Raymond E. Banks: "This Side Up," "The Littlest People," and "Double Dome"

Looking through the archives, it appears that over the last seven years or so I have read four stories by Raymond E. Banks, joke stories which bear marks of Banks putting a lot of effort into not just the jokes but also scientific and social speculation.  Most recently I read "Rabbits to the Moon" and liked it; the three stories I read earlier, "Walter Perkins is Here!," "The Instigators," and "Never Trust an Intellectual," I couldn't recommend, though their ambition was at times admirable.  One hit to three misses is a pretty bad record, but today Raymond E. Banks has a chance to even things up, even come out ahead, as I am going to read three more 1950s stories by the man who (I hear) was a manager at an electronics company and who would go on to write in the 1960s Meet Me in Darkness and The Computer Kill and in the 1970s Lust in Space and Lust of the Swampman.

In the interest of giving Banks every chance to succeed, I deliberately chose three stories published in Galaxy, a magazine with a reputation for trying to publish "literary" and "pertinent" work about social issues (in contrast to magazines like Astounding or Planet Stories that emphasize the hard sciences or action-adventure thrills) during the editorship of H. L. Gold, a famously hands-on editor, stories that were later anthologized--these three Banks stories have the imprimatur of the snobbier end of the SF establishment, and cannot be dismissed as hack work tossed off for some fast money, but must be seen as works that have gone through multiple layers of editing and gatekeeping.

I'm going to read all of these stories in scans of the appropriate issues of Galaxy.   

"This Side Up" (1954) 

This is a long absurdist story full of internal contradictions as well as lame jokes founded on the story's foundational gimmick, itself a stupid joke.  The alien Thurkians, who look exactly like humans, land on an Earth they find totally devastated.  The Thurkians may look just like Earth people, but their biology is radically different.  Thurkians pop into existence all wrinkled and bent over, and then straighten out and become vigorous, then begin shrinking until they vanish--their life cycle is the exact opposite of that of human beings.  So, when the Thurkians find a baby--apparently the last living human!--they figure this infant is an old man about to die.  The aliens figure a cemetery is a place from which new humans are dug up, and when they find the maternity ward of a hospital they come to believe women would have dying old people implanted into their bodies to achieve immortality.

This childish "opposite day" joke continues through the entire story.  Among Thurkians, a kiss isn't a sign of affection but an expression of hate.  Among Thurkians, high firm breasts and smooth clear skin are not attractive--sagging breasts and wrinkly splotched skin are attractive.  Thurkians hear with their mouths and eat with their ears.  And on and on, one groaner after another for like 16 pages.

As for the plot, one Thurkian scientist has figured out the reality of the life cycle of humans and voices his dissent against the famous scientist in charge of the expedition.  The rest of the expedition dismisses the dissenter's theories, but then a high level politician, a woman with whom the dissenting scientist went to school, arrives.  She comes to agree with the dissenter.  In a bizarre scene that may be some kind of lie told by the dissenter, or some kind of misunderstanding or hallucination he has suffered, the human infant kills the top scientist via trickery and the head scientist kills the baby with a knife before he expires.  Again and again in "This Side Up" the reader is confronted with behavior that is unconvincing and events that don't logically follow from preceding events.

Anyway, with the top scientist out of the way we get our happy ending as the the dissenter marries the politician.

This nonsensical story may be a clumsy satire of Christianity and conservatism and/or skepticism of technology and science.  Among the Thurkians, when a person overturns a scientific paradigm, the authorities execute him by carving a cross into his chest.  Thurkian history begins with world government and high technology, and then political authority fragments into increasingly smaller and more numerous states and societies become increasingly primitive technologically.  The top scientist argues this course of development is for the best.  Maybe this is meant to be a parody of luddites who fear technology and conservatives who oppose world government, but this element of the story renders "This Side Up" nonsensical--if the Thurkians have gone from a high-tech industrial society to a current low-tech agrarian society, how did they build a space ship to get to Earth, and what do scientists actually do?  

I don't get "This Side Up," and as a work of entertainment and speculation it stinks--thumbs down.  H. L. Gold was proud of it, however, and included it in a Galaxy best-of anthology.    

"The Littlest People" (1954)

This story's central gimmick has some similarities to elements of the Genesis song "Get 'Em Out By Friday," and its plot to the story of Pygmalion, the sculptor who, unsatisfied by real women, falls in love with a statue of a woman he himself carved.  

It is the future of interplanetary human civilization.  Many planets and asteroids have been colonized.  There is an unemployment problem on Earth, so people unable to find work are sent to the colonies.  Of course, shipping people through space is expensive, so, to save on fuel, food and O₂, these job seekers are shrunk to like 6 or 7 inches tall and put into suspended animation.  At the colony these inert little doll-sized people are inspected by employers (and lonely men looking for wives!) and if selected get returned to normal size.

Banks uses this conceit to address issues like class relations, sexual relationships, and the nature of economic life.  Most of the people who get hired and returned to full size do not succeed in the colonies.  Is this because they have no reason to integrate into a society which saw fit to ship them hither and thither like cargo, and because their lack of connections and social capital means they are unlikely to build fulfilling lives in the colonies?  Or because they are just intellectually or morally inferior--after all, isn't the reason they couldn't get work on Earth the fact that they were below-average workers?  Banks depicts the guilt felt by middle-class people about the plight of the losers among the working class, and the insincerity of relationships between employers and the barely-employable, how the low-skilled workers suck up to the new boss early on but are soon proving themselves lazy troublemakers.  At the same time, we hear a man who has made a success of himself, more or less, after being shrunk and resized, comment that nobody cares what happens to the shrunken people. 

The plot.  Our narrator, a kid, accompanies his father, a Personnel Director, when Dad does business with the regular rocket that brings new shrunken people to the barren asteroid colony where they live.  The guy who pilots the one-man rocket is getting old and disorganized and one of the shrunken people, an attractive young woman, through an unfortunate series of mishaps, ends up in the narrator's pocket and the rocket leaves without her.  The kid knows there are all kinds of laws and rules governing treatment of these shrunken people, and for fear of punishment doesn't just tell his parents about the pretty frozen shrunken woman--instead he hides her among his sister's dolls! 

In "This Side Up," Banks forced us to endure scenes of one alien scientist conducting abusive experiments on a human baby, and then another alien actually killing the baby.  In "The Littlest People" we have to countenance a woman in suspended animation getting her leg broken by a careless child.  The accident awakens the woman, and the narrator, still too scared to tell any adult what he has done, tries to patch up the woman himself.  The leg heals, but the little woman has a limp, and so despairs of ever getting a job or getting married and bitterly accuses the narrator of ruining her life and vows to kill him.  Sure enough, she tries to assassinate him while he sleeps, but she is too small to succeed; she does manage to kill the cat, though.

