1999 Dozois selections: F Pohl, H Clement and T Lee

Usually here at MPorcius Fiction Log we read old stories, but today we're mixing things up and reading some recent speculative fiction.  Last week I was in the District (you might know it as The Swamp) and took a look at the clearance carts at Second Story Books on Dupont Circle.  Among the books available was a copy of the 800-page anthology The Year's Best Science Fiction: Seventeenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.  A glance at the table of contents revealed stories by Frederik Pohl, Hal Clement, and Tanith Lee that seemed like they might be worthwhile.

If you are like me, it feels like just yesterday that Monica Lewinsky's boyfriend was president, that Kennedies were falling from the sky (so careless, those Kennedies, smh), and that we were introduced to SpongeBob, Patrick and Squidward.  Let's relive those happy days by reading these three 1999 SF tales that Dozois saw fit to celebrate as the best of that year, a year which sat at the deceptively smooth tail end of a black century of blood and at the dawn of a new century of upheaval and terror.

Of course I'm too cheap to pay four dollars for a huge book with a mush cover illustration that, after I read just three stories from it, will do nothing more than gather dust atop a pile of similarly forgotten books on the floor of MPorcius HQ.  So I'm reading today's stories in scans made available thanks to internet piracy.  Feel free to read along at the links below, me hearties.

Dozois         Pohl (partial)       Clement        Lee 

"Hatching the Phoenix" by Frederik Pohl

This is a long story, serialized over two issues of Amazing, the pioneering science fiction magazine at that time owned by the people who took over TSR and apparently devoted primarily to promoting television shows.  How the mighty.... The Fall 1999 issue of Amazing is right there at the internet archive, but finding a scan of the Winter 2000 ish was a little more challenging and I gave up, though I did come across a scan of the 600th anniversary issue of Amazing, which has a picture of Harlan Ellison's lovely mug on the cover, though SF's bad boy is perhaps upstaged by a painting of a leggy blonde in a metal bra.  Anyway, I'm reading "Hatching the Phoenix" in a scan of Dozois' anthology.

"Hatching the Phoenix" is an OK story composed of three elements that, in my mind at least, are pretty distinct.  We've got the hard SF business--an expedition to study an astronomical phenomenon.  We've got soap opera business--should the protagonist marry this guy, or that guy, or maybe listen to her nagging feminist friend and swear off men and sex once and for all?  Sort of sprinkled over this is left-wing social politics, attacks on Christians and laments over how poorly men treat women and how warlike people (Christians, mostly) are.  I'll deal with these elements one at a time.  

I read Pohl's famous Gateway as a kid and then again as an adult, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is set in that same Heechee universe.  Our narrator, Klara, a character from Gateway, got rich over the course of that novel and its two immediate sequels, Beyond the Blue Event Horizon and Heechee Rendezvous, books I remember very little about, as compensation for her participation in a disastrous expedition.  With her vast wealth, Klara has financed a major research project, the study of a planet which was wiped out in the supernova that created what we call the Crab Nebula.  The team of scientists conducting this research have dubbed the planet the Crabber planet, its native population Crabbers.

I'm not smart, so it was a little confusing, but it seems that by going to a certain spot in space, the scientists Klara is financing can, by using a nearby black hole as a lens, look back through time by observing old light that was generated thousands of years ago by the Crabber star just days before it went nova and bounced off the Crabber planet.  When their equipment is set up, the scientists can record what was happening on the Crabber planet right before it got wiped out.  It is suggested that Klara has the dream of somehow immortalizing the people who lived on this planet before it was destroyed, the existence of whom we cannot doubt because many thousands of years before the sun went nova, the Heechee recorded videos of primitive tool-using carnivores on the planet.  The question is whether these primitive Crabbers evolved to the point they could build a modern civilization; this is the main thing the scientists are trying to figure out.  Pohl tries to generate tension and suspense by having the camera apparatus that can look into the past only half built when Klara arrives, so the pictures of the past are very low resolution.  As the story proceeds, the pictures get more and more clear until the terrible truth is revealed.  Also meant to build suspense is the fact that the various ships which are the setting of the story--Klara's ship, the ship used by her unfaithful boyfriend, and the research ship--can't safely stick around where they are because the radiation from the supernova might hurt them.  Didn't all three ships already fly through that radiation wave to get to a point where they can see light that preceded that wave?  Isn't the first sentence of the story "We were only about half a day out when we crossed the wavefront from the Crab supernova"?  Like I suggested, I am too dim to really understand this story's science component.

The aforementioned terrible truth: Klara's multicultural band of boffins discovers that the Crabbers had developed a 20th-century technology and society just before the supernova exterminated them.  But Klara loses interest in immortalizing them when she finally gets the high quality video that makes clear the Crabbers were engaged in a World War I slash World War II type total war, complete with strategic bombing of cities by aircraft, submarine warfare, and large scale land battles with tanks.  Also, the civilized Crabbers were committing imperialism against the still-primitive Crabbers.

At the end of the story there is also some business about Klara moving people from the research ship to her ship and to her unfaithful boyfriend's ship so they can escape the radiation wave from the supernova--I feel like something similar happened at the end of Gateway.

Now let's consider the human relationship or soap opera elements of "Hatching the Phoenix."  A lot of the story's text is devoted to Klara's relationship with her computer, which she has given a personality and which has a holographic simulacrum with which to express that personality--when Klara is drinking the hologram will sometimes present the illusion that the computer is also drinking.  Much is made of how Klara tries to maintain an illusion of free will and independence when in fact the computer does everything for her, and she almost always takes the computer's advice.  (Gateway, I recall, was largely about a man's relationship with a computer therapist.)  The computer is a man-hating, Christian-hating, feminist, and keeps trying to convince Klara to achieve immortality and escape physical needs and problems by having her consciousness uploaded into a computer.  Of course, Klara herself designed the computer to have this bitchy nag's personality. 

Klara kind of wants children but doesn't know if her current boyfriend, a TV journalist whom Pohl depicts as a total jerk who is terrible at his job, is the right man to have a child with.  In the first half of the story, the chapters in the Fall '99 ish of Amazing (the one with the Star Trek cover), Klara arrives at the research ship and interacts with the sexually and ethnically diverse crew, and then in the final sentences of that installment of the serial we get a soap opera cliff hanger--the journalist is arriving in his TV station's rented ship to interview the scientists, and he has an assistant with him--a hot chick!  Is he cheating on Klara?

It turns out in the second installment of the serial in the Winter 2000 number of Amazing (the one with the Babylon 5 cover) that yes, he is.  Is this a big deal?  After all, are Klara and journalist being exclusive?  Anyway, Pohl spends quite a bit of time on the journalist's efforts to have sex with our narrator and Klara's efforts to put him off and to flirt with one of the scientists, a man who is also going through a difficult relationship, his wife back home cheating on him.  In the end Klara and the journalist stop seeing each other, and Klara starts seeing the scientist, but it doesn't work out--Klara is more like a mother to that guy than wife material.

Finally the left-wing social politics component of "Hatching the Phoenix."  Klara's computer's personality is based on Hypatia, who in this story is presented as the first woman scientist whose accomplishment men failed to erase.  The computer is constantly demeaning Christians, and men, and living human beings in general, apparently even trying to sabotage Klara's relationships with other humans as a means of encouraging Klara into being turned into a digital file.  In the computer's voice, Pohl bangs on repetitively at the anti-Christian stuff and misanthropic stuff about how humans are warlike, which is cagey as the computer isn't necessarily trustworthy, so it doesn't necessarily come off as our narrator Klara or our author Pohl droning on and on misanthropically but perhaps Pohl merely depicting Klara's annoying friend.  Though of course we know Pohl wrote this stuff and Klara designed the computer's personality so it really is Pohl and Klara expressing these opinions.  

