Episode 55.2 transcription - "Dangerous Visions", vol. 2 (1967)

(listen to episode on Spotify)

(music: pulsing piano)

Howard Rodman - "The Man Who Went to the Moon - Twice"

JM:

Hello, once again, this is Chrononauts. We are back, and I am JM, and I’m here with my lovely co-hosts Gretchen and Nate. And once again, we’re going to discuss "Dangerous Visions". We’ve moved on to Volume Two, Part Two of our podcast, and also Volume Two of the paperback editions released in three separate installments.

This is Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast, and we come here about once a month, thereabouts, to discuss science fiction and the literature that we enjoy, and talk about the authors and the themes and various other things connected with the genre.

And you can find us on all kinds of podcasting platforms. You can find us on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, YouTube. We have a Blogspot, chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com, and we really suggest you go there to check out some of our translations of previously untranslated works at this point.

The majority are Russian and Spanish. We also have a few never-before-seen and properly digitized English things that we have talked about on the podcast, and some stuff that we’ll do in the future.

You can reach us by email, chrononautspodcast@gmail.com, and we’re on X, Twitter, Twitter-X, @ChrononautsSF.

I guess without further ado, on this really, really hot July day, let’s get back into talking about "Dangerous Visions".

So if you want to hear all about the anthology—and I suggest that you do, because we had a little introductory segment where we just kind of talked about how this whole thing came to pass—and what we did is we essentially talked briefly about most of the stories. Well, every story, really. But then we decided each of us was going to focus on three stories individually that we wanted to talk a little more about.

And what I asked the crew is, well, can we rate the stories, or at least tier-rate them? Not a standard rating scale, but my suggestion was basically: an A story is a really good story that you think about a lot, that made an impact on you.

And a B story is, okay, they were trying for something, and it was cool, and I kind of appreciated what it was going for. I’m not sure I really connected with it that much, but at least I respect that it was trying.

C story, for me, this is where it gets a little weird, because I kind of felt like I maybe enjoyed some of the C stories more than the B stories, but that’s the way she blows. So the C stories were kind of like, yeah, it was all right. It was a decent story. Nothing too special. I might not wholeheartedly recommend it, but I enjoyed it.

And D story: just no good. No good at all. No good.

So far I haven’t had any D stories, but the responses have been somewhat varied, which is interesting.

And yeah, also I wanted to ask whether we think that each story is a dangerous vision or not, and how. So I think we came to some interesting conclusions about the stories in the first volume.

And we also talked a lot about Harlan Ellison and his personality and how it’s just all over this anthology, and you can’t escape it. And the purpose behind the anthology, of course, which is to ruffle feathers and break taboos and make people question existence and make people question everything they’ve ever known. And lots of exclamation marks all over that, right?

People responded in various ways. I think the interesting thing about this is that the remit was quite broad. And we get a large swath of people in the science fiction community, and even outside the science fiction community more or less, and how they look at things and what they might consider a dangerous vision may not be what we think of as a dangerous vision.

And also, of course, this anthology was published in 1967. That was quite some time ago now. None of us were born back then. And we kind of have a different perspective now about some of these, maybe, so many years later.

Now, for the majority of the experience, I think I have a lot of positive things to say. And even the stories that I would consider the B stories, in that, like, they shoot short of the mark maybe a little in some way, I really respect a lot because I feel like the authors were trying.

And I’m always going to, I guess, give that a little more kudos than something that’s just not trying and not memorable and just not very good.

So anyway, been a really interesting ride. I think we all had a really great time reading the stories and also talking about the first volume.

So let’s get into the second one, shall we?

We closed off last time with Brian Aldiss’s "The Night That All Time Broke Out". And yeah, I don’t know, it was kind of an anticlimactic way to end. I think we were running kind of late then. I was getting tired, or just like, yeah, I don’t really have a lot to say about this. Didn’t like it too much.

Hopefully this one will go a little better in the ending, but we’ll see.

We start off Volume Two with "The Man Who Went to the Moon—Twice". And this was written by Howard Rodman.

Now, Howard Rodman is a TV and film writer foremost. And the funny thing is, if you go to Wikipedia right now and type in Howard Rodman, you’ll actually be taken to the page for Howard A. Rodman. And that’s not the Howard Rodman we’re talking about here. Actually, this Howard Rodman’s son, who is also a screenwriter and a novelist.

Howard Rodman himself does not have a Wikipedia page, which is surprising. He does have a quite extensive IMDb background, though.

And some of these stories where we may not have a lot to say about them, I did do a little background digging, and I found some interesting things about some of the writers that did influence a little bit how I thought about this.

So Howard himself was very active from the ’50s up to the late-’80s. And his credits include "Route 66", "Harry O"—the private-eye show—and the movies "Charley Varrick", "Coogan’s Bluff", and "Madigan" for Don Siegel, as well as  "Naked City", both the movie and the TV series.

Lots of TV movies.

And he seems to have been largely responsible for "The Six Million Dollar Man", which was originally the book by somebody else. But he pretty much created the television version of the character and the format and stuff.

And Gretchen, as our resident "Man from U.N.C.L.E." fan, you’ll appreciate this.

So he wrote two episodes, which I believe were made into a movie. So the episodes are called "The Bridge of Lions Affair". And the movie is called "One of Our Spies Is Missing". Are these the same thing?

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think that the film is just slightly chopped up. And I don’t know how much is added or not. I haven’t actually seen the film version of it, but I have seen the episodes.

JM:

And Harlan Ellison also wrote for "The Man from U.N.C.L.E.", right?

Gretchen:

Yeah, two episodes.

One of them is where he has a character named Judith Merril, and it couldn’t be shown for, like, 25 years because there was a lawsuit over it.

JM:

Interesting.

Yeah.

So Ellison has brought in a few TV writers here.

Now, this I find really interesting because obviously Ellison was working in this field by then, and he knew a lot of these guys. And although some of them apparently don’t seem to come from much of a science fiction background, it is interesting that a lot of them did actually get their start kind of in genre magazines, if not necessarily devoted to science fiction magazines.

They’ve written some crime fiction. Maybe they got a story in "The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" or something like that. And it’s interesting how seriously some of these authors might be taking this anthology.

And I’m kind of going to question that mostly next episode. But I think Howard Rodman seemed to have taken it seriously, in the way that he contributed a story that’s pretty cool.

But yeah, he wrote a lot of stuff for anthology series too, "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre" and "Thriller", which is a good show, actually. He got around a lot. And if you watched made-for-TV movies, especially in the ’70s, you probably would have seen a bunch of this stuff.

But yeah, this story—I’ve been talking for a while, so why don’t you guys start then and give me your thoughts about this one?

Nate:

Yeah, I thought this was great. It was really, really tender and touching. The narrator who reads the audiobook version of the story, Grover Gardner, is the same guy who did the reading of Mark Twain’s "The Innocents Abroad" that I listened to.

And I’m not sure if it’s just my brain conflating the two based on that fact, but I could almost see Mark Twain writing this if he was alive in the 1960s and writing sci-fi-adjacent stuff.

It’s certainly less overly satirical and humorous than the Twain stuff that I’ve read and that we’ve covered on the podcast. But it does capture an element of that childlike wonder that Twain is good at, both in terms of early-life experiences and late-life experiences.

I also really like how it captured how society changes over time and how much it can change over the course of one person’s lifetime.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I agree. I thought this was really just very bittersweet. That’s really interesting about the fact that it was the same reader as Mark Twain.

I do think that, yeah, this is, I feel, a very sincere story. Very much, like, coming from a place. I know, JM, you had mentioned that you think that Rodman did take this story and the inclusion in this anthology pretty seriously, and I think that it really shows.

There does feel like a very genuine sense of, yeah, that wonder and also the fear of being lost to time, of not being able to keep up.

Yeah, I really enjoyed this one.

JM:

I didn’t really make this connection before, but I mean, this is a pretty wistful story. And on the surface, this seems a strange choice for this anthology. It maybe doesn’t really seem to fit.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of these where they don’t really have the dark and edgy tone that the rest of the anthology does, and this is definitely one of them. I mean, this could be just, like, in any mainstream science fiction magazine.

It worked really, really well.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I don’t think this is a dangerous vision, but I do enjoy its inclusion. I really am glad that it’s here. I like that it’s sincere.

JM:

Yeah, I can see that.

I agree. 

Gretchen:

A lot of the stories here, because they are pushing the envelope and they’re challenging readers, can come off as a little ironic and don’t really have as much sincerity, which can be fine. But I like that this one, along with the Aldiss, as we mentioned in the last episode, I think they kind of are a nice little breather after the initial stories.

JM:

Yeah, I do think I’d picture this in a mainstream magazine, not even a science fiction magazine. Like, maybe this could be in, I don’t know, "Harper’s Magazine" or something like that. I don’t know.

And that’s fine. It works pretty well.

Now, one thing—I didn’t make this connection earlier—but there’s a few stories in the anthology that focus on childhood. And those stories, weirdly—and I don’t know, maybe it’s not weird, but it’s the ’60s, right? So it’s supposed to be we’re waking up to the young people, waking up kind of thing, right?

But for some reason, the stories about childhood in this anthology all have this melancholy feel to them. And one of them—not this one for me—but one of them really, really got emotional for me. It’s at a point where I was severely affected.

But this definitely had the melancholy, the two time periods, like the one where the character is a kid and then he’s an old man. And, like, the wonder of childhood, right?

And he had this weird experience. Like, it was probably kind of scary. So it reminds me of, like, those Edgar Allan Poe stories about—the one story about the guy going to the Moon in a balloon, right? And then they’re like, oh, it’s probably a hoax, right?

But you really feel like he’s got something urgent to tell you, but it’s also like this mystery, right? And it’s like a secret known only to this kid, and he’s been holding onto it his whole life. And now he’s an old man and everybody thinks he’s probably a little bit senile and stuff like that.

And of course, how differently they react to that.

I don’t know. It’s interesting. And yeah, kind of melancholy, wistful. I don’t know if I would actually say it was a sad story, but it just kind of had this emotion to it that I thought was good.

It did remind me of Ray Bradbury as well, maybe a little bit in the way it was told. It was very, like, rural-America-feeling to it.

Nate:

Nate:

Yeah, definitely.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I can see that. I’ve been listening to an audiobook of "The Illustrated Man" recently, so I’ve had Bradbury on my mind. I can kind of see this having a very similar feel to some of Bradbury’s works.

JM, you had mentioned that Poe story, and I think it also does have a feeling almost of late-1800s works that we’ve read. Like, the one that came to mind was "Old Squids and Little Speller". There’s that sentimentality that you see in that era of the newspaper stories that I think—I don’t know, it just for some reason reminded me of that story as well.

JM:

Yeah. At a certain point, maybe I wouldn’t have enjoyed this kind of sentimental storytelling, but I think I’m more okay with it now.

It’s not very long either. It only takes a few minutes to read.

Some of the very short stories in this book are very powerful in their way. A few of them don’t hit the mark, and yeah, there’s, like, one or two that we might say, okay, if it had been longer and more developed, maybe I would have liked it more.

Some of these writers seem very experienced in the short-story format, and they seem to know exactly how to structure something to make it hit the mark just where it needs to.

I think actually some of the most successful—I mean, not all—but some of the most successful are quite short in here, that they’re able to not just convey an idea, but also an emotion, right? And I think that’s kind of important.

Some of my qualms with a few of the longer stories might actually be there’s too much idea and not enough feeling, maybe.

I don’t know. I don’t know. We’ll see what we think as we go on.

But yeah, I don’t really have anything else to say about this. It’s cool. We definitely suggest that you read it.

I don’t know what I’d give this. I honestly think I do have to give it a C because I just feel like it doesn’t qualify as a B story, but it also didn’t pack the punch for me that some of the A stories did.

So by saying it’s a C story, I’m definitely not saying that it’s bad. Kind of always having to justify my weird thinking with the tier system here.

But, so, this was good. I did like it.

Nate:

So yeah, I would give this an A, actually. I really like this one a lot. I thought it was the best one so far to appear in the anthology.

And yeah, I like the fact that it’s a bit atypical of this and doesn’t try to be excessive or edgy or anything like that. It just ends up being a good science fiction story with a very human touch.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I actually was thinking of giving it an A as well because, well, partially I am a very sentimental person. I think that this really speaks to that. I like that it’s a very genuine story.

And we didn’t mention that in the afterword Rodman goes into talking about his father and having a very similar story of how technology changes. And I think that also really added to how really personal this story feels.

And I really liked that. I really think that this is a really emotional work. I think it’s pretty moving.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely.

JM:

Awesome. I’m glad that you guys went to bat a little more for this one. I mean, again, I certainly didn’t dislike it. I definitely acknowledged all of that, and I did think it was pretty good.

It is really cool because, yeah, we all react differently to these. And apparently the general audience did as well, because it seems like a lot of people remember this anthology as being a little more one-note than it actually is, because there’s a lot of different stuff in here.

But it seems like people were just so, I guess, so taken over in their heads by stuff like "Riders of the Purple Wage" and some of the stuff that’s coming up. And there are stories like this in here too, right?

And so we really do have a good variety in the emotional and idea spectrum.

So yeah, good stuff.

Philip K. Dick - "Faith of Our Fathers"

JM:

But yeah, Philip K. Dick, "Faith of Our Fathers".

So this is one of the ones that we chose. I think we all kind of agreed that we were going to talk about this one.

It’s kind of funny. I have to do this again. But PKD, PKD—what did we start? Like, we did "The Last of the Masters" last year, and we enjoyed that.