Our narrator expects to be employed in his father's office when he grows up, so tells the tiny woman, whom he dubs "Gleam" after her blonde hair, that he will give her a job as a school teacher in a few years.  Gleam is uneducated and has no interest in book-learning, so the narrator has to chain her up and torture her to get her to agree to become a dutiful student, with he as her teacher.  For years, the narrator is the only person this woman has to talk to, and it is he who gives her all the formal education she has ever received and he teaches who her everything she knows about middle-class life--in a sense he is creating her.   

The narrator brings the tiny woman with him when he goes to college on another asteroid.  On this world, full-sized people keep little people who are mentally ill or alcoholics or otherwise unemployable as pets, so he need not hide his little captive.  Gleam seems to lose interest in getting resized and finding a job, and starts to flirt with the narrator.  Has she become dependent on the narrator, has she accepted the role of pet and lost any desire to live as a full adult, a working member of society?

Or could it be she has fallen in love with the narrator?  Has the narrator fallen in love with her?  Has their unusual relationship made them unfit to spend their lives with anybody except each other?  What is going to happen to these two people who have transgressed so many of society's most basic rules?

This is a good story, well-written and full of suspense and ambiguity.  Thumbs up!

"Double Dome" (1957)

In 1963, "Double Dome" was reprinted in Human and Other Beings, an anthology whose cover blurb suggests that every story it contains is a condemnation of the human race as a bunch of meanies.  Good grief!  I know there are a lot of misanthropic SF stories out there in which we are told human beings are too violent or too focused on material gain or whatever, but often such stories will camouflage their preachiness or spring the lecture on you near the end--this book tells you right out on its cover that you are in for a dressing down for the stories within.  Who would buy such a thing?  A masochist?

The narrator of "Double Dome" is a personnel manager, like the narrator of "The Littlest People."  He works at a factory in a small town in the spacefaring future; the factory has fewer than 100 employees, and produces parts for spacecraft.  One day an office worker quits, and his replacement arrives the next day.  The replacement is an "adaptoman," a man with four arms, an additional sub-brain, and a third eye.  Such genetically modified men were first developed to operate space ships--they can do more work than the average man, saving costs on space travel by reducing crew sizes.  The working-class employees of the factory are unhappy to see him--is he the first of an army of adaptomen who are going to do the jobs of two men and slash the number of union jobs at the factory?  The engineers and the company doctor aren't too crazy about having this freak around, either.

The narrator is sympathetic to the adaptoman; others accuse him of having the values of a big-city inhabitant, not those of a small town guy.  The narrator in his youth wanted to be a spaceman, and sometimes wishes he was an adaptoman himself, and he and his wife have been considering signing up to have their own children, when they are ready to have kids, turned into adaptopeople.  (Adaptos are created by bathing the fetus in the womb with radiation soon after conception.)  

The plot of "Double Dome" is sort of episodic and mechanistic.  The adaptoman gains acceptance among the citizens of the small town through a series of psychological stratagems, each of them targeting some demographic among the factory employees and then the town as a whole.  This four-armed operator even manages to get engaged to the prettiest girl in town, daughter of the vice-president of the town's bank.  There is a conversation between the adaptoman and the narrator about how adaptomen are the future, suggesting that one day everybody will be genetically engineered, and in different ways for different tasks.  In a paragraph that today would be considered sexist and racist, the adaptoman says that Arab men like fat women and African men like women with "plate-sized lips" and hints that in the near future female fetuses could be engineered to have these characteristics. 

Everything is coming up roses for this adaptoman but at the last moment the town balks--the idea of a man with two extra arms and an extra eye and an oversized noggin marrying a normie woman is too much for the people of the small town to handle.  At the wedding ceremony the prettiest girl in town sees something that triggers her to run out of the church, leaving the adaptoman at the altar, and the adaptoman slowly walks out, four hands over his face, weeping, never to be seen again.

The sight of the adaptoman weeping pulls the heartstrings of all the women in town and they decide they want their sons and daughters to be adaptos.  I guess that counts as the first twist ending.  The second twist ending is the narrator's discovery of a clue that indicates that the adaptoman engineered the disaster at the church in order to get all the women in town to embrace the adapto future.  The adaptoman didn't really come to town to take an office job at a factory, and he didn't really fall in love with the prettiest girl in town--he is an agent of an activist organization that trained him in how to convince people in small towns to accept adaptopeople.  He travels from town to town, pulling the same tricks in every town in the interest of building the new adapto society.   

"Double Dome" fits squarely in the tradition of science fiction stories in which--boo hoo!--we see how hard a time superior people have in a world of mundanes; I always assume there are so many SF stories like this because so many SF fans think of themselves as better than everybody else even though they were bullied in school by other boys and ignored by the girls.  "Double Dome" is also one of those science fiction stories in which the cognitive elite are shown to be fully justified in using their superior intelligence to manipulate the masses.  I guess it is also a kind of allegory about the plight of minorities, like Jews and African-Americans.

"Double Dome" isn't great, but it isn't bad.  The style and pacing and all that are fine; the problem is that the plot and the individual plot beats all seem either tired (the adaptoman is beaten up by the working-class factory employees but they respect him afterwards because he put up a good fight) or unbelievable (women see a freak get his heart broken by another woman and this inspires in them a desire to give birth to their own little freaks.)  It is just too easy for the adaptoman to manipulate everybody.  Can you believe this guy, even with his second brain, can seduce the hottest richest chick in town after town?  And, after getting her to the altar, manipulate her into dumping him right there in church in front of all her friends and relatives?  (I have this same criticism of all those "gaslighting" horror and crime movies in which a cabal tries to drive somebody crazy to get her inheritance, and of Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories--people are just not that predictable.)  

Finally, I want to point out a choice Banks makes I found noteworthy.  Even though this story is set in the future (we are told adaptomen have been around for over 50 years, so this story must be in the 21st century), Banks includes dialogue that puts you in mind of the 1940s, having one character crack "Something new has been added" and another invoke "the four freedoms."  Maybe these early 1940s coinages were still in such wide use in 1957 that Banks assumed they would continue to be so for many decades?

 We'll call "Double Dome" acceptable. 

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So, these tales run the gamut.  We've got an abysmal piece of junk.  And a competent, if preachy and less than believable, traditional SF story.  And a fine story that offers interesting speculations and social commentary as well as an unreliable narrator and characters with complex and ambiguous, but still creditable, psychologies.  One has to wonder if Gold had a hand in ruining the bad story and/or elevating the good story, how responsible he was for my reaction to them.  A mystery that will probably never be solved.