Popular fiction, I always say, is wish fulfillment fantasy, and it seems possible one of the things Fred Pohl, like 80 years old when this story was published, wished he could have done was set up vast programs to help single mothers and other underprivileged women and girls, as this is something Klara does with her wealth.  There is a lot of talk about Klara's tropical island where she has a refuge for orphans and single mothers and the implication is that Klara doesn't need a child of her own, shouldn't have to settle for a man, seeing as no man is good enough for her, that her motherly instincts should be devoted to helping all those orphans and single mothers.  I suspect we are supposed to consider that she could have been like a mother to the Crabbers in some way I don't understand, seeing as they died thousands of years ago, but the Crabbers, just like the journalist, proved to be unworthy of Klara, what with their war and imperialism.

Finally on this theme, we might note that the lead scientist on the research ship is a woman, and among the scientists who actually have no bearing on the plot that I can remember is a tall muscular Afro-Briton who says "crikey" and a jealous homosexual.  Even if they don't affect the plot, these people have their own sexual relationships and add to the soap opera atmosphere as well as the story's diversity levels.  

All three of these elements more or less work, though they do not excel, and "Hatching the Phoenix" is never actually boring, but it feels a little long and bland.  There's too much boring everyday stuff that I guess is supposed to humanize Klara, like how she likes coffee and what clothes she wears for this or that occasion and how she feels about her face and what plastic surgery she has had to make it less mannish.  The anti-Christian stuff is a little overboard and the anti-war stuff is repetitive, with every different type of warfare the Crabbers engaged in being presented as some new revelation.  "Hatching the Phoenix" also feels inconclusive--the research study of the supernova and the doomed aliens doesn't come to much, as far as I could tell, and the soap opera elements are also inconclusive, as the narrator dumps one guy with ease and picks up another with ease but then breaks up with him a few months later after the narrator has healed his psychic wounds, which I guess serves Pohl's women-are-so-giving-and-men-don't- deserve-them theme, but doesn't really make for a good conclusion to a story.  isfdb is telling me that "Hatching the Phoenix" would later be integrated into the 2004 novel The Boy Who Would Live Forever so maybe we should think of this thing as a part of a larger narrative and thus can't really blame it for feeling inconclusive.

I'm grading "Hatching the Phoenix" acceptable.  Besides Dozois' yearly best of volume, you can find it in The Hard SF Renaissance. 

"Exchange Rate" by Hal Clement 

"Exchange Rate" debuted in a magazine I perhaps have never heard of before, Absolute Magnitude, and I am reading it there.  This magazine feels pretty cheap--each story gets one or two illustrations, and to fill up dead space the same illustrations appear multiple times.  A picture of a vehicle appears within "Exchange Rate"'s 22 pages eight times, and a picture of a satellite five times.  Maybe they should have just made the print bigger if they had a lot of extra space to fill and couldn't find advertisers--my 55-year old eyes would have appreciated it.

Like "Hatching the Phoenix," "Exchange Rate" was included in The Hard SF Renaissance.  But no, I won't put a picture of that anthology's cover in this blog post two or three more times.      

           

The planet humans call Halfbaked is extremely inhospitable.  Gravity is like seven times that of Earth, air pressure 17 times that of Earth sea level.  The planet's tectonic plates are much smaller and numerous than those on Earth and are always scraping against and pushing into and away from each other, so there are constant earthquakes and fissures and ridges are always appearing and vanishing, creating new and forbidding obstacles to travel.  Clouds above this forever changing landscape obscure the sky, and lightning almost never stops.  Rain and dust storms severely lower visibility, while ceaseless emissions of radiation make radar and radio very unreliable.  Clement is of course famous for conceiving of alien planets where extreme conditions prevail and working out how those conditions would affect life and human operations, and much of "Exchange Rate"'s text is taken up with descriptions and depictions of the crazy geographic, geological, meteorological and biological facts of Halfbaked and how human explorers there keep body and soul together and go about their business.

All this science and technology isn't necessarily easy reading; here is a sample:

The assumption that the world had a nearly equipotential surface, with strength of crustal materials essentially meaningless, was presumed to be even truer here than on any merely one-gee planet. The drivers had not noticed the changes in actual power needed to keep a given speed; they merely knew they were three thousand kilometers closer to where they wanted to be.

The science in "Exchange Rate" is all interesting and it all makes sense--it is both more complex and ironically easier to understand than the science in Pohl's "Hatching the Phoenix."  Unfortunately, Clement's characters and their motivations are boring--the people in the story are forgettable, one almost indistinguishable from another.  People complain about cardboard characters in stories, how an author will give each character one personality trait and push it to the extreme, but the characters in Clement's long story here have no personality traits and it makes reading "Exchange Rate" sleep-inducing.  

The plot of "Exchange Rate" concerns weeks-long journeys taken by humans in heavily armored vehicles across the treacherous surface of Halfbaked.  Halfbaked, it appears, has native inhabitants, and, after radio communications with them that suggest the aliens are interested in trade, two human women drive a tanker truck thousands of miles, a trip of many days across shifting terrain that makes as-the-crow-flies travel impossible, to what they expect will be a native city to deliver some chemicals to the natives.  The women then, apparently, head back to the human base, but cease transmitting messages to the base.  Their nervous husbands hop in another huge heavily armored vehicle and set out to meet their spouses on the way, but turn back when the women's vehicle seems to be responding to advice transmitted by their husbands and by the base personnel, suggesting the wives--and their receiver--are OK, but their transmitter is out of commission.  

Clement presents "Exchange Rate" as a mystery story, so we never get a view inside the women's vehicle or hear anything from their point of view.  Clement instead focuses on the husbands, and everything we learn about the women's mission comes to us second or third hand--it is like those monster movies in which we barely see the monster and instead the camera spends most of its time in a room with military men and eggheads who look at radar screens and talk on the phone, saying stuff like "the blip on the radar screen shows the target is now heading northwards," or like a detective story in which the detective learns about the murderer and victim not from the murderer or victim but from a police officer who spoke to a witness who perhaps saw the murder from a distance through fog a long time ago.  I find stories that put this kind of distance between the reader and the activity kind of frustrating.

I also didn't appreciate reading about the husbands' journey in excruciating detail only for that mission to be aborted and end up being absolutely moot.    

The men do other work back at the base, then are sent out on a job to survey the height of a cliff, seeing as the cliff's height has probably changed since they last saw it.  While they are out there, satellite and other data sources suggest the women's tanker truck is not behaving properly, so the men again set out to intercept their wives.  Why does Clement abort the first intercept mission to only send the men off on an identical mission a second time?  This is not good narrative structure, in my opinion.

After weeks of driving, the husbands finally find the tanker, and their wives are not aboard.  The rest of the story involves figuring out what happened to the women, detective work that takes place over the course of this story's fourth weeks-long drive--another trip to the alien city to deliver more chemicals.  Yes, the humans decide to deliver another shipment to the aliens, even even though the last shipment suffered 100% casualties and the aliens are suspected of murdering the women.

At the alien "city" the astounding truth is revealed.  There is only one alien, a single huge being with many disposable components that get killed all the time without any long term detriment resulting.  It killed the women due to what you might call an accident or misunderstanding; the alien doesn't even have such concepts as individual personality, love, friendship, or sexual reproduction, and of course is extremely robust compared to a fragile human.  The climactic scene of "Exchange Rate" is when one of the husbands contemplates revenge on the alien and his colleagues talk him down from committing this sin--these future humans have evolved past the "War stage."  The alien knows not what it did and must be forgiven.  The briefly vengeful man talks about the need to teach the alien a lesson so it won't misbehave again, an idea his comrades dismiss, and I wondered if Clement was offering criticism of the justice of punishment as a crime prevention measure.

I have very mixed feelings about "Exchange Rate."  The science and technology stuff is all very good, as I have suggested, ands there are multiple cool sciency things I have not mentioned.  But the actual story is poorly structured and the characters are nonentities, so "Exchange Rate" does not engage the emotions and reading it feels like a long slog.  When Clement at the very end tried to depict emotions and present some philosophy, I was not on his wavelength--of course you should kill an alien who kills your wife so it doesn't kill anybody else.      

