Episode 55.3 transcription - "Dangerous Visions", vol. 3, part 1 (1967)

(listen to episode on Spotify) 

(music: alien communications)

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

JM:

Greetings once again. We are Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast, and I'm JM, and I'm here once again with Gretchen and Nate to discuss "Dangerous Visions".

Yes, we're still discussing "Dangerous Visions". This has been a lot. I guess maybe when I chose this I wasn't exactly fully considering just how long this would take us to do, but I'm really enjoying this, and I hope that everyone else is too.

It's just, wow, this is a lot to cover.

So where we left off last time, we finished with Volume Two. We're going to suggest that if you want to hear more about this, you go to our first episode, where we introduced the anthology and we talk about Harlan Ellison a little bit more and how he's all over this thing, and how you feel about the anthology may sort of depend on how you feel about him to a certain extent.

And I think we've come out with some different ratings and different perspectives, different feelings on each of the stories, which I think is really cool because it sets up some interesting discussion.

I also think that we may have sort of glossed over some stories that some of you listeners might consider to be favorites, or might consider worthy of more discussion.

And yeah, some of these sessions go on for pretty long. So maybe by the end we're a little bit whacked by the time we finish discussing the last story.

It's funny too because in both instances so far, the last story hasn't exactly been a standout, I think, for any of us. So we'll see how it goes from here on.

But before we get into it again, I'll just say that you can find us on all the podcast platforms of choice, and we can be found, most importantly I think, on our Blogspot, chrononautspodcast.blogspot.com. And there you will find, as well as things connected to all the previous episodes, you'll also find many translated stories and first digitized editions of a few very obscure works.

The translated stuff is very interesting. Again, some of it would be considered quite obscure even outside the English-speaking SF community. But we're happy to bring this stuff to you for the first time and talk about it.

And there's a lot more coming.

Yeah, let's get into it.

So before we really get down to discussing the stories again, I'll once again talk about how we're going to do this.

So we've each picked out three stories to really focus on, but we are going through each work individually, at least a little bit. And we're talking about the authors and we're talking about the stories and how we feel about them.

So we are rating the stories, and I've developed this ramshackle system that I have to keep explaining. So, I mean, for my own self-justification mostly, but the way we're doing this is we're kind of rating the stories in tiers.

So an A story is a story that's successful and also, I guess, thoughtful in a way that leaves an impression on you, and also is memorable in the sense that not only is it a good story, but it leaves you with some things to ponder over.

And there's quite a few of those in here.

A B story is a story that, while it may be aiming for something special and maybe trying to deliver a real punch, perhaps doesn't quite hit the mark for one of us individually, or more of us, but which is still memorable and that is trying to do something different and special.

A C story is a story that's enjoyable, but not really all that memorable, or maybe doesn't necessarily leave an impression as something that you're never going to forget about and always going to be thinking about. But maybe it's okay and quite likable.

And a D story is just no good.

So far, I believe I have not had any D stories. So let's see how we fare with this.

Nate:

Yeah, we'll do a running total at the end with all the statistics of how we came in for the final Chrononauts "Dangerous Visions" score.

JM:

It's interesting because I think this part of the anthology has both some of the strongest and some of the weakest stories in the whole set.

Nate:

So yeah, I would agree with that.

Gretchen:

Yeah, that's true.

JM:

Once again, I have to point out how much I think we've all been really enjoying the diversity of the stories, in terms of the fact that this is a mixed-bag anthology. Almost everybody would say so.

We've said it, and I think a lot of other commentaries I've come across pretty much said the same thing. That it's a mixed-bag anthology is actually, in a way, one of the strengths of the anthology, because you can tell that Ellison did put a lot of work into selecting these stories.

And for the most part, even though I have to question a few of his selections, I can kind of still see why he did it, because some of them are his friends, but also maybe he's thinking, well, they're kind of outside of the regular SF community and maybe they will have something special to present.

And he bought their stories.

So for the most part, I think he was pretty successful. And the fact that a lot of people have different views about the stories makes the whole process more interesting.

I also want us to discuss whether we see each story as a dangerous vision and how we might perceive the dangerous vision being different now than it would have been in 1967, when the anthology was published.

All right then. So where we left off, we left off with a question.

Yes, that question was, "If All Men Were Brothers, Would You Let One Marry Your Sister?"

Well, I'm not sure I would after reading this story.

This is a really interesting story by Theodore Sturgeon. We've covered him a couple of times and we've all kind of decided that we quite like Theodore Sturgeon.

While I think that this story is not an exception in terms of Sturgeon's personality coming through. And in a lot of ways, I think he's the right person to be writing this story because he always comes at things with a good heart, I think.

It left me thinking, for sure. And at first I'm thinking that this was quite a successful story. But the more I think about it, the more I'm sort of unsatisfied by it.

So I think this was a really interesting case, and I'm looking forward to talking about it.

I don't think we really need to get into Sturgeon background because we covered that quite extensively.

I will say he doesn't really have a lot to say himself about the germination of this story. But it might be worth noting that he and Harlan Ellison are really, really buddy-buddy around this time, and they were practically living together for a time around now.

And they were all hanging out with Norman Spinrad.

And Sturgeon has a really funny anecdote about them driving to some big hardware store and trying to cram a whole bunch of stuff into Sturgeon's little car, and Ellison basically trying to orchestrate the whole thing and them not having room for the people, and Spinrad just basically bursting into tears with frustration.

It's really funny because we're coming to Spinrad later, and Sturgeon calls him Eeyore, basically, because he's just so, like, down about everything all the time.

So there's a funny anecdote there in the introduction.

We actually get a letter from Sturgeon that Ellison decided to excerpt, where he tries to counsel Ellison on his love life, which you can sort of picture Sturgeon doing this.

I mean, I mean this with the best of intentions, but he kind of has this, like, '60s guru kind of vibe about him sometimes. Oh, this open-your-heart-and-love-everyone kind of stuff.

And it's kind of funny because, I mean, Ted Sturgeon can definitely write really dark stuff, and some of his stuff is horrific.

But at the end of the day, it feels like he doesn't entirely believe in evil and stuff like that. He just thinks that if the right people come together, maybe it's an unusual group of people, maybe it's a romantic threesome or something like that, if the right people come together, magic things can happen.

And sometimes all that's standing in the way is ignorance.

And I do believe that that's kind of an admirable perspective, and I do respect Sturgeon a lot.

And what he was trying to do with this story, it's a kind of thought experiment, which is a classic science fiction idea. And it's also very much pushing the taboo-breaking idea that Ellison was aiming for in the anthology.

And when I saw the funny title to this story, I didn't really think it would be so literal, but it absolutely is.

So what do you guys think of this?

Gretchen:

I do have to say that this is, I think, my favorite title of the anthology.

I do agree with what you were saying, that Sturgeon feels like the right choice to explore this. We will get more into this. It is a very uncomfortable and very controversial subject, very taboo subject, that is covered in this work.

And yet I think it's because of Sturgeon's personality and his optimism and attention to love, I guess, over maybe darker emotions, that it comes off a lot different than some of the stories we've read that you can tell things are included just for shock value.

But they're done in a very perhaps biting or sarcastic or kind of satirical way, where this feels like Sturgeon genuinely trying to approach this topic and explore it and question why this taboo exists.

Nate:

Yeah. I think my one problem with this story is that he neglects the whole power imbalance and abuse issue, which is kind of why the subject is taboo to begin with and seems like an obvious explanation of why it is.

But I don't know. His comments afterward were a bit odd, I thought, about the story.

But he is a good writer, and the universe that he creates in the story, I think, is just a really cool setting. I like the archivist character a lot.

But yeah, I'm not sure how I feel about his exploration of the subject matter.

It does feel very utopian, like you said.

Gretchen:

Yes. 

JM:

It does bear a lot of similarity with some of the older utopian stories that we read.

Nate:

Yeah, definitely. 

JM:

It's not in a kind of a modern style, but it's definitely brought me back a little bit to some of these 1800s kind of works, a little bit, in a way.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I do feel like there are certain aspects that Sturgeon overlooks. And I do feel that even in the formatting of this story, I do feel like there's some parts that feel pretty uneven, and the structure maybe isn't as polished.

There are definitely some issues I have with this work besides just something that you would expect from a story covering this topic.

I do think that, again, it doesn't have the same just-for-the-purpose-of-shocking that I think some of the other stories we've read have.

Nate:

No, it's uncomfortable, but it's not edgy.

Gretchen:

Yes. Yes, that's the word. Yes, it's not edgy.

JM:

But it's told in such a sober way and such a non-shocking way, like when you compare it to something like "The Malley System", right? I feel like that was definitely aiming to shock.

Whereas I think this is more aiming to get you to ponder something that you've maybe never considered before.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

JM:

When you think about the way things actually happen in the world right now—and yes, this story is, I mean, it deals with incest, right? Like, hardcore.

So you think about the way things happen, and then you're like, there's something seriously missing from this story. Like, there's just important things that are missing.

Sturgeon is just so wrapped up in doing his thing and his thought experiment. And he does convey the emotions of the main character very well, and he does convey his disgust.

And eventually he's kind of slowly coming around to seeing the value in this particular utopia, and he does that very well.

But he just won't talk about the evil that actually happens in the world and that's always linked to this subject. And there's no way around that.

It's not just a religious taboo. It's not just a moral outrage, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

It's linked to something.

And I think we'll have to get more into a very short plot summary this time before we discuss what the missing thing is. But I think Nate especially already sort of hinted at it, and I think we all probably can agree about what's missing from the story and why Sturgeon didn't cover it, because it wouldn't have suited his personal agenda in this case, I guess.

When I say personal agenda, I don't mean to imply that he was, like, personally into that. I mean, he was a family man. I don't think he did anything like that to his kids. At least I hope not.

But his personal agenda being to shake you up a little bit, if not shock you, but actually get you thinking about something.

For me, that was a success. I did.

And it took me a few weeks to actually decide that something important was missing from the story, and so I couldn't give it an A grade. I have to give it a B grade.

And it took me a long time to decide that because at first I'm like, well, maybe I should give it an A because it's actually giving me pause for thought, right?

But yeah, I mean, I can't in all conscience say that this is a perfect story because it's missing something extremely important that he just doesn't want to address in this.

And I mean, I don't know for a fact that a story written now influenced by this story would address this. But I think that it might, especially if it were, like, in the form of a novel or something like that.

I think it would have to come up.

But this is one of the longer stories in the anthology too. So he had room to, I guess, bring this up. But again, it doesn't suit his purpose.

So rather than beating around the bush, let's just tackle this.

So the story is set far in the future, and the Sun has gone nova. There's a human empire.

The beginning of the story kind of reminds me a little bit of Asimov, for some reason, just the way that he kind of describes everything.

But the main character is this guy called Charli Bux, and this really down-to-earth spacer guy. That's kind of a funny thing to say now that I think about it, but just his attitude.

He's very casual. He's very laid back. He talks kind of naively, I guess.

And most of the story is framed as a conversation between him and this Galactic Empire Official, who eventually gets disgusted with him and kicks him out of his office.

But it takes a while for that to happen because Charli has to get to the point.

And Charli is basically intrigued by the rumors of this planet that sort of is whispered about and talked about, called Vexvelt.

But nobody seems to know exactly where it is, and there doesn't seem to be any useful record of it. And people who say they go there have a way of having things deleted and disappearing and stuff like that.

He's really driven to find this place, and he actually takes a lot of risks in order to do it. And he just sort of decides that there's some kind of conspiracy going on.

So what he first does is he goes through this planet, Lethe. And it's interesting because it's actually sort of framed as the mirror opposite, or the reverse opposite, of Vexvelt, in that everything is permissible and everything is, like, freely available, except it's a really cruel, dirty-minded sort of place.

People get off on disease and stuff like that. Whatever you want can be had there for a price.

He thinks that that's a perfect place to be because I think it's, like, sort of galactically within a sort of proximity to Vexvelt, and he might find a way to get there.

But also, if he wants to find information, that's kind of a place to be.

Except instead of that, he gets into a sort of a bar fight or an alley fight, and he ends up defending this guy because a bunch of people are ganging up on him.

And they call him a dirty word, which again, it's funny because this is the second time Sturgeon did this. He did this in the 1930s story we covered too.

He doesn't say what the word is, but you know what it is.

Charli basically decides to defend this guy.

And you get the idea that Charli Bux is this big lummox of a guy who's a little slow-thinking, a little slow-talking, but really does connect the pieces together eventually.

And he befriends this character, and essentially they go on a space journey together and they go to Vexvelt.

And there's a girl there who is his daughter.

Essentially, as soon as you're on the spaceship, you kind of learn that these people are very free with their love-giving. And this goes really well for Charli at first.

But when he gets to the planet and everybody's really nice and friendly, and they have a very different way of doing things, because the rest of the galaxy doesn't normally trade with them, they have to do things in a kind of an underhand way.

At the same time, they've kind of developed their own technologies, and they like being able to see what the rest of the galaxy is doing in order to see how they could improve things or how maybe their technology is better.

So essentially, what was happening on Lethe was an exchange of goods. It's like there's this whole black-market thing going on.

I think it would be pretty easy to be cynical about this. Maybe the black-market people on the other side, like not the Vexvelt side, maybe they're interested in the society for not the most upstanding reasons, maybe?

I don't know, right? We can only speculate because Sturgeon doesn't really allow too much negativity to filter into this, except for the character Charli's own emotions.

But the people are really, really healthy and they seem very free. Nobody seems to want for much. And the confidence, I guess, and the poise the people have there is very admirable to Charli.