We’ve all read some PKD before. I’ve definitely been somewhat familiar with him for a while. But by no means have I read all of PKD’s work.

I like it. I wouldn’t say that I’m a super-PKD fan. And it does kind of feel sometimes like he’s one of those writers that it’s cool to like even if you’re not really into science fiction that much.

And while I can kind of understand that, because yeah, there’s a lot of cultural stuff in there, and there’s a lot of resonance with various kinds of counterculture and stuff like that, and it kind of works in that way as well.

And of course there’s all the movie adaptations, which again—people who don’t read science fiction are fine with watching "Blade Runner", right? It’s totally cool. They don’t have any qualms.

But a part of me does kind of feel like, do I like PKD that much? Do I like him as much as everybody else? And sometimes I’m not sure.

I did really like this, but it’s got some of those weird PKD things that sometimes make me feel at a distance from the work. But I like this a lot anyway.

And ahead of time, I mean, I’m giving this a high score because this was pretty powerful. This kind of went into the cosmic-horror realm.

And we don’t really need to get back into PKD background or anything like that. But I’m guessing everybody kind of at least got something good from this story, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I thought this was great also. So Volume Two is definitely off to a really strong start, in my opinion.

And while I did like "The Last of the Masters", that definitely felt like early PKD before he really got into the groove of doing this kind of stuff, which definitely feels more like what PKD is known for nowadays.

And yeah, it’s got all those classic themes of psychedelics and clandestine revolutionary bands and weird metaphysical stuff.

I think coming very close to Vedantic philosophy, though it’s a bit unclear if he was familiar at all with all that. He does seem to hint at Buddhism, which gets close in places, but he name-checks some early medieval cleric.

I don’t know. It’s just interesting how similar a lot of those ideas are. But he really plays with it in a nice twist that is the kind of thing that makes his stories a lot of fun to read.

Gretchen:

Yeah, of course PKD is known for the shifting sense of reality that you can get through psychedelics, through this religious lens that we get here.

I did like the Lovecraftian-horror direction that it ends up going in.

We’ve all read a little bit of PKD, but I was not as well experienced, really, with only "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" And actually, after this, I had read "Beyond Lies the Wub", which I really enjoyed.

But yeah, like, this was really my first experience of what a lot of people know PKD for, and some of the tropes that will be showing up in more and more of his work.

And I thought it was a really interesting story.

JM:

Cool, yeah. Sometimes it works for me, sometimes it doesn’t.

Like, I’ll try to get into it a little. For the most part, this really did work for me.

It’s interesting because in the afterword PKD is talking about other science fiction with certain, I guess, existential—

Well, that’s the thing. He doesn’t really mention Gnosticism. So he actually mentions "Out of the Silent Planet" by C. S. Lewis.

But the thing I mostly thought of is the other book we did during that session, "A Voyage to Arcturus". The stories were similar, exactly.

But that’s the whole idea of the demiurge, that what we see controlling everything on our plane of existence is, in fact, some kind of twisted—not exactly copy—corrupted form of the true spiritual essence that exists somewhere else.

And that seems to be something that PKD did talk about a lot.

And I’m sure our fellow podcasters, like the DickHeads Podcast, probably got into this stuff quite a lot. Entire podcasts dedicated to PKD’s work, and I’m pretty sure they’re not the only one.

It’s just pretty interesting that the man has been really covered all over the place. So a part of me actually did think, hey, do we actually want to get into this story because it’s probably been done?

But you know what? We should. Let’s do it then.

This story was a Hugo nominee. It was pretty well liked. We’re coming across a few of these. So far I think this one and "Riders of the Purple Wage" are the ones that seem to be receiving the most accolades from people, which is fair.

They are also the longest so far, which is also interesting. But again, maybe not exactly surprising.

Of this, PKD himself said—I think he said this in 1976, so this is several years later—“I think I managed to offend everybody, which seemed at the time to be a good idea, but which I’ve regretted since. It’s got communism, drugs, sex, God. I put it all together. And it’s been my impression since that when the roof fell in on me years later, this story was in some eerie way involved.”

So I don’t know how serious he is about this, but I’ll mention something later when we’re done with the summary, which maybe goes a little bit into contributing to maybe what he thought about the anthology.

Ellison is very enthusiastic about him and sings his praises, but I just kind of wonder if PKD was entirely on board sometimes.

I think he was serious about the story, but I don’t know. I think maybe he was a little cynical about the remit of the anthology. And from what he said there in 1976, he kind of feels a little bit of twinges about the story.

Which I’m not really sure why. I mean, there’s not really a lot of sex in it. The drugs are good for you. Communism, I don’t know.

Do we think that there’s a reason why communism is a part of this story other than to challenge the American readers?

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, it was certainly a big thing at the time, especially in Southeast Asia with the Vietnam War starting up, with the whole domino theory of, you know, we can’t let Vietnam fall to the Soviets or whatever else, the rest of the region will fall too, that kind of stuff.

So I’m sure PKD was just imagining what a future would be like in that part of the world under communism, which was definitely on everybody’s minds at the time.

JM:

So I know a little bit about this period in U.S. history, but not a ton. And obviously seeing a lot of movies, and I’ve heard people talk about it and read some books and stuff.

But I guess the general feeling, especially now, is that some people during that time were so paranoid about what was going to happen in the future with communism spreading, and that was a major reason for the war in the first place, right?

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

So it wasn’t so much about just Vietnam. It was about the spread of communism, which here has reached its ultimate fruition, I guess.

And basically, well, we don’t know that it runs the whole world, but it seems to run, like, the United States, for example.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, that was the idea, the whole containment philosophy.

Yeah, there’s a whole bunch of approaches to that. But yeah, they basically tried their hardest to prevent the spread of communism any further than where it was already going on, both in terms of active military intervention and propping up puppet rulers in various states in a lot of countries.

JM:

Yeah, yeah, it makes sense.

So do we think that, at the end of the day, with PKD concluding this story in the way that he does, he seems to be saying it doesn’t really matter? Like, it doesn’t really matter if we’re communist or not. We still have the same demiurge to face, or something like that.

Like, it doesn’t seem to matter, right?

Nate:

Yeah, in a way.

JM:

All right, well, try and briefly as possible. We have been trying to truncate some of the summaries a little bit. We even got sidetracked when we were talking about "Riders of the Purple Wage" and just ended up talking about "Les Misérables" and James Joyce for much of the entire discussion.

So we’ll see how this one goes.

So Tung Chien is a minor bureaucrat in Hanoi. It’s the nebulous near future, and Vietnamese-style communism seems to indeed have become the dominant force in the world at this time, even in the United States.

But our story does take place in Hanoi, where Chien works at the Postwar Ministry of Cultural Artifacts.

And right away we get the sense of the bureaucracy being a sort of vicious competition of opportunism, and one has to watch their back all the time. It’s got that PKD sense of paranoia that he’s so known for.

And at the beginning, Chien is accosted by a peddler who offers to sell him some special powders. Actually, he’s quite demanding about it.

And the law says one must buy from a disabled war veteran no matter what. That’s how Chien gets pulled into the underworld.

So the mysterious powder is supposed to help with life fatigue while watching endless droning sermons on television.

Well, all right then.

So, better than a spermatocide, which is also offered here and is not used, unlike in the Farmer story.

At work, Chien has various interactions with his superiors and a white man named Darius Pethel, who is supposed to run a school party inductees in California.

And there is a Leader here, the Absolute Benefactor of the People, who has been alive for about a century and lives in Peking, seems to be top of the Party. And not many people get to see him. And it’s a special privilege.

So there’s a sense that Chien is being set up for something, perhaps ideologically tested.

Well, ostensibly, this is to prepare him for evaluating the American students and their examination papers to see who is responding to the programming.

So the Absolute Benefactor of the People has hand picked Pethel to run the school. And even though this will be a lot of work for Chien, he can’t refuse.

But to see if he’s qualified, he’s given two essays to read, one of which is demonstrably written to dissemble and one of which is ideologically correct.

And this is something that I kind of thought was really interesting. And I almost wish it had been focused on a little more. But at the end of the day, I don’t know that the ideology really matters in this story. It’s just a background.

But it’s a present background. And I guess that’s kind of the point, right?

If Chien passes the test, he’ll be going places in Party bureaucracy.

One of the papers is examining a poetic excerpt from "The Thousand and One Nights".

Were you familiar with this one, Nate?

Nate:

Yeah, I’m not sure. There’s a lot of poetry in "The Arabian Nights" in general.

JM:

It is a lot, and I didn’t really know where to look. So yeah.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

So the poem seems to be about death. But after, when we finish the story, we will kind of see Chien starting to realize that it might be about something else. It might be, in fact, a poem about—just a poem about God.

So yeah, the essay is just some boring thing full of clichés. Crush the imperialists, all that stuff.

And the second paper is on a John Dryden poem, "A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day".

Listening to the addresses from the Absolute Benefactor is mandatory. And like in "1984", the television sets also have cameras, so they can see if you’re paying the proper deference and attention.

So Mr. Chien is specifically singled out for honor and encouragement in the broadcast.

And bored and cynical, Chien pulls out the packet he got earlier, and it claims to do all sorts of cure-all stuff. But he decides what he’s purchased is actually snuff, and has a nice big sniff. Or three.

And actually, I guess he doesn’t take very much at this point because it doesn’t last very long.

But then right then, the Building Warden checks in, saying he got a call from the television authority saying Chien wasn’t dutifully watching TV.

Well, that was a close call.

When he gets back, something strange has happened. The screen goes blank, and all of a sudden the Absolute Benefactor’s face is replaced by a monstrous mechanism of circuits and pseudopods and lenses, with a speaker in it that blares jarringly.

You can kind of imagine what it sounds like, but it doesn’t really say if the words changed or anything like that. I guess they didn’t.

It’s just really interesting because, yeah, PKD describing altered states of consciousness, right? And it’s like, oh, all of a sudden everything’s different now. It’s like the same but different.

His first reaction on realizing that he’s apparently taken a dose of psychedelics is to call the police. And he figures it’s some kind of psychedelic warfare drug used by the West in the big war.

I don’t know. I was confused by this character.

I guess it kind of made sense because a lot of the things he did were very orthodox, but his thoughts were always very cynical and anti-orthodox.

Apparently, he grew up with this system. Like, he was a child already when it was in place.

No, he wasn’t even born yet when it went into place.

So it seemed like he wasn’t very indoctrinated. He just trained himself to perform all the right actions.

Nate:

Yeah, I think it’s more survival than being a member—a true believer.

JM:

Yeah, definitely a survival mechanism.

Yeah, I mean, I didn’t quite get the character voice, I guess. Like, it just seemed to me like sometimes he was almost too cynical about the Party and everything like that in his thoughts. And he was, like, so irritated with everything, but he was so, like, calm and, you know, right away, like, I’d better call the police and report this.

Nate:

Yeah, I don’t know.

I think in this particular scene, he probably just did not want to get in trouble or be caught anywhere in the paper trail of what he thinks is an LSD analogue floating around.

And it also has the, I guess, added motivation of somebody spiking you with a drug that you didn’t consent to take as a really violating and just uncool thing to do.

So he probably was personally offended and didn’t have any qualms about turning this guy into the cops for peddling drugs and, you know, basically spiking him with something.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think even though he might have this cynical, disillusioned feeling towards the government, I think it’s still that his survival response—it’s a bit of a fear response of, like, what is this? And I don’t want to be caught with it. I don’t want to have this anymore.

So I can see why he would turn it in. 

JM:

And especially, I don’t want trouble.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it makes sense.

Yeah.

So he’s pretty shaken up, but it doesn’t last long. And the cops take the rest of the drugs and some info about the peddler and his location.

So he does feel oddly reluctant.

Surprisingly, he gets a call a short while later informing him that it’s not a hallucinogen at all he’s taken, but phenothiazine, an anti-hallucinogen.

So again, this is interesting to me because maybe I’m just so inured to, like, conspiracy theories and conspiracy-theory fiction right now. And I just feel like you always suspect that everybody’s in on the conspiracy.

I’m surprised that call even went through. Like, it seemed like they would want to convince him that it’s a hallucinogen, right?

But then I’m not even sure how many of the upper Party people are aware of the thing. The cosmic-horror thing. Like, how many of them really know about it?

I don’t know. It’s never made clear, right? So it’s kind of ambiguous.

There’s a lot of questioning in this story, I think, which is good. It’s not a bad thing, mostly, but I don’t quite understand how the conspiracy works.

There’s always a conspiracy, right? And I just don’t know. I don’t quite know how it works.

But then if there was a long explanation of things, it would probably drag the story down. So I don’t know. It’s fine the way it is.

It’s just, wow, I’m surprised they let that call through, right?

And it’s just this thing about the society too. Like in "1984", it’s hopeless, right?

But then when you look at this society, well, it’s very rigid. You’re always being watched and monitored—until you aren’t, right?

And, like, certain things go on and, like, oh, so they didn’t watch that. Okay.

It feels like the social control is very, very strong until it just isn’t for the sake of a plot kind of thing.

It still works for me. I’m coming off a little critical about this story, but spoiler: I’m still giving it an A.

So PKD fans should be happy.

But so the knowledge isn’t very comforting, though.

And then the doorbell rings, and in this time comes a girl. And yeah, it’s one of them, the underworld people. And her name is Tanya Lee, and she’s a clerk in the Ministry.

And she wants to know if it was the aquatic horror shape, the thing with slime and teeth. She’s pretty intense about it. And he says, no, it was a machine that didn’t even try to talk like a man. Not any kind of simulacrum.