I guess we'll be generous and call "Exchange Rate" acceptable.

"The Sky-Green Blues" by Tanith Lee

If you judge by who can write a good sentence and who can paint vivid images, Tanith Lee is one of the very top speculative fiction writers.  And "The Sky-Green Blues" is far and away the best of today's three stories.  Of course, it is not about science, but about sex and danger and the craft and life of the writer and a twist ending that is supposed to blow your mind.   

Our narrator is a journalist, a woman who has reported from numerous dangerous regions.  It is some kind of alternate reality future; our heroine has a chip in her arm that allows her to understand foreign languages when spoken, and even read foreign languages; she carries around a computer with which she can watch TV and send messages back and forth with her employers as well as record her notes; to save time, before interviewing an author, she has his books fed into her brain while she sleeps.  

The author lives in a city in a jungle.  "The Sky-Green Blues" is, I think, set on Earth--"Europeans" and "sparrows" and other Earth people and animals are mentioned, but there are also animals and people from other planets around, or at least that is where I think they must have come from.  As our narrator is interviewing the author over the course of days or weeks, she is also conducting a strange affair with the author's manservant; this servant is a humanoid alien, and every night he comes to the narrator's bedroom and they have sex, sex which never leads to an orgasm for either of them.  At the same time, an enemy army is advancing on the city.  

The morning of the day it looks like the enemy is going to take the city, the author commits suicide.  The narrator and the manservant jump in the author's armored vehicle and drive through the jungle--at the coast they hope to be picked up by ships being sent by some authority or other to rescue refugees.

In the jungle, after a day's driving, the alien manservant leaves the vehicle and leads the journalist to a beautiful waterfall by an ancient decaying temple.  Within the temple the narrator is astounded to find the author!  Still alive!  And scribbling away!  The author provides difficult to refute evidence that the journalist and the manservant and even this war-torn world are not quite real, but the product of the author's imagination and pen!  The author and manservant send the narrator on her way, with the prediction that, even though the manservant never ejaculated while they were having sex and their species cannot breed, she will soon give birth to the manservant's child because a hybrid baby like that will be a good plot development.  The narrator makes it to the coast alone on foot and is among the crowds of people taken away in VTOL aircraft by soldiers; the soldiers grope her, but she doesn't take much offense.

I think this story is quite well written, but I'm afraid the resolution of the plot is disappointing me.  The whole this-is-not-real-life-but-a-story-gimmick feels tired and silly.  Admittedly, Lee tries to use the gimmick to talk about life and the profession of writer in a philosophical way, but I'm not convinced this really works all that well.  I'm still recommending the story, but I can't love it like I wish I could.

"The Sky-Green Blues" debuted in the British magazine Interzone.  This magazine suffers a little from the embarrassing expedient of reprinting illustrations in an effort to make sure there are illustrations on most pages, but not as much as the issue of Absolute Magnitude we just looked at.  "The Sky-Green Blues," it appears, has only ever been reprinted in the various editions of Dozois' 17th Year's Best anthology, which include a British edition titled The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction: 13th Annual Collection.

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All three of today's stories leave me feeling uneasy.  Pohl's science I found hard to understand, and while I could grok Clement's science, the story was long and tedious with no human drama, no human feeling.  Lee's story was brilliantly written, but the plot and central gimmick were underwhelming.  Maybe recent SF just isn't for me, even when written by the masters of the field.

Tanith Lee: "You Are My Sunshine," "The Unrequited Glove," and "Mirage and Magia"

There are a lot of Tanith Lee collections out there.  Let's read a few stories from 1989's Women as Demons, published by The Women's Press as part of their science fiction series, which is meant "to present exciting and provocative feminist images of the future" that "offer an alternative vision of science and technology" and "challenge male domination of science fiction itself."  On the title page the collection has a long subtitle, as might an academic treatise: "The Male Perception of Women Through Space and Time."  Of the book's sixteen stories, I've already read, I believe, four: 1978's "The Demoness," 1979's "The Thaw," 1981's "Gemini," and 1982's "Written in Water."  Let's read three more tales from the book, those  with titles that are striking me: "You Are My Sunshine," "The Unrequited Glove," and "Mirage and Magia."

"You Are My Sunshine" (1980)

"You Are My Sunshine" debuted in Roy Torgeson's Chrysalis 8 alongside Barry Malzberg and R. A. Lafferty stories I don't think I have read.  Two years after being reprinted in Women as Demons, "You Are My Sunshine" would reappear in the Lee collection Space is Just a Starry Night.

"You Are My Sunshine" begins and ends with excerpts from a transcript of an interrogation by some officials of the only survivor of a space ship disaster.  The middle, the lion's share of the story, is the story of the disaster, told in the third person but only depicting events the sole survivor, a good-looking thirty-something guy named Leon Canna, experienced.

It is the future of interstellar civilization, in which solar-powered starliners carry thousands of passengers at a time between star systems.  These huge ships closely orbit stars for a few days before an interstellar jaunt to charge their batteries.  The vessels' shields filter out all dangerous radiation, so only beneficial radiation reaches the crews and passengers of the ships--this beneficial radiation provides tremendous health benefits, and people who can afford it flock to the "Solarine" ships to bask in this health-giving radiation while they are charging up.  

Canna is a "Passenger Link," a sort of morale officer, geisha man and liaison between the technical crew who operate the ship and the civilian passengers; he makes sure everybody on the cruise is having a good time and if anything goes wrong makes sure the passengers don't panic or get too angry.  It seems that he regularly has sex with female passengers as one means of keeping their spirits up.

Canna notices a shy and plain girl passenger, Apollonia Hartley, boarding the ship right before one of these popular charging-up periods.  He encourages her to come out of her shell, go tan in the solarium, and he flirts with her.  Lee portrays his dealings with the girl as somewhat predatory, but also suggests Canna himself is being manipulated--Canna is not sure why he is attracted to this girl who is not very good-looking or interesting.

Over the course of just a couple of days the plain girl seems to blossom, becoming the hottest girl Canna has ever seen and pursuing Canna sexually--now Canna is scared of Apollonia, and he tries to avoid her but she finally succeeds in coupling with him in his cabin.  Parallel to this erotic drama, a technical drama is proceeding.  The levels of radiation on the ship are rising, and the computers and technicians can't find anything wrong with the ship's shields or its other systems--where is the radiation coming from?  Of course we readers know it must be coming from the mysterious Apollonia.  After she has sex with Canna, she goes out to the solarium--the solarium has been declared off limits because it gets more solar radiation than anywhere and the crew assumes if the dangerous rise in radiation is coming from the star they are orbiting so closely then the solarium is the most dangerous place to be, but the Ms. Hartley stole the key from Canna right before losing her virginity to him.  The tech boys detect that the radiation in Canna's cabin is higher than anywhere else on the ship and tell him to get in his space armor tout suite.  Right after he dons his vacuum suit the no-longer-plain girl explodes, destroying the ship and killing everybody aboard except the fully armored Canna.

Lee, as I have told you a hundred times, is a great writer who is very skilled at putting sentences and paragraphs together and creating moods and painting characters, and so "You Are My Sunshine" is an entertaining and exciting story and of course I am giving it a thumbs up.  As for the plot, it works fine if we accept it as a horror fantasy set in a future starfaring civilization and not a serious science fiction story that is trying to teach you science or make an educated guess about what the future will be like; one might complain that Lee never makes clear what is going on with this exploding young woman--is she an alien or something?--but fantasy writers don't need to explain trolls and ogres and dragons and demons, they are just there, perhaps as symbols.

So, this is a good story I recommend.  But, considering where I am reading it, maybe we should assess if "You Are My Sunshine" really is a feminist story that is all about male perceptions of the female and offers an alternative female or feminine vision.