More 1950s magazine SF in the next installment of MPorcius Fiction Log.

R P Mills' Decade of F&SF: M W Wellman, R E Banks and A Davidson

Robert P. Mills edited Venture and F&SF in the late Fifties and early Sixties, and also edited a bunch of F&SF-related anthologies.  Let's check out some stories from his 1960 book A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, which has a sort of abstract cover by Mel Hunter, a realistic work of whose I recently saw during one of my regular explorations of magazines at antique stores.

Of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction's contents, we've already read John Ciardi's "The Hypnoglyph," Theodore Sturgeon's "Fear is a Business," and Mildred Clingerman's "First Lesson."  Today we'll attack stories from this anthology, all of which debuted in F&SF, by Manly Wade Wellman, Raymond E.  Banks, and Avram Davidson.  We'll probably investigate three more tales from the book in a future blog post.

Nota bene: I am reading all these stories in a scan of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction, but if something looks fishy I will consult scans of the original magazines.

"Walk Like a Mountain" by Manly Wade Wellman (1955)

This John the Balladeer story first saw print in an issue of F&SF that also included Damon Knight's "You're Another," a story I took to task at great length in a blog post which also serves as one component of my defense of A. E. van Vogt against the Knight groupies.  This ish also offers stories by Chad Oliver, Evelyn E. Smith and Charles Beaumont I haven't read yet but may read in the near future.  Who knows what paths I will tread?

It is pretty common for SF stories to find inspiration in, and to directly invoke as a means of creating a mood or painting an image for the reader, elements of Greek and Roman or Norse mythology, or 19th-century British novels like Frankenstein or Dracula.  Here in "Walk Like a Mountain," Wellman changes things up a little, piling on references to the Bible and to American tall tales like those of Paul Bunyan and John Henry.  This not only feels like a refreshing change of pace, but makes sense for the milieu Wellman always sets his Silver John stories in--the rural South--and the characters who inhabit them--hillbillies, not the scientists, college professors, urban nerds and aristocrats who populate so many of the SF stories we read.

John has taken up the task of bringing to an old friend some money due to him from an inheritance.  This old friend now lives near the top of a mountain, in a little village of like five houses.  Above the little village, atop the mountain, is a sixth house, home of a man eight feet tall who is said to have the power to summon rainstorms and control lightning.  Up on the plateau where sits this giant's shack is the stream and pond that feed the waterfall that rushes past the village.

When John arrives at the village, he finds the place in turmoil.  The giant has kidnapped John's pal's beautiful daughter, a woman over six feet tall.  The villagers are of course scared to confront the giant, who, besides being hugely muscled sorcerer, can only be reached via a treacherous climb, during which the climber will be very vulnerable.

John volunteers to try to talk sense into the giant.  The silver-tongued bard uses his ability to sing and play his silver-stringed guitar, his knowledge of the Bible and folklore, and his natural cleverness and neighborliness to get in good with the giant.  After climbing up the cliff, John learns from the giant that the village is doomed--a big rainstorm is coming and it will swell the waterfall to the point it will wash away the village and its inhabitants--the giant carried off the beautiful girl to save her from this disaster.  The giant is in love with this tall woman, who besides being beautiful is brave and resourceful, but he couldn't care less about the other villagers, whom he suspects think him a freak.  With the woman's help, John uses psychology to persuade the giant to put his super strength and magical powers to the job of altering the shape of the pond so that water from the terrific storm will drain on another side of the mountain and not destroy the village.  This act of redemption wins the giant the hand of the beauty in marriage.

An entertaining story, Wellman rendering the images and ideas skillfully and making all the characters sympathetic--thumbs up!  "Walk Like a Mountain" has been reprinted in numerous Wellman collections and several anthologies.

"Rabbits to the Moon" by Raymond E. Banks (1959)

Here we have a dead pan, straight-faced, humor story.  While it isn't actually funny, the story is clever, even sophisticated at times, and the humor doesn't get in the way of the more serious character and speculative elements of Banks' story.  For example, I found Banks' depiction of a once-vital man going senile, and how those around him react to his decay, very convincing, even sad.  "Rabbits to the Moon"'s plot is also well-constructed; the disparate pieces operate smoothly so the story has plot twists and a compelling complexity but is not hard to follow or to credit, and Banks' wild science fiction speculations are not simply window dressing but are actually fully integrated into the plot.  Thumbs up!

It is the future of air cars and routine travel between Earth and the little colony of domed scientific facilities on the moon.  Reginald Goom is a wealthy businessman, head of Goom Looms, a boutique clothing manufacturer.  For generations, Goom Looms has been a small firm that trades in the finest attire for fashionable men, each article it produces and sells a work of art.  But today the company has an opportunity to get a huge contract, for space suit components, and expand its operations and profits radically.  Reginald Goom doesn't want his company to get into mass production, to abandon its essential nature; of course, most everybody else who has shares in the company wants to seize this opportunity to make stacks of money.  These people who care more about profits than tradition and quality can outvote Reginald Goom because, at the moment, they have more voting shares than he does; you see, Reginald's cousin Dick Mullen usually sends a proxy to Reginald so Reginald can vote his shares, but cuz is currently on the moon and the proxy won't arrive in time for the vote.

Reginald is one of the two surviving Gooms; the other is his niece, who is married to a scientist who is secretly working on a teleporter.  This scientist has been teleporting rabbits to the moon, but hasn't got all the kinks out of the process yet, so is scared to send a human being.  When Reginald Goon finds out about the teleporter he jumps into it when the inventor isn't looking, thinking this way he can get to Luna ad get his hands on the proxy in time to save his company from expansion.  When Reginald arrives on the moon he is like a blob--the teleporter transmits soft tissues and bones at different speeds, and his bones haven't arrived yet, and won't for a week or so.  Amazingly, life as a blob ain't so bad!  As a blob, your cells become pretty plastic, and you can devote additional cells to the brain to increase your intelligence (a cure for senility!) or to your muscles to increase strength, maybe even form wings and glide around.       

With the help of his clever, manipulative niece, Reginald Goom triumphs.  With the proxy from cousin Dick Mullen, he can vote down acceptance of the space suit contract, a contract no longer valuable anyway, because the success of the teleporter renders space suits obsolete.  Increased profits that can satisfy the shareholders are still available, however--separating yourself from your bones is going to become very popular among the fashionable set, and Goom Looms can get into the business of making the most stylish of exoskeletons for those who prefer to walk around instead of slither and ooze from place to place.  

I find this story unusual and entertaining, but it hasn't been reprinted much beyond the various editions of A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Here in "Rabbits to the Moon" Banks demonstrates the ability to construct a satisfying plot, develop science fiction speculations, and write likable and interesting characters, but it seems he never wrote a respectable science fiction novel, just goofy porn novels and hard-boiled detective novels which wikipedia says did not sell.  Sad!    

