Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are reading Roger Elwood's 1973 anthology of all new science fiction stories, Ten Tomorrows. In our last episode we read stories by Robert Silverberg (in the future you should work for the Revolution), Barry Malzberg (in the future you will be allowed to hunt down and kill old people), Laurence M, Janifer (in the future a chronoscope device will allow us to make decisions that end racism and avert nuclear war) and Edgar Pangborn (in the future we'll live on communes and have lots of gay sex.) Let's see what futures Anne McCaffrey, Pamela Sargent, and Larry Niven came up with in their contributions to Elwood's anthology.
"The Rescued Girls of Refugee" by Anne McCaffrey
As a youth I read a bunch of those Pern books and I guess I enjoyed them. As an adult I tried to reread one and thought it pretty poor. This is the first time I have read any fiction by McCaffrey in ages, and seeing as the story is mediocre, it is perhaps the last time I read any fiction by her.
The protagonist of "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" is a young woman living in an authoritarian matriarchal society, I guess a colony on an alien planet set up by feminists who fled Earth or whatever. Like all the young women in the colony, the protagonist has never seen a man and has been conditioned to believe men are filthy disgusting dwarves. This girl has had a complex and vivid dream, and is greatly troubled over it, so she is describing it to one of the matriarchs. In the dream she met men, and they were handsome and kind. It was explained to her in the dream that she was being conditioned to like men, in fact to be attracted to a specific man, to counteract the conditioning of the matriarchs who have squelched the natural desire of most women to have a sexual relationship with a man. It turns out that our protagonist is not the only woman in the colony to have this dream.
In the end of the story a space ship lands and men come out of it and the young women who had that dream run to join them.
There is a long SF tradition of stories in which different factions of the cognitive elite are battling over the shape of society behind the scenes, and the plot of the story concerns the protagonist learning this and having to choose sides between the secret factions, and there is a related tradition of stories about how the elite are fully justified in manipulating the common run of humanity.* There is also a long tradition of SF stories which depict societies run by women; some of them depict such matriarchal societies as utopian, others as dystopian. "The Rescued Girls of Refugee" is an addition to all these traditions that doesn't do anything particularly new or do anything particularly interesting, but isn't exactly bad. It makes sense to interpret McCaffrey's story here as an anti-feminist story, but the fact that the leaders of the heterosexual society uses the same intrusive methods on the hapless girls as do the rulers of the authoritarian lesbian society adds a level of moral ambiguity--at least I think it does.
Merely acceptable. The style is not very good--the protagonist's dialogue sounds more like the overwritten purple prose of a professional genre writer than the speech of a confused girl talking to a fearsome commissar--but at least the story is short at eight pages.
"The Rescued Girls of Refugee" reappeared in Elwood's 1976 anthology Visions of Tomorrow, and then never again.
*Many van Vogt works, Asimov's famous Hari Seldon stories, Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and Sturgeon's "Slow Sculpture" are some prominent examples of SF productions that fit into either or both of these categories.
"Matthew" by Pamela Sargent
I don't think I've ever read any fiction by Pamela Sargent. "Matthew" has never been reprinted, so is perhaps not representative of her best work, but let's see; you never know, maybe I'll like it.
"Matthew" is a first-person narrative delivered by a guy living in the future who has a difficult family life. This isn't one of those stories in which the author tells you the background setting of the story at the start, and then you get the plot in a straightforward chronological manner; rather, Sargent explains things gradually in dribs and drabs, out of order, so as you read it you are piecing it together.
In brief, our narrator lives in a world where most people don't have to work, because robots and computers do most everything--you just "dial" up you meals from a machine. A few conservative types dial up the groceries and cook the food themselves, but they are considered retrograde weirdos. This world is no utopia, though! Due to a capital-P Plague in the past, few women are able to carry a baby successfully to term--births are so rare that they are news events broadcast on TV. By the end of the story it is clear that population is in radical decline, there are fewer than 100,000 people in the whole world, and the computer network everybody relies on is breaking down because nobody has the knowhow to maintain and repair it, most people being decadents who spend their time using drugs and watching TV.
The narrator has a job filming births for the TV. He had a sexy girlfriend, a Greek-American expert on Ancient Greece named Athena, and had a child with her, Matthew. Matthew is a genius, but was born without hands. When Athena was pregnant with Matthew, the narrator married his other sexy girlfriend, a volatile African-American woman with yellow eyes, Laura. Laura is apparently unable to have a child, and is jealous of Athena and Matthew, whom the narrator goes to see every month or so.
