain is at the mercy of the body (as concentration-camp experiences and the later development of brainwashing have since gruesomely proved). It is powerfully and circumstantialy told, and also brings off a difficult technical feat: The author tells you the ending first of all, and then leads you back to it, by which time it has completely changed from ordinary melodrama to a situation packed with irony. p. 40
Blish concludes by saying that Nesvadba is “well worth your attention.” Given that I’ve had this book sitting on my shelves for forty years, I’ll take his advice.
Coming Soon promises Love is a Dragonfly by Thomas Burnett Swann (a novella or “short novel”) in the next issue (he had previously published The Manor of Roses and the novel The Goat Without Horns in the magazine), and a number of big names in future issues: John Christopher, Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe and Anthony Boucher, plus a special James Blish issue in April.4
The Cartoon by Gahan Wilson is an amusing one about tombs and Egyptology.
Films by Baird Searles begins by dismissing a movie called The Peace Game (which sounds like a pretentious bore) before going on a Trojan kick with two movies, The Trojan Women and Helen of Troy, both of which sound like they are worth a watch.
The Asymmetry of Life by Isaac Asimov, like most of his essays, starts off with a good anecdote:
Only yesterday (as I write this) I was on a Dayton, Ohio talk show, by telephone; one of those talk shows where the listeners are encouraged to call in questions.
A young lady called in and said, “Dr. Asimov, who, in your opinion, did the most to improve modern science fiction?”
I answered, after the barest hesitation, “John W. Campbell, Jr.”
Whereupon she said, “Good! I’m Leslyn, his daughter.” p. 106
Following this there are six deadly dull pages explaining mirror-image molecules (I assume this is another way of describing optical isomers). If ever an essay called out for diagrams this one does—half my degree was in chemistry and I could barely follow some of this:
All enzyme molecules are proteins. Protein molecules are made up of chains of amino acids which come in some twenty varieties. All twenty varieties are closely related in structure. In each case there is a central carbon atom to which are attached: 1) a hydrogen atom, 2) an amino group, 3) a carboxyl group, 4) any one of twenty different groups which may be lumped together as “side-chains.”
In the case of the simplest of the amino acids, “glycine,” the side-chain is another hydrogen atom so that the central carbon atom is attached to only three different groups. For that reason, glycine is not asymmetric and is not optically active.
In the case of all the other amino acids, the side-chain represents a fourth different group attached to the central carbon atom, which means that the central carbon is asymmetric and that each amino acid, except glycine, can exist in two forms, one the mirrorimage of the other. And, in fact, each amino acid exists in living tissue in only one of the two forms; and the same form is found, in each case, in all living tissue of any kind. p. 113
I hope no-one was driving or operating heavy machinery while reading that.
The article finishes by discussing enzymes, the stuff of life, and a possible non-conservation of parity (if I recall correctly, Asimov states all enzymes are all levo- and not dexorotatory, left not right handed).
The short Editor’s Note at the end of the Asimov article mentions that, unknown to the magazine, and as the result of a misunderstanding with his agent, Fritz Leiber’s The Price of Pain Ease (F&SF, November 1971) had previously been published in book form before it appeared in the magazine.
•••
This is one of the better issues of F&SF I can remember reading. Not do you get the Hugo and Nebula winning Anderson story, but all the other fiction bar the McAllister is good or better. Recommended. ●
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1. Goat Song’s Wikipedia page says the “story has strong parallels to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice”
2. Kit Reed’s Dog Days superficially fits into the “future as present” category but the ending is so surreal that it also fits the “no sociological significance” criteria of the other category.
3. As the introduction to his story hints, Dennis O’Neil went on to be a big wheel in the comics industry. Our loss. His Wikipedia page is here.
4. Bert Tanner did some striking artwork for a number of other issues of F&SF, most of which were double page spreads like this:
He also did a number of single page covers for Venture, F&SF’s sister magazine, which, oddly enough, were not up to the same standard. His ISFDB page is here.
5. The James Blish special issue is reviewed here. ●