For one thing, early in the story there is a throwaway line that suggests that in the future people will realize women are smarter than men and stop stifling women's superior brains and superior ambition:

...the Solarines had a low percentage of female crew—since women had realised their intellectual potency, they tended to go after the big-scale jobs which pleasure-cruisers didn’t offer.

This female superiority doesn't manifest itself any other way in the story, unless we think that the passenger who seduces Canna and then kills everybody (and herself?) is demonstrating some kind of superior ambition and cleverness by doing so.

The board of inquiry that hears Canna's story accuses him of making up or hallucinating the story of a plain girl blossoming sexually under his influence and then exploding, saying he has "managed to turn a naval tragedy into an exercise in masculine ego."  This sounds like feminist talk, but Lee undercuts this assessment by offering unmistakable clues that indicate Canna really is telling the truth to the investigators.  I'm not even sure "You Are My Sunshine" really works on the simple level of feminist revenge fantasy in which a woman turns the tables on a male aggressor--sure, Canna has contempt for the young woman and manipulates her, and then she turns the tables on him and he suffers, but he lives through the disaster, suffering far less than all the people on the ship who never did anything to hurt her, hundreds of whom must be women passengers.  

In the context of the story, the girl in "You Are My Sunshine" really was something of a demon, a creature who used her sexual wiles to get something she wanted out of a man and then callously or cruelly killed thousands of people--Lee's story doesn't seem to be questioning men's perceptions of women as trouble so much as instantiating it.  The final image of the story is the burns on Canna's back in the shape of Apollonia's arms and hands that Lee compares to those left by branding irons--sex with Apollonia physically injured, perhaps permanently scarred, Canna, which feels like Lee's symbolic representation of men's fears of disease and of permanent attachment should they have sex with a woman.  Well, maybe if we go full "meta" we can say by writing a story in which a woman's blossoming, triggered by a man flirting with her, kills thousands of innocent people and permanently damages the man, Lee is offering a vision of what men think, providing a peek into the male mind.

"The Unrequited Glove" (1988)

In 1988 four issues of the widely beloved Weird Tales appeared, including special issues devoted to Avram Davidson, Gene Wolfe, and Lee.  "The Unrequited Glove" debuted in the Lee issue, which is full of illustrations by Stephen Fabian, so his fans as well as Lee's should seek the issue out.  Besides Women as Demons, you can find "The Unrequited Glove" in the 2017 collection The Weird Tales of Tanith Lee.

"The Unrequited Glove" is a lot like "You Are My Sunshine," and many of my comments about that story apply to this one.  A good-looking, confident guy trifles with a virginal and shy young woman in an exotic locale frequented by the wealthy, and when he loses interest in her she achieves a terrible revenge on him.  While written in the third person, it is mostly written from the perspective of the male lead, with the female avenger "on screen" relatively rarely.  The man had some level of contempt for the woman, but didn't intentionally set out to harm her, so is her use of her supernatural powers to commit murder justified, or is she the villain?  

Jason Drinkwood is a wealthy Englishman who spends long periods of time in some kind of coastal tropical "colony" in the New World where lots of rich or artistic Europeans and Americans hang around.  These jokers all have servants and sit around drinking and attending parties and having affairs with each other and so forth.  Jason has a brief affair with a female painter who owns a gallery where she sells her work, Alys Ashlin.  Jason doesn't take women too seriously, going through them at a rapid pace, and he soon tires of the painter and tries to break off their relationship.  But she has fallen in love with him.  She comes to his place, to tell him she loves him, and then departs, leaving behind a glove.  The glove is animate, and terrorizes Jason for weeks, throwing things at him, cutting holes in his expensive clothes, etc.  It toys with him, I guess the way Alys thinks he toyed with her.  The glove follows him everywhere, and is too magical for him to actually destroy, even though he does catch it once.  Jason begins to lose his sanity.

Finally, by taking a "steamer" back to London and bringing no luggage so the glove has nowhere to hide, Jason escapes the glove.  But Alys figures out a way to get the glove across the pond (a friend of Jason's has a crate of oranges from the colony shipped over to Blighty and the glove hides in the crate--some friend!) and this time the glove is not playing--it murders Jason.

This is a superior horror story that perhaps we should see as the wish fulfillment fantasy of shy sensitive girls who think of themselves as smart and who resent the good-looking but not-quite-as-smart guys whom they desire but who reject them.  Is the idea that, if you fall in love with a guy but he doesn't fall in love with you, he deserves capital punishment, a feminist idea, making this a feminist story?  Or is "The Unrequited Glove" just a reworking of the traditional theme that women are trouble and every time you get involved with a woman you are taking a terrible risk because women are irrational and calculating and play by different rules than do men, or respect no rules at all?

"Mirage and Magia"  (1982)

"Mirage and Magia" debuted in the DAW witch story anthology Hecate's Cauldron, which was reprinted in Germany as Hexengeschichten. The story has been reprinted in multiple anthologies and Lee collections in our own 21st century so all you admirers of the female form have a wide array of hubba hubba sex-sells covers to choose from.

"Mirage and Magia" immediately reminded me of Clark Ashton Smith.  The story takes place in some exotic fantasy world in which there are "balloon-ships" and "carriages" that walk on giant insect legs, in a remote city of rococo towers and fantastical mansions terrorized by a witch.  This witch, Taisia-Tua, only appears in public in a mask and wig, never wearing the same mask and wig twice, so nobody knows what she looks like.  She seems obsessed with her own image, carrying a little mirror around with her in which she often gazes upon herself.  TT has the ability to summon men to her; against their will, men she accosts on the street with the phrase "Follow me" walk to her mansion, through its 30-foot-high gates.  When they come back out through those gates their souls are absent, apparently awarded to some demon or evil god--the men are vegetables, unable to clean or feed themselves, and those who look into the empty eyes of one of Taisia-Tua's victims see not their own reflections, but the back of the victim himself!

Over the years, many men lose their souls this way.  Attacks, physical and magical, on the witch and her mansion come to nothing.  Taisia-Tua arrogantly flies a kite over the city trailing a banner that boasts that she is the greatest of all magicians.  The city's greatest thief, in return for a hefty fee, sneaks into the mansion and investigates, finding the place's interior a labyrinth of mirrors of dizzying variety.  The thief witnesses one of the witch's victims losing his soul, apparently merely from looking at his own many-multiplied reflection in all the mundane and magical mirrors.        

Years later another magician arrives in the city, a sorcerer skilled in the making of music and the performance of acrobatic feats.  He advances to Taisa-Tua's mansion and proves immune to her mirrors.  We learn the witch's story.  A man broke her heart and she came to the city of mansions to work her revenge on the world, using men's own vanity to stupefy them.  But this new man falls in love with Taisa-Tua after convincing her to reveal her true face and hair to him, and wins her love.  This love connection causes the mirrors to shatter and the witch's apparently soulless victims to recover their senses.  The lovers leave the city, and in the abandoned mansion the city dwellers, now liberated from her campaign of terror, find a note which bears witness to Taisa-Tua's recognition that love is the greatest magician of all.

An unexpected happy ending, but not necessarily a feminist happy ending!  A woman lashes out at the world because one man broke her heart, and then another man comes along and his love cures her and ends her reign of terror--"Mirage and Magia" suggests that even the most able of women's whole outlook on life and her behavior are determined by the response of men to her!

A quite successful fantasy tale; Lee piles on the extravagant descriptions but "Mirage and Magia" does not feel overwritten--all the descriptions paint a vivid picture in the mind or convey to the reader a powerful mood--every sentence is entertaining.  