And they seem to accept all kinds of sexual habits and non-traditional relationships.

But once he sort of ends up falling in love with Tyng, one of the girls there, he actually gets into a situation where he walks in on her having a sexual event with her father, Vorhidin.

And he's very disgusted by this and basically is absolutely horrified.

So a lot of the rest of the story is framed as a discussion. And again, this really feels like an old-school utopia-type thing that they did.

Now, I'm not normally a fan of those kind of stories too much. They get very tiresome very quickly.

But I did think that Sturgeon handled it well here because, I mean, I do think he addressed things in a way that a modern audience—that is one from the '60s, but also one from now—can quite relate to.

Vorhidin, the father, has kind of, like, taken Charli under his wing, and he spends a lot of time arguing with him about how the prohibition on incest is a social prejudice and it's not a universal moral truth.

And he does this by making a lot of interesting parallels.

And he talks about the double standard involved in how people talk about sex, and how, for example, at no point when most casual people are relaxedly among their buddies, whether they're whatever orientation they are or whatever gender they happen to be, how they talk about sex in a casual sense, they never bring up, for example, the idea of birth and stuff like that, right?

It's not a reason why modern humans engage in sexual relations.

Yet as soon as the subject of incest comes up, that changes quite drastically, and all of a sudden people are thinking of, like, monster infants and stuff like that.

He says it's all about consent. And it's about the fact that children, in fact, do have the sexual urge from a time when they're very young, and this is something that society has repressed or has largely repressed.

Also that in the animal kingdom, naturally, but also in terms of breeding, when we breed animals, we are not doing it the same way that we do humans. He talks about how likely it will be that the idea of, I guess, incestuously generated births might be considered abnormal.

Some of this stuff is difficult to talk about. So even now I'm struggling to express myself, which is really interesting power, I guess, that this story has.

After a while you kind of have to put your foot down and say, well, it's not really just an arbitrary taboo-type thing, even if there is a double standard.

And even if Sturgeon is—or Vorhidin, if you prefer—absolutely dead-on that we don't think about animals this way. So why do we think about people this way?

Nate:

Again, this is what we were talking about earlier. He just seems to ignore the whole consent piece and power imbalance that presents itself.

JM:

Yeah. And how can a child consent? They don't know, right?

Nate:

Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, the implications are just not good. And I guess the afterword didn't really quell that in my mind.

I really don't know what the hell he was thinking here, to be honest with you, because I thought the story was really well done, basically, up to this point.

His handling of the whole situation is just kind of weird. Like, I don't know how to explain it in any other way.

JM:

So here's the thing that's missing in just a couple words: discussion of power.

There's just not—there's not at all, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah.

Some of these stories where the authors write about sexual topics, it's clearly them venting their sexual hang-ups to the world. And I don't know if Sturgeon was doing that.

It doesn't feel like he's doing that. But then again, his treatment of the subject is just, like, really weird.

I mean, I guess it's an uncomfortable subject to begin with. But, like, still, this story definitely, like, sits in the wrong way, for sure.

JM:

Okay.

Yeah. I mean, I get that.

I think I like this more than I disliked it. But I think that it's impossible to address this story without basically admitting that the most important elements in the equation are just not there.

And I'm not sure if anybody ever asked Sturgeon why he didn't want to talk about that.

But again, I don't know. It doesn't seem like there was room for that in this story and what he was trying to do. I guess it would have sort of diluted his point, maybe, or something. I don't know.

Nate:

Still, I mean, without the discussion of that, you'd have no point. You know what I mean?

Gretchen:

Yeah. 

Nate:

It's just, like, an obvious factor that needs to be considered. Like, it just seems ridiculous that you would even approach the subject without a discussion of power and consent and all of that in some fashion or form.

Which just seems hopelessly naive in thinking.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah, I think naive is a good way of describing it.

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think that just trying to boil it down to, like, oh, this is people having this taboo because of purely biological or, like, genetic concerns—that cannot be the whole discussion.

JM:

We say it's naive, but again, I don't want to give Sturgeon too little credit because I think we all know that Sturgeon is a smart and perceptive person.

And I think he really does try to come at this from as good a place as one possibly can.

But in order to do that, you do kind of have to ignore the elephant in the room, so to speak. And that's the fact that, well, you're talking about this starting when people are children, and there's obvious power dynamics at play.

Gretchen:

To not address: these are the same people that are providing for you while you are still a child.

JM:

Yeah.

And in this place nobody gets mad or jealous, right? That's what happens in real life, is people get mad and jealous.

And, like, I'm sorry, but you can't just breed it out of people in a couple of generations and be like, yeah, nobody gets, like, possessive around here.

If, like, a child says, no, I don't like this, I'm not comfortable with this, nobody ever says, but I'm providing you with all the food that you want and all the toys that you want. You should just do what I say.

Nobody says that, right?

Unfortunately, the reality that we're in—and there's been lots of books written about this, and I actually wanted to get more into this in preparation for talking about this story.

But, to be honest, the subject was just too depressing.

Because I did get a couple of books on the scholarly examination of the topic and how it works within families and stuff like that.

And I've never been really, really close to something like an abusive relationship like this, but I've definitely heard about it. And I've heard people talk about it, especially in certain places where I visited in the past.

I don't know. It's just, yeah, it is really still uncomfortable.

Nate:

Yeah, I think it's too heavy for this podcast to get into at all. 

JM:

Just getting really into this topic is not something we really want to do on Chrononauts.

Nate:

No, I don't think so. We all know what the topic is.

Gretchen:

I feel like we could have an entire podcast just, like, unpacking the stuff that is way too heavy for what we're doing here, I think.

Nate:

Yeah. And I think that's best left to the experts and people who deal specifically with those topics.

So I don't see any need particularly to go into any specifics on the research and all that stuff here. But if people want to find that information, I'm sure they can do so on their own.

Yeah. I don't know. I didn't really like Sturgeon's treatment of the subject matter here.

The story basically just hinges on the thought experiment. So I'm kind of torn between giving it a B and a C, and I still really don't know where I'd put it.

JM:

Nobody has any dissenting voices. So it's like, yeah.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I don't know. I'm kind of leaning towards a high C.

Gretchen:

I feel like when we do have people in this story who do have objections, they're kind of treated as not taking it seriously. You're not really considering it at all.

It's a very—you're being incurious or something, is how I feel when there are people in the story who are immediately against it.

There's a sense that you're not really supposed to side with those people.

I mean, and Sturgeon, to be fair, he is a person who, I guess, really, really totally embraced the sexual liberation that really started in the U.S., I guess, in the 1960s.

And he is a person who absolutely 100 percent, even though he was certainly older than a lot of the countercultural people at that time, he completely went for it.

And he was respected by all the younger people because of not only his writing, but because of just the way he was a very open and liberated kind of person.

I mean, I'm sure at the time, and now just at large, he would be considered perhaps a bit of an eccentric person in the way he went about things.

And then a lot of the time in his stories, you can, especially around this time, see how he's thinking a lot about human relationships and how things work within them.

And he does discuss power dynamics sometimes.

I read the story recently, and I think it's "Foundations of Fear". It's the sequel to "The Dark Descent", basically.

He has a story in there called "...And My Fear Is Great..." I think that's the one, anyway.

It's a really interesting story about, I guess you could call it a four-person love situation, but it's—the whole story is in the way they come together.

It's actually all about power dynamics.

And in the end, that's subverted in a way that ultimately makes everybody happy, even though in the beginning there's an old woman in the story—she's an older lady—and she has a certain power about her, and she's able to do things.

She kind of takes this younger adolescent, just on the verge of becoming an adult, under her wing and sort of tries to, I guess, direct his life in a way.

But also, like, there's some affection and love there.

But then he meets somebody else, and it becomes this weird situation where a rivalry turns into something else, and it turns into something positive.

It's a really interesting way of looking at something where you think something is going to be really bad news, especially this weird relationship between this older woman and a younger man.

But when you introduce another person into the equation, things can be sort of made better in a weird way, and the way he addresses that is really interesting.

But this story, it feels far less personal.

Again, like I mentioned Asimov at the beginning, and I feel like, again, I respect Asimov a lot as a short story writer especially, and as an ideas person, but it feels like there's something missing, and I guess—I don't know who would be the dissenting voice in this story. I feel like it would be sort of unfortunate to make it Tyng, because then she would just be the girl that needs rescuing from the utopia, so-called utopia, right?

But at the same time, there should be something. It can't be perfect.

And this is "Dangerous Visions". We're all about busting utopias here as well as taboos, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. After reading "Slow Sculpture" a few months ago, I've read a number of Sturgeon stories since then, including another story where Sturgeon challenges our views on different relationships, "The World Well Lost", which is considered by many to be a pretty groundbreaking sci-fi story for covering homosexuality and a gay relationship.

And even in one of Delany's introductions to Sturgeon's collected stories, he discusses that work and how impactful it was for him to read.

It makes sense that Sturgeon continued to try to look at various types of human relationships.

But yeah, here it just doesn't work. It neglects some of the major issues with why this is such a taboo and why it understandably is looked down upon and not accepted.

There are a few other stories where this topic comes up in this work. I mean, thinking of "Riders of the Purple Wage", you do have this included, and there it is treated just, oh, just another thing to shock the readers.

So again, I do sort of at least respect Sturgeon for trying to give it some weight and maybe looking at it with, like, less edginess.

But again, what does it say if you're not looking at the most important aspects of the argument against it?

JM:

Yeah. I think that he does a decent job of presenting this idea of absolute judgment being a huge problem that people have.

The official is just so—he's not even willing to entertain any possibility. And he's just so utterly disgusted on these moral grounds that are probably quite shaky if you really tried to analyze it.

And I don't know. I think that was decent.

I guess we're all kind of in agreement on this. I don't know if there's really a lot more we can say about it.

There's something important missing from the discussion, if not from the story itself, that you kind of just have to talk about.

And then, like, you end up getting off the scope of the story entirely because you're talking about how and why this stuff actually matters to society right now.

And it's perfectly understandable, especially when it comes to young people, children who don't have the ability to fight back or to turn away and just walk away.

Hell, older people have enough trouble doing that from perfectly normal relationships sometimes.

So, I mean, when you bring family into the equation, it's—

And to think too that there's several other stories involving children in this anthology that are done in a very, very sympathetic way, where you really feel the power struggle that's happening and the existential aspects of being a child, especially one that's coming up later.

It's just missing something that would bring it to the next level.

And at the same time, I don't really think that this story is capable of going there.

So yeah, sorry, Ted. I mean, I still give it a B.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I don't know if I'd give it a B or a C. I feel like I might have to go with high C because I think that a very important aspect of it is missing.

Even though maybe part of it is the bias in that I do love all of Sturgeon's other works that I've read.

A few days ago, when I was at work, one of my coworkers was talking about reading Theodore Sturgeon, and I was like, oh yeah, all the works I've read are pretty great. But I did not mention this story.

I was like, I don't know. The fact that I don't want to recommend this to somebody and I can't in good faith be like, well, everything else I've read by him is really great.

Yeah, I think I might have to give this one a C.

JM:

Yeah, right. Somebody commented in a review of the anthology that there was a lot more incest than they were expecting or wanted.

And it's from this story and "Riders of the Purple Wage" mostly.

But I don't know, "Riders of the Purple Wage", it's kind of done for laughs.

In here, it's something that you're supposed to seriously consider as a kind of a, well, let's not do this absolute-judgment thing. Maybe a society like this could actually work, right?

But then yeah, like I said, the more I thought about it, the more, like, yeah, I don't know. It's not that satisfying. It's probably not a story I'll be rushing to read again, unlike some other Sturgeon stories.

Because once you get that thought experiment and you start—the thoughts start whirling in your head, and that's a good thing.

But once you get that, you're never gonna have it again.

Even though there's no plot twist in the story, there's no great, oh wow, holy shit, there's no moment like that.

But at the same time, it's like it has the same effect, where once you have it, it's never going to be the same again.

And you're never going to get that level of satisfaction from the story because it's just not there.

Larry Eisenberg - "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?" 

JM:

A special case this time.

And this is a story called "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?"

We get two stories that I would say are similar in some aspects, back to back.

Now, I'll just say this is a unique case for me in "Dangerous Visions" because, okay, let's get this out of the way right now: I hated this story. This was so dumb. I don't like it at all.

Nate:

Yeah, it was a stupid story, and even Harlan Ellison admits at the beginning that it's a stupid story, and he wonders why he even published it.

I didn't hate it. I wouldn't say it's good.

It reminds me a lot of those really bad '60s spy comedies, of which there's a lot. It's like that kind of same sense of humor.

And I don't know anything about Eisenberg, and I didn't look up anything about Eisenberg.

JM:

All right, well, we're going to get into that, because what I wanted to say is I'm just so charmed by Larry Eisenberg that I don't want to hate this story.

Like, I really don't.

To be honest with you guys, I just want to get this story talk out of the way first so we can actually talk about Larry for a bit because I think this is a lot of fun and very, very awesome.

But there's only one man—or should I say one writer—that I know of who can get away with a story like this, and that writer is Roald Dahl.

There is actually a book that—I don't know. I don't think it's ever come up on the podcast before. If so, maybe I would have talked about it.

But it's a book that I heard about when I was a kid because, Gretchen, I don't know how it was for you, and maybe it was more like it was for me. But when I was a kid, Roald Dahl was, like, the guy. If you wanted to get kids interested in reading, you showed them Roald Dahl, right?

Gretchen:

Oh yeah. I had an elementary school teacher where we spent the whole year just reading a bunch of Roald Dahl stories.