"The Certificate" by Avram Davidson (1959)

Here we have a brief and pungent horror story about life on Earth fifty years after the conquest of humanity by inexplicable and invincible space aliens.  These alien bastards destroyed most of what was on the Earth's surface in their irresistible attack, including most of the people, and the human survivors are maintained as slaves, put to work at jobs they don't even understand, pulling levers twelve hours a day that do they know not what, sleeping the rest of the day in poorly heated dormitories.

The aliens spare little for the humans, so that people's clothes wear out, for example.  Once a year you can petition the aliens for some boon by forgoing sleep and waiting in line on your off hours; if you make it to the head of the line before it is time to report for work you then fill out the request forms; lots of people ask for new clothes or for permission to visit relatives or friends they knew fifty years ago, before the invasion.

People like our protagonist are still able to work twelve hours a day fifty years after the conquest because the aliens have instituted a comprehensive system of socialized medicine.  All humans have had something implanted in them that immediately cures them of any disease they might contract or heals any possible injury in a matter of moments.  This system also serves as law enforcement--anybody who is late for work or otherwise misbehaves suffers horrendous physical and psychological torture which leaves no permanent damage.

This implant makes people almost immortal, and also makes suicide almost impossible.  And on the fifth and final page of "The Certificate" we learn what the main character has been waiting in line, scurrying from one office to another, and filling out forms to request--permission to die.

Thumbs up.  

After its debut in an "All Star" issue of F&SF, "The Certificate" was reprinted in several Davidson collections and various anthologies.

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Robert P. Mills did us a solid recommending to us these three stories, all of which are somewhat unusual and all of which hold the attention and generate real human feeling in the reader by depicting characters who face challenges and pursue goals that resonate with the reader and who evolve in response to changing circumstances.  Let's hope that the next time we open up A Decade of Fantasy and Science Fiction that the stories will be equally satisfying.

Dynamic Science Fiction, June 1953: R Z Gallun, R E Banks and C M Kornbluth & D A Wollheim

Bopping hither and tither at isfdb and the internet archive, one will often discover little gems.  My latest uncovered treasure is the June 1953 issue of Robert W. Lowndes' Dynamic Science Fiction.  The issue has a terrific red cover, a montage of classic SF elements like a man in a spacesuit, a satellite, a rocket ship ready for launch, an atomic bomb blowing up your town...and a naked woman in chains!  Wow!   

Inside, we find the magazine is full of beautiful little sex and violence spot illustrations and chapter headings that probably have nothing to do with the stories in which they appear.  There's a naked woman expressing dismay with heavy machinery, a naked woman reclining high in the atmosphere, multiple crashed rockets (stop texting while driving, guys!), a man in a space helmet brandishing his ray pistol, a woman using her pistol to disintegrate a man (you've come a long way, baby!), a variety of futuristic artillery and armored vehicles, and on and on.

So this magazine looks gorgeous.  But anybody can just look at an old magazine.  Not everybody will actually read a 70-year-old magazine!  Now, I'm not suggesting that I myself am going to read this magazine from cover to cover, either, but I will read three stories and skim the editorial by Lowndes and letters from Robert Silverberg and James Blish.

Both Lowndes in his editorial and Silberberg in his letter talk at some length about the labels affixed to pieces of magazine fiction to indicate their length; the general idea is that, for advertising purposes, texts bearing such appellations as "novellas," "novelets" and "novels" are getting shorter and shorter, so that what might have been labelled a "short story" back in the Thirties might today be called a "novella" or "novelet."  Silverberg is excited that Dynamic is going to have trimmed edges, complains at length about the typeface on the cover of the last issue of the magazine, and indicates that he hates present-tense narration.  Blish in his letter says he is glad that the covers of Dynamic have been portraying "situations from science-fiction, rather than the burlesque runway" (I wonder what he thought of this June cover) and then complains about the practice of editors commissioning stories from authors based on cover paintings; he suggests Judith Merril once wrote a story based on a cover illustration and instead of writing up a scene based on the painting just had the painting appear in the story as a canvas on a wall--Lowndes corrects him, suggesting the mention of the painting was added to the story after it was written.  (Is that better?)  Dynamic is a new magazine, this June issue being the third, and Blish offers a long list of advice for going forward, including getting rid of the spot illos I was just praising, and by all means keeping Dynamic's pages free of cartoons ("seldom funny, usually painful"), a personals section, gossip, and reviews of fanzines.      

Alright, now the stories, tales by Raymond Z. Gallun, Raymond E. Banks, and C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim writing under the pen name "Wallace Baird Halleck."

"Double Identity" by Raymond Z. Gallun 

If isfdb is to be believed, this story, Dynamic's cover story, was reprinted in an Australian magazine in 1954, and then faded into oblivion, never to be printed again.  I tend to like Gallun's work (most recently "Bluff Play," "Brother Worlds" and "Saturn's Ringmaster" in Thrilling Wonder) so I am not going to let that discourage me.

Unfortunately, "Double Identity" is not very well written, with clunky dialogue and somewhat intrusive exposition.  The plot and themes are OK, but not particularly fresh.

The Verden brothers are young self-educated intelligent farmers in rural Missouri.  One of them is affianced to Mary Koven, the daughter of the farmer whose property abuts theirs.  The brothers have always been interested in astronomy and space travel, avidly watching via the newspapers the career of rich businessman and adventurer Frank Cramm, who is on the brink of launching private space ships to the moon.  So, when a meteor lands near the farm, the three countryfolk go investigate it, only to find it is a small missile from the moon!

Contact with the missile starts changing the nearby landscape, turning Earth plants into the kind of plants that live in a valley on the far side of Luna, a deep valley which has retained an atmosphere and still supports life.  The Verdens and Mary Koven also start changing, growing fur and undergoing many other changes that make them look like monsters!  Eventually their very minds begin to change--they develop memories, and see visions, of a lunar landscape, even a lunar civilization!  

Just as some ignorant locals are hunting them down because they are scary, the consciousnesses of the three farmers shift into the bodies of moon people strapped onto operating tables in the lab of a lunar scientist.  The rest of the plot consists of the three Earthlings trying to act as ambassadors between the human race of Earth and the dying race of lunar people, who have technology superior to our own but number only three hundred.  The big theme of "Double Identity" is that people suffer a fear of the unknown and an inability to identify with what we now call "the other."  In theory, Earth peeps and loonies could through friendship help each other tremendously, but in practice each finds the other scary and is likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and for much of the story it looks like Frank Cramm's space ships, working in coordination with the USAF, are going to nuke the hidden valley.  The Verdens wonder if the natural aggression of the human race towards aliens, which is probably shared by other intelligent races throughout the galaxy, means that space travel will inevitably mean war and imperialism, that peaceful relations between civilizations are impossible.  But the three farmers, and the lunar scientist, through trickery and bold action, manage to forestall a Terra-Luna war and convince Frank Cramm to deal peaceably with the loonies.  So we have a happy ending in which it is proven that different civilizations can peacefully coexist and undertake mutually beneficial relations.