And he’s very comfortable about this. And then some of his responses—and this seemed very strange. But I think that’s just a PKD thing. I think, like, people talk weirdly. And sometimes it’s funny. Like, sometimes it’s, I think, intentionally funny, right?

So some of the ways that she had responded to things in the story almost cracked me up a little bit. He just comes out with sometimes, like every so often, he does speak the first thing in his head, especially when he’s at the party.

Okay, yeah, like, there’s a little bit of humor going on here, I think.

So everyone who takes the stelazine, which is the drug, sees a different thing. And that doesn’t make sense. It should be that way with a hallucinogen and not the other way around. That’s obviously true. So that’s just how hallucinogens work, right?

But there’s not an infinite variety of true visions, and there are apparently twelve of them.

I don’t know. I was kind of looking into this, and I thought maybe it might represent the sefirot in Kabbalah, which are the different creative aspects that God forms. But apparently there’s only ten of those. So I’m not really sure why the number twelve here.

I guess this is one of these things we’ll always have to wonder about. Occult experts, comment in and let me know what you guys think. But yeah, I’m not sure if there’s a significance to the number twelve. So it’s apparently not the sefirot.

They call the thing that Chien saw the Clanker. And there’s also the Gulper and the Bird and the Climbing Tube and the Crusher, and other things maybe too terrible to name.

And they want Chien to join them now, of course. The Clankers are Group Red. They want to know what the thing, the Leader, really is. And Chien might be their man on the inside.

So she seems to know a great deal about him and his life and work. And she knows there’s no school in California, and this thing with the exam papers is just trying to test him. And Pethel is, in fact, Higher Secpol Inspector Judd Craine.

And the drinking water is laced with Datrox-3, a powerful hallucinogen.

I do also have the question: why do the underworld people have so many resources? And why does the system let Chien know what he’s actually consumed?

So at first Chien just wants to know which essay is orthodox, because apparently these people know about that too. So she once again tries to convince him to be the man on the inside.

Not many people get to see the Leader, like I said, but apparently he likes to hold elite stag parties.

Oh boy, like Stalin.

And yeah, there’s actually a lot of Stalin parallels in this second half. So again, it’s kind of weird, but that doesn’t really seem to play into it too much.

But I don’t really understand how we get from stag parties to God exactly. But there you go, right?

So they want him to take the stelazine and, at one of these events, see the Leader for what it really is.

So she tells him the Arabic-poem paper is the orthodox one, and now he owes them something. So they—that is, the government—wanted him to fail, and now he won’t.

So it was less than a 50-50 chance. And now the conspirators are going to help his career along.

Technically Chien hasn’t broken a law, but they’ll be watching—that is, the government. Or should be.

Has anybody seen the Absolute Benefactor as he really is? I’m not sure.

But Chien seems to be getting into the spirit of the thing a little bit. And indeed, the door is open for Chien when he passes the test.

As a matter of fact, he’s informed the Benefactor’s image is adjusted, and that actually the Benefactor’s name is Thomas Fletcher. And he’s a white man originally from New Zealand. And that’s not secret, but it’s not something that’s talked about among most people.

Everyone agrees—thanks, Chien—even if for different reasons.

Yeah, I thought that was sort of funny.

So he’s in, faster than expected, and he doesn’t think he can get the anti-hallucinogen in time, which is sort of a relief. But it does happen, and he does.

It’s all a bit formal, and Thursday he’s meant to be taken to the Leader’s private villa, the Yangtze River Ranch.

“If you’re disappointed, don’t show it,” he’s told. And the Leader might drink a bit too much or tell a ribald tale.

And yeah, it really reminds me of Stalin at this point. And even Khrushchev had stories about being at Stalin’s parties and how he liked to humiliate people and how things got really out of control and stuff like that.

Yeah, it was kind of interesting.

So they’ll give him some amphetamines, and he should take them because the party will go on until the next morning.

And he can’t avoid the dissidents, and he gets forcibly handed the stelazine the very day of the stag party.

So the atmosphere of the party is strange and decadent, with nude girls and men in white tie and tails. And the clearance procedures are quite invasive, and the stelazine is making Chien feel dizzy and sluggish.

Everything’s going more or less weird, but okay, when the great Leader shows up.

And it’s not a mad war machine, but a semi-transparent, shapeless mass that absorbs essence from whoever it comes into contact with. Maybe even more like Clark Ashton Smith than Lovecraft in some ways.

But yeah, it eats and eats endlessly.

And he feels like he is somehow a part of it too, which is the worst thing. And he sees himself and everyone else in the room as a pile of twisted slugs being voraciously consumed.

And the mass—the Leader, the demiurge itself—is coming straight toward him.

And the being speaks to him inside his head, and it’s raving and mad. And God makes and destroys the world. The Arabic poem isn’t about death, but it’s about God making and unmaking.

Horrified and wanting a dignified end, he tries to throw himself off a balcony, but the thing catches him.

I imagine this in the voice of the lead Cenobite from "Hellraiser", but it goes, “Don’t fall on my account.”

The extended pseudopod starts to look like a human hand. He says, “What I want is for you to see me as you have seen me. As I am. And then to trust me. As you live on, unable to stop, I will torment you. I will deprive you item by item of everything you possess or want. And then, when you are crushed to death, I will unfold a mystery.”

From that moment on he is physically marked where the thing touched him. There are things worse than the being, but Chien will not meet them.

He tries to hit the thing and blacks out and wakes to find himself ejected from the party. So he makes it home and sits up smoking cigarettes until Tanya shows up, as he knew she would. And you get the idea he’s going to be a different man henceforward.

He’s not even cynical anymore. He’s hateful and bleak. And he wants to kill God, but God is everywhere and everything. And he can’t bear to be looked at too closely.

But he wants her to stay the night.

Then the night is the worst part.

“Is there anything we can do to fight this thing?” she says.

And he just says, “Believe in it.”

“But what will that do?”

“Nothing,” he says. “Nothing at all.”

His shoulder is bleeding where the thing touched him, and he doesn’t think he has much time left.

And they decide to have sex again. And it’s sort of beautiful still, but melancholy. It’s an interesting way to end the story.

It was weird because I didn’t know—like, it was almost redemptory-feeling. Like, it was almost—I guess maybe he doesn’t have long left. But then again, the thing did say it would torment him for a long time. No idea, really. It just ends like that.

I guess now he knows what the Leader really is, and he knows what everything is really all about. He’s had his monistic truth.

I don’t know. What kind of person do you all think he’ll be now?

Nate:

Well, certainly an experience like that, when you come to a non-dual realization with direct interaction with a deity, has the tendency to warp one’s mind a bit and will radically change his personality and persona no matter what direction it goes in.

And I like that PKD cuts off here and we don’t really see what happens to him after this whole enlightenment period. But he’s definitely not going to be the same that he was beforehand.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I also like the ambiguity. I know we had mentioned some other cosmic-horror figures here with Lovecraft and Smith, where you get the typical protagonist who goes mad after being confronted with something so incomprehensibly grand and just something that you can’t really understand.

But I do like, yeah, that Dick doesn’t show that. He just leaves that to your imagination and to wonder what happens to him.

JM:

Yeah. I don’t know what he really meant by good and evil being the same thing. I guess what he really meant is that they both come from the same root.

Nate:

Right, exactly.

Yeah. And that’s kind of the core of non-dualistic philosophy to begin with.

JM:

So PKD did say at the end he doesn’t believe in any of this necessarily, but he does take some time to talk about the perhaps-value of drug experiences in terms of having religious revelations, which I thought was interesting.

Nate:

Yeah, outlining a future area of research, which I don’t think anybody was too eager to take him on in the formal laboratory world, but certainly a number of people have embarked on that outside of the formal channels.

JM:

Well, Ellison says at the beginning, he’s like, meet PKD. He’s the only guy who can write well zonked out of his mind and actually make sense.

Nate:

Yeah, I don’t know. I like this one a lot. It was cool to have him play with the philosophy at the end as a little twist of what the big bad monster is actually going to be.

And I really like how he brought those ideas into the story. I would also give this an A. Definitely one of the major standouts of this anthology.

I like pretty much everything that I’ve read by PKD, and I’m glad that Ellison found a way to get him in here.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I would also give this one an A. I really enjoy the concepts that PKD puts in here. I do find that fascinating, the initial psychedelics leading to the same realities. I’m sure that that comes up in quite a few other works that he does, or something similar.

And I think that the ending, of this revelation, really makes the story.

JM:

Yeah, I enjoyed a lot of this. I enjoyed the paranoid feeling through most of the story. I enjoyed the kind of tension of, like, feeling that you’re always under scrutiny. You might be able to think something, but you better say something else because otherwise you’ll be in a lot of trouble, right?

I think he did a really good job of that.

I guess, in a way, the dichotomy between the outward-facing Chien and the inside Chien was actually really interesting and kind of cool to see, because he did not really think like somebody who’d been indoctrinated.

But that might just be because actually he’s a pretty smart man and he’s, like, resistant to all this programming. He knows that that’s what it is.

And even though he’s, like, a minor functionary at this point, you also get the sense that the superiors also know what’s going on. But he has to tread carefully because, yeah, if he’s not careful in what he says, they could report him for, like, dissidence and stuff like that.

And then, yeah, the party—as in the stag-party atmosphere—was pretty freaky, pretty out there.

You just kind of imagine, like, okay, he’s on this weird drug and, like, it’s an anti-hallucinogen, but it’s still making him feel pretty strange. And then, yeah, the ultimate revelation is pretty scary and pretty awesome.

So, I mean, I’m also giving this an A. Like I said, it was powerful. It was the most cosmic-horror story in this book.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

We all like that atmosphere.

Gretchen:

I also think it is interesting almost—JM, you mentioned a couple of times "1984" and comparing it to that due to the same kind of oppressive atmosphere of the society. And I think it’s really interesting that it’s almost PKD saying, what if instead of Big Brother it’s worse, and it’s God that’s in charge of everything?

The sort of threat is even bigger than what Big Brother is, which I think is a pretty neat little concept here.

JM:

Yeah.

But unlike "1984", there is a little glimmering of humor from time to time poking its head out of this, which I did appreciate as well.

Some of his responses eventually do seem, like, really off the cuff. They’re like, maybe because he’s nervous or anxious or something, and he starts walking up to this girl and he’s like, “Oh, why do your breasts glow?”

And, like, you know, you see a lot of that kind of gender-bending. Sometimes it’s done a little less subtly than here. But anyway, that’s not something for a while.

But the party atmosphere was pretty cool.

And—but yeah, we said PKD. He didn’t believe necessarily wholeheartedly in what he was writing, in terms of that this was a true religious revelation.

But now we want to know: did PKD take the anthology seriously?

So he and his friends seem to have been discussing it in a somewhat lighthearted way, I guess.

If you look in PKD collections, I think the one this ended up in was "The Eye of the Sibyl", which is one of the "Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick" volumes.

Immediately following this is something called "The Story to End All Stories for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions". And yeah, that is the full title, including “for Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions.”

And it’s really short. It’s just an outline.

So I’ll read it. It goes like this:

"In a hydrogen-war-ravaged society, the nubile young women go down to a futuristic zoo and have sexual intercourse with various deformed and non-human life forms in cages. In this particular account, a woman who has been patched together out of damaged bodies of several women has intercourse with an alien female there in the cage. And later on, the woman, by means of futuristic science, conceives.

"The infant is born, and she and the female in the cage fight over it to see who gets it. The human young woman wins and promptly eats the offspring, hair, teeth, toes and all. Just after she has finished, she discovers that the offspring is God."

And this was published in the fanzine "Niekas", for the cost of postage—one dollar—in the fall of 1968.

Coupled with PKD kind of saying he almost had some regret for writing this story, I was kind of wondering, maybe he should have skimmed through it as much? Maybe he should have read the Rodman story?

Did he really think this anthology was just weird sex and blasphemy?

Is it really mostly weird sex and blasphemy?

Nate:

I don’t know if it’s mostly.

It’s definitely present.

But I’m sure in putting together his entry for this, he had to deal a lot with Ellison himself. And I’m sure elements of Ellison’s personality came very clear to Dick as far as, like, what he wanted to appear in the anthology.

And yeah, I haven’t read that follow-up. I could definitely imagine him wanting to poke a little bit of fun at Ellison himself, given that he is a very large and loud personality.

JM:

Yeah, definitely.

Gretchen:

Overall, the anthology itself is more varied than what PKD is making out. But yeah, I think perhaps PKD seeing what specifically Ellison may have been looking for, what he may have been encouraging, or what his ideas for the anthology were, he may have gotten the idea that that’s what the anthology was all about.

It checks quite a few of the boxes of some of the stories that we will see in this anthology.

JM:

Yeah, I think some of this may in fact be a commentary on Ellison’s personality. But also, like, there’s so much Ellison in this.

And yeah, the authors give their afterwords, and there’s some joking around from both sides in a couple of cases. But for the most part, we’re not getting people’s feelings about Ellison from this.

And they were contentious, to say the least, right? And they remain so.

I’ve even seen some comments about Ellison getting so angry about things that were said about him that he would write, like, threats to people and stuff like that. At least in writing, if not in person.

But apparently he did get in a lot of fistfights. But I don’t think there’s any record of him actually trying to beat up a fellow science fiction writer.

But yeah, we’re not getting a lot of the other side, I guess, in this.