My second-grade teacher loved Roald Dahl, so we did read a lot of his works.

JM:

Okay. 

Nate:

Yeah, it's pretty timeless.

And I revisited "James and the Giant Peach", like, recently-ish, but, like, within the last ten years or so, and I was amazed at, like, how well it holds up.

It was just, like, a really fantastic, pleasurable read.

JM:

Interesting.

Yeah. Interestingly too, you mentioned spy-fi. So Roald Dahl actually did write the screenplay to the James Bond film "You Only Live Twice".

But now, what I wanted to talk about with him is he published a book called "Switch Bitch".

And yeah, as a kid, you were not supposed to read "Switch Bitch" for obvious reasons.

I mean, it's not just the title, but it's four bawdy, kind of sexual-themed stories that were, I believe, published in "Playboy".

And this is kind of Roald Dahl's second book of adult-oriented short stories. The first one is actually my favorite. It's called "Kiss Kiss".

So these are really, really good stories. Most of them ended up being televised on the "Tales of the Unexpected" TV show.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Which one? I know there's, like, "The Landlady" and "Lamb to the Slaughter". Are those in "Switch Bitch", or is that "Kiss Kiss"?

JM:

No, those are actually later stories, I think. "The Landlady" is in "Kiss Kiss", anyway. But yeah, it's the same kind of vibe with Roald Dahl.

Now, "Switch Bitch" was kind of special because these are specifically sex-themed stories. They're very funny, except for one, "The Last Act", which is really depressing.

And sadly, it's the only story with a woman-perspective main character. So it's the only one, and it's the one that's really sad and depressing and a downer.

But the other stories are kind of bawdy and fun.

And there's the story "Bitch" in particular, about this perfume magnate who invents this scent that essentially—I don't know if it works on both men and women—but when a man sprays it on himself, he's, like, completely irresistible and everybody just pounces him, right?

This ends up happening to, like, the President of the United States or something like that, and he gets, like, mobbed on camera.

It's kind of funny and really stupid, but, like, somehow he can get away with it.

Larry Eisenberg is trying to do something like "Switch Bitch"—or I think actually "Switch Bitch", the book, was published after this, but the stories may have come out first.

So, I don't know. Humorous sci-fi is something that Larry Eisenberg was quite conversant with.

But I’ll introduce Larry with this:

“A nonagenarian, I,
A sometime writer of sci-fi,
Biomed engineer,
Gen’rally of good cheer,
With lim’ricks in ready supply.”

So let’s talk a little about Larry, just because I think this is so cool.

Larry, yeah, he just seems like a cool cat. He was born in 1919 and died on Christmas Day in 2018, just four days after his 99th birthday. And that means he lived through a hell of a lot.

And he was a biomedical engineer indeed, a New York native, and apparently designed the first transistorized pacemaker.

And while he wrote science fiction, he doesn’t seem to have been too prolific. And in fact, kept most of his stories later in life in Ziploc bags in his apartment.

If you look on Wikipedia, "What Happened to Auguste Clarot?" looks like his most notable work, and it’s kind of sad.

But a strange thing about Larry later in life: he got recognition as an internet commenter.

And yeah, that’s right. He wrote apparently over 13,000 comments over the last ten years of his life, most of them to "The New York Times" website, stories and articles, but also to the radio station WQXR, New York’s classical radio.

So nearly all of his comments were in the form of limericks.

Now, you can apparently get a couple of books of older Eisenberg limericks, "Limericks for the Loo" and "Limericks for Lantzmen", that were published in the ’60s.

But anyway, I couldn’t access anything from the "New York Times" because they’re behind a paywall. But I want to read you a few of his opera limericks, as well as a couple of other ones just for fun, because I think this is cool.

So here’s what he says about Rossini:

“Of Rossini I’m a huge fan,
I listen whenever I can.
The Barber, what’s more,
I truly adore,
For bel canto Rossini’s my man.”

“Beethoven I love, and I too
Adore this opera anew.
A Rossini gem
That age cannot stem,
This vivacious musical brew.”

And about Strauss—he calls this Strauss II. Now, I know there were two Strausses. One was Richard Strauss. I can’t remember the other one. I’m assuming—well, I’m not sure which one he’s referring to here, but he’s talking about "Die Fledermaus".

“Die Fledermaus isn’t my speed.
A surfeit of schmaltz I can’t heed.
Till next week I’ll wait,
Queasiness will abate,
A shot of real music I’ll need.”

He wrote these limericks from his third-floor apartment on the East Side of Manhattan, on a MacBook Air his children gave him.

So here’s Larry Eisenberg’s limerick about Twitter:

“Was there no life before there was Twitter?
Was it stodgy, lackluster, or bitter?
I find life too fleeting
To spend time in tweeting.
I’m a face-to-face kind of a critter.”

Just for the politically minded among you all, here’s one on economics:

“What’s a more mediocre pitch
Than giving tax cuts to the rich?
That trickle-down twaddle
Is hardly a model.
It scratches the one-percent itch.”

I mean, Larry, a lot of fun. Quite a guy. Lived a long life.

There’s a really good article you can read online, which kind of is paraphrased from an interview with him that was done when he was 96 or 97 or something like that.

His wife died a year before him. They lived together for a very long time, and she died, and then he was moved to a hospice in Massachusetts, and that’s where he spent his last year or so.

But just—I don’t know. Really fun, wholesome story.

I’m sorry, Larry, that I didn’t like your story, but you’re awesome. So thank you, and thank you for just being a cool person.

And yeah, we need more old people who just write limericks on the internet because, I mean—

Yeah. Okay, so did anybody like this story?

Nate:

Not really. This is a C story for me. I wouldn’t hate it as much as giving it a D, but yeah, it was just—yeah, not good.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I don’t hate it. I don’t think it deserves the sort of hate that I would give some of the stories for. You know, it’s a very inoffensive story. There’s nothing that’s really too bad about it.

The humor here doesn’t really hit with me. I think I like the limericks a little better.

Nate:

Yeah, I do too. 

Gretchen:

I think those are very delightful, but unfortunately, not as big of a fan of Eisenberg’s writing here. I think I’d give it a C as well.

JM:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t know. I can’t harp on about it.

This was definitely a D story for me, but, I mean, I want to give it a C. Let’s put it that way. Like, but I just didn’t like it enough.

It doesn’t look like Larry wrote a lot of SF, but it seems like he did a lot of other things in his biomedical career, or something to consider.

He lived a long life and he lived through a lot, and he commented on everything that was happening in the modern era.

And just to think, when you look at, like, Miriam deFord, right—and I didn’t really say this when we talked about her—but it’s just so cool to think that somebody who was writing in "Dangerous Visions" probably also read "The Time Machine" not long after it was first published.

Larry lived through the Second World War. He lived through all the other wars that America was really involved in. And he made all these contributions to medical science.

And he wrote a hell of a lot of limericks that were clever and pithy and fun.

So yeah, good for him.

Gretchen:

I’m not sure how much I would check out some of his other stories, but I might check out "Limericks for the Loo". I wouldn’t mind giving that one a little bit of a read.

JM:

A science fiction story told in the form of limericks. Maybe that would be fun. Larry could have done it.

I don’t know how many stories he had in his Ziploc bags there in his East Side apartment in Manhattan.

Apparently he was quite a science fiction fan, and his stories were anthologized a little bit. But it seems like this one is what he’s going to be mostly remembered for, for better or worse, in terms of SF.

Henry Slesar - "Ersatz" 

JM:

All right, well, let’s move on.

Unfortunately, we now have to talk about another unfortunate story.

So yeah, here we’ve got "Ersatz" by Henry Slesar. And I will say the best thing about this is the name Henry Slesar because I just love that name.

But he’s another TV writer.

There was a time when "TV Guide" actually called Henry Slesar “the writer with the largest audience in America”. And that’s because he wrote a huge amount of TV episodes, everything from "Alfred Hitchcock Presents", which apparently he actually either adapted or basically wrote from scratch, pretty much almost all the stories that were featured on that show.

But also a lot of soap operas, most of which I don’t recognize the names of, but I’m guessing they were very popular, like, in the ’60s.

One of them, though, did survive quite a long time. And I believe that’s "One Life to Live". I think that was on when I was a kid.

So yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, that was on forever.

JM:

Yeah, okay.

He also wrote a lot of novels and short stories. And that’s kind of where he’s part of the SF thing, is mostly with the short stories, from what I can tell.

His novels mostly appear to be mystery and crime stuff. His first one was "The Gray Flannel Shroud" in 1958 and won an Edgar for that. A lot of stuff from mystery magazines, but also "Fantastic" and some science fiction.

He’s anthologized a lot. You can find him in, like, some of those anthologies of short-short science fiction works, and also the so-called Golden Age huge e-books, which actually encompass a pretty wide spectrum of stuff, not just the Campbell Golden Age.

"Ersatz" is the story he decided to write for "Dangerous Visions".

And yeah, this wasn’t good.

I don’t know. I can say it.

Gretchen:

Gotta say, straight up, this is a D story for me.

It is kind of impressive how, for such a short story, you can immediately tell what the twist is going to be.

JM:

Yeah. And that’s a big thing for him, apparently, is—

Gretchen:

Yeah, this twist is just really cheap.

JM:

The twist is: it’s a boy.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it makes "Roberta" by Margaret St. Clair look like "I Saw the TV Glow" in terms of trans representation.

JM:

I was going to say, so a comment I saw on the internet about this story was, “Is Rowling looking for a story to add to an anthology?”

And my comment was, so are we going to say, Margaret St. Clair, we forgive you, come back?

Nate:

I wouldn’t go that far, but this is definitely the transphobic trope that has existed for far too long and still persists to the present day.

This is definitely a D story for me, and I think easily the worst one in the anthology.

Gretchen:

Yeah, yeah. I think this might be my least favorite story of all of them.

I give "Roberta" a lot of flak, and I still don’t think it’s the best story out there. But at least Margaret St. Clair doesn’t refer to the main character as “it” by the end, which was really fun to read.

Nate:

Yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, no, this one I did—I did not enjoy at all.

JM:

It’s a shame because I actually have enjoyed a couple of the Slesar stories that I read in the past.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I was looking at some of the "Twilight Zone" episodes because I know that he had written for that.

I have not seen too much of either "The Alfred Hitchcock Hour" or "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". I haven’t seen much of either of those two shows, but I have seen all of "The Twilight Zone".

And I think, like, one of the episodes I quite enjoyed that he wrote—I will say that there was another one that he wrote I did not really care that much for, but neither of them were as bad as this story.

JM:

There’s one I read that I thought was quite amusing called "My Father the Cat". It’s this kind of absurdist thing where this guy is, like, at his family house and somehow his father is actually a cat.

It’s really weird. Kind of funny.

I just got one more thing to say about this, and it’s that essentially when I was 12 or 13 or so, I went to a lot of summer camps.

And this was, like, a kind of an expensive thing for my parents that maybe was, like, a little—like, it was kind of dicey sometimes.

But, I mean, being raised in a fractured family where things were always very chaotic and there wasn’t the nuclear-family thing going on for very long—and when it was, it was pretty toxic—there were times when, yeah, the parents just wanted time to themselves.

So yeah, it was good for me, I guess. So I got sent to a lot of summer camps.

And there was one counselor at this one camp who liked to entertain the kids by telling ribald stories.

Not just—usually the typical thing is, like, scary stories, but I guess he was more into, like, the dirty, semi-sexual stories.

And he pretty much told this exact story without the post-apocalyptic aspect to it.

Like, this exact flavor of this story is just some jokey crappy story told by a slightly older boy at a summer camp or something like that.

It was lame then and it’s still lame now.

So yeah, I don’t like it.

Yeah. Sorry, Henry. There you go. It’s a D story.

It’s D, definitely.

But I think we’ve got a better one coming up.

Sonya Dorman - "Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird" 

Gretchen:

Born Sonya Gloria Hess on June 4, 1924, Sonya Dorman was an infant when her mother died, and she was taken in by foster parents, spending her childhood on a farm in West Newbury, Massachusetts.

She went to private schools in New England and could only afford a year of agricultural college. Most of her education came from her own personal interest in and reading of world literature.

She was married twice, first briefly between 1945 and 1946, then again in 1950 to an engineer named Jack Dorman, with whom she had a daughter, Sherri, in 1959.

She worked as a receptionist, a stable hand, a tuna-boat cook, a writing instructor and a flamenco dancer.

And she raised Akitas and other dogs to exhibit at dog shows with her husband.

As a writer, she wrote about two dozen sci-fi stories over two decades. Her early story "Winged Victory" was published in 1963, and one of her most recognized works, "When I Was Miss Dow", appeared in "Galaxy" in 1966.

She also wrote non-science-fiction works for publications such as "The Saturday Evening Post".

Dorman, like Bunch, was also a poet.

While her 1971 experimental novel "Onyx" was rejected by publishers, her first poetry collection was published in 1970, followed by several other poetry volumes into the 1990s.

By that decade she and her husband had divorced, and she began publishing her work under her maiden name.

She died at the age of 80 in Taos, New Mexico.

The story that is in this collection is "Go, Go, Go, Said the Bird".

And yeah, I thought this was a really, a really good story.

Nate:

Yeah, I like this one a lot too. Really moody and atmospheric. And yeah, welcome change from the last one, for sure.

Gretchen:

Yes.

Yeah, it was a refreshing story after "Ersatz". Even though the Eisenberg, I didn’t find it as bad as the Slesar. Still nice to get this story after the other two.

JM:

Yeah. It’s funny because, yeah, I didn’t really read the anthology in order.