The ending gets even happier when it becomes clear that in a year or so the Verdens and Mary Koven's lunar bodies are going to change into human bodies under the influence of their human consciousnesses.  This, I thought, was sort of a cop out--if the three farmers had to live the rest of their lives in alien bodies it would have better suited the story's themes of getting along with "the other," that beauty is only skin deep, and space exploration is a risky plunge into the unknown but ultimately worthwhile.  It would also be easier to swallow scientifically.

For much of "Double Identity"'s twenty five pages I expected to give it a thumbs down because the writing was irritatingly poor, but either I got used to it or the later parts of the story aren't so bad, so having read the whole thing I guess it deserves a grade of barely acceptable.       

"Never Trust an Intellectual" by Raymond E. Banks

We just read Banks's story about a guild of robot programmers who took extreme measures to defend their monopoly, "The Instigators."  It looks like "Never Trust an Intellectual" was Banks's first science fiction story sale (Lowndes tells us that Banks has already been published in Esquire and has also written a stage drama and radio-plays) and has never been reprinted.  Not a good sign, especially since I couldn't bring myself to recommend "The Instigators."  But let's give it a chance!

"Never Trust an Intellectual" is a joke story about a future in which reading books is frowned upon--everybody gets information and entertainment from electronic devices, and private individuals don't own books--those who like to read go to "bookbars" where the licensed proprietor has permitted books up on a shelf for you to rent on the premises by the hour.  We are subjected to dopey jokes that liken reading to drinking alcohol--the narrator brags he can read anybody "under the table," there is talk of people being "bookdrunk," a college kid who sits at the bar reading a comic book is said to be "underage" and so on.  

This is the "Era of Happiness," the time of the new morality of sexual licentiousness and government-imposed limits to access to information that might make you sad or anxious.  "...reading books is anti-social.  It leads to withdrawal, conflicting ideas and permanent memories."  People are strongly discouraged from reading (signs don't even have words on them, menus have pictures of bills and coins to denote prices instead of numerals) and from refusing sexual advances.  People who follow the old morality of sexual modesty or monogamy are suspected of being intellectuals who read books.    

Our narrator edits a video magazine, a little metal box that can fit in your pocket; you plug it in and it projects TV shows on the wall--no text, just video and narration.  (The sample story from his magazine, Listeners' Digest, that we learn about is a saccharine report on a community which banded together to help a blind canine.)  Our hero is also a bootlegger of books.  A pretty woman catches him trying to move 1,500 copies of John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress; is she one of the Happiness Police, or a rival seller of illegal books trying to crush a competitor?  We get lame humorous chase scenes and fight scenes as another woman, the head of the Anti-Book squad of the local Happiness Police, enters the fray, and then the story ends abruptly without what I would consider a proper climax.         

"Never Trust an Intellectual" has a lot in common with "The Instigators," in that both take a facet from history--in "The Instigators" the fight of guilds and unions against progress, here the battle of bootleggers against revenuers--and use it as the basis for a future conflict.  Also, neither is very good.  "Never Trust an Intellectual" is the worse of the two, lacking a satisfying build up and conclusion--it is more of an idea upon which are hung some jokes than a narrative with a satisfying beginning, middle and end.

If we are being generous we might say Banks's story prefigures our own era of trigger warnings, cancel culture and political correctness, in which there are social and even legal sanctions for using words that might allegedly hurt other people's feelings, words like that H-bomb of words, the "n-word," or strings like "Bruce Jenner is a man."  But Ray Bradbury had already trod this ground by the time "Never Trust an Intellectual" appeared.

Thumbs down!

"Go Fast on Interplane" by C. M. Kornbluth and Donald A. Wollheim 

I generally avoid Kornbluth because I have a patience for left-wing satires in which ad execs or insurance salesmen or whoever take over the world that was never great and has severely diminished over the years (as you've seen, I don't even have much patience for satires attacking guilds and censorship, even though I am against guilds and censorship.  As a kid I enjoyed irony and parody and satire, but I have had it up to here with that stuff and now seek authenticity and sincerity.)  But I find Wollheim an interesting figure and thought this blog post should probably address three stories as well as slobber over pictures of naked girls and space tanks like I was still thirteen.

"Go Fast on Interplane" is a competent filler story.  The plot is totally ordinary, but the style of the prose is actually good, and the pacing and structure are good, making it superior to today's questionable Gallun and Banks pieces.

A guy who loves to drive and has a top-of-the-line automobile discovers a highway that leads to other dimensions, parallel Earths.  He talks to the natives, who welcome him as a foreign tourist, eats lunch.  Then he returns to our Earth.  When he tries to get back to the alternate world he finds the road he took there has been dismantled.  Following the newspapers, he discovers clues that suggest a power struggle among our nation's elite--some want to have a relationship with the alternate Earths, others do not.  He wants to further explore the alternate worlds, and when he stumbles upon an indication that access may again be possible, he hastens to seek the right highway.

Acceptable.

Translated into Italian, "Go Fast on Interplane" would appear in the 1965 anthology of SF about cars Il grande Dio Auto.  isfdb has a note about Il grande Dio Auto, but no entry for it; those interested can see a contents list at goodreads.com.  Under the title "Interplane Express," "Go Fast on Interplane" would be reprinted in the 1988 Wollheim collection Up There and Other Strange Directions.   

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Not a brill selection, but we gotta take the rough with the smooth in the reading old magazines at random game.  Our selection will be a little less random next time, when we read stories recommended by Kornbluth and Wollheim's comrade Judith Merril.      

Merril-approved 1956 stories: P Anderson, S Allen & R E Banks

Here at MPorcius Fiction Log we are taking an alphabetical trip through the SF world of 1956, cherry-picking stories from the list of honorable mentions at the back of the 1957 volume of Judith Merril's famous Best of series of anthologies. Our journey began in our last blog post with Robert Abernathy and Brian W. Aldiss, and today we break out of the "A"s and get started on the "B"s, reading one story each by science fiction Grand Master Poul Anderson, comedian, songwriter and anti-obscenity crusader Steve Allen, and the guy who wrote 1978's Lust in Space, reprinted in 1980 by Hustler Paperbacks as The Moon Rapers, Raymond E. Banks.  

