4/5 (collated rating: Good)

What a way to finish 2024! Future Powers, ed. Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois (1976) is a well-crafted thematic anthology with seven original stories and two older classics. Other than R. A. Lafferty’s average contribution, all the tales effectively engage with the theme of the complexities of future control both in everyday and the macropolitical contexts.

A few tantalizing fragments: Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Diary of the Rose” (1976) explores the operations of dystopic control through the eyes of a neophyte doctor (“scopist”); Damon Knight ruminates on the nature and treatment of the psychopath in “The Country of the Kind” (1956); and A. K. Jorgensson’s “Coming-of-Age-Day” (1965) takes the reader through all the unnerving and confusing moments of a child in a strange future attempting to understand the nature of sex.

You can read the entire anthology online here if you have an Internet Archive account (you should).

I apologize if the reviews are on the brief side. I’m trying to start the new year with less incomplete projects!

Highly recommended.

Brief Plot Summary/Analysis

“The Diary of the Rose” (1976), Ursula K. Le Guin, 5/5 (Masterpiece): Nominated for the 1977 Hugo Award for Best Novelette. Nominated and withdrawn from the 1977 Nebula. According to Le Guin, she received advance notification that her novelette won the Nebula. However, in protest of SFWA’s treatment of Stanislaw Lem, she withdrew it from contention. Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” (1976) won instead.

As an unabashed fan of the epistolary SF story, “The Diary of the Rose” hits on all levels. It tells the story of Dr. Rosa Sobel, who keeps a diary of her scopist readings of psychiatric patients. A scopist “reads” on multiple levels, a visual representation of the thoughts of the patient. One of her patients, Flores Sorde, supposedly admitted for violent psychopathic behavior, slowly changes Sobel’s perception of her role and the nature of the world.

The epistolary format allows Le Guin to interrogate the functioning of dystopia at both a personal and institutional level. Simultaneously, it allows an immediacy to the events and interactions that cause an individual to understand the true nature of their world and their own part in its perpetuation. Brutal. Fascinating. Deeply effective and affective. I know others have written in far more perceptive detail about this deserving classic than I have. Seek those reviews out!

“The Country of the Kind” (1956), Damon Knight, 5/5 (Masterpiece): First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. Anthony Boucher (February 1956). Over the years whenever I review Damon Knight’s fiction, my lovely visitors recommend “The Country of the Kind” (1956). And I can now confidently say that if you’re in the hunt for Knight’s best (and perhaps the best of the 50s), “The Country of the Kind” should take its place on the list.

A stripped down rendering of a homogenized post-scarcity future, Knight places the reader in the world of a psychopath guilty of murdering his “love-play” partner at fifteen (29). But rather than an institution or jail, he’s allowed to wander across the transformed landscape and perform almost stylized crimes, and create totemic pieces of art, as long as they do not involve violence. For instance, he follows a woman into her underground home (all the current fashion) and dials steaming hot food from her dispenser with the intention of squirting her with cool water that she would misinterpret as the hot food until the last moment. Soon the nature of his “treatment” becomes clear: 1) People may not speak to him or acknowledge his existence. 2) When he’s close to violence a debilitating epileptic state takes over. 3) In addition, whenever he approaches another a deep stench emanates from his person. He goes to bizarre lengths to connect to people. In one instance, he interacts with a woman while diving (and thus she’s unable to smell his odor). In another, he attempts to lure a child towards a piece of art (with a manifesto-esque message attached).

This is a smart and complex story. On one level it reads as a critique of 50s conformity. The jarring interactions between the psychopath and society of course call into question the psychological nature of of both the “normal” and aberrant. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the 50s saw a fixation on the complex and ever-changing use of “normality” to critique and control. I imagine some readers might see Knight as endorsing uncertainly and violence as necessary components of society. I think it’s a bit more complex than that as the story is a hyperbolic exercise. He’s also emphasizing the value of diverse opinions, the role of art as a political medium, and the necessity to interrogate and question the views of the establishment.

Not to be missed.

“Smoe and the Implicit Clay” (1976), R. A. Lafferty, 3/5 (Average) reworks a serious theme, the origin of humanity, and reduces the vastness of the premise into a metaphoric  (and goofy) scenario to tease out some greater meaning…. Colonel Crazelton of the Inquisition has a hunch that something is up on many of the planets that man has traveled to. He’s not exactly sure the nature of the mystery, or if there even is one, and calls in the spaceman Donners and Epikt, a particularly goofy ktistec machine associated with the Institute for Impure Science, to investigate. The story revolves around the phrase “Kilroy was here,” which was spread by American workers and serviceman in far reaches of the world in the 1940s. There’s the suggestion that various phantoms of man appear on distant worlds. And that explorers have become phantoms themselves.

Eventually the trio concludes from photographs and other inferences the presence of a primordial clay that creates illusions and can interact in ways that aren’t perceived as actual interaction. In classic Lafferty fashion, soon this concept amalgamates with fragments of pseudo-religious esoterica about creation and the origin of the races: “was this sixteenth people really the first and original, our Paternal Clay our Heritage? What is the name of the race from which we may all descend?” (48). Soon the characters drift through “impressions of world after world after world of implicit clay that was almost being called into animation” (53). Interspersed with crafty metatextual moments (interrupted silly jokes as an opportunity to intersperse the conception core of the tale via quotes), the descent into the metaphysical takes on a distinctly Oklahoman hue.