Adults try to keep the truth about the terminal decline of the human population from children, but Matthew is a genius and has access to the computer network and all its records and has made friends over the network with other genius youngsters, and has figured it out. He has also figured out that the Plague was likely engineered by somebody in authority in the Northern Hemisphere as a way to solve the overpopulation problem--he theorizes it was meant to just afflict Indians and Africans and Latin Americans but got out of hand.
The narrator decides little Matthew needs psychiatric intervention to stop him from thinking these dark thoughts. But before his appointment, Matthew turns up dead at the bottom of a cliff at the beach--did he commit suicide, or was it just an accident?
This story is pretty good. The SF stuff works, and all the human drama works, Sargent successfully constructing characters who have believable personalities and act in a believable fashion and about whom we are interested and can even feel for. I've read five stories from Ten Tomorrows so far and "Matthew" is the second best of them. Maybe I should read more things by Sargent. According to isfdb, she wrote a history of women characters in SF that is illustrated with paintings of naked women having sex--that sounds worthwhile.
[UPDATE MAY 8, 2022: isfdb says Firebrands: The Heroines of Science Fiction and Fantasy "Contains much erotic imagery and nudity;" I have acquired a copy of the book and I can assure you this simply means that many of the women in the paintings are baring their breasts or bottoms; there is no sexual activity depicted. Also, I have to say that I don't think Ron Miller is very good at painting people or animals.]
"The Defenseless Dead" by Larry Niven
Thankfully, "The Defenseless Dead" is moderately good, a SF story built on a classic model--a police detective story set in the future complete with a manly man protagonist who has a shootout with a criminal that is integrated with speculations on how high technology will affect politics and society. The technology in question is medical technology, efficient organ transplants and the ability to cryogenically freeze people who are ill in hopes of reviving them in the future when their ailments can be cured.
(The Gil Hamilton stories are set in Niven's Known Space setting, and we have already read a little about this transplant business in another Known Space story, Niven's 1967 tale "The Jigsaw Man.")
The Background: In the 22nd century, people's lifespans can be greatly extended by trivially easy replacement of their organs and body parts. But there is a shortage of spare human parts. One solution to this problem is passing laws mandating the death penalty for more and more crimes--people who get executed for making a mistake on their taxes or running a red light are a source of new body parts. (This was the theme of "The Jigsaw Man.") Another solution is the black market--criminals known as organleggers kidnap people and carefully kill them and cut them up and sell the parts. Gil Hamilton is a cop with the united world government's federal police (the Amalgamated Regional Militia--ARM), he has psychic powers and he is working for the division of the feds' police force assigned to hunt down organleggers. As the story begins the organleggers have been doing less work lately, as a law was recently passed that opened up a new source of body parts: people who had been frozen.
Some years ago, there was a youth craze that saw some daffy young people, even though they were healthy, getting themselves frozen with the idea that they would have the chance to wake up in the far future when life would be more interesting or more comfortable due to technological and societal advances. People who wanted transplants saw these frozen healthy people as a source of new body parts. Now, obviously, it costs money to keep people frozen, and some of these silly kids' estates, due to bad luck or incompetent management or whatever, had run out of money and could no longer pay to maintain the frozen kids. In response to public demand, the government passed a law that allowed frozen people who could no longer pay the maintenance fees to be killed and their parts added to the organ banks. This flood of legal parts onto the market meant the organleggers were largely out of business.
The Plot: As the story begins, the organ banks are again running low on supplies. A new law is proposed that will allow people who were frozen because of mental illness to be killed and their healthy parts put into the organ banks. One side effect of this law would be that the heirs of frozen people who are killed would inherit the money of their formerly frozen relatives, an incentive for them to not oppose passage of the law. (Thus the title, "The Defenseless Dead.") Will the organleggers oppose the law because it will again create competition for their illegally obtained spare parts? Or can they turn the new law to their advantage by using their expert kidnapping skills to sieze and hold for ransom the new millionaires who will be created when frozen rich people are slain?
I won't summarize the somewhat complicated mystery plot, in which Gil Hamilton and his girlfriend are attacked by a laser armed organlegger for unknown reasons and then Hamilton and his police colleagues hunt for clues and interview people and have to see through disguises and all that, all the while taking into account how their actions might affect the upcoming vote on passage of the new law; I'll just say it is reasonably well handled, moderately interesting and entertaining.