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These are three good stories, and the Women's Press has done the world a service making them available to more people by printing Women as Demons.  I'm skeptical that these fantasy stories of women abusing people with their magical powers further the mission of the Women's Press of exposing people to "provocative feminist images of the future" and "alternative vision[s] of science and technology," but I suppose the most powerful and least controversial feminist act is giving a woman an opportunity to demonstrate her abilities, and Lee is a writer of high ability and these stories certainly prove that.  These stories specifically and Women as Demons as a whole are highly recommended to fantasy and horror fans and to those who enjoy speculative fiction that emphasizes traditional literary values over teaching you science or beating you over the head with some kind of obvious political or social commentary.

Tanith Lee: "Sea Warg," "A House on Fire," and "Beyond the Sun"

When recently I read Gene Wolfe's sword and sorcery chess and gender roles story "Bloodsport" in Paula Guran's The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror: 2011 Edition, I noticed the book also included a story by Tanith Lee.  Let's check that story out and two other stories from the period by the talented Ms. Lee, who has one of the best prose styles in speculative fiction and regularly stuffs her fiction full to bursting with strange and disturbing images and themes.

"Sea Warg" (2010)

Here's the story from Guran's 2011 "Best of" anthology.  The editor's note in front of "Sea Warg" pessimistically says that we live in an "Age of Solipsism" in which people only care about themselves and only notice another's unhappiness if it has been photographed.  We're in disturbing territory already!

"Sea Warg" is a monster story with an intricate plot which I won't describe in detail here, and two characters with rich backstories, whose histories and personalities I won't exhaustively detail either.  There is also quite a bit of detective business going on, with one character committing monstrous crimes and going through various tergiversations and manipulations to conceal them, and the other using his particular abilities to see through the monster's deceptions and camouflage, collect and interpret clues, and then lay a trap for the monster that destroys it.  There is a lot of plot material here, but the story does not feel long and it doesn't bust your brain--Lee's smooth and evocative prose renders everything easy to digest and quite engrossing.

"Sea Warg" begins with a description of an abandoned pier and a town, once a fashionable seaside resort with a ferry to France, now the decrepit haunt of drug addicts and the dealers who supply them their "skunk" and "crack."  Decay and decline are one of Lee's themes; another is the selfishness hinted at in the little intro.  Related to this solipsism is the idea of alienation--the monster, a sort of aquatic werewolf, is of course an outsider who is callous or cruel to ordinary people, but the man who engineers the destruction of the killer beast is a cold and callous outsider himself who preys upon people in his own fashion and who doesn't slay the monster because he feels any duty to defend society but as a sort of entertaining puzzle.  The trap he springs on the monster snares some innocent ordinary people, and the monster slayer shrugs these casualties off as acceptable collateral damage. 

A great weird tale; I can't think of any flaws in it--five out of five severed hands found washed up on the beach!   

"Sea Warg" was first printed in the 2010 anthology Full Moon City; it can also be found in the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door and Other Rare Tales.  I'd like to see a scan of Full Moon City as there is a Gene Wolfe story in there, but the scan at the internet archive is no longer operative for able-bodied people.  I guess I could claim I have a disability to get access, but that would be like claiming I had a disability to get extra time on a school exam, or claiming I was a girl so I could compete against young women in some kind of sporting event, and no self-respecting person indulges in such knavish tricks.

"A House on Fire" (2011)

Stephen Jones, indefatigable anthologist, presented to the horror community in 2011 a volume entitled Haunts: Reliquaries of the Dead that reprinted a bunch of tales Jones considered classics as well as ten new stories.  Among the reprints are tales by people we read, like Richard Matheson, Robert Silverberg, Basil Copper, Ramsey Campbell, and Karl Edward Wagner, so maybe I'll look into this book again.  But today we're reading the original-to-this-volume story by Lee, "A House on Fire."

The epigraph of "A House on Fire" is an excerpt from a fictional book of "legal mysteries," a brief description of how some guy murdered his mistress and then burned down her remote house to hide the evidence.  The authorities were fooled, and judged the woman to have died in the fire which they deemed an accident, but then the killer confessed and was hanged.  The main story of like 27 pages explains why he confessed.

It is the late 19th century.  Slum-born Edwin Onslowe received a considerable inheritance and as an adult lives a life of leisure with his London apartment as his home base.  For some years he has been conducting an affair with Violet North.  Wealthy middle-aged businessman Mr. North spends most of his time in India, the British climate not agreeing with him, leaving his young attractive wife Violet alone in England for long months at a time.  Edwin and Violet only meet a few times a year, and make an elaborate game of their trysts, wearing disguises, putting on fake accents, giving false names at inns and hotels, etc., ostensibly to protect their reputations, but largely because this deception is fun--in fact, Edwin has come to enjoy all this espionage business more than the actual sex.

Via a pseudonymous letter, Violet invites Edwin to one of her husband's remoter properties, a 17th-century country house.  Edwin dons a disguise and boards the train to meet her there, reflecting that this will probably be the last time he meets her--he is tired of her and has just met a 19-year-old woman he thinks he can seduce (Violent is now 27.)  The 17th-century house has a strange effect on Edwin; Violet says it is built on some kind of pagan holy ground, made of bricks and wood collected from holy sites throughout the world, designed and built by carefully vetted men of high character.  Edwin feels like the house is watching him, listening to him, judging him.

After they have sex Violet breaks the news to Edwin--Mr. North has fallen in love with an Indian princess, and is abandoning Christianity and giving Violet a divorce and a huge settlement, including this house.  Violet tells Edwin she is in love with him and now they can get married!  Edwin has never loved Violet, and never suspected Violet loved him, and he wants nothing more to do with her.  His rejection drives her to hysteria.  When she assaults him, he kills her.  Then, to cover his tracks, he burns the house.

Back in London, Edwin is haunted by the smell of smoke, nightmares whose theme is heat, optical illusions when he looks at gas lamps or other fires, and eventually hallucinations of fires.  Things get worse and worse; Edwin goes totally insane and we are told straight out that the dead house is haunting him by making him experience its death--its murder at his hands--again and again.  The police find Edwin collapsed in the street in his nightclothes; he confesses to the murder of Violet and as his execution approaches he seems to welcome death.

"A House on Fire" is good but not great.  I enjoyed all the stuff with the Norths and Edwin's relationship with Violet.  But the escalating haunting of Edwin back in London is kinda long and kinda repetitive.  And the whole idea of a house of goodness that is essentially alive and then seeks revenge is a little silly; Lee suggests the house is a healer and a protector, so why is it on a campaign of vengeance?  Turn the other cheek, house!  

In my humble opinion, if Lee wanted to write a story about a vengeful house, she should have made it the house built by a murderer on the site of a massacre, and if she wanted to write a story about a good goody house, she should have depicted it protecting a woman from murder and reforming the bad guy.   

In 2013 "A House on Fire" was reprinted in the Lee collection Animate Objects.

"Beyond the Sun" (2011)

Over the years, we've read like seven stories from the 2015 Lee collection Blood 20.  Well, here's an eighth.  "Beyond the Sun" made its debut alongside a bunch of stories by people I've never heard of in 2011's Evolve Two: Vampire Stories of the Future Undead; we are reading it in a scan of that very volume.

Here we have a sympathetic vampire story, one that paints vampires as superior beings, as both romantic and tragic; "Beyond the Sun" is a sort of wish fulfillment fantasy for those who dream of being immortal and sexy aristocrats.  The more original and creative part of the story is how Lee speculates on how the super powers vampires have might be utilized in the star hopping future and how this might shape the role of vampires in larger human society.

Our narrator is Anka, though she sometimes writes about herself in the third person.  We learn her life story out of chronological order, in flashbacks as we observe her current work as a terraformer/sunmaker.  

Anka was born into a future world in which vampires were accorded special legal status because they are so useful to society--after all, they are perfect astronauts, able to live without oxygen, fly on their own mental power, see in the dark, etc.  And out in most of space they can work 24/7 because vampires only need sleep when close to the hated rays of a sun.