But at the same time, I do feel it now because we’re talking about it, and I did look a lot at the order of the stories.

And I don’t know what significance that necessarily had to Harlan Ellison, but yeah, this is a nice upstep again into some quality stuff.

And we’re going to see some more quality stuff before we get finished, so that’s good, right?

But this one was interesting. I liked it. Definitely great atmosphere.

There’s some surprises with this anthology. I never—I don’t recall having heard of Sonya Dorman before.

There’s a couple writers in here where I can say that about, and it’s interesting to me because I feel like at this time, in 1967, he was kind of thinking—well, Ellison, that is—some of these writers might attain a great reputation in the future. They just haven’t yet, right?

And I kind of got the feeling with some of them, like he would say, well, they’re going to do great things, and then I should have them in here.

And, like, there’s a couple who are just kind of starting out around this time.

Unfortunately, Sonya Dorman doesn’t seem to have become a household name, but I’m glad to see that she did continue writing for a long time.

Gretchen:

I did read "When I Was Miss Dow" as well, which, like I said, is her most popular work. And it has been anthologized a few times.

There’s "The Norton Book of Science Fiction", edited by Ursula K. Le Guin that "When I Was Miss Dow" was in.

And there’s, like, several other collections that it’s been in.

I think it might be in one of the VanderMeer—not "The Big Book of Science Fiction", but I think "Sisters of the Revolution", which is edited by Ann  VanderMeer.

That one is a little more known.

But yeah, it doesn’t seem like Dorman stayed as much in the science fiction genre and instead embraced poetry more than prose.

JM:

That seems to be the case for a few of the writers too, where they obviously really loved SF, but it seemed like they were pushing to other areas for one reason or another.

Largely, I guess, personal choice. But, like, also—we’ll get into this a little more later—but I guess some of these authors perceived science fiction at the time as being rather limiting.

I guess in terms of not necessarily what could be discussed, but the type of editors that they had to work with and the publishers and stuff like that. They just weren’t able to make a living off of it.

It doesn’t sound like Dorman is necessarily—that’s the case with her. Like you said, she did write a lot of poetry.

And I don’t know. I never think about poetry as a very lucrative thing to write. I mean, maybe it used to be at one time in the past, but certainly not in the 20th century and beyond, besides a few really big names, I guess.

Yeah, it’s not always about just money, I guess. It’s feeling like you’re chafing under somebody else’s restrictions and pushing somebody else’s ideas.

Enough’s enough, right?

We’ll talk about that a little more later. But yeah, this was cool, definitely.

Gretchen:

Yeah, every once in a while we will mention Ellison’s introductions here, and this one—this one is an interesting introduction.

So there are three women writers that are in this, and I will say that Ellison does have the tendency to be like, well, they’re a very talented writer, they do well, and they’re pretty too.

He does have a tendency to do something like that, which is kind of exhibited here, as well as him being like, well, you know, the thing about Dorman is that she doesn’t write like a man, like some writers do, and she doesn’t write just like a woman. She just writes like a writer.

Which is also kind of an interesting comment from Ellison there.

Nate:

Yeah, he comes off as fairly condescending in a lot of these introductions, but especially this one, for sure.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I’m glad that it was definitely in here, and I think even if the introduction maybe is a little bit patronizing of it, I’m glad that Ellison knew a good story here and put it in the collection.

Nate:

Yeah, this is an A story for me. I like this a lot.

It doesn’t have, like, a lot of deep ideas, but it’s just really heavy on the atmosphere and the dread.

And I really like how it just covers a really dark tone in a way that—it’s graphic for sure and is disturbing, but it doesn’t feel edgy. It doesn’t feel like she’s trying to offend with the story.

Gretchen:

Because this is another case of we do have another pretty taboo subject, which we’ll get into a little bit more. 

JM:

Cannibalism, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah. I think cannibalism, it can be quite a taboo and could be displayed in a very edgy manner, but I think that she approaches it with a lot of sophistication here.

And yeah, it’s just sort of an element of a larger story that is being told in a really interesting way.

Obviously, it’s not as experimental perhaps as the Farmer or the Bunch, but I still think it has some pretty unique elements in terms of structure.

JM:

Yeah, it was kind of reminding me a little bit of Margaret Atwood or something like that.

Not any specific works exactly, but just, I guess, kind of the way she writes some of her stories and the way she positions a woman as not exactly a prisoner, but she’s trying to frantically get away from a situation throughout the entire story.

She’s, like, running, right?

Gretchen:

Yes.

JM:

At the same time, she’s, like, utterly convincing about her desire and need to survive against all things, right?

Gretchen:

Yes.

The story opens with a woman running for her life. People follow her and taunt her as she runs.

An old woman tries to lure her by calling, “Here, chickie,” likely planning to eat her, as her other pursuers are.

The running woman considers this fate an injustice. She is unique. Others may be eaten, but not her, of whom there is only one in the universe.

The woman contemplates her memories through snapshots presented between her running. We learn she is a headman’s woman, the daughter of one as well. The men hunted animals, but the animals were growing scarcer and food harder to come by.

During the famine, she gave birth, this her third child, and seeing he had a bad foot, the headman, Marn, snapped her son’s neck and brought him to the smokehouse to cook.

Eventually Marn died, and most of his body was sustenance for her other son, Neely. Marn was killed by a man named Tichy, who then took Marn’s woman as his own mate. Neely and Tichy fought, the former killing the latter, and Neely brought home a woman who the protagonist recalls is pregnant. Who besides her can help her through the childbirth?

She gets caught by someone, but manages to kick her away. She just has to get home, she thinks frantically, to her grandchildren, who will welcome her.

She makes it to familiar territory, only to be attacked by another woman and be advanced upon by a man with an axe. It is Neely and his mate, backed by their children.

The protagonist cries out, “Save me! I’m your mother!”

But Neely only replies, “We’re all hungry,” before bringing the axe down.

Yeah, I really think this is a story that really explores the oppression of a woman’s self and that coming second to, like, the needs of her family, which I think that Dorman does get into a bit more in the afterword, where she kind of talks about writing this story as a bit of a message to her children’s generation.

JM:

That’s interesting.

Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of a story about the dissolution of family, right? Family bonds. How much do they really mean in this kind of situation, right?

I don’t know.

Nate:

Yeah, it’s like the ultimate betrayal, pretty much.

JM:

Maybe that’s also how it’s a dangerous vision, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, but again, it feels done out of necessity in the society. I mean, presumably the entire human population is on the verge of starvation.

JM:

Yeah.

So you got the sense, I suppose, a post-apocalyptic story, right?

Nate:

Yeah, definitely.

JM:

Somebody I read on the internet thought she was, like, a cavewoman or something like that, some prehistoric thing.

But I don’t know. Yeah, I feel like there was a sense of loss of something that used to be, even though it’s not really gone into.

Maybe they might as well be cave people, but it feels like it’s a future or whatever.

I guess it doesn’t matter even when it takes place.

Gretchen:

It could even be compared a little bit to "The Night That All Time Broke Out", where there was civilization and then there’s something that sets it all back.

But here, it’s obviously a much more—it seems like it’s been a gradual collapse of society that’s led them to this point.

I like the way that the protagonist continuously throughout the story is kind of begging for her life through her thoughts, like, I’m unique. I deserve to live because I’m me. I have to live.

But yeah, in the end she does get betrayed by the people she thinks are going to save her.

And by the people, it seems, through her entire life she’s, like, provided for.

It’s like, this is my son. This is someone that I was going to help in childbirth for his wife.

But it doesn’t lead to anything because they’re hungry and they’re going to kill her anyway.

JM:

I kind of got the sense that, like, in "From the Government Printing Office", that comes later, where somebody is not able to really communicate those thoughts.

They’re not really able to express all that you’re seeing on the page, but it’s still there. Just because they can’t express it doesn’t mean that it’s not present.

I mean, you could say, in her way, she’s representing the sophistication of thought that’s still possible from a depleted culture or depleted civilization.

Her survival instinct is just as strong as anybody else’s, but she’s also able to come up with reasons.

It’s not just animal fear, right? I mean, there’s a bit of that.

It was definitely interesting the way she did that.

Gretchen:

I definitely think this is an A story.

JM:

Yeah. When she’s giving her reasons, it’s almost photographic.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Each section of the flashback into the past, it’s called, like, a snapshot. So it is taking from that language.

JM:

Yeah, yeah.

She’s got this sharp memory and sharp instinct. She’s running for her life, and the whole story is that.

So it’s a pretty good example of a well-conceived short story that doesn’t really—I mean, I guess it could leave you wanting more, but as, like, a picture, it’s a picture of a short moment in time.

Although it could be quite a long moment because it seems like she’s perpetually running.

But yeah, so there was an intensity to this one because of that, because you always got the sense of the speed that she was moving.

And then the end is, oh no, you knew it was coming. You probably did before you got there.

But at the same time, it still hits you.

Yeah, I mean, I like this story, but I don’t know that I have a lot to really say about it.

I feel bad because I think I kind of liked it more than that.

But when I give it a C, it’s better than that sounds because my way of rating things is apparently all messed up.

But yeah, unfortunately, I think that because it’s so much based on the atmosphere, maybe it didn’t hit me as hard as some of the other ones.

And I’m not sure it’s really trying to be a dangerous vision or anything like that.

Yeah, exactly.

So I did like it.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Thinking of, is this a dangerous vision or not, I can see the case for it going either way.

I think that it feels similar to me, especially in Dorman’s afterword. It kind of has a similar urgency to me that Niven’s does, although perhaps a little less literal than Niven’s fear, where Niven is writing like, this is going to happen. This is, like, absolutely the thing that’s happening, and we have to, like, make sure it doesn’t.

Where I think Dorman is writing this, and the emotions that she’s trying to evoke and the metaphorical place she puts women in this story, she’s saying, like, this is where women are now, and I don’t want this to be the case anymore.

And so I think that it can be a dangerous vision in that sense.

But at the same time, I can see it not really maybe fitting, and being, as Ellison says in his introduction to the entire anthology, just being a story that’s so story that you kind of have to include it.

JM:

Yeah, I think this is one I need to read again, because I think unlike some of the other stories in here that I don’t think I ever need to read again—I’m not necessarily unhappy that I did, because most of them were quite short, but I’ll probably skip them next time, personally.

But this is not one of those.

This is definitely one I feel like I’d probably get more of the emotional reaction the second time.

Maybe I’m missing a little bit because I do feel it. I’m not quite connecting with it on the same level for some reason as I should be.

So again, I feel it probably deserves a reread. I did reread some of the stories in the anthology, but this is not one that I ended up rereading. I should have, because I kind of feel like it’s one of those things where when you know it’s coming, the emotional impact probably hits you harder.

And also not being a mother, perhaps, may influence us also. Somebody who has been through those kind of experiences might feel a lot more, right?

That’s kind of my feeling on it.

I guess in that way, it reminds me a little of "That Only a Mother" by Judith Merril. I wonder if Merril was a fan of this story. I guess it’s too bad that she and Ellison both seem to have had somewhat similar visions, but apparently didn’t get along very well.

Nate:

Yeah, her Best Of Series- 

Gretchen:

"Year’s Best".

Nate:

"Year’s Best". Yeah. So she had some of the same authors in there that appear in here, because she was publishing those around the same time this came out.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I know that Merril, just like Goldsmith, was also championing Bunch. She was also someone that included Bunch in the anthologies that she was editing.

So yeah, I think that it seems like Ellison and Merril definitely had some similar taste in writers.

Nate:

Yeah, Bunch, again, is definitely some stuff that I would really like to explore further, and possibly check out more of those Merril anthologies as you get a greater depth for the field.

Because this has been an interesting experience. Even though a lot of the stories for me have been in the middle, it’s definitely exposed me to a lot of new writers and people I want to check out more of, for sure.

JM:

Yeah. And that’s a good takeaway.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it definitely inspired me to read quite a few stories since finishing the collection for the first time. I feel like I have been going out and looking into the bibliographies of most of these authors.

JM:

Yeah, one name in particular coming up where I’m just like, who is this guy?

But yeah, that’s a good takeaway from the anthology, though, because if nothing else, he succeeded at that. And that’s good.

That’s one of the reasons I love short-story collections and anthologies.

John Sladek - "The Happy Breed" 

JM:

This one is "The Happy Breed" by John Sladek.

So we’ve got John Sladek here, who I had a little bit of experience with before.

So John Thomas Sladek—let’s say that, because he’s almost got the same name as me.

But he was born in Waverly, Iowa, in 1937, and he was just getting started around the time this story was written.

So he was friends with Thomas M. Disch, who should have been in this anthology, according to Harlan, but wasn’t.

And I don’t really know why. There’s some kind of personal thing going on there that apparently got rectified.

So I don’t know. He speaks very highly of him in the next book and apologizes for not—because I guess he did contribute something to this, or tried to.

Anyway, the two of those fellows—that is, Disch and Sladek—traveled in Europe together. Sladek ended up moving to England for about 20 years, and he was more involved with the New Wave scene over there.

So his first stories, most of them were sent to "New Worlds". His first novel, "The Reproductive System", was published by Gollancz in London. He and author Pamela Zoline co-edited a short-lived magazine called, for some reason, "Ronald Reagan: The Magazine of Poetry". It featured work by both, alongside J. G. Ballard and Thomas Disch.

Sladek seems very interested in artificial intelligence, but looked at this in a very different way from, say, Asimov.

"The Reproductive System", called "Mechasm" in the United States for some reason, is literally about the creation of self-replicating machines and how that gets completely out of control.