Gretchen:

The most that you can get of people’s feelings about Ellison himself is perhaps just the amount of effort it seems that they have put into the stories, or the ideas that you find in the afterword, their justification for certain stories being in this collection.

JM:

Yeah, yeah. And I definitely think that perhaps the reputation of certain stories in this anthology kind of overrides the entire discussion in a way, or has done traditionally.

And I hope actually that with this podcast—I mean, I know we talked about how much this book has been given coverage lately—but I hope we actually do help to broaden the scope of talk of the anthology.

Because yeah, it’s not just about a few stories that stand out. There’s actually a lot more going on here.

And yeah, the whole dialogue between Ellison and his writers and everyone else is really interesting.

As we kind of alluded to earlier, not all fandom was pleased with this anthology. And some people were, if not shocked by it—maybe they would say, no, I wasn’t shocked; I just felt like it was trying too hard to shock.

There was one particular reviewer. I can’t remember if I mentioned last week. It wasn’t the woman from Philadelphia. That was just some letter that he got. But this is somebody who actually reviewed the anthology in a fanzine. And she was somewhat unimpressed, and she did, like, a full review of the anthology. There’s some interesting discussion around this whole thing, both then and now.

Larry Niven - "The Jigsaw Man" 

JM:

The next story we have in the collection is "The Jigsaw Man" by Larry Niven.

And yeah, I didn’t really do my due diligence here. We were just talking about some of the authors that were unknown to us earlier before reading this, and Larry Niven has a name you hear a fair bit. And most readers of science fiction at least have a vague idea of who Larry Niven is.

I’ve read a lot myself, mostly just short stories, actually, including this one, which I realized I had read before in a collection of his. But I’ve not read "Ringworld" or any of the other novels that he’s written.

And I didn’t really look up too much about him. Apparently he helped to finance this anthology, and Harlan Ellison seemed to think he had a lot of money lying around. I don’t know if that was a joke or not.

Nate, you read "Ringworld", right?

Nate:

Yeah, I read "Ringworld". I read "The Mote in God’s Eye", and I read another one of his short stories that appeared, again, in that "World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970" anthology, "Death by Ecstasy", which was actually, like, a really, really cool sci-fi detective story, very noirish in tone.

And it’d be cool to do some of that stuff on the podcast at some point.

But yeah, this is from a couple years earlier, and it feels—it’s very, very much early in Larry Niven’s career. I don’t think he had, like, a whole lot out at this point. Certainly none of his major award-winning works were out at this time.

So yeah, it’s an interesting one, for sure.

I think it’s interesting how it ties in with real-world technology of organ transplants. And it’s fascinating to think that this was also relatively new technology at the time.

JM:

Yeah, he seems to have felt very serious about it.

I must say, I’m very confused by what he’s going for in this story. I don’t understand at all.

I don’t think I like—this is the perfect example of a B story for me, because I’m just so, like, I know that you’re taking it very seriously, and this is gritty dystopian.

I almost see this as being part of some, like, futuristic noir film or something like that. Like maybe not the whole film, but a specific sequence from the film where the guy’s in prison and all this.

And, like, I don’t know. Yeah, it was interesting for sure. I enjoyed reading it, but yeah, I’m a bit puzzled by it.

Nate:

Yeah, I think it only tries to extrapolate on current technologies like organ transplantation, which—the first successful organ transplant was the kidney transplant in 1954. And the first total artificial heart wouldn’t be implanted in a human until 1969.

So it’s not only very early for the technology in general, but it’s just amazing how far we’ve come since then.

But also the whole, like, nudist angle that plays a small part in some of this. Like, seems like he’s trying to—

JM:

People are modest about—

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Nate:

But yeah, he seems like he’s trying to extrapolate on social trends there. Like, I think a lot of pearl-clutching was going on in the media of how people were wearing less and less clothing and were less covered up, like—

JM:

Which Sturgeon was very into.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Nate:

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gretchen:

This is my first Niven. I haven’t read any short stories or any novels by him. I really think it’s interesting just how alarmed Niven is. I think it’s really interesting to see his extrapolation here.

And even to go so far where the beginning of the story is him, the narrator, discussing the invention of blood transfusions, and that sort of being the starting point for this really dystopian society that Niven has created here.

JM:

Yeah, it’s interesting.

So I just kind of made this connection now because I was talking about how I wasn’t sure about what he was trying to say about capital punishment. There’s this whole section where it seems like he’s on a soapbox. Like, he gets on a soapbox, and I’m not quite sure what he’s soapboxing about exactly, like why he’s saying this.

But then it kind of connected it with something that we talked about in an earlier episode, the fertility episode, and how we were kind of talking about how there were a lot of positive sides to modern, I guess, technology and how it was shaping the world of alternative parenting and stuff like that.

And there were a lot of reasons to believe that that was kind of cool. But there are also a lot of reasons to suggest why it’s pointing in a eugenics direction and why it’s also maybe not so cool, because it’s very expensive, and who are the kind of people that are going to be affording this?

So we’re looking at a story about correction here, and there’s a couple of stories about it. There’s "The Malley System", right? And then there’s this. We’re thinking about the prison system. We’re thinking about what’s going to happen to people who basically have their rights taken away from them, right? And what kind of experiments are going to be done?

You know, you can picture the warden sitting these people down and being like, you guys have done wrong, but you can still be useful to society. Just sign these papers.

I can see, I guess, why he feels like this could be a gruesome future.

I do think it’s charming how—I don’t know, some people on Goodreads seem to complain about this like it’s bad. I just think it’s kind of charming how some of these authors envision all these changes happening in the next 20 years.

Like, yeah, they’re thinking, like, oh yeah, by the ’80s, like, we’re going to be fucked.

It’s weird because, I guess, when you think about the 1960s, like, things were changing. They did seem to be changing pretty fast, right?

Nate:

And it’s always hard to predict how fast major changes in society or technologies are going to come into effect.

Sometimes science fiction authors get it way too quick, sometimes way too slow. And modern-day technology eclipses where a lot of people were predicting it would be by this time in their stories.

JM:

So I think a lot of them kind of get it right, but they get it right, like, at the wrong time.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, that’s what I mean.

JM:

Right, okay.

It’s like they’re less far off in their predictions than you might think. They just missed some of the steps because, yeah, it’s taken us longer to get to some of these places, but we’re kind of there now in a lot of ways. We’re kind of closer to there than they were in their time.

It’s just, yeah, it may be a little different.

But, like, there’s a story coming up, the John Sladek story, where I just think that’s fascinating, the way that that’s done, right?

And yeah, that’s not for a bit yet, so I won’t spoil it. But we’re going to talk a bit more about that one.

And I don’t know. I guess my one issue with this story, though, besides being a little confused about its message—but then I’m starting to get it a little more the more I think about it.

And I guess that’s a good thing about doing this and, like, really sitting down to talk about these stories.

And I’m still going to say it’s a B story because I’m just not feeling it as much as Larry is. But it’s fine.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, I’d agree it’s a B story. It’s not, like, a total masterpiece, but I had fun reading it, both the, I guess, extrapolation with technology.

The message he’s trying to send is a bit muddled. But again, he was a young writer and probably just did not have a lot of coherent stuff—

JM:

There’s some really good writers in this anthology, but I don’t think Larry Niven—

That is something I did want to add also, is, like, I did find the writing to be a little clunky and, like, overwritten in some weird ways.

Like, there’s an entire sentence describing the way a bed is a part of the cement floor or something like that. I was just like, why?

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

You could say that a lot more concisely, and it’s not like poetry or anything, so it doesn’t feel like it sings.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

The prison escape and the adventure stuff was kind of fun, though. So I enjoyed that.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Yeah, I enjoyed the romp the story goes on.

I also agree. This is, like, a B story. I think it’s a good story. I enjoyed reading it, but I wouldn’t say this is the best of the best in this collection.

But it does make me want to read more of Niven in the future.

Nate:

Yeah.

That one, "Death by Ecstasy", that I read in "World’s Best Science Fiction: 1970", was pretty good. I don’t know if I’d say, like, these two stories better than the two novels I read.

"Ringworld" is—I don’t know. I thought it was okay. It has some cool ideas, but it feels a little bit thin in some areas.

And "The Mote in God’s Eye", again, it was, like, way longer than "Ringworld", and I’m just not the biggest fan of military science fiction to begin with.

So I don’t know. I would definitely like to check out more of his early short stuff, for sure, where he’s kind of restrained to a much lesser word count, but also has the room to play around with some of these ideas and might make them feel a little bit more complete, as opposed to a full-length novel where some of the characters feel a little bit flat, as it doesn’t really matter nearly as much sometimes in some of these shorter stories.

Fritz Leiber - "Gonna Roll the Bones" 

JM:

We get to revisit my man Fritz Leiber, and we’ve got a story here called "Gonna Roll the Bones". And I believe this won the Nebula award.

And it was kind of interesting because, to me, this is not a very science-fiction story. And that award generally is given to more—I don’t know, it feels like more of a science-fiction award, but there you go.

So, all right. Lots of feelings about this.

It’s Fritz Leiber, so I have this kind of predisposition towards feeling a connection with it. I think the story has great atmosphere, but I’ve always been a little bemused by it.

And I’ve read it a few times, and you know what? I think I like this because I can read this story many times and I’m still kind of bemused by it, but I’m oddly fascinated by it, right?

Yeah, I just have so many questions. And it’s just so—I don’t know, like a contrast to Larry Niven before. Like, just the writing here is just so—it just pumps you along, and it just feels so—it’s got such atmosphere to it.

Questions I have, like, why is Joe such an asshole, right?

And I listened to a podcast about this earlier, a week or two ago. I think it was the Wheel of Genre podcast, and they talked about this story.

And they were a little less familiar with Leiber, and yeah, I must have read this story maybe half a dozen times in my life, like since probably the late ’90s.

So this is a story that is quite familiar to me, but at the same time I’m bemused by it. So I keep reading it, right? Like, I keep reading it again, and I remember things differently or a little bit like, oh yeah, that.

I think the story is different, and I think this is a dangerous vision possibly for Fritz himself. I think that’s how this story might be a dangerous vision.

I think most of the dangerous visions are looking outward. They’re looking out at society. They’re looking out at the future. They’re looking at what’s going to happen when we meet aliens, what’s going to happen with artificial intelligence. This story is totally looking inwards. This story is looking at a person who’s struggling with addiction, and the whole thing could be a hallucination.

There’s again this whole weird thing with the witch-wife, and that’s this theme that Leiber keeps returning to about the women in his life, and his fascinations with trying to understand each other and stuff like that.

And the domestic situation in this story is not great.

In the end, it’s like he decides to go home the long way around. And so is he going home at all? Probably not, right?

All these questions just sort of add to the intrigue and weird nature of the story.

The gambling scenes are really, really tense and weird.

I think, like, this stuff was probably a big influence on Stephen King. I can just feel like, yeah, he kind of wrote some stories that were like this, but they were, like, kind of an imitation.

Like, I don’t have much bad to say about Stephen King. I think he’s good for what he is. And I respect that he would not hesitate to tell you, oh yeah, I was inspired by such-and-such a writer to write this, right?

Like, he’s never held back about that. He’s not, like, one of these guys who’s hoity-toity about his influences and just acts holier-than-thou with being a literary author and all that. And he’s never been like that.

He’s always been very down-to-earth about it, which I appreciate.

I don’t know if he’s ever talked about Fritz Leiber. I think he might have mentioned him a couple of times. I might have come across something. I don’t know if he ever talked about this story, but I definitely kind of got that sense.

I don’t know. I have a few things more to say, but why don’t I shut up for a while and you guys can talk. What do you think about this one?

Nate:

Yeah, generally speaking, I enjoyed the story. This is my second time reading it. I previously read it in "The Best of Fritz Leiber" collection that I have, that Del Rey version that I mentioned before.

It’s definitely got some cool atmosphere. It feels like Leiber pretty much distilled the worst aspects of his personality into one character here, so in some ways it’s kind of amusing to see just this, like, terrible shitty person getting into no good.

There is an unfortunate use of a racial slur that is removed from the Blackstone audio version, so I’m not sure if that’s also the case in the recent Blackstone edition that came out a couple years ago that J. Michael Straczynski put together.

JM:

Yeah, I don’t know.

Nate:

Yeah, I didn’t actually get to see the text there, but I think that blemish aside, it’s a really, really effective horror story.

Again, not really much to do with science fiction, aside from maybe the setting of the town of whatever it is, wherever it is.

JM:

He does refer to that, but it’s a weird thing that he does where it’s almost like you’re open to being like, oh, is this just some, like, Wild West story, right? Is this, like, some Western story?

Because even in the same sentence he does it over and over again. He mentions, like, some vaguely futuristic rocket-type thing, but then he’ll, like, say, oh no, it’s like a Western, like a dusty old town.

And, like, he’ll mix the genres within the same sentence.

And he’s just like, yeah, it could be either thing, which kind of makes me wonder, like, I don’t know, is Joe already in some kind of limbo? Is he in some kind of purgatory?

Like, does this—it doesn’t matter what genre the story is in. It’s just, like, a story, right?

And it could be a Western. It could be a crazy sci-fi story. Whatever matters is that he’s fighting the Devil, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, I pictured this as one of those, like, planetary-romance space-Western-type towns that you’d see the heroic side of in a Leigh Brackett story, but here you get to see the seedy underbelly of what goes on in the gambling halls and with workers at the mine.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I was definitely picturing something similar. I think also, thinking of the crossover with Leiber with fantasy as well as sci-fi, I kind of had this idea of maybe a town similar to a fantasy setting.