Vampires in modern society typically have two human companions, blood donors, who act as their source of food.  Having your blood sucked by a vampire is erotically exciting, at least for some people, so there are plenty of people willing to fill these jobs.  Anka, at age 20, becomes one of a handsome vampire's blood donors and falls in love with him; they get married and he turns her into a vampire.  After some decades together, they break up and Anka takes a job flying around the galaxy in a spaceship with her two blood donors, preparing colonies for humans by terraforming planets and creating new suns to warm them.  We hear plenty about how the sex life of this interstellar menage a trois operates and how Anka marvels at the beauty of outer space and planetary surfaces as she flies around at the head of her squadron of robots, directing their terraforming efforts.

The big climax of the story is the revelation that vampires have better dreams than us, that their dreams seem real and occur to them when they are awake, seeing as the vampires in this story do not sleep.  Anka periodically has dreams of having sex with the vampire who turned her into a vampire, and these dreams are the best part of her life but are also heartbreaking and leave her crying in her cabin on her space ship.

"Beyond the Sun" is merely acceptable.  Lee's story lacks tension, didn't surprise me, and failed to make me care what happened to any of its very fortunate characters (if I was a leftie or a religious person I would call them "privileged" or "blessed" instead of "fortunate.")  The plot is kind of boring--the characters don't really face risks or make decisions--and the images and characters are not very engaging or moving--we've got beautiful people living beautiful lives seeing beautiful things.

Not a bad story, but a disappointment considering how fine so many Lee stories are.  Ripe for class and gender analysis, though.  We might say that "Beyond the Sun" has a stereotypical plot designed to appeal to females--a girl is turned into a princess by a man.  (The corresponding stereotypical plot designed to appeal to males is a young man killing a bunch of people or monsters and thereby making himself king--John Carter, Tarzan, and Conan do this sort of thing.)  And then there is all that business of the vampires getting special legal status and lording it over the commoners, whom they can raise to the aristocracy if they see fit.

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It is too bad that the first story we read today was the finest and the last was the least satisfying, but such is life.  

No doubt there will be more Tanith Lee in our future, but first, short stories by other SF authors.

2011 Horror: D Etchison, T Lee, and G Wolfe

I don't read a lot of 21st-century material, but I was poking around the internet archive looking for stories by Gene Wolfe written late in his career and came upon Paula Guran's The Year's Best Dark Fantasy and Horror: 2012 Edition, and saw it had stories not only by Wolfe but also Dennis Etchison and Tanith Lee, writers I generally life.  So let's check out these horror stories penned and published in the internet age, only a few years before I started up this blog of mine.

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" by Dennis Etchison

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" debuted in Stephen Jones' A Book of Horrors.  Over ten years ago we read the Ramsey Campbell story in A Book of Horrors, "Getting it Wrong," a story about torture that has particular appeal for film buffs.  Let's hope I like Etchison's contribution to A Book of Horrors more than I did Campbell's.

(Hopes are dashed.)

"Tell Me I'll See You Again" is about survivor's guilt, a topic that is coded as mature, a fit subject for serious contemporary literature or a special episode of a TV drama, and thus kind of pretentious and boring.  This story itself feels pretentious and boring, a sort of fragment of suburban working-class life with scenes in a grocery store and talk about going to Home Depot.  Zzzz.

The fantasy or horror element of "Tell Me I'll See You Again" is a young boy's odd affliction: he will periodically collapse and appear dead--his heartbeat and breathing are actually undetectable during these events.  But then he gets back up just fine.  These episodes are likened to "playing possum"--in the same scene in which the kid has one of these episodes his friends actually find nearby a possum feigning death and the girl of the bunch uses the same technique on both boy and marsupial to arouse them.  We learn that the kid started having these episodes after his mother and brother died in a car accident--the kid himself was scheduled to ride with Mom, but he was busy so his brother went.  The aforementioned girl is a budding scientist or aspiring doctor or something, and is trying to figure out what is going on with her friend, experimenting on bugs, reading books, interrogating him.  He tells her he hopes he dies for real.

Then the story ends abruptly, telling us the boy with the odd malady and the smart girl drift apart and the boy's father dies when he is a senior in high school and the boy develops a sad philosophy about life and death.

This story feels like a load of nothing, lacking a conventional plot structure with characters who make decisions and some kind of resolution, and offering themes and images that are jejune but respectable mainstream fodder.  Thumbs down.  In 2019 I read the Karl Edward Wagner intro to the 1984 Dennis Etchison collection Red Dreams in which Wagner suggests ordinary people are too dim to understand Etchison, so maybe this is on me, even though I have enjoyed quite a few Etchison stories.

"Why Light?" by Tanith Lee

Here we have a tale of a teenaged girl's angst--her father is dead, she doesn't get along with her mother, and she is being thrust unwillingly into the world of adult relationships.  But it all turns out well for her in the end.  I don't think we can even call this a horror story--luckily Guran's book has "dark fantasy" as well as "horror" on the cover.  (I'm not adding "dark fantasy" to my blog post title, though--just remember I'm not engaging in false advertising, but "subverting reader expectations.")   

Daisha is a seventeen-year-old in an alternate universe where they have email and automobiles and skyscrapers, just like your world, reader, but in this world many of the wealthy are vampires and they live on estates catered to by human servants.  These vampires are genetically diverse; sure most of them have to drink blood and are harmed by sunlight, but some, like Daisha, can eat regular people food and endure some time in the sunlight.  Daisha can tolerate more sun than most, and this is one of the reasons her aristocratic family is cementing an alliance with another family of aristocratic vampires by having her marry a guy named "the Wolf," a 27-year-old vampire who is very vulnerable to the sun.  The Wolf's family's bloodline will benefit from gaining some resistance to solar radiation.  These bloodsuckers are into selective breeding!  (Daisha's rough relationship with Mom is also, it seems, because Mom is disgusted by or envious of Daisha's ability to tolerate, even relish, the sunlight she herself hates and fears.)

"Why Light?"'s 17 pages are split into three parts.  Part One is an imagistic scene in which Daisha dramatically describes her mother carrying her outside as a child to witness a sunrise and see how much sun her little vampire kiddo can take.  In Part Two seventeen-year-old Daisha says good-bye to home and rides across the country is a chauffeured limousine to her new home, that of the Wolf, where she finds the vampires of this family live quite differently from her own family back home.  Daisha is cold towards these odd disturbing people, and the Wolf himself is cold--could he be as unexcited about this arranged marriage as Daisha is?  

In Part Three, after three weeks with her new family, Daisha learns of the Wolf's secret sorrow.  He loves sunlight, dreams of it, but the slightest touch of sunlight makes him deathly ill!  He was bedridden for ten months when his parents took him outside as a child to test his resilience to the dawn.

And then Daisha learns what a goody the Wolf is--he cures any humans on his estate who get hurt or fall ill by letting them drink his blood!  Daisha falls in love with the Wolf.  And she has a brainwave--after they are married tomorrow, she will offer him her blood to drink!  Maybe he will gain some tolerance to the sun after drinking her blood, and they can share the light!

"Why Light?" is like a romance novel, or maybe I should say what I suppose a romance novel to be, not being very familiar with them.  Maybe it is Lee's version of Pride and Prejudice or Wuthering Heights or something like that, the novels I am led to believe are the foundational texts of the women's romance genre.  "Why Light?" is also what we might call a switcheroo story.  Aristocrats in stories often oppress the commoners while vampires in stories traditionally murder and exploit humans, but in this story an aristo is generous and giving, and the lead vampire donates blood to give life to mere mortals rather than killing or enslaving them to steal their blood.