Meanwhile, the one Sladek novel I did read, "Tik-Tok", written in the ’80s, isn’t about a social-media platform full of short-form goofy video content used to control dopamine surges among children.

But it’s actually about a robot whose, “Asimov circuits” are broken. And yeah, as we know, all robots hate Isaac Asimov. But because this robot’s Asimov circuits are broken, he becomes a serial killer, extremely ambitious at that—President of the United States. So it’s kind of like this weird satirical book. It’s very, very clever, very dark, very cynical.

A lot of his stuff could be classified as satire, but I think that’s only one layer of what he’s doing a lot of the time. And for me, from what I’ve seen in his work, it’s actually quite complex and got a lot of interesting stuff going on.

So his work often is really full of autonomous machines and experiments related to human personality and consciousness. Seldom, if ever, do you see extraterrestrials. Perhaps this interest in machines also comes from his background as a technical writer. So we’re seeing a few of these still in this generation. So the Gernsbackism hasn’t entirely died.

But we do see, I guess, like, a lot of the authors trying to be a little more serious about the writing that they’re doing, maybe, than I’d say some of those writers in "Amazing Stories" whose names you probably don’t remember.

His stuff is always married to a lot of interesting psychological examination, from what I can tell.

Although it’s only a little in evidence in the story we have to talk about here tonight.

Sladek was something of a humorist, publishing "The Steam-Driven Boy and Other Strangers" in 1973, which is a collection of tales that includes deliberate parodies of older SF writers. Such as the story "Broot Force", as written by Iclick As-I-Move. "Joy Ride" by Barry DuBray, an anagram of Ray Bradbury. And "Solar Shoe-Salesman" by Chipdip K. Kill.

You know who that’s supposed to be.

He also wrote, under the pseudonym James Vogh, the book "Arachne Rising", a supposedly truthful account of the thirteenth zodiacal sign or constellation, maybe suppressed by the scientific community. And his aim at doing this seems to be to prove that people will believe anything. And I guess here we have somebody who’s continuing the tradition of the hoax novel, so good for him. Or not novel, but, like, supposed nonfiction work describing some incredible thing.

You could say, like, even some of the lost-race novels and stuff like that that we talked about a long time ago on the podcast a little bit have that character to them, because people seem to have taken them a little bit more seriously than sometimes even the authors perhaps intended.

Although I think in some "Symzonia"'s case, it’s probably the opposite.

Nate:

Yeah, that was not a good book.

JM:

But no fan of pseudoscience, he also wrote a piece called "The New Apocrypha: A Guide to Strange Sciences and Occult Beliefs", which was a merciless debunking of several trends, including dowsing and homeopathy and parapsychology, ufology, and unfortunately Scientology, which he ran afoul of and had to censor that part after the 1973 edition, which sucks.

But there you go.

He seems to have had something in common with Norman Spinrad in his sort of, like, occasional cruel dissection of SF traditions.

Spinrad writing a science fiction novel that purports to be by Adolf Hitler and then explaining in the afterword why this is totally appropriate and the right thing to do.

But in a roundabout way, we’re revisiting some of that kind of hoax stuff.

But a lot of these were published under pseudonyms. There’s "The Cosmic Factor: Bioastrology and You", also as James Vogh, and "Judgement of Jupiter", as Richard A. Tilms.

And just why he spent so much time doing this kind of stuff, I’ll never know.

He also seems to share a lot in common with Thomas Disch, and the two of them collaborated on quite a lot of stuff.

A Gothic novel called "The House That Fear Built", published under the pseudonym Cassandra Knye, and "Black Alice", which is sort of a thriller novel. What was the pseudonym for that? Thom Demijohn.

He didn’t write much SF work in the ’70s, but focused mostly on detective novels featuring his recurring character Thackeray Phin.

About Sladek, "The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction" says, “As the most formally inventive, the funniest and very nearly the most melancholy of modern American SF writers, Sladek always addressed the heart of the genre, but never gained due renown. We needed his attention, which we got. He deserved ours, which he did not receive.”

Yeah, that’s too bad, I think.

"The Happy Breed" was only his second published story, I believe, after his early collaborations with Disch. I’m happy I picked this story. I think there’s a lot of stuff in here that I thought was really cool. It’s not the most subtle piece, but for me it really works. And it’s sad. It’s horrifying. There’s a lot to talk about.

So yeah, what do you guys think of this one?

Nate:

Yeah, I like this. And it’s especially poignant in the modern day, where everything is being taken over by machines.

So that was nice to read in 2026.

Gretchen:

Yeah, it has not lost its relevance, I will say that. It does feel very prescient for our time.

The feelings I have towards this story—it is sad, it is funny—but yeah, it’s one of those where I don’t know if I think that what happens is comical or kind of horrifying.

It’s kind of a mix of both, I think.

But yeah, especially the connections that you can make to the things that are happening nowadays does lean it more into horror, I guess.

It isn’t subtle, but at times you don’t really need subtlety.

I still think it works really well for just being so blatant and for being so forthcoming with what he is saying here and what his message is.

JM:

So yeah, "The Happy Breed". We’re in the future of 1987. And I mean, I’m trying to connect this to all that you were saying there because Sladek is a smart guy, and I have to question his dating of the story. But on the other hand, first, it illustrates the idea that this could be closer than we realize.

So we could wake up seemingly one morning and things would be different. I kind of got that feeling now. Like, this is already kind of the way I feel about the so-called AI boom and stuff like that. Suddenly I feel like I woke up in the morning and everybody important who’s sending me emails—it’s literally written by a machine. And I’m just like, what’s going on? I just feel it right immediately. I can tell that a machine wrote this.

I think it’s just so fascinating to me that this story is both dated and scarily prescient at the same time. I just think it’s so fun because—I don’t know what to say about that.

Gretchen:

Yeah, you can really relate to this when every time you turn around and you try to use, like, a different website, they’re, like, trying to shove any sort of AI tools down your throat, where they’re like, use Gemini. Please use Gemini. Look at it.

Nate:

Yeah. Not every website needs a chatbot assistant.

Gretchen:

No.

Nate:

And I feel like so many pop up in the course of me just using the internet now. And it didn’t used to be that way for the longest time.

But now I need a robot asking me if I need help every time I poke around.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Yeah.

An interesting way that this is both prescient and non-prescient too.

We’re looking at the time when newly released and patented psychoactive chemicals are really causing the science of psychiatry to boom.

And they’re on a lot of people’s minds.

And we’ve got the selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, as well as the monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

Sorry if I’m saying that wrong. It’s a bit of a tongue-twister, especially that second one.

But the SSRIs, they’re beginning to be used to treat a huge amount of mental conditions, ranging from depression to anxiety. And these drugs were often shown to be helpful in a great many cases, but also come with a plethora of pretty heavy side effects and other contraindications—not necessarily side effects at all—that need to be heavily monitored by experienced physicians.

And this story deals with what happens when we put our mental health and medication completely in the hands of machines.

It’s always a question when we’re dealing with the future in SF, especially a so-called near future. We have to ask the question: well, just how did we get from here, being the time the story was written, to there, being the projected future?

I think "Riders of the Purple Wage" did this in a really interesting way. I think that was one of the highlights of the story. And it’s also far enough in the future that we could kind of imagine there’s a huge fight to get there.

I mean, we were talking about "The Triple Revolution" document and how it influenced that story. And I feel like something like that might have been a subtle influence on this one as well.

This one presents things a lot more soberly, despite being comical, and a certain influence that it has that I’ll talk about when we finish up here that is definitely absurdist in the extreme.

And yes, it’s the play he talks about in the afterword, which sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.

Nate:

Yeah. And it’s an interesting time period that this is being written, when artificial intelligence was just starting to be in its early phases of serious study by engineers, and computers at this time were getting to the point where—it’s not like they had a computer in every single home, but they were being used pretty widely in the business environment at this time.

JM:

Yeah. Already in 1967, he says in the afterword, “We have now lost the freedom to do without them.”

Nate:

Yeah.

Right. 

JM:

That’s how he phrases it, which I think is a really good way of phrasing it. It doesn’t sound, like, stupidly antagonistic. Now things have gone too far, and now we can’t do without.

Nate:

Yeah. I mean, most people don’t think of the internet as existing in the ’60s, but the origins and the seeds of it started then, in the late 1960s, on the computers that existed when this was being written.

So there’s pretty much a direct line to what he is writing about here and what we have today, as far as the extrapolation of computer and artificial-intelligence technology.

It’s just he was a little bit more optimistic of the pace of it than it actually played out. But I don’t think there’s anything, like, really off in here.

Sometimes when these authors do forecasting of future tech and how it is going to affect society, it can come off as a little—I don’t know—awkward in the storytelling and integration here.

But yeah, it does feel like a plausible world, or at least more plausible than some of the other stories in the anthology.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree with that.

JM:

It’s scary. I can say that there are some optimistic things about imagining all this stuff happening a mere 20 years after the story was written. And that’s a scary thing, right?

Because that’s always how it starts, right? Everything starts with the best intentions, at least from somebody, right?

I also think, in many ways, going back to what Gretchen was saying, I think we’re closer to there now than we were then in some ways.

I do have caveats about that, but they’re minor ones and mostly interest rather than points of criticism, I think. And I think we’ll come to them a little later, because I want to say what happened in this story.

So before I do that, though, there’s a few things that this reminded me of within the genre. But I think this one, the way it combines ideas and gives a thoroughly pretty modern perspective, is unique enough.

So, but there’s of course the 1947 story that I read recently by Jack Williamson, called "With Folded Hands ..."

And that story is about a new form of androids that come from another world to spread their creed of, quote, “to serve and obey and guard men from harm.”

And they take it to extremes, to the point where it becomes a dystopia where people literally cannot do anything that could even be remotely considered dangerous or harmful. Even the means to do such things are taken away from them.

In a slight way too, in a more psychological sense, I guess—like, the story is very different. Maybe in some ways less personally tragic because this is a social-commentary story. But I was also reminded of "Flowers for Algernon", that you can see intellect whittled away bit by bit while the personality kind of survives. And it’s very sad and melancholy.

And finally, of course, we have "The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster.

But here, of course, the Machine certainly does not stop. It’s eternal and self-perpetuating, which, of course, is something that Forster didn’t entirely predict.

But considering that Sladek’s first novel was also about, like—his first novel was also about self-replicating machines—it’s obviously something that he’s given a lot of thought to.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I’m glad you brought up "The Machine Stops", because I definitely wanted to bring that story up as well.

JM:

Yeah, it’s actually all about these Therapeutic Environment Machines.

And that’s apparently how it starts. We have a group of characters that we follow over a period of two years.

And one of them is James, who’s a former psychiatrist. And he was somehow involved with the creation and adoption of the Therapeutic Environment Machines program, although he seems to have had misgivings about it from the outset.

And he’s hosting Marya, a painter, and her partner, Porter, who was a writer and former patient of James.

Marya is suicidal, and Porter is so dissociated that he barely does anything but exist and certainly doesn’t write anymore.

And by the way, there’s speculation over what the Therapeutic Environment Machines are doing. They’re assessing human behavior and environments and prescribing instant cures to stabilize mental health in all cases, whatever the cost.

The speculation is that that is eroding away creativity and genius, and even personality itself.

But it’s mostly delivered in the musings of a deprofessionalized psychiatrist, which is fitting.

James talks about watching the personalities of his friends and colleagues slowly sinking down into a general mass of snowflakes falling. And it’s a very poignant and melancholy image for me.

As well as dispensing free psychoactive drugs to benefit mental health, a person’s home is now fully automated, with drinks emerging out of the walls at the touch of a button, and robots coming out of the walls at night to apply fixes to both their human subjects and the environment itself, which could be anything from repainting to exchanging furniture, removing certain objects.

We never really see the robots in action exactly, but we hear about it in a kind of cold, detached, mechanical explanatory voice.

If this were a ’90s story, it probably would have been written in C language or something like that. Like, you would have seen some guy attempt to express this in some kind of computer program.

It would have been goofy and fun.

It’s done more creepily because, yeah, it’s like this just cold, detached voice explaining the plan and how people are being treated, and recording every minutia.

We do get a lot of cool world-building details. So if one feels lonely, one can dial FRIENDS, all capitalized, at which point a machine-based algorithm of some kind will select a new person or group of friends for the lonely individual to hang out with.

We only see a few people in this world, but there’s an indication that it’s happening all over.

And slowly and inexorably, humanity is being reduced to a vegetative state.

It’s such an insidious kind of non-evil. The machines are only doing their job, and they’re doing what they’ve been programmed all too well to do.

At the beginning of the story, the three characters are sitting around drinking martinis from unbreakable glasses, harboring the subject of whether they’re really happy or just content.

Certainly a question I asked myself many times, especially as a young person.

The machines seem to have cured depression in some people, even though they have to work harder on ones like Marya. But they haven’t generated happiness, only generally created a kind of numbness and apathy, which is a known side effect of some SSRIs, including the soon-to-be-released-to-the-public Prozac, which I believe made its debut in 1970.

So not too long after this story was written.

They talk about art in this blanketed world, and it’s oddly hollow but moving in a way because throughout the story you can see them just grasping at things, and it becoming harder and harder the more it goes on and the more their faculties are suppressed.

And nobody works anymore.

So just like in "Riders of the Purple Wage", which I guess, even though this story is very different, it reminds me of the most in a way, just because of how this, like, extreme future dystopia, I suppose.

But here nobody’s really having a lot of fun, unfortunately.

Yeah, they might work, though, for benefit, something to do.

Gretchen:

At least in "Riders of the Purple Wage", there is some art being made.

Yeah. The machines definitely take care of everything, and it does happen very quickly and spontaneously.