(I know I just read an exploitation novel and was taken aback by how bad it was, but I have to admit I am pretty curious about what a book with a title like The Moon Rapers is all about.)

"The Live Coward" by Poul Anderson

Merril included two stories by Anderson on her Honorable Mention list, "The Man Who Came Early," which we read a year ago, and this one, which appeared in Astounding alongside Thomas N. Scortia's "Sea Change," which we read in 2019.  I actually own two books which reprint "The Live Coward," Groff Conklin's 1966 anthology Another Part of the Galaxy which has a lazy photo cover (sad!) and the 1991 Anderson collection Kinship with the Stars which has an OK cover that is a little busy and hard to read (why is the vehicle the same color as the snow?)  Despite having those two printings in my custody, I'm still reading "The Live Coward" on my computer screen in a scan at the internet archive of the June 1956 issue of John W. Campbell's magazine, where it is illustrated in light-hearted vein by Frank Kelly Freas.

The gimmick of "The Live Coward" is that the human race is the dominant member of a Galactic Empire and maintains order by threatening troublemakers with its space navy but the human government has a secret Prime Directive forbidding the killing of any person, even in self defense.  Varris, a war mongering dictator, has fled the Galactic Patrol and is in hiding on a world with a medieval technology and society--kings, knights, priests whose symbol is an "X," and so forth.  When Patrol operative Wing Alek and his assistant, a sort of caterpillar man (he smokes from a water pipe, I guess a Lewis Carroll reference), finally arrive on this planet to arrest him, Varris has forged a close relationship with one of the native monarchs and is under that king's steadfast protection.  Wing Alek can't seize Varris with modern weapons because to do so would risk getting into a life-threatening fight with the king's many professional fighting men, so how to arrest the fugitive?

Wing Alak uses his knowledge of every aspect of the planet's culture (hypnoed into his brain by a machine) to figure out how build an alliance with the church and manipulate Varris out from under the protection of the monarchy and into the clutches of the church, leaving the fugitive war monger no choice but to return to Galactic civilization, where he will have his brain rewired to obey Galactic law.

Competent filler, acceptable but no big deal.

"The Secret" by Steve Allen

You've heard a million times that Merril thought genre boundaries were bogus and tried to break them down or reach across them, and here is another instance of her practices in this regard, her promotion of a story written by TV personality Steve Allen which appeared in the mainstream magazine Collier's.  I tried to find a scan online of the specific issue of Collier's in which "The Secret" appears, but without luck.  Fortunately the story was reprinted in J. N. Williamson's 1991 anthology Masques IV (as well as the Masques omnibus from 2002, Darker Masques) which is easily available at the internet archive.

"The Secret" is a story about the afterlife, and, I guess, angels.  The narrator describes how he had an out of body experience after falling asleep following a day of exercise his doctors had advised against.  As a ghost, he looks at his inert body and realizes he has died!  His wife finds his body, calls the doctor, and the narrator watches as medical professionals struggle to revive him.  None of these living people can see or hear the narrator, but two men appear who can talk with the narrator.  They ask if he really wants to once again be counted among the living, and the narrator tells them he wants to spend more time with his family.  Apparently because his desire to live (for others!) is deemed worthy, the doctors succeed in reviving the narrator.  The story ends with the narrator telling us he no longer fears death.

This is competent filler; maybe "The Secret" offers additional interest because Allen was an atheist?

"The Instigators" by Raymond E. Banks

We read a story back in 2018 by Banks, a story I called a waste of time, but let's give the author of 1978's Lust of the Swampman (reprinted in 1980 as a Hustler Double Novel with Merlin Kaye's Penetrators of Time under the title The Savage Princess) a second chance.

The "Instigators" of the title are what today we might call programmers.  It is the future in which many people own household robots, and for each task you want your robot to perform, you know, mow the lawn or whatever, you have to buy a unique hand cut punchcard made to suit the exact specifications of the job, like the size and shape of your lawn.  The setting of Banks's story is the neighborhood where are clustered the stores that sell robots and where live the working-class men who fashion the custom punchcards by hand.  

The hero of the piece is a 20-something kid, a college graduate  who is good at making the punchcards but envisions modernizing the instigation process.  College boy has developed a camera that films a human performing the desired action and records the vital statistics on tape--this  tape can then be installed in the robots in place of the punchcards.  This tape system is also able to program robots to perform fluid and complex activities, like dancing, that the punchcard system is too clunky to handle.

This camera system will put the Instigators out of business, as robot owners would just buy one of these cameras and make their own tapes.  The Instigators Guild obviously doesn't like this idea, and in the past they have gotten away with murdering people who stand in their way by programming their robots for violence--there are robots everywhere, a ready made guerilla army that can blackmail the government into not looking into Instigator Guild crimes.  And the head of the Instigators Guild has an additional, personal, reason to want to get rid of the kid--not only is the kid threatening the entire Instigating profession, but the 40-something Guild leader's 30-something girlfriend has a crush on the kid!  

While it may sound like "The Instigators" might be a serious comment on the pros and cons of technological and economic change and organized labor, or a thrilling adventure story or a tense love triangle story, rest assured that this is in fact a joke story in which every male character has a goofy nickname and which features slapstick scenes like when an Instigator programs robots to put misbehaving adults over their knees and spank them.  The ending is tragic rather than comic, however.  The Guild programs a robot to murder the kid, and the Guild leader's girlfriend sacrifices her own life to save him; as the story ends it is clear that the Instigators are doomed to be thrown out of work by the kid's new programming system.  

I think I'm issuing a borderline negative judgement on this one; Banks seems to have put some real work into coming up with a whole culture for the world of robots and Instigators, with novel lingo and rituals and traditions, and I admire this ambition, but I don't feel he quite makes it over the line into "acceptable" territory.   

    

"The Instigators" debuted in Science Fiction Stories in an issue in which Damon Knight complains that there is too much action and adventure in science fiction, offering as one example John Wyndham's Re-Birth, which he says is one of the best postapocalyptic stories of all time until the chase scene at the end ruins it, and, as another, Isaac Asimov's "The Martian Way," which he praises for depicting a space voyage that suffers no mutinies or malfunctions, focusing instead on the beauty of space and Saturn.  Knight also writes about books by J. T. McIntosh and Jerry Sohl and puts so much energy into making fun of them--or just flat out insulting them!--that I kind of felt bad for McIntosh and Sohl, even though I have not liked their work either.  I guess this is what the lefties call "punching down."

"The Instigators" would be translated into French for a 1959 magazine.