I also really enjoyed this story. JM, you had mentioned this is a more internal story, about looking at, like, dangerous visions, rather than an external societal dangerous vision that we’ve seen in a lot of these other stories. 

JM:

It’s really interesting to me that nobody else seems to have interpreted it like that, only Fritz.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I really think because no one else really seems to have done it, it is a really unique story in the collection, so I think it sticks out and is pretty memorable because of it.

Even though I don’t really understand many games in casinos and stuff, I always like a good gambling scene, and I think that the gambling done in this story, that scene, is really a delight to read. It’s pretty tense. I really think that Leiber captures that atmosphere really well.

JM:

Yeah, you’re spending the time with this main character. You kind of root for him in a weird way, but yeah, I mean, you’re also—I don’t know, I always worry about him from the start, right?

I mean, like, first of all, nobody really—that I picked up on, like, this doesn’t get commented on a lot—but he’s talking about, like, just killing his entire family, right? He’s talking about basically ending it all in a family suicide, right? Like, that’s a plan that he has in his head that he’s thinking about doing as this story goes.

And he gets lured by the lights of the gambling, and he has a special ability. He can throw things really well and got a little bit of magic in him, and he guards this magic very carefully.

It does a bit have the sword-and-sorcery kind of feeling to it too.

I think there’s a really interesting way of writing this. Like, I think some of Delany’s later work is, like, weirdly classified as sword and sorcery, but he uses it as this weird way to explore, like, internal conflicts and stuff like that. And I kind of feel like that’s what this story is.

And I don’t know. Like, I feel Leiber wonders if he could become a person like this, right? Maybe it’s all this slaving away for nothing. And yeah, like, all I really have is my addictions, my drinking, my gambling and stuff like that.

Like, I think there’s a weird vulnerability to it. But also, at the end, like, it seems like somehow he’s managed to win out through his special magic, right? And he doesn’t have to kill his family. He can just go the long way around. And maybe after a hundred years of crazy adventures he’ll come home.

It’s got a certain power to it.

And yeah, so for me, this is an A story, even though, yeah, I’ve always been puzzled by it. I’ve always been a little bit put out by some of the racial language. Like, Leiber doesn’t do that normally. Again, so I think it’s kind of—yeah, this is weird. Joe Slattermill, the average man really down in the dumps kind of thing, but also, like, yeah, maybe there’s a little bit of personal touch to just how low someone might feel that they could go, in a way.

And so yeah, weird story. Weird and kind of powerful.

Nate:

Yeah, this is a B story for me. A high B, probably, not quite on the A level, but I did really like it a lot.

JM:

Yeah, that’s fair. I always said it wasn’t one of my favorite Leiber stories, but weirdly, every time I read it, it kind of goes a little up in my estimation. So I don’t know.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Kind of thinking, because it could go either high B or low A, I feel like I might go with high B, almost A, though. I really liked the atmosphere that Leiber sets up. I think that it’s a really interesting story in terms of how it interprets the theme of this anthology.

I would say that there maybe are a few other stories in this collection that are stronger. So I think, yeah, like, I would say B.

JM:

Cool. I can definitely see all that. And I definitely think this story is a puzzle. And I don’t really know that I would have said it was an A story if I had read it for the first time now doing this anthology. I might not have.

But again, it feels weird because, yeah, this is a story I must have read half a dozen times, right? So I’m kind of coming at this a little differently. Not necessarily better or anything like that. It’s fascinated me enough that every time I see it come up somewhere, I’ll be like, oh yeah, I’ll read that again.

I think it’s mostly the way it stuck with me.

Joe L. Hensley - "Lord Randy, My Son" 

JM:

The next story we’ve got is "Lord Randy, My Son" by Joe L. Hensley. And this is another story dealing with childhood.

So Joe Hensley, briefly: Joe Hensley got involved in fandom at a very young age and went straight into the U.S. Navy after graduating high school in 1944. And he became a Navy journalist during the Korean War.

And then he earned his law degree and was a practicing attorney henceforward. But, as is the main character in this story and a lot of the other stories he wrote, his legal career is a big deal. Actually, he served a term in the Indiana General Assembly, worked as a prosecuting attorney, and was appointed a circuit-court judge in 1975 before being elected to the bench and serving two terms.

He did publish around 20 novels and collections, including a series about an Indiana judge. They say write what you know, right? So his last novel was published in 2008. So yeah, he was going for a bit.

And this story is definitely heavy on the melancholy. I quite liked it. What do you guys think?

Nate:

I don’t know. I wasn’t really too into this one. I thought it was a little bit trite at the end. I kind of appreciate the effort, but it didn’t really resonate with me.

Gretchen:

I thought it was pretty good. I think that the ending, I could kind of see where it was going, but I did like the bit of a switch that was being set up there. We see this child who we think may be this messianic figure, or much more of an angelic figure, who turns out to be more of an Antichrist than anything else.

I enjoyed it. I think that it felt like perhaps one of the more—JM, you said melancholic. I think that that’s a good description. But I also think pretty jaded, I guess, is the word I would describe it.

JM:

Interesting. So it’s weird how I put this sort of in the category with the Howard Rodman story, but also one that’s coming up a little later, which is kind of stories that feel like they’re kind of connected very much with childhood.

And this one didn’t quite hit me like the next one did, but I think this was very good nonetheless, and very sad.

And though things look like they could be all right for some characters in the end, it really makes me think of the Jerome Bixby "Twilight Zone" episode "It’s a Good Life", only here the kid is kind of poised on the edge. We’re not quite sure if he’s going to become a monster or not yet.

But with all the hurt and hate he feels in the world, it seems like he might.

And Daddy will live, but "Lord Randy, My Son" seems kind of like a promise for the future. And I think, for me, that’s a dangerous vision because it’s kind of like the Second Coming, perhaps. And Hensley did call this a religious story in the afterword.

So yeah, I really like this. There was a real poignancy and sadness to this that worked for me.

And to me, this story is a lot about perception because you have this kid. He’s not understanding anything we’re saying. He’s nonverbal. Basically, he doesn’t talk, at least hardly at all. But as the story progresses, he is starting to talk more.

But the thing is, you can tell—and it’s not from his perspective—but you can kind of tell he’s been absorbing a lot of things, and he’s been learning a lot of things. And he hasn’t felt the need to communicate verbally because he’s kind of somewhere else, right? He’s kind of, like, in his mind. That’s where he is, right?

He’s a little kid, so he’s, like, lashing out against things sometimes. He killed the kids that tormented that poor old man, but then he also made the dog better because the dog had some kind of brain injury or whatever, and it was making the dog go crazy.

He could tell the dog was hurting, and he’s like, yeah, I’m going to make the dog better. He finally realized his dad was hurting, and his dad had cancer.

So the story is kind of from the dad’s perspective, but it’s not a first-person narration. And Dad has cancer, and Dad is dying, and he’s kind of working as much as he can, but he knows he’s got not much left.

Mom’s committed suicide because when he was in the womb he did something to her because it was hurting, and he didn’t want to leave. And he was like—yeah, he’s like a tiny infant, right, lashing out. And he has this power.

And it’s totally like that "Twilight Zone" story. But in that one, the kid is so far advanced in just being this absolutely, like, in-control fiend that nobody can resist, right? Oh yeah, I’ll bury you in the cornfield or whatever, right?

There’s kind of this hint at the end of this story that it might go that way. That even though the kid has been Christ-like, putting hands on and healing, he’s also absorbed a lot of the hatred and nastiness in the world.

And I don’t know if it’s Dad’s perspective—maybe this story could have told him in the first person. It could have been maybe a little more poignant. I’m not sure. But maybe I’ll ask you guys that in a second.

But I just think that, yeah, like, there’s a hint at the end that there’s something ominous. Randall is going to become Lord Randy eventually, right? I think he’s going to use his powers for some kind of perhaps dictatorial aim. I don’t know.

I don’t think Jesus really ever asked people to call him Lord Jesus, did he? I don’t know.

Nate:

No, I don’t believe so.

JM:

I give this one an A. I think this is good.

Nate:

Yeah. This is a C for me. I wasn’t really into it.

Gretchen:

I think I would give this one a B. I did like reading it. I think that there are aspects of it that I found really interesting, but I think it’s a little below an A for me.

JM:

All right. Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough.

This is really interesting and cool. I’m really enjoying this, how we see some of these a little differently. And that’s good. If we all said the same thing, we would be a much less interesting crew.

Poul Anderson - "Eutopia"

JM:

Next story, though, is "Eutopia" by Poul Anderson.

Nate:

Yeah. So we covered him once on the podcast before, "The Man Who Came Early" from 1956. So this is a little bit after that. But they share some similar themes where a traveler from a far, far away land or time meets a bunch of Nordic warriors and pisses them off and has to fight for his life in some way.

So I thought that was kind of interesting, how they share that similarity.

So Harlan Ellison in his introduction doesn’t really tell us any useful or truthful information about Poul Anderson. So there’s really not much insight to be gained from Ellison’s comments on his writing since the last time.

But yeah, generally speaking, I enjoyed this one. Again, it’s not another masterpiece for me, but it was an interesting romp with some thought experiments thrown in.

JM:

I can kind of guess why you wanted to talk about it, though, a little bit. Maybe. We’ll get to that.

But yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I don’t know. I thought it would be—this is a good one to cover in general. It definitely brings up some things that I’m sure made people uncomfortable at the time reading it. The very last twist at the end there.

JM:

Yeah.

So I mean, I liked it. I like Poul Anderson. But there are times when Poul talks about stuff in a non-story way where I’m a little bit suspicious now of what he’s saying because of various things.

Like, I guess sometimes his politics come through and different things come through. And this story has—I don’t know. I’ll save it till the end. I don’t know. I have some thoughts.

But I think in general he handled this really well, like, considering, right? And I say that as somebody who enjoys his writing and his stories. I just read one of his stories in a sword-and-sorcery anthology that I thought was fantastic. There’s a fantastic story about Vikings and this weird curse and stuff like that.

And I really like Poul Anderson. But yeah, I mean, every time I read an introduction by him or comments by him or something like that, you know, I have to kind of be like, what do you mean by that?

Yeah, his politics—he’s definitely a little more on the right side of things. It comes across sometimes. Like, he was one who supported the Vietnam War, I believe.

So there’s something I’ll bring up after this, because it was an interesting thing in "Galaxy" magazine where they actually polled the writers to see where they stood in terms of the war. And I don’t know, it feels like a way to establish battle lines.

Like, I think now I can see a lot of people would have probably complained about doing that. Like, yeah, like, you’re just trying to make everybody mad at each other.

And it probably worked. It probably worked, right?

So I don’t know. I like Poul Anderson. I think I mentioned this when we did "The Man Who Came Early", but reading an introduction to one of his books was one of the things that made me start thinking about the author and thinking about, like, sometimes maybe I just want to read the story. I don’t necessarily want to know everything the author thinks, right? Like, maybe I don’t want to know that all the time, right?

And it’s funny because when we’re doing this on Chrononauts, we kind of get into that stuff a little more than some people do.

Gretchen:

This one just didn’t really resonate with me too much, actually. I don’t know if it’s because I really just wasn’t as intrigued by perhaps some of the world-building that Poul Anderson was setting up. Yeah, I feel like this just didn’t really capture my interest too much.

Nate:

Yeah, I liked this one a little bit better on the second time around. Yeah, the world-building is a little bit basic, which, you know, we’ll get to in a second.

So our story revolves around Iason Philippou, from an alternate-history Greek civilization called Eutopia. And he’s an interdimensional traveler who finds himself in another alternate history, a European version of America called Westfall, where the various European nationalities have their own countries in America, fragmented and at odds with one another.

So he’s managed to offend the alternate Norsemen and is clearly unable to talk his way out of things, and basically running for his life while pursued by these angry Norsemen to get back to his loved one.

He seeks refuge among the Hungarians. In addition to the political entities being an alternate-history-type thing, so is the development of technology, with Iason being far more advanced and the other societies having a hodgepodge of past, present and future tech that is unevenly distributed and unevenly developed with respect to our current technological continuum.

So Iason has traveled the stars and among other dimensions and alternate histories, and spends a good amount of time reflecting on that. And indeed, a good chunk of this story is more or less that kind of interesting thought experiment on alternate histories and how civilizations can progress or not progress.

After convincing the Voivodeship to grant him protection, which I always thought was more of a Polish title than a Hungarian thing—so either Anderson is introducing more alternate history or unable to keep our own straight—Iason makes another social faux pas, and the Hungarians only very reluctantly help him out.

But he gets there fine and meets up with another pseudo-Grecian, Daimonax Aristides, and it turns out that Utopia is boring in "Eutopia", which is why they’re there in the first place.

So he says:

“For what we enjoy at home, we pay dearly. We do not allow ourselves a single unthinking, merely felt impulse. By excluding danger and hardship, by eliminating distinctions between men, we leave no hopes of victory. Worst, perhaps, is this: that we have become pure individuals. We belong to no one. Our sole obligation is negative, not to compel any other individual. The state—an engineered organization, a faceless undemanding mechanism—takes care of each need and each hurt. Where is loyalty unto death? Where is the intimacy of an entire shared lifetime? We play at ceremonies, but because we know they are arbitrary gestures, what is their value? Because we have made our world one, where are color and contrast, where is pride in being peculiarly ourselves?”

So after this little spiel, he returns through the interdimensional gate to his lover, the boy Nikias Demostheneou.