There’s a sense in this—one of the ways we might have evolved from 1967 or changed is our view of politics and government.

Nate:

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, as we’ve seen covering some of the early utopian novels, especially that one anti-feminist dystopian novel, the polemic against socialism—or what, I forget what it was called. It was like "Socialism: The Reality of the Future" or something like that.

People have been forecasting these political utopias or dystopias or directions that the world’s going to go, and it’s going to be, like, radically different than it is at the time that it’s being written.

And it’s almost never accurate in the way that they predict things going.

A lot of the political commentary and forecasting in a lot of these stories really isn’t that astute.

And I think politics have changed in the way we view governments, and the government, I should say—well, I guess Americans view the American government—but the political landscape, as far as the media and how news and political thought is communicated, has radically shifted.

But I don’t know if the underlying sentiment of the people themselves has really moved that much at all since the ’60s.

I mean, I think in some ways society has gotten a little bit more progressive, especially with things as regards to women’s and LGBTQ+ rights.

But again, it’s not really, like, that radically different. It’s not like society has gone and massively transformed itself into something that would also be totally unrecognizable to people from the ’60s.

Gretchen:

I feel like when it comes to politics, there are a lot of people, I feel, who think that there has been a stronger divide recently. But again, I think that’s only because I think that it is much easier to see it through the media landscape that we have today. 

I think that the kind of divide that we see, and the tendencies towards progressive ideals or conservative ideals, has remained largely the same. It’s just that the way that they are apparent to the public and to, just like, the people in general, has shifted.

JM:

I think, though, that’s definitely true and right.

I think in reference to this story, I’ll tell you guys the one thing that I find incredible and almost amusing. It’s not the robots coming out of the walls. It’s not the incredibly nowadays-seeming mass media that these people have, which is, like, absolutely tailored. Not that at all.

It’s the idea that the U.S. government would actually just spontaneously, within the space of a few years, decide, yeah, it’s a great idea to just give everyone—absolutely everyone—free access to psychoactive drugs.

Like, what?

I don’t know. On the face of all the other stuff, that idea doesn’t sound so terrible.

But yeah, in practice, like, what we get is something like this, right?

So it’s not like conscientious medical practitioners or gurus or wise hermits giving out useful narcotics to people. It’s machines that think they can measure our mental health and quash our genius and creativity.

I mean, we also get a guy called Lloyd here, who’s a former MIT engineer and now he’s a farmer. And machines, of course, do the work, but he likes to milk a cow or two every now and then, so the machines let him do this. But when he gets this crazy desire to just have a nice cool drink of the unpasteurized milk, the machines swoop in and they knock him down, causing some minor injuries, and they give him a bunch of antitoxins and gentle-but-firm TV instructions never to do that again.

And Lloyd has a different voice in the narrative, more homey, a little more like an old man in childhood. And again, you get the sense that this was once quite an intellectual and, in his own way, creative and daring person.

But we also have David, a former nineteenth-century literature professor who wants to swim but isn’t allowed to because of a heart condition. And he’s deprived of his pipe, his port and his big lunch. Also, even his library is taken away, and he’s only allowed two pages of Bowdlerized Dickens per day.

The machines know he’s writing letters to an imaginary woman called Delphinia, so they dial up FRIENDS for him and bring him an actual woman, Helena, a former judge.

They all end up at Marya’s apartment along with some other people.

James apparently has a reputation for going through FRIENDS—which is always capitalized—quickly. And I found this funny because it just makes me think of some dating or social-media site where there’s a board you can post things about people and reputation scores and stuff like that.

Eventually, everyone’s personalities become completely subsumed. Most people are sent to the hospital, where they’re fed intravenously. And the machine’s goal is to stabilize the birth and death rates, which it does. But 90 percent of patients call for regressive therapy. Eventually one of the two major hospitals is destroyed, killing 17 million people. The survivors are all just packed into these weird bottle things and transported east by trains.

There’s actually some unsettling concentration-camp imagery in this story too, which I thought was an interesting touch. There’s the discussion of the Mussulmen, which I’ll talk about later.

Everyone in the nearby country is moving to New York because of subliminal advertising, which is another big thing back then. I don’t know, people in the ’60s believed that you could actually flash Coke enough in people’s eyes, even if they couldn’t register it, their subconscious would or something like that. I think that’s been thoroughly debunked, to my knowledge, but that’s what they want us to think, right?

So Porter’s gone to the hospital. That seems to upset Marya. But she says, “I wish I could feel something, but they won’t let me.”

And she can’t paint anymore.

David can’t play chess.

And Lloyd can barely string sentences together, as well as their sinking personalities in the form of a kind of regression into childhood. Their memories are slowly being erased. And they have big childish notions of rebelling against the machines. But it’s far, far too late for any of that. Nobody knows what to do. The system is far too efficient, and the machine has a plan that will eventually make everything completely safe and stable.

Eventually these are the last five, “abnormals.”

And things erupt into chaos, and the machines come out and drug them and seal them away. MEDCENTRAL’s duty is now done, so it switches itself off. And that’s the end of the story.

We get our main characters there just slowly sinking into oblivion.

And yeah, I mean, we didn’t have to know these people that well, but it’s still effectively done, I think.

And I think the grasping is what it is because you can just feel them just trying so hard to get there, because their intelligence is still kind of there, but they’re just unable to.

But there’s some really neat world-building in this, right?

Nate:

Yeah, definitely.

I think this is a very high B for me. Not quite on the level of an A, but it’s, like, really, really, really close.

The world is good, and the concepts in general are cool. Feels like a very lived-in world that feels natural to the story.

Gretchen:

I think I would give this one an A.

I do think that, yeah, the world-building is really interesting. And again, a lot of these concepts definitely still feel quite pertinent.

I think that what does make this lean more into horror and a very depressing sort of ending is—I think that there’s a lot of stories where the issue is that machines go bad.

Usually it’s, oh, the machines that we have started to rely on have broken down, or they have—there’s been an error or a flaw in them.

But here they do their jobs.

But that job is just, well, we want them to be completely safe and completely happy forever, so let’s just have them revert back to the womb.

And that’s how they end up, is that they’re back into just a state of infants.

JM:

Yeah. I think this is very influenced by "The Bald Soprano" play, which I didn’t know about until reading this story. But it sounds like it would be really, really cool to actually see that performed.

I don’t know if either of you guys know anything about that.

Nate:

No.

JM:

Okay, I’ll talk about it a bit more at the end. 

Gretchen:

I have not read or seen that play. I have read some others by Eugène Ionesco because he’s a playwright for the Theatre of the Absurd. So I’ve read some of his plays, but I have not actually read "The Bald Soprano" yet.

JM:

Yeah, that’s really cool. Yeah, I’m definitely very curious about that now. And it was one thing that I was curious to look up and I was like, yeah, that sounds pretty awesome. I’d definitely be interested in some of his other work, but I’ll bring that out a little more at the end.

I just wanted to talk first about some of the fun aspects of the technology and stuff in this.

So, as well as the dial-a-FRIENDS thing, we also get AI-generated music. And this totally reminds me of current boasts that within a few years we’ll be able to generate our own AI movies, and it’s debated as a form of liberation.

But yeah, in reality it’ll probably just end up like Captain Kirk pilots the Millennium Falcon in an exciting adventure with the Daleks, right?

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I mean, AI songs have already hit number one on certain "Billboard" charts, which is pretty scary.

So who knows what AI movies will be like in five years? I’m sure that it’ll flood that industry too.

Or at least AI short films, if not totally full-length movies.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I mean, I have seen people talk about—there are already AI films, at least short films, that have been out.

JM:

Yeah, and I did see some early AI-generated movies, one that had human actors, then just, like, an AI-generated script, and one that had actual, like, composite images.

Yeah, it’s weird.

This was a while ago, though. The technology’s gotten better since then. But it was just really interesting because, yeah, the big message I got was the thing kept saying, “I don’t understand.” That kept coming up in the dialogue, which I just thought was weirdly fascinating.

Gretchen:

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, like, there’s already certain controversies where people have perceived other TV scripts and stuff that they are like, well, it’s AI because of the way that—the style, people have pinned down certain phrases that come up in AI scripts or anything written by AI.

You already have perhaps AI being used in scripts that you wouldn’t even be aware of, which is kind of a scary thought there.

JM:

Yeah. Interestingly, the E. M. Forster story also went a little into this concept, but obviously it was not really as committed to it because technology hadn’t come that far.

And now we’re literally talking about this.

So in the story, the songs which are played by the Muzik, another machine, are tailored to each individual’s moods and mental state, often mentioning them by name.

And the Komiks, which seem to be all everyone reads, do the same.

And James Fairchild has a mirror image now, Jim “Hell-on-Wheels” White, in the pages of "Hot Rod Komiks". But what I especially like is the "Kustomized Tragedy", a teenage-tragedy-type song where the AI mimics the voices of Marya and Jim and harmonizes them. And it’s hilariously hokey and ends with the two lovers in each other’s arms after being murdered by a cop.

But now little Marya can see Jim’s custom car at last.

It’s a riff on these popular teenage-tragedy songs from the early ’60s—late ’50s, early ’60s. Really exploded around 1960, right?

Gretchen:

Yeah.

JM:

Epitomized by this song "Teen Angel". And then there was this other song, "Tell Laura I Love Her", performed by this guy called Ray Peterson, and then covered millions of times, it seems. And there was also an answer song, "Tell Tommy I Miss Him", performed by Skeeter Davis and others. Oh, "Laura" was covered dozens of times.

Gretchen:

The one I think of is "Leader of the Pack". It’s a girl group that did that song, but I can’t think of the name of who performed.

JM:

Yeah.

And you can see a bit of his humor coming out in this.

Like, I think this story, definitely, you don’t feel too much levity, but then there’s some comical aspects to it. And especially near the end, when everybody’s just absolutely hopeless. So the song speaks to the truth of their love affair, which they can’t help but feel is somehow a tragedy.

We also get the chess-playing robot, which definitely was a thing for a very long time.

Nate:

Oh yeah. That was one of the first applications of computer gaming, is chess problems.

And even before that, we had the famous Poe story and all that.

It’s definitely an interesting problem that’s fascinated people mathematically for centuries at this point, really.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, even, like, you think of the Mechanical Turk, and even though that was obviously, like, a hoax, but it’s interesting to see that also having echoes in this story.

JM:

Yeah. I don’t know. Just mainly two more things I wanted to mention.

This Mussulman thing, because it’s kind of weird.

So it actually was used in the concentration camps, and its etymology literally, it seems kind of unclear in this context. So it loosely comes from Turkish "Müslüman", and seems to have made its way into German and then Yiddish.

But by the 1940s, the time of the concentration camps, it was considered somewhat archaic and derogatory.

Nate:

It’s still the word used in Spanish, and possibly some other languages too.

Gretchen:

Interesting.

JM:

It could be a play on the muscular weakness of some of the inmates, who were largely unable to stand and spent most of their time prone on the ground, and thus appearing to imitate the position of a Muslim in prayer.

Its use is definitely somewhat uncomfortable, but the concentration-camp allusion does, I think, kind of work.

And yeah, I mean, even Primo Levi wrote in his memoirs that he didn’t really know why they called them that. It was just, like, all the old-timers would say that.

It’s definitely a story of the ’60s.

It’s really hitting home.

I do want to mention the afterword briefly because he does suggest his inspiration was a French play called, yes, "The Bald Soprano", that I mentioned earlier, by Eugène Ionesco. And it features, even though it’s a French play, English characters, two couples and a maid in an increasingly absurdist situation that ends in complete chaos, a blackout, and then a recapitulation of the opening scene with the couples switched.

The play is full of non sequiturs and bizarre conversations inspired by Ionesco’s attempts to learn English through the dialogues in some kind of scholastic method that he found very strange and bizarre, apparently.

Sladek talks about utopia too, and how we could all be stimulated for pleasure by a simple electrode for a dime’s worth of electricity per day. Maybe that would be the horrible utopia.

And he also talks about doctors depending on machines to make diagnoses, and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that. But unfortunately, already seeing people’s confidence in their GPs decrease as they notice how often they’re referring to ChatGPT to help come up with answers.

Sladek says it doesn’t need to stop with machine diagnoses. And also, I think, yeah, we’ve learned that since the 1960s, I think that the human brain itself is capable of a whole lot. You can witness people, not just children but older people, my parents’ age, becoming really addicted to social media. And why does this happen?

Well, our brains train themselves to release chemicals of pleasure just because someone hit a like button. And finally, Sladek brings in a lot to make his case. Talks about Norbert Wiener and Freud and Lenny Bruce and fairy tales and genies and jokes. And it’s quite neat the way he’s able to just tie it all together. And the machines are waiting.

So yeah, A for me. Powerful and smart and analogue.

Yeah. Again, not the subtlest, but I feel that it kind of works that way. And the dating is not really a negative as far as I’m concerned.

Gretchen:

Yeah. Just like Dorman, I was not familiar with Sladek before reading this anthology, and this definitely makes me want to check out more of his work.

Nate:

Yeah, likewise.

JM:

Yeah, I’m definitely looking forward to getting into more of this stuff now.

I really enjoyed "Tik-Tok", so I definitely have an impetus now to take a lot more into some of that stuff.

There’s not a huge amount, but it seems like he unfortunately died at age 62 in 2000.

And it would have been interesting to see what he would have made of the rise of the internet and all the things we have to deal with today.

Unfortunately, his longevity was not that of Larry Eisenberg.

A really interesting writer, fun to read, and also scary.

That’s just the story.