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I didn't love these stories, but I think Merril's promotion of them is justified by the fact that they are all legitimately speculative and put meat on the bones of the claim that SF is the literature of ideas--Anderson speculates on a government which maintains order while scrupulously avoiding killing people, Allen wonders what death might be like, and Banks considers the ways robots might operate and might change our society.  

We have many 1956-centric blog posts ahead of us, but first, we read a relatively recent novel--well, recent by the standards of MPorcius Fiction Log, anyway.      

The Future Is Now conclusion: Dixon, Banks, Russell and Goulart

Here it is, the third and final installment of MPorcius Fiction Log's exploration of William F. Nolan's 1970 all-new anthology of SF stories, The Future is Now.  I own the 1971 Playboy Press paperback edition.

"Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" by Terry Dixon

Call me crazy, but "Crotch of Mother Death!"
makes me laugh

Dixon has only three fiction attributions at isfdb, all three short stories in anthologies.  The intro to this story includes a page-long block of text from Dixon himself, who quotes Vladimir Nabokov, Saul Bellow and Joanna Russ.  Dixon, it seems, intends "Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" as a very hostile parody of New Wave stories (or maybe just bad New Wave stories.)  Dixon, in the intro, suggests the New Wave writers try to shock and impress with violence and sex and with literary techniques which may appear new to SF fans but are in fact old hat, and that they are guilty of inflicting upon readers bad poetry, hollow profundity, current slang and ideas which purport to be revolutionary but are in fact banal.

The four-page story itself illustrates Dixon's complaints, employing a multitude of different typefaces and bad puns and absurdist wordplay and references to religious figures, hemorrhoids, unappealing sex and disastrous mother-son relationships.  Lampooning the excesses of innovative literary and art movements is an old game and not a particularly difficult one, but it can be fun (I enjoyed the beatnik scenes in A Bucket of Blood, for example) and Dixon here made me laugh, so I am giving "Hate is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" a thumbs up!

"Walter Perkins is Here!" by Raymond E. Banks 

Banks, with whose work I am not familiar, has a longish list of short fiction ranging from 1953 to 1970 at isfdb, and then seems to have spent the '70s writing SF porn.  Nolan tells us he made his living as a manager at an electronics firm and of an electronics magazine, and besides SF wrote hard-boiled detective novels.  Sounds like a productive life!

Nolan in his intro warns us that "Walter Perkins is Here!" is "surreal," and it is certainly pointless, generating zero interest and zero emotion.  I hope Banks's pornography is more stimulating than this thing.  In the future everybody carries around a little receiver like an ear bud and can put it in his or her ear to receive sage advice from a supercomputer on every issue great or small.  The computer makes everybody's life smooth by managing careers, sexual relationships, and everything else.

Our protagonist Perkins decides to start ignoring the computer one day, apparently on a whim.  He gets picked up by an ambitious local politician who (somehow) turns Perkins into a celebrity and inspires everybody in the world to stop working and to party all day, every day.  Society will keep on humming because it is the computer who produces food and maintains the roads and so forth.  The pol becomes president.

A waste of time.  For some reason this slice of nothing was included in Abbe Mowshowitz's Inside Information, which I guess is some kind of college textbook on literary explorations of the effect of computers on society, or something.

"The Darwin Sampler" by Ray Russell

Look, it's our old pal Ray Russell with a two-page story.  Nolan's intro here offers a lot of info about Russell; for one thing, our pal Ted White (I actually do like White's fiction and non-fiction, and his work as an editor, so this use of "pal" is not a sarcastic gibe) thinks Russell was Playboy's best ever editor.  Also, Russell wrote the screenplay for X: The Man With X-Ray Eyes!  

In the future of the 1990s, pollution is so bad that scientists have developed a drug that can be injected in people so that they can safely breathe, even thrive on, polluted air.  This drug is administered universally, but nostalgic types want to experience clean air, and procure tanks of oxygen.  They are in for a terrible surprise when they strap on their oxygen masks and their adapted bodies reject the clean air!  Russell structures his tale as a police detective procedural following two flatfoots investigating a death, and we readers don't get the explanation of the setting until the end.

An inoffensive gimmick story that succeeds in its object.  "The Darwin Sampler" was translated for inclusion in Sirius. 

"The Whole Round World" by Ron Goulart

I have always avoided Goulart because I associate him with SF stories that are supposed to be funny as well as books that are adaptations of comics and other media properties like Battlestar Galactica, TekWar, sexy sexy Vampirella and sexy sexy Flash Gordon.  (Women find Flash Gordon sexy, right?)  But today I am embarking on this 68-page story by Goulart in the interest of squeezing every last drop out of The Future is Now.  Nolan spurs me on by telling me that Goulart is like Hemingway and by quoting Avram Davidson's assessment of Goulart as a "mordant" Swiftian who "kills cliches."

"The Whole Round World" starts off as a satire of Hollywood TV production set in a chaotic future world in which the United States military is fighting leftist guerrillas in Latin America; meanwhile, China has just nuked India into oblivion.  A computer predicts that a Tarzan-style TV show will win big ratings so a network exec commissions one, but black activists have just burned down the studio's jungle set (Tarzan be racist, yo), so our hero, assistant Tim McCarey, is dispatched to the walled estate of a rich old guy, Vincent Belgraf; Belgraf is a botany-fan who has a few hundred acres of transplanted jungle on his estate, and it is hoped that the TV peeps can rent some of it for filming.

(Don't worry overmuch about the racial politics of this story, young people--two pages after the blacks burn down the studio lot a white left-wing terrorist group named "The Pallbearers" blows up some android police as well as some private property.) 

Over 50 pages of "The Whole Round World" takes place on the Belgraf estate, and Tim's time there reminded me of Sunset Boulevard.  The estate is inhabited by a bunch of wacky characters, including a gorilla, and the Belgrafs enlist Tim's aide in writing their PR copy.  Forged correspondence plays a role in the plot, as does Tim's being the object of two women's desire.

Vincent Belgraf's nephew Clem, a former "stock-plane racer," aspires to solve the unrest afflicting the United States by taking over the country and crowning himself Emperor.  Once Emperor, Clem plans to solve the unemployment problem through public works projects, primarily the construction of concentration camps where will be interned Chinese, Japanese, Russians, and, of course, Jews: "You really can't have a concentration camp without them."  When Tim arrives Clem is still debating whether blacks should be put in the concentration camps or just exterminated: "...none of the other inmates would want to be in the same concentration camp with Negroes.  You can't blame them for that.  Building separate but equal concentration camps may prove too costly."  Clem needs an army to take over the country, and has been recruiting and training one on the grounds of the estate.  This would-be Bonaparte has already suffered a mutiny among his troops, and during that bit of unpleasantness was so severely injured that his doctor had to transplant his brain into another body--human bodies were in short supply, so, when Tim meets him, Clem's brain is lodged in the body of the gorilla from his uncle's private zoo.