So the little twist at the end, which I’m assuming is why Harlan included this in here, as it’s really the only kind of taboo-breaking thing in a story that mirrors a lot of the power-imbalanced same-sex relationships from the ancient world that you see in some Greek and Roman works.

So yeah, again, this is probably a B story for me. I wouldn’t say it’s, like, a first-rate masterpiece or anything like that. As you alluded to, Gretchen, the world-building is rather simple and basic, where you’re just taking historical—

JM:

I thought that aspect was really interesting. The different paths that things took. Like, neither of the paths talked about are really the one we know, although it is alluded to, and it’s kind of, like, portrayed as a nasty path.

So it’s kind of interesting, you know, because he seemed to spend time in what’s probably a world very like the one we know, and, like, yeah, that wasn’t very good.

So yeah, we get to see this kind of, like, Viking America, Eutopia, right? E-U, the way it’s supposed to be. And that’s the Greek civilization flourishing for thousands of years.

And he seems to be saying, well, maybe we need each other. Even though things turned out differently and things are different, it’s not necessarily wrong or bad.

Yeah. I mean, this is why I like the way Poul Anderson thinks about stuff in his fiction. It feels like I get it a lot of the time.

But he does the afterword to this one, and he talks about being—I don’t know what he’s referring to specifically—he talks about being accused of being a fascist.

So I remember reading in the Nevala-Lee book about "Astounding" that we haven’t discussed for a while, but we were doing a whole bunch of stuff on "Astounding", so that stuff really came out. And they talked about that whole Vietnam War business and the feud that was going on, I guess, a little bit.

And at one point Anderson referred to protesters with a pretty nasty homophobic slur. And I kind of wonder because he says being called worse than a fascist could happen because of the story, right?

And I don’t know. I do enjoy his writing quite a bit, actually. And I did enjoy this story.

But yeah, for me this is a B story because I didn’t think the twist was too badly handled. This is also a story I read several years ago, so I knew what was coming, and I can’t honestly recall what I thought back then, which is sad because I wish I could. A lot of the time I can’t.

But it’s just the passage of time, man. The passage of time grows wearying.

This would probably—this would have been around 2001 or something like that when I probably read it for the first time.

I don’t think Poul handled it too badly. I think we’re seeing a little of that kind of subversion going on in this anthology. It’s usually coming from the outside, I guess, but not always.

But it’s just kind of interesting because, yeah, Poul Anderson seems, like, very calmly willing to go along with this and know that, yeah, well, we’re probably going to be kind of sympathetic for this character. I mean, we can kind of see what shoes he’s in, and we can kind of go along with it.

And yeah, he kind of makes it work.

So I don’t know. I liked it.

Nate:

It feels less exploitative than pretty much all the other mentions.

Gretchen:

This is by far one of the better pieces of representation, although the bar is pretty low at some points in this collection. But definitely not the worst here.

And yeah, like you were saying, JM, I mean, we are technically supposed to sympathize with this character. And of course there is the age gap that we get here. That is also the case with some of the Grecian relationships in general.

But besides that, I think that this is still handled in a way that’s not as bad as some of the other instances we see in this collection.

JM:

Yeah, I did really enjoy the atmosphere of the story. I think Poul has a very solid—I don’t know how to describe it. Like, it’s very readable. I definitely enjoy, like, the pages turn whenever I read something that he writes.

Even some of his kind of drier science fiction stuff like "Tau Zero", it bursts along pretty well.

And yeah, the twist wasn’t so bad. I don’t know. It’s a really interesting piece, and I do think that probably this would have been perceived a little differently by some of the readers.

And yeah, there’s—back then, I mean, there’s some weird stuff in the anthology from Harlan. Some of these stories you definitely feel the vintage that they have.

And, you know, when we did "Roberta" a little while ago by Margaret St. Clair, and I stood up for her, and, like, I like Margaret St. Clair. I think she’s a very solid writer, and maybe she didn’t do the best job at portraying what she was trying to portray in that story, but it was still pretty well written. And for a very short story, it conveyed what it wanted to.

This is in a similar bracket, and yeah, there’s another coming up. This definitely wasn’t as bad as that, and this is pretty good.

I really appreciated the alternate-world aspect of it and the path that could have been taken. I really liked that, and there’s not much of that in this anthology, so yeah, it was cool.

I was, like, I enjoyed his kind of wandering through the landscape of this new 20th-century America, kind of whenever it was supposed to be. I mean, it doesn’t really matter, right? Because it’s an alternate path.

But it’s a sideways-in-time trip, so, like, it’d be equivalent to now, but, like, it’s different, right? And it seems way more pastoral. It seems like—I don’t know, the society developed in a different way.

But yeah, I guess what he decides to do during this is criminal there, so yeah, it’s really bad. He has to be on the run.

And so we’re with him. We’re with him all the way. And good luck, and hopefully he can have a bright future.

Gretchen:

And yeah, I don’t mind the representation of queerness in this story given the other options that we have.

And yeah, I also think there is potential in the alternate-reality idea. But yeah, this one just didn’t really click with me, so I think I will rate this one a C. Not necessarily because I don’t think it’s a good story. I just think for some reason this one just didn’t really make much of an impact for me personally.

JM:

Yeah.

David R. Bunch - "Incident in Moderan" and "The Escaping"

JM:

Now we’re going to talk about the two stories by David R. Bunch.

Gretchen:

Yes. David R. Bunch was born in Lowry City, Missouri, on August 7, 1925. Growing up on a farm, he attended Central Missouri State College on a scholarship, where he majored in English and minored in both physics and social science, earning a bachelor’s degree.

He continued his study of English and American literature with a master’s degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, and pursued a Ph.D. there. He finished up the coursework but left before writing his dissertation to attend the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

Outside of writing, Bunch worked as a cartographer for the U.S. Air Force.

When it came to his writing, Bunch was prolific and wrote in both prose and poetry. In Ellison’s intro for his stories—yes, stories, because "Dangerous Visions" contains two texts by Bunch—he writes that Bunch has written in over 40 magazines. And this includes a variety of both sci-fi and literary magazines, and both fan magazines and more official publications.

It makes a lot of sense that Ellison was drawn to Bunch’s work and wanted him included in the anthology, as Bunch’s work was pretty controversial, meeting with very mixed reviews.

"Amazing Stories" and "Fantastic", both under the editorship of Cele Goldsmith Lalli, published multiple stories by Bunch over the late ’50s and early ’60s. These include several of the "Moderan" series, stories set in the titular society where humans have replaced most of their bodies with metal, the land is coated in plastic, and war is the most common pastime.

The fan mail coming in during this period was divided on these stories, with many vocally bashing Bunch and begging the magazine to stop publishing him. I read some of this mail myself, and it is really entertaining to see writers chime in as either Bunchophobes or Bunchophiles.

I think it was mostly in "Fantastic". When I was reading through "Amazing Stories", I didn’t really see much, so I thought maybe Ellison was exaggerating a bit. But then looking into "Fantastic", you get a lot more of it.

Nate:

Yeah, I was looking at his ISFDB record, and he has, like, tons of the "Moderan" stories.

Gretchen:

Yeah, yeah, yeah. 

JM:

I found an almost-complete collected fiction, I guess, and there’s a lot of stories that are not part of that too.

Gretchen:

Yes. As far as I see, there’s actually been, like, no official complete compilation of his work or even a record of his work. It seems like he just had so much published over so many different publications. It doesn’t seem like anyone has a real, completely certain record of what he wrote.

JM:

Yeah, I heard about David Bunch for the first time through somebody that I haven’t talked to in a long while, but we used to chat sometimes about music and science fiction, and he was into some pretty awesome stuff.

And we both liked R. A. Lafferty, and he was really into "Fiasco" by Stanisław Lem, and he told me that’s the Lem book that I should read. And yeah, that was really awesome.

And he name-dropped this David R. Bunch, and, like, who the hell is David R. Bunch, right?

And I knew about "Dangerous Visions", and I’d read a lot of the stories from it because I’d come across them in other places, but I didn’t realize that David R. Bunch was a part of this anthology at that time.

And I kept hearing little things about him, suggestions that he might be a little bit more on the experimental side and that he might have some tendencies that we’re not used to seeing in science fiction.

And yeah, I mean, I can sort of feel that already. I haven’t really got around to reading much of the other stuff yet, but I did read the intro that he did to the "Moderan" stories, which is kind of, like, in-universe, and also the first few stories. And yeah, there’s definitely a very unique voice going on here.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I actually had heard of Bunch before getting into "Dangerous Visions" because I had the New York Review Books reprint of the "Moderan" collection, which was originally published in 1971. I think this is from, like, 2017, and it has an introduction by Jeff VanderMeer, who compares Bunch to e. e. cummings.

So it’s kind of like we get to see, very similar to Philip José Farmer, sort of someone who seems to have some modernist influence.

But yeah, the two stories that are here in "Dangerous Visions" are "Incident in Moderan", which is obviously a "Moderan" story, and "The Escaping", which is not considered a "Moderan" story. It was not collected in the "Moderan" collection back in 1971, and it is also not in the 2017 version, which has, like, a couple of extra ones.

JM:

Because he kept writing them through the ’80s, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah, he had a couple in different magazines in the ’80s. So the New York Review Books edition has the "Apocrypha" section, which is some of the stories that were not collected in the original collection.

Nate:

Yeah, I’d definitely like to check them out someday because I really like these two stories.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

So he’s the only writer in the book with two stories.

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

This happens twice, I believe, in "Again, Dangerous Visions". Gene Wolfe and somebody else get two, but they’re pretty short. In both cases they’re pretty short.

I will say, and this is probably pretty predictable, I thought the first story was very cool. I appreciated everything about it, the world-building. Like, it was very concise. I got a real emotional sense from it in a very short time, and it was a very small piece of the world, but it was effective.

The second one, I don’t know what to make of that. So I guess we’ll talk about it. I don’t even know what to say, right?

Gretchen:

I feel like that seems to be a pretty common consensus. Or at least, I know you had mentioned, JM, watching a few of the Wheel of Genre videos on some of these stories, and it’s very interesting to see that one of their favorite stories was "Incident in Moderan", but they did not care for "The Escaping" at all.

I personally do prefer "Incident in Moderan". The emotions in it, as you were saying too, JM, I really like them. I really like the contrast between the narrator and another character in the story.

But I also really like "The Escaping", and I like the poetic prose of Bunch, which seems to be something that is pretty central throughout other works of his. I did read the entire "Moderan" collection, and I really enjoyed it.

I like also the cumulative effect of the "Moderan" stories, but I also did read some of the stories from another collection that he published in the ’90s, just called "Bunch!", which are non-"Moderan" stories that also have a very interesting sort of poetic quality to them.

Nate:

I’m not sure which of these two I like more. I really like "The Escaping" a lot. I really liked how it was good at portraying these weird surreal scenes, and also a look at madness presumably induced by criminal justice and excessive imprisonment, or long imprisonment.

With all the other stories—well, there’s a couple in the anthology that do some very basic musing on criminal-justice concepts, like "The Malley System", like "The Jigsaw Man", maybe one or two others touch upon it too. But this, despite the fact that it’s very short and very strange and out there, feels like a much better exploration of that topic than some of those other stories that are just trying to make an off-the-cuff point.

JM:

Yeah, I guess they’re another example of very short stories that seem to convey something very pointed and very narrow, but do it in a way that’s extremely successful. And so, yeah, I really do think there are a few authors in this anthology who are just excellent at this format.

Do we want to talk about the stories individually?

The "Moderan" stories, interestingly, have been described as military science fiction. And I mean, I—you know, I can kind of see that from this story a little bit.

Gretchen:

Yes, I feel like it becomes very clear in the rest of "Moderan" that it is very focused on war and on the military, essentially. I think that Bunch really does a great job of satirizing...

JM:

Extreme war mindsets.

Gretchen:

Yeah, and also, like, this toxic masculinity that is seen through the sort of warmongering of our central character. And also he does very interesting things in the other "Moderan" stories when it comes to relationships between, like, men and women and the family.

Yeah. Rereading this story after having read the other stories in the collection was also a neat experience here.

JM:

Do you think, like, this story being part of a series puts it at a bit of a disadvantage in this anthology, though? Because most people aren’t going to—especially back then, they weren’t going to get their hands on a "Moderan" collection—and they might be kind of like, oh, okay, it feels a little disconnected from everything.

Gretchen:

I still think that "Incident in Moderan" stands on its own, and I think that’s the case for a lot of the "Moderan" stories, where Bunch can drop you right into the action, and I don’t think it takes away from the story if you don’t know all the details about the world.

JM:

So, cool. Let me see if I got this straight about Moderan. "Incident in Moderan". So the Moderans, they live on this world and the world has been kind of decimated. And the thing is, they’re mostly cybernetic, so they can, I guess, make war on each other as much as they want and destroy as much of the planet as they want at this time, and they’ll probably survive.

And there are also Moderans who are less cyberneticized, who are the lower class, and they’re kind of, like, more human, right? Or am I reading—

Gretchen:

Yeah. Moderan, which is the area—the people who are the highest class of people are called, like, the new-metal humans, the new-metal men, which does include the warmongering class. And then you have people who have less and less metal that has been integrated into their body.

JM:

Yeah. And so it’s a class system with the warlords at the top, and they’re mostly machine at this point.

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

The other people have just enough to live, I guess. They probably have a bunch of implants too. Their brains are still, I guess, not artificial. I don’t know. It kind of makes me think of one of the possible visions of the Cybermen from "Doctor Who" or something like that, what they basically represent.