Jonathan Brand - "Encounter with a Hick" 

JM: 

We have our next story, which is "Encounter with a Hick" by Jonathan Brand.

And yeah, I really don’t have anything to say about Jonathan Brand. I actually couldn’t find out much about him at all. It seems like he had a very short career, possibly died quite young.

I didn’t really like the story either, unfortunately.

This is just Genesis gone all goofy.

I don’t know. I guess my patience for these kind of stories is worn a bit thin, which is weird because I feel like I would have liked them more a long time ago.

But I don’t know, even something clever and fun like "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy" or something—like maybe I’m not really as much of a fan of it as I was, you know, when I was a kid. And I just—it gave me a little of the vibe of that. Not like the Englishness, of course.

But I wasn’t impressed by this.

I’d say this is very skippable if you were so inclined.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

Nate:

Yeah, I didn’t mind this at all. I thought the style was witty and fun.

I mean, the message isn’t really that deep or profound or anything like that, and I can definitely see people finding it a little groan-worthy.

JM:

Yeah, it’s one of those stories that’s trying to be funny.

I almost said, who let Nelson Bond in, when we were talking about Eisenberg, but I thought that was too big, so I’ll say it now.

Who let Nelson Bond in?

Literally nothing. Like, it’s just this religion sort of parody of the creation of the world, and it’s, like, being told to these people sitting in a bar.

So, I mean, I guess it’s got the amusement of being a tall-tale-at-the-bar story, which I always kind of like.

But yeah, I don’t know. Your weird drunk buddy from the neighborhood pub probably has something better.

Sorry, man, but this is—I want to move on.

This was a D story for me.

Nate:

No, I actually didn’t mind this at all. This is a B story for me.

You know, not a high B, maybe not even a low B, but yeah, I didn’t mind this.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I just feel like I did not care for most of the religious stories in this collection.

I can appreciate it trying to be a little witty with it, but I think I would probably give this one a C. But it just doesn’t really stand out to me.

I think it was the spree of stories. I feel like the Dorman and the Sladek back-to-back didn’t really help because I did enjoy those ones quite a lot. And so I think that coming to this one, I just didn’t really connect with it.

I don’t hate it, but it just sort of falls in line with a lot of the other stories that try to tackle religion but don’t really—I don’t really feel like it does too much.

JM:

Yeah, I appreciate that perspective. Yeah, I can see somebody liking this.

So I don’t know, don’t skip anything in this anthology. Just read it for the first time. There’s ones you won’t want to read again.

Gretchen:

Sometimes the stories here, there’s a surprise in there. There are some I didn’t expect to like as much as I did that I ended up enjoying.

Nate:

And everybody does seem to be getting something different out of it. I mean, normally we’re pretty aligned on stories when we do stuff for the podcast, but just looking at how we rated stuff, we’re all pretty different across the board, and not really consistently either.

So I think that is interesting.

Kris Neville - "From the Government Printing Office" 

JM:

The next story is, thankfully for me, something much, much better.

This was "From the Government Printing Office" by Kris Neville.

And Kris Neville, born in Carthage, Missouri, in 1925, became one of the world’s leading authorities on industrial epoxies, believe it or not. But he was also a science fiction writer and a family man, and you can tell the latter from this story.

He was good friends with writer Barry Malzberg, and the two of them had a lot of negative things to say about their experiences with science fiction, mostly editors and publishers, as I was kind of mentioning earlier.

There’s something in common here with writers in this anthology, especially also Thomas Disch, who quickly realized that if he were ever to make a living off SF, he would have to increase his output to an impossible degree. Neville’s problems seem chiefly to have been restrictions and limitations that were imposed by editors and so on.

You can kind of picture these guys griping about it. 

I discovered Kris Neville because of this story. I had literally never heard of him before, just like Jonathan Brand. But unlike in Jonathan Brand’s case, I think this was a fantastic short story. This was just a perfectly, perfectly put-together short—like, really short—story. It’s definitely, of the authors that I’ve never even heard of before, I think this is probably my favorite one.

It just captures the essence of this weirdly—it’s hard to describe. Like, he’s not exactly—he’s got the intelligence of a well-developed brain, but he’s still got the, I guess, in using D&D terms, the wisdom of a child. He’s got that childlike sensibility. He’s three and a half years old, and the whole thing is from his perspective. 

At first it’s kind of funny because, you know, you’re just like, oh, look at the precocious kid, like, all that. And gradually, as it goes, you realize that it’s actually really dark. This is some weird future where the world is, I guess, very polluted, and there’s this plague everywhere. Basically there’s a colony on Mars because literally humanity decided that it had no choice but to try to reach out and colonize Mars, because it seems like the Earth might not last very much longer. This is all just kind of hinted at, though, because it’s all in the mind of a three-year-old kid. He’s just going through these weird existential moments, which really culminate for me in the end of the story.

I will say, I can imagine perhaps the Sonya Dorman story having this effect on some readers, but for this anthology, this is the story that made me tear up. This is a story that made me actually—like, when I got to the end of the story, I was, like, devastated. 

It’s this moment in time where we have this kid looking at this drawer full of weird things, and he doesn’t know what any of the things in the drawer are. He’s having all these thoughts because he’s been educated in such a way. His parents have this book that was given to them by the government. 

Apparently, again, this is a weird government-type story, which is, again, interesting. We see this so much in this anthology.

So here, in this future, the government has taken a direct approach to child-rearing, and they’re specifically interested in creating scientists. They’ve decided that the best way to do this is to introduce a kid to, like, constant anxiety and all kinds of weird stuff to make them, I guess, really paranoid, fascinated by finding out how things work.

I can kind of relate as a kid because I had this habit when I was visiting places, just walking all over. I would be at somebody’s house and I’d be, like, walking all over the house and going into all the rooms and looking in their personal drawers and stuff, which is, like, not a cool thing to do, right?

But I was three years old, and I was, I have to find out what’s here.

And eventually I kind of realized that’s not socially acceptable, right?

The parents in this story, I mean, they seem really, really abusive and terrible. But he’s caught on reasoning at the end. He’s like, oh, I guess the book told them to be that way. And they’re still making me. And soon I’m going to get to go to school.

At the end of the story, the kid is standing in front of this drawer, crying because Mom is yelling at him and telling him there’s no candy in the drawer. Because all he can say is, well, maybe there’s candy in there. And he just wants Mom to search the drawer with him. But at the end he’s having this absolute existential meltdown because he’s realizing that time is really weird, and that also it’s important to forget things. And he’s already started forgetting things. He’s almost forgotten that time, all that time ago, over three years ago, when it seemed like Mommy and Daddy loved him.

Then he’s like, I guess when I get older and I figure out how things work, I won’t care about all the starving people in India so much because I’ll forget that too. Then he’s like—because this is a theme throughout the story—he keeps seeing this stuff on TV, and he’s like, why are these piles of bodies here? Mom is just like, oh, don’t look. It’s terrible, right?

So at the end of the story, he’s going through this existential meltdown. He’s just like, I want to start forgetting, because apparently when the kids turn four, they get to go to school. Who knows what happens to them there.

There’s certainly hints that there’s some real dystopian stuff happening here. But you don’t really know because you’re entirely in this perspective, which I think is one of the cool things about the story. Because on the one hand, you can just kind of imagine it’s just this kid going through kind of normal stuff. But on the other hand, it’s like, no, there’s some really sinister stuff going on here. And even a three-year-old can perceive it, right?

Nate:

Yeah, I don’t know. This one didn’t really land for me.

I wasn’t really getting the sense that the kid was supposed to be hyper-intelligent.

It just seemed like something I would complain about in the Zenna Henderson episode we did when we talked about the "Galaxy" stories recently, in that a lot of authors depict children more as small adults rather than the childlike thought processes that children actually go through.

Zenna Henderson, I thought, was really good at capturing that feeling.

But the depiction of the childlike mind here, I didn’t really get the sense that he was supposed to be, like, canonically hyper-intelligent like an adult, but he certainly came off that way in the story.

JM:

It’s not gone into, but the sense I got was that perhaps something had been done to him. Like, his brain had a certain level of development. But all the things that he observed and the way he observed them, to me, were still very childish.

I think there was something unique to it. Although I do understand what you’re saying. I think in a way I like that way of portraying children, at least when it comes to a story like this, which is, like, a really short story. But also, he’s obviously not aware of a lot.

For me, it rings true. I feel like—I don’t know, I’m only guessing—but I feel like Kris Neville might have written this story after having a revelation with one of his children. Like, maybe the kid said something and he’s like, oh gosh, really? And that kind of thing happens all the time. And I definitely think as a child I remember having thoughts similar to this, not really being able to express them.

I don’t know. So let me ask you both a question. You just want to give, like, a time frame. What’s your earliest memory, or when was your earliest memory?

Nate:

Definitely around, like, three-ish or so. I lived on the West Coast, around Reno, Nevada, during that time.

So I definitely remember stuff from there before we moved to the East Coast when I was four years old.

So I definitely remember stuff from around the three- to four-year-old range-ish.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I would say, yeah, around that time. Like, I would say around four.

I remember some stuff from, like, when I lived with my dad, when my mom and I still lived in the same house my dad lives in. And that was, like, before first grade.

And yeah, I would say there’s some stuff I remember from then.

JM:

Yeah, same.

I don’t know exactly what the first memory is. I feel like my sense of the linearity of events is most screwed up rather than the recollection of the events themselves.

So I’m not quite sure.

As an example, I used to think that I started watching "Doctor Who" like just before I turned four. But looking at the dates when the episodes were broadcast, it seems like I was probably almost five. So, you know, these things are not set in stone. When you’re a kid, you don’t have as good a track of things like that.

That’s something actually I think is very well portrayed in this story because the sense of time is a really big factor. I remember having thoughts like that. I remember when it suddenly flipped the other way.

This is a weird story, but I guess I was five years old and I had just gotten a needle in a doctor’s office. It was very painful to me and shocking, and I didn’t like it at all. The nurse, in an effort to reassure me, said, oh, don’t worry, you won’t have to go through anything like that until you’re ten years old.

And at first I was like, yeah, that’s good. That’s good. Thank you.

But then I remember being in the bathroom at this cottage we were staying at and having this terrible existential moment when I realized that ten was actually not very far away.

And I started getting scared.

It was like, wow, this whole time is weird, right? And you start realizing that for the first time. 

There’s a lot of that in this.

I think, to me, the ending paragraphs are what really brings this story home and just really made me start, yeah, tearing up. Because, so, he’s going through this existential crisis. Mom is, like, actually going, “What do you want?” in this, like, way that I can totally picture. Inside, in his head, he’s just like, I want to start forgetting things. I want to start forgetting all the horrible things that have happened to me.

But what he actually says is, “I can’t wait to be four.”

You know, I just want to be four, right?

And that’s how the story ends.

Okay. Not like miniature adults, but I do think sometimes that adults make a mistake in not thinking of kids as miniature people, right? Or as people, right?

There’s a lot of different thought processes that go on in a child’s head. They’re not all the same.

And yeah, I mean, I definitely get the sense that something was being done to the children in this society, not just physical and mental abuse. It’s almost sad and comical because at one point you get the sense that the mom says to the kid—because he’s just accidentally destroyed all his bedclothes in this fancy future-tech washing machine—she says, “Oh, you filthy little shit,” because it’s in the book. Dad’s like, no, shut up, this is really serious. Something really bad could happen.

This one hit me a lot. Sorry, Nate, you didn’t feel it.

But yeah, to me this one really worked.

What do you think, Gretchen?

Gretchen:

Yeah, I went back and reread some of these stories.

The first time that I read this, I really didn’t care much for it. It really didn’t hit me. But it was more because I did suspect that this was one that you did enjoy more.

JM:

Yeah, I was hinting at it.

Gretchen:

Yeah.

And I did see a couple of other opinions on this one that seemed pretty positive, so I went back and I reread it.

I can’t say that I still truly enjoy it to the same level.

I think it’s the final instance of that idea, well, four is when I start forgetting this, so I can’t wait to be four, so I can forget these moments. I can see the poignancy in that. But I feel like the majority of this text just feels, like, too absurd. It hits in a way that it feels like it’s trying to come off as more comical.

I don’t get that sense of emotion.

I think that the ending, I guess, sentiment of the story I can get behind.

But I still can’t find myself really enjoying this story to the extent of saying that I would call this one of the best stories in the collection.

JM:

Okay, fair enough.

To me, this was a buildup. This was a buildup to that moment at the end.

And like I said, it starts out, you’re like, oh yeah, this comical story about a kid, and he’s like, let’s turn on the waterworks so Mom feels some sympathy, and stuff like that.

It hits home as you go.

And I do think after a second reading it hit even more because I feel like, yeah, to me, it was a buildup.

I see what you’re saying.

I think that it handled the tone really well of shifting, like, into—because you don’t know what the rules are. You don’t know what’s going on. At the end of the story, you still don’t exactly know what’s going on because you’ve only had this little perspective, right? And he can’t even walk down the stairs without falling over, right? So he doesn’t understand what’s going on.

And I don’t want to hype this story to the heavens and then disappoint everybody. But I feel like if somebody asked me, what’s an example of a really good composed short story where it feels like everything just sort of fits together in a really concise way that has some emotional power to it? I would say this is a really good example. It worked really good. I liked it a lot.

So I’ll be the one out a little bit, but I think you all also appreciate a lot of what’s good about it.

So yeah, it’s an A for me.

Nate:

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, I’d give this one a C. Didn’t really land for me. The depiction of the childhood mind just didn’t really work.