The plot meanders around, focusing on a love triangle: femme fatale Laura, Clem's sister, tries to seduce Tim, but Tim is more interested in Carrie, a secretary who is being blackmailed into working for the Belgrafs.  Finally, there is a second mutiny (not due to any actions of Tim's--Tim does not drive the plot of this story) and Clem is overthrown.

"The Whole Round World" isn't abysmal, but it is a waste of time.  It fails as a humor piece because few of the jokes are funny and the satiric jabs at Hollywood and political extremists are banal and perfunctory.  It fails as an adventure or drama because it is too silly for any suspense or excitement to develop and because Tim and Carrie are characters who lack personality and do little.  The most interesting characters are the villains, Clem, an ambitious man stuck in a gorilla's body who grows increasingly insane as the story progresses, and his horny sister who is always seductively touching her own breasts, because they have powerful motivations and try to accomplish things despite insuperable obstacles, but they don't dominate the narrative enough to make the story engaging.

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Let's rank the stories in The Future Is Now from best to worst and break them into three broad categories of Good, OK and Bad, even if directly comparing stories with very different aims--the traditional character- and plot-driven stories like "Earthcoming" and "Damechild" with brief literary experiments like "Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" and "Belles Lettres, 2272," for example--is questionable:

THE FUTURE IS NOW SCORECARD

GOOD

"Earthcoming" by Richard C. Meredith

"The Ogress" by Robert F. Young

"Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It" by Terry Dixon

OK

"A War of Passion" by Tom Purdom

"Damechild" by Dennis Etchison

"The Darwin Sampler" by Ray Russell

BAD

"The Whole Round World" by Ron Goulart

"Belles Lettres, 2272" by Norman Corwin

"Jenny Among the Zeebs" by William F. Nolan

"Toe to Tip, Tip to Toe, Pip-Pop As You Go" by William F. Nolan

"Walter Perkins is Here!" by Raymond E. Banks

"A Shape in Time" by Anthony Boucher

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Erudite blogger marzaat encouraged me to read The Future Is Now, and I do not regret doing so; I enjoyed some of the stories and if I didn't like some of them, well, they were by authors important enough to the SF field that it is valuable to have some familiarity with their work.

Back in 2014 marzaat reviewed The Future Is Now, and now that I have committed my own opinions to pixels I am curious to see to what extent we agree and disagree on its contents.

It looks like for the most part we are seeing eye to eye on the stories in The Future is Now.  One big point of disagreement is Terry Dixon's "Hate Is a Sandpaper Ice Cube with Polka Dots of Love on It."  I actually found it funny, and it seems that marzaat did not.  Marzaat suggests that Dixon's main target in his satire may be Harlan Ellison, which did not occur to me.  Now that I think about it, Dixon's long and self-important introduction to his own story is reminiscent of Ellison, but I'm not sure the actual story is, though I have read only a small portion of Ellison's massive oeuvre.  Marzaat is probably more familiar with Ellison's work than I am.  Marzaat also must be more familiar than I with Alfred Bester; he suggests that the odd prevalence of typographic symbols and pictographs in the stories in this anthology may be due to the influence of Bester.

"A War of Passion" was the first story by Tom Purdom I have ever read, but marzaat has read many of his stories and, in a separate blog post, has an interesting analysis of  "A War of Passion."  Marzaat has actually written a number of posts on Purdom, part of his project devoted to looking at all of Purdom's fiction.

Marzaat's blog is definitely worth a look for SF fans, and he has a wide range of additional interests, offering insightful reviews of books on economics, for example.  Check it out!

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So we bid farewell to The Future Is Now and those photos of dolls (there really never was a story that made the cover feel appropriate, was there?)  In our next episode, another book somebody encouraged me to read via the interwebs!

The Bridge by Iain Banks

A tweet from SF blogger star Joachin Boaz alerts me to the fact that Iain Banks has been recognized with a special award at the 2013 British Fantasy Awards.  I read an Iain Banks novel, The Bridge, many years ago, and recently found in my archives a somewhat jocular and quite mixed review I wrote of it.  This review I paste below.

I sold my copy of The Bridge long ago, and could only find this one less-than-ideal image online of the paperback edition I read.

The Bridge by Iain Banks

As far as I can tell, The Bridge is about this working-class Scottish guy who, in college in the 1960s, begins an on-again-off-again love affair with a rich woman.  These two are left-wing hippies, having all kinds of promiscuous sex, using drugs, railing against capitalism, saying nasty things about Thatcher and Reagan and laudatory things about the Soviet Union and the Sandinistas.  As he gets older, the main character, despite his politics, becomes a very successful engineer, making piles of money and buying all kinds of expensive cars.  Then, one day, drunk and stoned, kaboom, he gets in a terrific car crash, and is put into a coma, during which he has vivid surreal dreams.

These surreal dreams, and not the banal "real life" story, form the bulk of the book.  The main dream is about the Scottish dude's life in a city of skyscrapers built upon a colossal railroad bridge, a life of amnesia lived at the mercy of mysterious people and powers, but there are also various "sub-dreams," including a sort of Conan/Elric/Aeneas pastiche and several episodes of a military character.  These dreams have a sort of unifying theme: that of powerlessness, all of them portraying people whose fates are determined by others.

What you might call the novel's central "literary conceit" or "device" is how the "real life"and dream portions are interspersed with and influence each other, rather than being presented in strict chronological order.  A long fantastical segment will be followed by a briefer biographical segment, a sort of flashback, in which we learn the source of the elements present in the dream. 

Is this book worth reading?  It's not exactly bad (and many people seem to adore it), and some of the scenes in the bridge city and in the sword and sorcery parody are good and memorable, but as a whole it came up short for me.  The main character (who after all is shown to not be running his own life) is not very compelling, and the "real life" portion of the story is mostly a tedious exercise in nostalgia (again and again we hear about what sort of rock music the Scottish engineer likes.) The dream sequences really have the surreal character of dreams, which shows literary skill, but also imbues them with a sort of airiness, dimness, nebulousness and basic lack of reality that is characteristic of dreams, and makes one wonder what the point of them is.  In fact, the book as a whole leaves me with that feeling: there is no overarching plot, the the portions of the book that have a plot are dreams in which the narrator is virtually powerless, driven by the whims and wills of others, dreams whose significance lies in their containing mental artifacts from the dreamer's less than exciting real life.  So what is the point?  That under capitalism (or maybe life in general) we are at the mercy of forces not under our control?  Perhaps.


Since I read The Bridge a decade or more ago I have not read any more of Banks's work, and it seems unlikely that I will read any in the future.