Lee is a good writer and her descriptions and metaphors are all good, and Daisha really does talk like a teenaged girl who is all depressed and angry and acting out one day (she declares she will wear black to her wedding) and then falls in love with a super guy and is all gushing over how awesome he is (she picks out a green dress for the wedding) the next.  So the story isn't bad; it may be a superior specimen of what it is trying to be, the characters and setting being totally convincing as they are.  But do I really want to read a story about good vampires or a story in which a teenaged girl meets her Heathcliff or Mr. Darcy or whatever?  Not really.  We'll call this one acceptable, though it may well be catnip for the people who like sympathetic vampire stories or all those paranormal romance books which I know even less about than I do Jane Austen, Emily Bronte, or Georgette Heyer.        

Vampire fans can find "Why Light?" in Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling's Teeth: Vampire Tales and the 2019 Lee collection A Wolf at the Door.

"Josh" by Gene Wolfe

Here we have a six-and-a-half-page story that is genuinely creepy at some points and disgusting at others, so a horror success, thumbs up.  Do I really know 100% what is going on in this story?  Maybe not--as the little intro before "Josh" reminds us, in a Gene Wolfe story the narrator is often an unreliable one.

"Josh" is a portion of the journal of a young man who lives with his parents, a sort of depressed anti-social type, a guy who sees himself as an outsider or loner.  I guess he is high school age.  The family moves into a new house far away, a house in a sort of remote spot by a forest.  Before the furniture has arrived, before the electricity is switched on, Josh's parents disappear, leaving Josh alone for days in a house almost empty, and the journal excerpt ends before Mom and Dad reappear.  Josh has several eerie supernatural experiences in and around the house, and a sex and violence adventure with some hitchhikers which winds up with him trying to hide a dead body and then fearing attack from vampires.  Or so he suggests.  Is Josh including wish-fulfillment fiction in his journal?  Is Josh insane?  Are ghosts making him see things?  The vampires using their hypnotic powers on him?  Who knows?  There definitely seems to be some thing or things haunting the house, but the vampires seem to be coming to the house from outside.  (We had two distinct, perhaps competing, supernatural groups in Wolfe's "Sob in the Silence" a few days ago, didn't we?)

"Josh" debuted in Portents, an anthology edited by Al Sarrantonio, and has been reprinted in the 2023 Subterranean Press Wolfe collection The Dead Man and Other Horror Stories.

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Lee's story is written in a rich style, lavish in detail and easy to understand, but, as with the Etchison, the main themes are not to my taste.  Etchison's and Wolfe's stories are on the spare side stylistically, and a little challenging to get, but while Etchison's story is not engaging at all, Wolfe, as he does so often, does that thing where the story is very entertaining on the surface, delivering the thrills and chills we hope to find when we open up a book with the words "horror" and "fantasy" and a picture of a haunted house on the cover, even if you don't quite comprehend what it all means or what is really going on. 

I'll be mining the internet archive, world's greatest website, for more relatively recent Wolfe stories for our next episode.

More Masterful Dark stories: F Leiber, D Knight, T Lee & G A Effinger

Here at the blog we are reading stories from Dennis Etchison's 1988 anthology Masters of Darkness II, our source being the scan at the internet archive of the 1991 omnibus edition of all three Masters of Darkness books.  The Masters of Darkness books reprint, in some cases in revised form, horror stories selected by authors from their own bodies of work.  Last time we read stories by Manly Wade Wellman (quite good), Charles L. Grant (lame), Frank Belknap Long (not good) and Thomas F. Monteleone (a pungent slice of NYC-flavored urban alienation), and today we have tales by Fritz Leiber, Damon Knight, Tanith Lee, and George Alec Effinger.

"Black Corridor" by Fritz Leiber (1967)

This is one of Leiber's Change War stories, and first appeared in Galaxy.  Even though it is part of that series, it seems to stand perfectly well on its own.

Remember how, in Dr. No, James Bond has to navigate his way through a sort of cramped gauntlet/maze?  (In the book he has to fight a giant squid at the end, but that was too complicated for the silver screen.)  "Black Corridor" is a little like that, but includes some logic puzzles and philosophical content.

A naked guy who has lost most of his memory finds himself in a corridor--a wall behind him is moving forward, compelling him to advance to a pair of doors labelled "AIR" and "WATER."  He has only a brief period of time in which to select which door to open.  The story describes the series of such choices he must make; it is implied that if he ever makes a wrong choice he will be killed by whatever fatal hazard lies behind the door which bears the "wrong" answer to the puzzle.  One of the doors is labelled "TIGERS," presumably a reference to the famous story "The Lady or the Tiger?"  

After surviving multiple such dilemmas, the protagonist comes to a choice between "PERPETUAL SOLITARY CONFINEMENT IN HAPPY COMFORT" and "LIFE OR DEATH."  Of course he chooses the latter--it is pretty common for SF stories to tell you that an easy life in a utopia is actually bad for people, that to be satisfied and to reach their potential people need challenge and risk.  Anyway, behind the "LIFE OR DEATH" door the protagonist finds an office where sits a nurse with a robotic hand.  The end of the story seems to suggest that the corridors were a test to see if he was suitable to colonize this alien planet and/or therapy to cure some psychological issue from which he was suffering, but now cannot remember--the nurse gives him a file folder full of information about himself, and in it he will learn what neurosis he has been liberated from.

"Black Corridor" is well written, and the plot is acceptable, so I can give this one a mild recommendation.  It is followed (as all the stories in the Masters of Darkness books are) by an Author's Note; Leiber in his describes the circumstances in which he wrote the story, places it in context within the speculative fiction field, and dedicates it to Robert Heinlein, whom Leiber praises as an inspiration and an educator.  The themes of "Black Corridor" perhaps bear some resemblance to those of Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky, in which students face a potentially lethal final exam that consists of surviving on an alien planet and have to make such basic decisions as what equipment and weapons to bring and whether to work in teams or individually.

"Black Corridor" seems to have been reprinted in French and Italian more often than in English; it appears in two different Urania anthologies with Karel Thole covers.

"Strangers on Paradise" by Damon Knight (1986)

This is another of those stories I was just alluding to that suggest the easy life in a utopia is not all it is cracked up to be; I guess we get so many of these stories because scientific and technological advances since the Industrial Revolution have made material life so much easier, and at the same time a wide range of political actors have promised to improve the lives of their clients via vigorous government intervention into the economy--these anti-utopian and utopian-skeptical stories remind us that changes that appear good on the surface or in the short term or for particular interest groups might have painful unintended consequences, impose serious long term costs, or entail trespassing on the rights of people outside a political actor's constituency or inflicting harm on society as a whole.

"Strangers on Paradise" is set in the 22nd century.  The human race has developed teleporter technology and is exploring the galaxy; for the teleporters to operate, both a transmitter and a receiver are required, so exploration is relatively slow, as it takes decades to fly to an unexplored star system and deploy there a teleporter receiver.

Thus far, the human race has discovered and colonized only one Earth-type planet, Paradise.  There is no disease on Paradise, nor any crime or pollution, and the colonists keep it that way by strictly controlling who can visit and who can immigrate.  Our hero, an Irish professor of English based at a Canadian university, is one of the lucky few allowed to land on Paradise after spending three months on a medical satellite having his body disinfected.  (Knight presumably affiliated him with bland anodyne nations so we wouldn't think the prof represents the Cold War West or Western imperialism or whatever.)   The prof has come to Paradise to conduct research on a female poet who was permitted to move to Paradise some 30-odd years ago; she died two or three years ago.

The prof finds Paradise as advertised--everybody is happy and friendly and good-looking, the air is clean and nobody ever gets sick.  But buried in the poet's papers he finds a secret message--she figured out that the original colonists massacred the entire population of intelligent natives!  Paradise is built on a foundation of genocide!

The prof keeps his knowledge to himself.  It is suggested that the Paradisans might permit him to immigrate to their peaceful Edenic world, and it is implied that a university job and relationships with attractive women will be available to him, but he decides to return to Earth, which is polluted and full of germs.  It appears that he is not going to reveal the horrible truth about Paradise--he cancels his plans to write a book about the poet.