And I definitely got that from the one story. Reading the early stories and the intro, it also made me think of "Last and First Men" by Olaf Stapledon, because of how it’s commenting from this very, very future time and saying, like, oh, both the flesh people of now and the Moderans, like, they’re both things of the past now, right?

But now it’s the flesh people of the 20th century are all fragile and they got a lot of things wrong, but then you look at these Moderans and they’re a step further on the evolutionary plane. They’re not quite where we are now. Let’s see, like, we can see how they did things and how they possibly went wrong with what they may have done, right? And, like, it was very Stapledon-ish to me, with the kind of Stapledon that we haven’t covered on the podcast yet.

But I’ve been threatening to make "Star Maker" a Host’s Choice for a long time now, so I don’t know. We’ll have to get to that at some point, or maybe "Last and First Men".

They’re difficult books to talk about because they have no characters, and the whole book feels like almost—I mean, especially "Last and First Men", it just feels like this is taking us through the evolution of man for millions of years from now, being 1930 or something, like 1931 or something like that.

Almost exhausting to talk about because there’s just so much stuff. So, I mean, we’d probably have to come up with a different approach if we ever wanted to really talk about that kind of a book.

But anyway, yeah, this was like a glimpse at, I guess, the future evolution of humanity, and it doesn’t sound so good from here.

But I think there are points of light in the "Moderan" stories, though, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. You do get certain moments of humanity and of beauty. They’re very fleeting, but they’re there.

Since they are pretty short, I thought that I would probably summarize both of them at once and then we could maybe discuss them a little further.

JM:

Yeah.

Okay. 

Gretchen:

All right.

So "Incident in Moderan" begins during a truce, a rare occurrence. This is because one of the Strongholds—the term for the warring zones in this world—had malfunctioned, and the other Strongholds were waiting for them to recover. Not out of pity or mercy, but out of the opportunity to destroy them even further.

Our narrator, a Stronghold master himself, while beating one of his subordinates for merely something to do, catches sight of a man approaching across the plastic landscape.

Unlike the Stronghold people, this man is mostly flesh instead of metal. He tells the Stronghold master that he’s come to thank him for the truce, for having the decency to pause the war for him to bury his son.

The Stronghold master, confused by the concept of decency, disillusions the man—the so-called flesh-bum—as to the purpose of the truce and warns him that the blasting is starting up again soon, heavier than before.

The man, realizing he had come to thank the narrator for nothing, begins to cry and doesn’t move as the truce comes to an end.

Bombs from the neighboring Stronghold rain down and obliterate the man, while the Stronghold master doesn’t even try for tears for the flesh-bum, too happy to be warring once again.

And "The Escaping" is less clear plot-wise, more enigmatic.

However, our narrator describes himself as a chained man, and a tank that holds his chains, and he appears before a crowd of people while blowing up and tying to himself balloons. His chains are hidden within the tank when the crowd sees him, and the group of people want to make sure that he is still chained and cut another hole in the tank to see the chains, pulling them and part of the man out through that hole.

However, while the narrator goes through this experience, while he performs his unfulfilling tasks on the Earth, another self exists in what he calls an egg up in the sky.

And he says that it goes fine there and means fine there.

So yeah. Very short little stories, but I think both of them are really powerful, really pack a lot in there.

These, I think, are the shortest stories in the collection, I believe.

Nate:

I think so.

Yeah.

Yeah, I definitely really like both of these.

JM:

Yeah, I think this was weird because, to me, this was like a preview. And this just, to me, felt like: here, read more "Moderan" stories, right? That kind of felt like that’s what this was doing.

And it was weird because none of the other stories in the anthology really, really did that. It was strange.

I appreciate this being in here because I finally read David R. Bunch, right? Find out what David Bunch is all about. And now I really want to—I want to read not just "Moderan", but all these other stories with the really bizarre experimental titles that I was like, what is this, right? I want to know, right?

But I did feel this was kind of emotional. It kind of had that melancholy that I feel, again coming back to that topic, where I feel like some of the strongest stories in this anthology turn out to be the saddest ones.

And maybe that’s weird. I don’t know. Maybe everybody agrees. I haven’t got a clue, really, despite all the commentary on this book that we’ve been looking at and everything coming up to this moment.

I still can’t say there’s really a huge amount of consensus about anything, really, which is one of the really interesting things about doing "Dangerous Visions", I think.

And yeah, I’m glad this is here. Again, it’s just a snapshot to me. It felt like the world-building was good, and it told me that I wanted to read more.

So yeah, I mean, after that snapshot I’m really interested in reading more. So you’re going to add him to the list of writers who kind of intrigued me coming across them in "Dangerous Visions".

So for me that would include Miriam deFord and Kris Neville and maybe, to an extent, Howard Rodman and Joe Hensley, right? These are authors that I didn’t know anything about.

So I’m kind of glad they’re here because, yeah, Ellison cast his tentacles far and wide for different authors here. And I think probably in 1967 David Bunch was new to a lot of people too.

And now I don’t hear a lot of people talking about him.

So reading a couple of those other "Moderan" pieces and the introduction, like, yeah, I am already pulled in. I want to know. I want to know what this is about.

So yeah, I mean, this was good. I guess it’s an A story for me, but with the caveat, you know, it kind of feels like cheating. It’s like the preview of "Moderan".

And also, I guess David Bunch himself chose this to give to "Dangerous Visions". I think he was paid for it. But do you think that this was a good choice to introduce "Moderan"?

Gretchen:

Yeah. Even though I have read all of the "Moderan" stories, this was the first story I did read. I only looked at the "Moderan" collection after finishing up "Dangerous Visions", and I think it really does intrigue you, and I think you want to know more about the world.

Something that Bunch really accomplishes is he is really great at creating a vocabulary for the particular world. He has so many different phrases and terms that continually come up in the book.

It almost feels a little bit like reading "A Clockwork Orange" at times, although not as perhaps extreme as the writing of "A Clockwork Orange", where you have to decipher it a little bit.

And I think that there is something in "Moderan" where the certain terms continually come up, and you do come upon "Incident in Moderan", where you have some of the examples.

In that one, the main character refers to his flesh-strips, and he’s a new-metal man. And they do refer to other people who are less technologically enhanced, I guess—they do refer to them as flesh-bums throughout the collection.

But I think it’s really interesting that you see that at play in this work, establishing some of the world-building that I think can stand on its own, but I think it also entices you to read more if you enjoy this story.

Nate:

Yeah, I’ll certainly definitely like to check out that collection.

I think these are both A stories for me. I really enjoyed both of them.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Yeah, these are A for me. It really led me down a Bunch rabbit hole, so I really like both of these stories.

I think that if Farmer is a bit of a Joycean writer in this anthology, the writer that I associate a bit with Bunch is almost Beckett. I feel like the sort of tragicomic feeling, especially of "Incident in Moderan", the desolate landscape, brings to mind Samuel Beckett’s work to me.

Nate:

Yeah, I can see that. 

JM:

That’s really cool.

Yeah, yeah.

"The Escaping", then, I’m honestly not sure what to say about it. I read it a couple of times and I still think—I’m not sure.

Like, I’m not saying, like, a story has to be about something or it has to be definite. I’m pretty open-minded. This one was really short, so it’s not like it hurt me or anything. I just have no idea.

I mean, is it a creature in a tank or something like that? It feels like that’s what it is. It’s—I don’t know.

Nate:

I thought it was just a guy in a tank that is just having these fantasies about how he can get away after being in prison for however long and just driving him mad.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I really enjoyed the interpretation that you have of this, Nate, of it being in the vein of "The Malley System" and "The Jigsaw Man", speaking about incarceration and punishment, the justice-system sort of stories.

I was looking at it as allegorical, perhaps, but maybe that’s because I was seeing Beckett very clearly in it. And I really like to think of that in that connection that this has with the other stories of people being punished.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. And it explores the theme in, again, a very abstract way that is surreal and strange, but it conveys a lot in the very short work.

JM:

Yeah. I mean, aside from the opening paragraphs of "Riders of the Purple Wage", which, like, I think would stop a lot of people dead in their tracks, this was the most abstract, kind of like “I’m not really sure what I’m reading” kind of experience that I had with this.

And "Riders of the Purple Wage" managed to resolve itself, and this just ended. So I’m not sure. How much did I really get from this?

Like, it was an interesting experience, and I kind of felt like there was some weird emotion and, like, elation in how he was describing, I guess, the experiences of this entity.

And I don’t know. "The Escaping"—I guess, like, the title seemed appropriate, but I’m not really sure why, right? Like, I’m not sure what was—was anything actually taking place? Was he just imagining the escaping?

I don’t really know, right? I feel a little overtaxed by this story. Like, I just don’t know, right?

This is the first time this has happened on Chrononauts. I just—I honestly, I’m just so puzzled that I just—I don’t know what was happening in this. I don’t know if I’m supposed to care what’s happening in this, or if it’s—for the first time I’m at a loss, honestly.

Gretchen:

Yeah. My first read-through, both—I liked "Incident in Moderan" from the first time reading, but "The Escaping", I feel like I did have to go back and reread to really appreciate it.

JM:

That does help with a lot of things. Like, yeah, I definitely have learned over the years that people are just so impatient, right? And it is like, they can’t get something the first time around, they throw it in the corner, “I don’t want to come back to it,” right?

That’s not fair, right? So I’m definitely not writing this off.

Gretchen:

I remember reading someone—I can’t remember which review or someone said this—that reading Bunch can be sort of a bit of a taxing experience, where you kind of have to draw out the meanings a little more than other sci-fi writers.

And I think that "The Escaping" is a pretty good indication of that, of perhaps having a bit more of a challenge of understanding exactly what Bunch is writing about.

JM:

This is certainly not a story to summarize because the story itself—what is it, a page long? Two pages? It’s not very long.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

So again, it really doesn’t hurt.

Yeah, it’s not like I’m sitting here suffering because of this story. It’s not like that at all. I’m just not sure what I’ve read. I’m kind of intrigued by it, but yeah, maybe that’s good in itself, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. It’s very short. It definitely feels more akin to a bit of a prose poem rather than a story.

JM:

Yeah. 

Gretchen:

The writing to me just reminded me of Beckett’s work in some of the tone and some of the tropes that are in especially "Moderan".

JM:

Well, I’ve definitely got more to explore. And one thing I can definitely thank "Dangerous Visions" for is turning me on to a couple of writers.

I’m definitely not throwing aside David Bunch because of this. If anything, it makes me want to know more about what he’s doing.

So—but it’s just kind of a weird thing in "Dangerous Visions" because, yeah, the first story was a preview for a world, to me, that I want to get more involved with.

The second one is a story that I don’t really understand. But like you said, it might not really be a story in the conventional sense. And it’s not like, oh, we’re starting here, and this happened, and this happened, which led to this thing. Like, it’s not like that.

And I get that, and I appreciate that. But it weirdly just, again, left me feeling like I just needed to read more stuff.

I guess that’s okay.

Now I’ve got to have to give "The Escaping" a B because I just don’t—I don’t know. It was aiming for something, but it lost me a little bit.

But again, it’s so short that it’s just this experience of reading this story and feeling like the creature—maybe it was once human, but it’s not now, probably? It’s in these layers of obscurity.

Maybe it’s, like, a liquid. Maybe it’s, like, something solid but transparent. Kind of—that’s what made me think of a tank.

And it had these weird associations in my head. Like, I kind of started thinking of the Candlemass song "Born in a Tank", and I started thinking—like, it was cool.

I was like, I kind of appreciated that it felt like something I’d have come up with when I was really high or something like that. Like, just written down this weird almost-like-a-scene, but it’s not even a conventional scene because we couldn’t act it out or anything like that.

But yeah, I don’t know. It’s really interesting.

Is it a dangerous vision? I don’t know. No clue. Maybe it is.

That’s an example of one of those stories of science fiction has come a long way. Science fiction is not Hugo Gernsback and "Amazing Stories" anymore. American science fiction is definitely something else now, and yeah, David Bunch and people like that are leading.

And you old fogeys had better wake up because that’s the way it is now.

I’m just speculating on the feelings I got from it. This weird elation, I thought. Almost like an experimental text subject or something like that. Like, I’m really just guessing, right?

This is the cool thing about this story, kind of. Yeah, like, it’s almost like not even a full thought. It’s a mood that gets you sort of associating with different things.

And, like, if you handed this story to ten random people, what would they make of this? It’s super interesting, though.

I don’t know. I kind of liked it. But yeah, I’m going to give it a B story because I want to read more Bunch, and I will.

I have this collection and I’ll check out the rest of "Moderan", but also, yeah, he’s written so much other stuff and it sounds weird and interesting.

Gretchen:

So yeah, I definitely recommend the rest of "Moderan". I think it’s a really good collection.

It’s really interesting that Bunch had taken all of the stories he had written over about a decade and a half and placed them into a narrative. Sometimes it doesn’t work as well. It can get a little redundant at times if you’re reading them back to back, but I think that’s overall a really, really good collection.

JM:

Cool. All right. Well, let’s move on then.

James Cross - "The Doll-House" 

JM:

Next up we have James Cross with "The Doll-House".

And James Cross is really Professor Hugh Jones Parry. What a very Welsh sounding name.

He apparently was really into working in military intelligence, but also academia. Pretty high-profile degrees from Yale, Columbia and Southern California. He was born in England, and he seems to have moved to the United States fairly young.

And he did write some thrillers and such under the James Cross name, but not a lot. Certainly less fiction than Mr. Joe Hensley, Right Honorable or whatever you want to call him.