I know I mentioned Joyce a lot in the "Riders of the Purple Wage" segment, but the beginning of "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man" is a really fantastic depiction of the childhood mind for me.

JM:

So all I can say is we’re all different, right?

Nate:

Yeah, for sure.

JM:

I definitely could relate to some of this.

I remember what my thoughts were like, at least, like, probably age three or something.

I seem to remember a birthday party. I don’t know exactly the order of things.

I also remember going on a plane to Edmonton and hating the plane ride.

I feel like that might be one of my first memories, is crying in the seat of an airplane.

Gretchen:

Initially, I might have given this a C, but I think rereading it and maybe understanding a little bit more about what can be appreciated in this story, I think I would give it a B.

JM:

All right, cool.

Well, this is fun. A lot of the time—and I’ve commented on this before when we did the podcast, I think even the last one when we did the international "Galaxy"—I’m like, well, we’re in accord a lot of the time, right?

Like, and we mostly are with these stories, but there are some variances.

And I think that’s a really fun thing about doing something like this in a group.

R. A. Lafferty - "Land of the Great Horses"

JM:

What do we got next?

"The Land of the Great Horses" by R. A. Lafferty.

We talked about Lafferty a few episodes back. We did a quite long introduction that was even mentioned by Daniel Otto Jack Petersen, who does "The Hole on the Corner" podcast on YouTube.

And so that was cool. We had a comment back and forth about Lafferty and stuff, and that was nice.

And I’m glad to see him in this anthology.

I will say right off the bat that his afterword in here is one of the more charming in the entire book, despite learning some uncomfortable truths about him, which you can hear about if you listened to our last episode where we talked about him. He has a charm about him that I could really appreciate.

That said, this isn’t, to me, one of my favorite stories by him. And I do think it’s confusing because I read a lot of his short stories in order. Lafferty has over 250 short stories. There’s a lot. Some of them have recurring characters of a sort, but how important they are, or how their recurrence actually works in the narrative, varies from story to story. Sometimes they’re practically just cameos. You sort of just notice them after a while because they have the same names. And you’re like, oh, it’s that guy. I remember. Wait, what was that story? Wait, what was that? That is, like—all the stories have such weird names. You kind of remember the names, but you don’t remember exactly which story was that. Then you kind of come back and reread it, and you’re like, oh yeah, that one.

So some of the characters, actual names that are mentioned in this, like Gregory Smirnov and stuff like that, they belong to something called the Institute of Impure Science. And it’s this thing that Lafferty visits in a bunch of stories from this time period especially, where they do weird experiments and come up with weird concepts that they test and stuff like that. Some of the stories are a lot of fun. 

They’re just kind of used tangentially here, but it just kind of adds to the fragmented nature of this story. I think it’s very well written, and I think it’s kind of funny. I think it’s interesting because it’s a novel idea about aliens stealing pieces of the Earth, and the Romani culture especially, who have no homeland, and stuff coming from this mythical homeland that’s been taken away. One day the aliens are going to bring it back, their test sample, and people who are called to that place will go and find it, this mythical land somewhere in India.

It was interestingly done, and I thought handled pretty well.

But it’s very fragmented. It’s hard to really take it seriously because it has that light Lafferty tone.

And at the same time, he’s just throwing names at you left, right and center and playing linguistic games and stuff like that.

Yeah, it’s a little, but it seems like a lot, kind of, and it works pretty well. It’s fun to read, like a lot of his stories are, but I’m not sure what I would include if I were editing "Dangerous Visions". And he did write this story specifically for that.

I think he’s the only writer in the whole collection who thanked all the other writers in the afterword and said he appreciated being among their company.

That was just a sweet thing to say.

I don’t know.

At the end, too, the aliens, they bring back this weird mythical Romani land, but they also steal Los Angeles. So at the end of the story, we get a report about how the Angelenos lived, and they’re, like, wandering around obsessed with cars and all this. It’s kind of weird and funny.

And yeah, I don’t know. The story worked for me, but it’s a B story because I’m not sure it really stands out as a Lafferty favorite. But interesting concept that I think he handles in a fun, cool way.

Nate:

Yeah, I know this one also didn’t land for me. I felt it was kind of Orientalist, and I don’t know. I just didn’t really get into it that much.

Gretchen:

I have read a few more Lafferty stories since we read "Rainbird", and I think this one is definitely the lesser of the ones that I’ve read.

I don’t know too much about Romani culture, so I don’t know how to comment on that particularly. But I think that the base concept of the story, the idea of parts of the land being stolen, it is an interesting concept. I think that the little twist at the end of Los Angeles being stolen is kind of funny. I think that that is a pretty fun little ending.

I would probably give this one a B.

JM:

Yeah, well, I said the story was well written earlier. I should caveat that because it is kind of ramshackle-feeling. I think that’s something that Lafferty just does. Sometimes it’s just really fun. And not everything he writes is like this. But sometimes it’s like you see the nuts and bolts hanging off of everything. You just see, like, oh, here’s a little bit of this and here’s a little bit of that. 

He has a very ADHD style of writing where he’s just zipping all over the place, and you’re just like, who’s who again? We spend two minutes with these characters, then we just leave them behind and we never hear from them again. Then it’s like, oh, there’s these people from the Institute of Impure Science speculating, and there’s the report about the Angelenos. It feels haphazard, but in a fun way, if that makes sense.

I like it.

But it’s really hard to pin down Lafferty.

I kind of feel like I really grew to love Lafferty, or at least Lafferty’s writing, after reading a lot of stories. I feel like it started to accumulate over time.

So just picking out one story where I’d be like, here, read this if you want to get to know R. A. Lafferty, is actually really difficult.

And I don’t think it would be this one, actually.

Nate:

Yeah, this is a C story for me. I definitely like "Rainbird" better than this one. Those are still the only two Lafferty stories I’ve read.

Certainly, it’s the lesser of the two.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I think so far—even I’ve read, like, "Nine Hundred Grandmothers", and I really enjoyed "Rainbird". And I think that’s still my favorite.

JM:

"Nine Hundred Grandmothers" is great. 

Gretchen:

I do like that one.

But I think that "Rainbird" is just a really great story.

JM:

I mean, yeah, that might be—maybe that would be one. I don’t know. But there’s also the weird story about the guy who stays on a planet and slowly turns into a spider. That was very disgusting and body horror.

It’s like, you don’t expect that from R. A. Lafferty.

But yeah, I don’t know. There’s a bunch of really amazing stuff that he’s written.

But yeah, he’s just written so many stories.

And I think it’s really cool that he contributed to "Dangerous Visions".

And Ellison speaks very highly of Lafferty, and Lafferty is very self-effacing and gentle in his afterword, which I actually really appreciated, especially being a little disheartened after last episode a little bit.

Yeah, so I like it.

J. G. Ballard - "The Recognition"

JM:

J. G. Ballard, though, is next.

And yeah, "The Recognition".

So Ballard, very influential and important British—English, I should say—science fiction writer.

But he definitely would have been one of those to prefer the term speculative fiction, and was more interested, he said, in inner than outer space.

That said, he did write a lot of stories about astronauts and stuff like that, but they were very influenced by what was happening in contemporary culture.

So "The Recognition", it’s in here.

But this is a weird inclusion because this story is actually not meant to be in this anthology. This is a really weird case of a mistake. Apparently Ballard had actually submitted a completely different story to the anthology, and for some reason Ellison didn’t get it. Well, supposedly they talked about this and tried to flush it out, but according to Ellison, Ballard was still disgruntled about it years later. He didn’t remember the conversation at all.

But again, this is Ellison talking. But I just also kind of wonder—oh, well, we know from our Hawkwind podcast, when the members of Hawkwind, or maybe it was Nik Turner specifically, offered J. G. Ballard a spliff, Ballard said, “I’m more of a whisky man,” you know. So they met at some convention somewhere, and maybe there was some sloshing going on there. Who knows, really.

The fact is, the story that was supposed to be in here was "The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race". Yeah, that’s definitely not the story that ended up in here. If that story had been in here, it would definitely have been a dangerous vision.

But what Ellison actually thinks happened is that the agent pulled the story because he decided it was too offensive, because the story did eventually get published. And that the agent sent him a different story entirely. He pretty much admits this in the next-volume introduction. He’s like, yeah, like, this happened, and Ballard and I are not friends.

It’s Ellison, so it’s hard to know exactly how serious some of this stuff is. But this story, to me, was a very puzzling inclusion.

I have a relationship with Ballard. I’ve read a few things. There’s a few things that are important that I haven’t read, like "Crash", for example.

Nate:

Yeah, I’ve always heard "Crash" is supposed to be great, but yeah, this is my first Ballard I’ve read.

Gretchen:

Same. I have a copy of "Crash". I haven’t read it yet.

JM:

Yeah. So the thing with Ballard, I do find—I don’t know how to describe it. It’s a certain coldness or something. It’s a certain, like, aloofness, and I find it a little bit alienating. And I think maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s how he wants to be.

Although I respect him a lot, and I want to read more of his stuff. I mostly enjoyed what I’ve read, although some of the stories don’t really work for me. They’re a bit on the dull side for me. But I do appreciate what he’s doing.

Yeah, I don’t know. There’s just this weird detachment that I find very cold, I guess.

It’s hard to feel any emotion in what he’s writing, and I don’t know. I think that’s a purposeful stylistic choice. I think I can see certain instances where it works really, really well.

There was a book, "High-Rise", which I read, where basically a completely self-contained high-rise building, where everything goes completely haywire and out of control. And by the end everybody’s, like, cannibals, and they’re just completely dog-eat-dog. It’s supposedly an influence on that "Doctor Who" story "Paradise Towers". And I can kind of see that.

That book was really quite good, but it did have that too, this weird aloofness.

So this story is a circus story. And to me there’s just so many weird circus stories. This was kind of hard to get a sense of. I don’t even want to say it was ambiguous because that implies one could go one way or the other. But there’s this vagueness about the story where you don’t really know who the narrator is.

It kind of reminded me of the Robert Aickman story "The Swords".

Gretchen:

That’s what I was going to bring up.

I will say the two people I thought of when reading this story were Aickman and Kafka. I think it was because I was thinking of "A Hunger Artist", and I get a sense of that in this story, which is why I quite enjoyed the story.

I would probably give this one a B.

I don’t think it’s the best, but I was intrigued by it.

And I get what you’re saying, JM, with, like, there’s a sort of coldness to it, but I think that kind of works here.

I think it lends it the mystique of what’s going on. There is a sort of vagueness to it that works. 

JM:

There was that.

Nate:

Yeah, this is definitely a B for me as well.

The one it reminded me of is "Titus Alone", which is the third "Gormenghast" novel.

JM:

Oh, yes.

Nate:

It’s way different than the first two. And I like the first two more. But the third one has this, like, really weird atmosphere that felt very similar to this story here, even though this was in a different style and felt different. It still had that same strange surreal feeling to it.

JM:

Yeah, I didn’t make that connection, but I can sort of see it now that you’re saying it.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

I do feel the style is very different, though, because "Titus Alone" is more like a fever dream. Like, it’s really wild.

Nate:

Yeah.

JM:

This felt very controlled.

I feel very removed from everything that’s happening. Like, I feel just very distant.

I think that’s why it’s a C story for me.

Like, it works, but it’s bad because, again, I told my friend today, well, remember what Robert Aickman said: it’s the mystery that lasts, not the explanation.

But I don’t know. Here I feel like it was just too—it was almost too vague, right?

He kind of explained, literally explained what he was going for in the afterword, and I’m just like, yeah, okay. mean, maybe it’s good that you did that in this case, but also I’m not really getting that. I don’t really know. You’re assigning significance to things, but I don’t really make that connection. Like, what is he saying about the woman and the dwarf? He’s trying to call your attention to it.

Maybe I’m just not smart enough. I feel like I was missing something, maybe.

So yeah.

Gretchen:

Yeah, I mean, I don’t think I fully got everything the story is trying to offer.

I think it’s just that I really enjoyed the atmosphere.

And yeah, I really am glad, JM, you brought up "The Swords", because I had recently read that story in "The Dark Descent". It was really brought to mind when reading this. There is a sort of Aickman-esque quality to it where everything feels off, even though you’re not entirely sure why. Or, you know, there’s this mysterious element to it that I think really drew me in.

JM:

Cool.

Yeah, I mean, we can certainly call to mind a few weird circus stories.

And I guess—I don’t know—most of my favorites are perhaps a little more involved and longer than this one.

I just find it interesting that it’s just a theme that so many writers are interested in, and that some people have been affected by this kind of thing from an early age, I guess.

And, like, I just wonder, like, if Ray Bradbury had written the story, how would it have been different?

Gretchen:

A much warmer story, I’m sure.

JM:

Yeah, probably.

But I wonder if he would have kept the theme of the audience becoming the prisoners in the cage.

And again, we’re supposed to gleam something, I think, from the fact that this person—like, the narrator escapes, or not really escapes, but he’s not, like, a part of the thing. And again, I’m like, not sure. I mean, is that because of the cold detachment? Is that why?

I don’t know.

Sometimes maybe you shouldn’t read the afterwords, because maybe sometimes we’re thinking—we’re coming at this differently than the author, I guess. As a reader, our perception is different. I mean, in the Neville story, in the afterword he goes on about fear. And I kind of got that. But I’m like, yeah, but that didn’t seem to be totally the main thing, right? But I can see how that maybe is what mattered most to the author.

With Ballard, I’m not really sure. I’m getting a bit of a vagueness about that. The fact that Ballard didn’t actually want this story in the anthology makes the whole thing kind of weird to me as well. This isn’t the story that should have been included.