All the science fiction business  in "Strangers on Paradise"--the means of travel and the alien species and the medical developments--is good, and the pacing and plot structure are as well, and the twist ending is actually surprising but not outlandish.  The story's themes have broad appeal; the story will resonate not only with anti-utopians like me, but also lefties who will see the story as an attack on religious people (the first colonists were members of a "Geneite sect" and one Paradisian flatly declares that the planet was given to humanity by God) and on the United States--one has to assume that we are supposed to see Paradise and its extinct natives as stand-ins for North America and American Indians.  At the same time I will note that there are clues that we are expected to see Paradise as being like Australia.  For one thing, the extinct natives are referred to as "aborigines."  Secondly, the prof, in an act of sabotage, frees a male and a female rabbit from a lab--these rabbits have been given an experimental treatment that is likely to have made them immortal, and Paradise lacks any predators large enough to take down even a rabbit. 

I am a Knight skeptic and have attacked many of the man's works of fiction at this here blog, so it always feels good to find a story by Knight that is easy to like, because it makes the respect he receives more intelligible, and because it reassures me that my low opinion of so many of his stories is a fair and rational response to individual stories and not the product of prejudice or a subconscious campaign of vengeance for Knight's infamous hostility to A. E. van Vogt.  

Thumbs up!

When it first appeared in F&SF, this story bore the title "Strangers in Paradise."  Gardner Dozois and Donald Wollheim both included the story in their annual "Best of" volumes in 1987, suggesting that this story was a big hit in the SF community.  In his Author's Note, however, Knight suggests he had trouble selling the story because it is such a misanthropic downer.  He doesn't name the editors who rejected the story, though if we look at the big magazines in 1985 and '86, Analog was being edited by Stanley Schmidt, Amazing by George H. Scithers, Asimov's by Shawna McCarthy ('85) and Dozois ('86), and Omni by shifting combinations of  Ellen Datlow, Gurney Williams III, and Patrice Adcroft.  

"Gemini" by Tanith Lee (1981)

On a recent trip to Wonder Book in Hagerstown, MD, I spotted a copy of the ninth volume of Roy Torgeson's Chrysalis series, which purports to contain the "Best All-New Science Fiction Stories."  When I saw that it contained a Tanith Lee story I didn't recognize, I whipped out my smartphone to figure out if I could find that tale online someplace, an act which incepted this current Masters of Darkness-centric project.

Gemmina, our narrator, is a beautiful blonde who is pathologically shy.  She lives in some alternate universe or alien planet or far future or whatever where there is a socialistic government which provides a UBI and demands ten days of service four times a year.  This society still has private property, though, and Gemmina lives alone on her family's ancestral estate in a mansion which, via robotics or magic, cleans itself.

One of the mysteries of Lee's story is how Gemmina seems to anthropomorphize her insecurities about other people, talking to us as if she had living within her a jealous vampiric entity that wants her all to itself.  When women try to make friends with her or men try to seduce her this entity inflicts pain on her, makes her shun or fight those who would get close to her.  When she looks into a mirror this entity feeds on her beauty.  Is some creature living within Gemmina, or is she just nuts?

Another mystery has to do with Gemmina's identity, and her resemblance to some blonde deities of her people, an incestuous pair of androgynous twins, a slender girl with small breasts and a thin boy with no facial hair.  These deities are named Gemmina and Gemmini.  Outside her mansion, our narrator wears a brown wig so her blonde hair, "the hair of the golden Twins," won't attract attention.

As an intellectual and artist, for her quarterly ten-day service Gemmina is generally assigned to work in libraries or art galleries (this story has elements of a grad student's wish-fulfillment fantasies, what with the stigma-free dole and having to work only 40 days a year, and that at a solitary creative job.)  In the period covered by the story she is cataloging books and painting a mural in the Library of Inanimate Beauty.  The mural is of the golden Twins Gemmina and Gemmini holding hands.  

The plot of the story, once all the background is out of the way, concerns an attractive young man she meets in that Library during her service.  This ill-fated man endeavors to approach Gemmina, and, driven by the jealous entity within her that seeks to keep her all to itself, Gemmina pushes him off a balcony to his death.  As the story ends, the government begins investigating our narrator in connection with the disappearance of that young man, and it is hinted that a disaster in Gemmina's life is looming.

Pretty good.  Lee is a master of mood and image and all that, and "Gemini" delivers that stuff as well as the solid plot and setting I have described above.  In her Author's Note, Lee comes right out and tells us that there is no alien entity possessing the narrator, that Gemmina has a psychological problem, what Lee calls "a case of bad nerves," and has constructed an artificial male oppressor to justify her unhealthy fears and distance herself from the moral implications of her anti-social behavior.          

"Gemini" would resurface in the Lee collection put out by the Women's Press in 1989, Women as Demons.

"Glimmer, Glimmer" by George Alec Effinger (1987)

I think I have read nine stories by Effinger over the course of this blog's improbable life; here the long-suffering staff of MPorcius Fiction Log presents a list of them, complete with links to my blog posts about them and even representative quotes from those posts for the TLDR crowd:     

"New New York New Orleans" ("This sort of thing isn't really my cup of tea")

"Trouble Follows" ("too lame to bother figuring out")

"A Free Pass to the Carnival" ("Marginal thumbs up")

"The Westfield Heights Mall Monster" ("borderline negative vote")

"The City on the Sand" ("a literary mood piece...a good one")

"Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson" ("a waste of my time")

"Ibid." ("a decent Twilight Zone-style story")

"Contentment, Satisfaction, Cheer, Well-Being, Gladness, Joy, Comfort, and Not Having to Get Up Early Any More" ("just boring")

"Live, from Brechtsgaden" ("I'd be lying if I said I enjoyed it or was moved by it or whatever")

It looks like I only liked three of those nine.  Will today's Effinger story, my tenth, improve my view of the man's oeuvre?  "Glimmer, Glimmer" debuted in an issue of Playboy the cover of which is dominated by the mug of Howard Stern Show habitue Jessica Hahn, about whom I have not thought in many years.  Besides in Masters of Darkness II, "Glimmer, Glimmer" would be reprinted in the Effinger collection Live! From Planet Earth. 

Rosa is a scientist, married to Joey, a man who inherited his father's dress shop and has built it into a business empire with outlets in hundreds of shopping malls.  Their marriage isn't working out so well--Joey can't take any time off of work to spend with Rosa, but somehow he finds time to cheat on her with a woman named Melinda.  As the story begins, this couple is taking their first vacation together in over a decade, biking cross country from one national forest or state park to another.  Joey planned this vacation without much of any input from Rosa, and it often leaves them alone, far from any other people, leading us readers to suspect Joey has brought Rosa deep into the wilderness with the idea of murdering her!

Whether or not Joey was capable of murder we will never know, but one thing is for sure--Rosa is willing and able to commit murder in the first degree!  Uninterested in settling for only half of the fortune Joey's hard work has accumulated, Rosa eschews the idea of divorcing her unfaithful husband and instead leverages her knowledge of biochemistry and insects to set a deadly trap for Joey.

This is a pretty good crime story that has a relationship drama at its core and employs a science gimmick, like we might expect of a science fiction writer.  Probably more interesting to social science and humanities types than the way Rosa uses her hard science knowledge of insects and chemistry to kill somebody is the matter of the story's gender and class politics: is "Glimmer, Glimmer" a feminist/leftist story in which a capable professional woman--a woman who fucking loves science!--wreaks a just punishment on a grasping nouveau riche bourgeois striver?  Or is it a misogynist/populist story about how women are cunning and manipulative and duplicitous and love money more than anything and will spread their legs or stab you in the back in order to get it from you, and how the credentialed elite of the non-profit sector have contempt for real work and will use their diabolical cleverness and esoteric knowledge to steal the fruits of your honest labor from you!    

I like it.

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Four good stories in a row, from four different authors?  How often does that happen?  When an English professor of the future studies this blog, he, she or they will recognize this as a black swan event!