And yeah, this one was fun. I kind of liked it.

Was it special or dangerous? Yeah, I don’t really think so.

This is a C story for me, but it’s good. Like, I enjoyed reading it. But I think the idea that the American Dream isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and, like, chasing the dollar at every opportunity doesn’t seem like the greatest thing to do—I don’t know that that was that dangerous by 1967.

Nate:

Sinclair Lewis was talking about it 40 years ago.

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

Arthur Miller and people like that beat James Cross to it by quite a way.

And he was kind of trying to justify himself in the afterword, explaining why it’s a dangerous vision. And, like, yeah, I mean, I appreciate that. I appreciate you trying to convince us.

Gretchen:

I feel like the idea, the concept of the failure of the American Dream, has been around for a couple of decades at this point.

And also the style itself, I feel like I could pick up a copy of "Weird Tales" and this would be in there. I think that this is just, like, a fairly average story. I don’t think it’s very dangerous at all.

I would give this one a C. 

JM:

The ending could have gone in a couple of different ways, but yeah, I agree. 

Gretchen:

The only thing that maybe could be at all potentially dangerous is maybe there’s a little bit more violence than I would have expected from a different story, but even then it’s not very intense or extreme.

So I think this one’s just, like, okay.

Nate:

Yeah, I give this one a B. I did like it. It wasn’t great or anything like that. It felt very much like a "The Monkey’s Paw" variant, where—

JM:

Right. 

Nate:

There’s tons of those.

JM:

So this is one story where I would say, like, this story could have actually been written, like, 30 years earlier.

Interestingly, some of the stories we can say, oh, this is ahead of its time, or this is this and this is that. And this story feels like it could have been written almost any time in the first half of the 20th century, right?

I don’t know. I mean, yeah, this scenario is pretty cool. I liked how he made the main character, yeah, such a dick. Like, unrepentantly.

Yeah, I mean, this is not really a guy that you’d want to hang out with. This is just really annoying. He’s so obviously acquisitive, right?

And in his dealings with people he’s always thinking, like, oh, how can I get my leverage up there and make sure, like, I’m the top dog, right?

And it’s obvious where he’s going with this. And yeah, if he shot Pongo—I mean, what a guy, he shot Pongo. I don’t know. You shoot Pongo the cat? Pongo the cat’s just trying to do his cat thing. Why would you hate Pongo?

Anyway, I mean, this could have gone well on "The Twilight Zone", which we say a few times on this podcast. It’s, like, the kind of story that they would have done for sure.

And I could picture, like, Rod Serling having picked up a story like this. And yeah, I mean, we’ve got some authors—Henry Slesar is coming up, and he’s got some "Twilight Zone" teleplays and stuff.

And, like, we see this a bit in this anthology. And this is one of the guys that Ellison pulled out of his hat. He was not really involved in the field, and it seems like most of his books and stuff like that are thrillers and stuff.

He didn’t write a lot of fiction. Seems like he was mostly busy with his professor stuff and then being a Ph.D. and all that sociology.

And I don’t know what the military-intelligence stuff is all about. I guess it would be these mysteries, like writing under a pseudonym, kind of like Cordwainer Smith.

But this guy is, like, more of a—not necessarily SF writer, I guess.

I definitely feel like this story was more mainstream, not SF really. I guess, again, I’m kind of like, this feels like somebody Ellison pulled out of his hat. Just to me, like, yeah, I’m getting people from outside, right?

And, like, good for him. But I’m just not sure. Sometimes it goes well, but sometimes I’m like, yeah, maybe that’s not the best person to have in "Dangerous Visions".

But I’m not really complaining because I did enjoy reading the story. But yeah, C story for me in that classic sense, where I did kind of enjoy it, but, like, I’ve read a lot of things that are kind of like it.

Its social-commentary aspect, I get it, and I get that it’s still relevant, but people have been doing that long before Professor Parry.

Carol Emshwiller - "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" 

JM:

All right. Well, now we’ve got "Sex and/or Mr. Morrison" from Carol Emshwiller.

And yeah, Emshwiller was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in 1921, and Ursula K. Le Guin said she was, quote, “a major fabulist, a marvelous magical realist, one of the strongest, most complex, most consistently feminist voices in fiction.”

She’s written a lot of short stories and novels, published in all sorts of places, and she’s somebody that I’ve kind of been looking into a little more lately. And I think, Gretchen, you said you have as well.

And I’m really interested in this story because, again, I feel like this is not science fiction by any stretch. But, I mean, maybe it is speculative fiction because it’s all speculation.

Second reading, I think I decided that it’s actually quite effective, and it’s speculative fiction, I suppose, because very literally the narrator is sure doing a lot of speculating right up until the very end.

And it seems to be a story of voyeurism and obsession. It was a little bit creepy. Like, we’re only getting the one perspective, and it’s so full-on. Like, we’re right in there in her perspective.

And it is kind of really confrontational in a way because you’re kind of thinking all this time when you’re reading, how does her obsession see her, right?

And I guess she’s kind of wondering that too, and she’s wondering it with this, like, intensity. And this is a really weird story.

I kind of liked it. I don’t know. I struggle with how I really feel about it.

So I read a bit of Emshwiller before, and yeah, I mean, her early stories seem to be more sort of science fiction, often with a kind of domestic feminist twist to them.

So Gretchen—I’m not sure what stories you’ve read. I kind of was not exactly going in chronological order for once, but I was looking at the first volume of her collected short stories, and it starts in the ’50s.

And it does seem like in the ’60s she got a lot more weird, a lot more experimental.

I don’t know if you have any thoughts about her as a whole and how much you’ve read so far.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I read a collection that is called "Moon Songs", which has a good amount of stories in there. It might be about ten or so, maybe. I can’t remember the exact amount.

They are out of order. They aren’t in any chronological order. I don’t know what the logic of the order is, so I can’t really say how I feel about the sort of development of Emshwiller’s style over time.

I did enjoy those stories. There are some really interesting ones in there, and I like her style.

I do like in this story the, I guess, the way that Emshwiller gets into the mindset of this character, even though I feel like this one isn’t one that I enjoy as much as the other works that I read by her.

JM:

Yeah, at first I didn’t think so either, but I’m not sure. I kind of want to say it’s a B story because I’m not sure I really connect with it.

But at the same time, I think maybe that’s connecting with the dangerous-vision aspect, in that women aren’t supposed to have these kind of thoughts. Very uncomfortably intimate, the obsession that she has is very notable.

And it’s done very differently than Farmer, who kind of just, like, dwells on it and how disgusting it is.

But, like, the subject of her obsession is a very, very large, large man who, like, stomps around upstairs all the time and moves very slowly. He is really big and, like, not muscular, you know.

And she’s obsessed with that aspect of him. She’s obsessed with his corpulence and his breadth and the material side of his being, right?

So it’s—I can see how probably some of the old science fiction readers read this and are like, wow, that’s disgusting. What the hell?

Nate:

Yeah. It’s probably a B story for me. I did enjoy the comic grotesquerie of it. Don’t really have too many comments on it aside from that, but yeah, it’s an interesting piece.

Certainly one of the more interesting pieces in the anthology that—I don’t know. Again, yeah, like you said, it doesn’t really have, like, a lot of overt science-fiction elements. It’s just this kind of weird weirdness, uncomfortable feeling.

Gretchen:

Yeah. It leaves a sort of ambiguity near the end. There is a weird concept, the way that sex—specifically between, like, male and female, type sex, not sex as an act—the way that that is approached in the story is kind of odd.

And you’re left not really knowing whether the character that the narrator is interested in is human. There is a bit of an ambiguity, although I’ve leaned more towards that it’s just a human that she’s obsessed with that she’s kind of warped into this other being.

I would probably give this one a B. There are some aspects of it that are really strange, and I feel like I have a bit of a mixed feeling on them, but overall I do like the style of this, and I like the style of the other works I’ve read by Emshwiller, which I think that the collection I read is maybe some of her later work. They definitely feel a little more experimental.

JM:

Fair. But I mean, I actually love how passionate this story is. I just—it’s not like this story is super sexually explicit. It’s not.

But it’s just the raw passion of it is just kind of overwhelming. And I feel like that’s kind of a confrontational aspect of it, maybe.

And so maybe when she heard the "Dangerous Visions" remit and she’s like, yeah, this is the kind of story that should go here. It feels kind of deliberate.

Like, again, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. And a few of the stories in here do, including the next one we’re going to talk about.

And I just kind of feel like I admire this quite a bit, actually, in a way. I read it a couple times, and yeah, the first time I’m like, I’m not sure. This is some weird obsession creepy stuff.

And the second time I read it, especially the end there—but some of the endings of these stories are very effective.

So at the ending here she’s gone back downstairs to her apartment and is sitting in her room. And she knows that her voyeurism—because she’s been in the upstairs room for, like, hours just sitting there watching him.

And she’s even been, like, eating food and stuff like that while he’s there and not knowing that she’s there, like hiding in his closet or something like that.

He accidentally is able to see her for a second, and she runs out. And obviously she’s a lot quicker than him because he’s, like, really, really big and slow.

And she goes downstairs and she hides in her room, and you can even kind of picture her there sitting there and breathing really fast.

And she’s kind of like, is he coming downstairs? Is he coming downstairs?

If I was him, I would definitely come downstairs, but I’m not. What’s he going to do, right?

And it just kind of leaves us like that.

I mean, her name—you know, people know who she is. She was involved with the Clarion workshops and stuff like that, and Harlan Ellison was really, you know, into her writing and stuff like that.

And I don’t know. The fact that she is willing to push out that far and stuff like that—and yeah, maybe it’s not science fiction, but I can see how it fits in here. It’s as a challenge.

And now in 2026 I’m looking at this story and being like, it’s not a challenge maybe in the same way as it was in 1967, but I’m still kind of feeling it. I’m still kind of feeling it.

So yeah, I liked it. Interesting piece. I think we all probably should read more of hers.

Damon Knight - "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?" 

But then we get Damon Knight’s story "Shall the Dust Praise Thee?"

I read this recently, actually, in "100 Great Science Fiction Short Short Stories", edited by Isaac Asimov. This story wasn’t new to me. I’d actually read most of that anthology too, like, many years ago.

And yeah, this is kind of one of the religious-themed stories. And I like Damon Knight, and definitely Damon Knight as an editor and a writer is very significant. And again, there’s a "Twilight Zone" connection here.

But yeah, I don’t know. This story didn’t do a lot for me. It’s short. It’s fine. This is a perfect example of a C story for me. Just—it’s fine for what it was.

Nate:

Yeah, I didn’t like it. I give this one a D. To me it feels just like pure filler. And I think Damon Knight even admits that it’s pure filler in the introduction or the afterword or whatever it is.

JM:

Yeah. Ellison was really—

It’s really—

Nate:

Yeah, the Ellison introduction is really funny because he just insults Damon Knight the entire time.

Damon Knight just said that he, like, couldn’t sell the story anywhere, so he just, like, shuffled it off on Harlan, I guess as a payback for all the insults. Or maybe the insults are payback for that.

So it’s just funny getting that back-and-forth between the two of them.

Gretchen:

Yeah, no, I think that, to me, the most interesting part of this was the intro and afterword, where I love Ellison saying that he would have preferred if Kate Wilhelm, Knight’s wife, was there.

JM:

Yeah, what’s all that about? 

Gretchen:

He’s like, I’d rather have a story from her.

I thought this was probably one of my favorite intros just because I thought that was really funny.

If it was just the story, I may have given it a C, but I feel almost insulted by Damon Knight’s afterword, the fact that he’s also like, I don’t really believe in this, but if you do believe in it, maybe this is a dangerous vision, you know?

I know that when we were talking about PKD, he also said he didn’t really believe in some of the aspects of his story. But at least there was more to it than just that religious aspect, where here it’s just Damon Knight hashing it in, not really adding anything to the discussion, I guess, this collection.

I think I would give this one a D. I didn’t really feel this story, and apparently neither did Damon Knight.

JM:

Yeah, I definitely agree. I think I’ve read other Damon Knight stories that I thought were much more dangerous than this.

And it’s weird to, like, sometimes reading Ellison’s introductions and kind of going to myself, how much is he joking here? How much is he—

He gets Kate Wilhelm in the next one, so he’s probably happy either way.

And of course Damon Knight should be here. I mean, bringing science fiction into modernism and what became the so-called New Wave, the "Orbit" anthologies edited by Damon Knight are considered very important.

And a lot of the writers who we see in these show up in the "Orbit" anthologies too, right? It makes sense.

It makes perfect sense. So it makes perfect sense that Knight is in here.

But I don’t know. Maybe there’s some rivalry with Ellison. What kind of rivalry, we can only speculate.

Again, I feel like this was fine, but, like, if Knight really wanted to make a story that would stand out in this anthology of dangerous visions, he could have done more. He could have done better.

This was just, like, the very typical cosmic science fiction, also relating to the ancients, I guess. The del Rey story was a little bit similar in a way.

And this kind of thing had been around for a while. It’s 1967. We don’t need to be sitting here questioning the tenets of Christianity that much.

Like, it’s just—it works. And again, it did have a little bit of that melancholy feeling to it that I think some of the best stories in here have.

But I just don’t think it was very emotional. It was too much like a vignette that didn’t have any real substance to it.

So yeah, C story for me. Not a D story. I didn’t hate it.

And in fact, as we go through this, it’s harder and harder to talk about really, really negative feelings about too many of these.

But okay. Next, I’ve got a really important question for you guys, and the question is:

"If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"