I find Lafferty’s best moments are when he restrains his desire to indulge in the comedic elements of the tall take. He indulges in them here. It’s it turns goofy and transfixing. I can only take goofy in small doses. Regardless, he’s the master of the strange turn of phrase and memorable image. If you’re new to Lafferty, I recommend tracking down stories like “Nine Hundred Grandmothers” (1966) and “Days of Grass, Days of Straw” (1973) first.

“She Waits for All Men Born” (1976), James Tiptree, Jr., 3.75/5 (Good): A story that transpires across the longue durée, “She Waits for All Men Born” charts moments of destruction from the extinction of the dinosaur to the stuttering steps to rebuild in the post-apocalyptic. Intermediary scenes depict the interactions of defeated Kiowa with the genocidal U.S. Cavalry, Jews fleeing the Holocaust, and the moment a nuclear war breaks out.

The story takes on narrative shape in the post-apocalyptic around the birth and adolescence of mysterious blind baby girl whose mother dies in childbirth. The Healers contemplate whether she should be allowed to breed with the other members of the tribe. Despite developing slowly, she seems to be full of life and contributes to the community despite her blindness. The community must periodically fight off fliers, mutated animals or men, who abduct and consume children. Soon the girl’s true abilities manifest.

This is far from one of Tiptree, Jr.’s best. However, it is filled with disturbing imagery and a mournful sadness. There’s a tenderness in the character of the young blind woman despite the curse she bears. Tiptree hammers home the message that it’s impossible to escape the evil ingrained within us. It’s a bleak little cosmic vision.

“The Day of the Big Test” (1976), Felix C. Gotschalk, 4/5 (Good): According to SF Encyclopedia, Gotschalk, an American psychologist, “In a relatively short time he established a reputation as an author of high linguistic energy whose many stories emote a ruthless savvy about the future. Many of his tales are narrated through stunning linguistic displays of the emotional and physiological ways of being that humans display in isolation and in their relations to the social world; these ways of being are constantly articulated by the protagonists in a flow of brilliant jargon, with the result that existence and the Linguistic perception of existence become identical. The effect is exhilarating and also rather terrifying.” “The Day of the Big Test” (1976) ticks all of those boxes and I desperately want to read more of his stories.

Goltshalk spins a tale through the eyes of a “seven tier old” (77) kid named Bradley about to be tested by pysgnomomist named Dr. LeGrand. This intelligence test gives an encyclopedic glimpse into a world linked to ours but utterly transformed. Physically, the world experienced seismic rupture and a nuclear event that melted the layers of the past together: “beneath the turf are three layers of service decks for the city’s energy pool […] beneath the grid are the strata of previous ages: layers of space stations, ICBM’s, 797’s and huge varieties of aircraft, monorails, trains, autos, velospedes, housing cubules, plasticrete freeways, cracking towers, entire factories, and high-rise apartments” (76). Similarly, the story takes the reader on a whirlwind jarring and jumbling jaunt through the mindscape of the future via inundating linguistic displays, strange implanted technology, and subvocal communication. Of course, human material and social desires remain frightening similar to our own.

As a sucker for satires about isolation in the modern world, I’ll be reading more of Gotshalk’s work. Recommended for fans of slick SF satire.

“Contentment, Satisfaction, Well-Being, Gladness, Joy, Comfort, and Not Having to Get Up Early Any More” (1976), George Alec Effinger, 3.5/5 (Good): This summer I read the majority of Effinger’s brilliant novel The Wolves of Memory (1981). Unfortunately, the stresses of the fall semester caused me to put it aside and I forgot about it in a pile of other reads and half-formed projects. I’ll pick it up again in 2025. Despite its bibliographic listing as a standalone, “Contentment” is a direct prequel to The Wolves of Memory. It’s describes the dystopian abandonment of democracy and the emergence of TECT, a super computer. In The Wolves of Memory, the characters attempt to fight the arbitrary power exerted by the machine in the most nightmarish locale possible–a planet afflicted by a memory disease. In “Contentment,” the characters abandon themselves to the forces of homogenization and allow the machine to creep into all elements of their lives. Effinger depicts the descent into machine dictatorship as an exercise in banality. People do not care. And that’s the point.

Recommended for fans of Effinger. If you’re new to his fiction, take a gander at The Wolves of Memory (1981) or his New Wave masterpiece What Entropy Means to Me (1972).

“Coming-of-Age Day” (1965), A. K. Jorgensson, 5/5 (Masterpiece): First appeared in Science Fantasy, ed. Kyril Bonfiglioli (September 1965). The only published SF story of English author Robert W. A. Roach, “Coming-of-Age-Day” is an absolutely brilliant (and disquieting) analysis of a potential future backlash to loosening societal strictures on sex and sexuality that characterized the Swinging London of the 60s. The story, told retrospectively by a convertee to the new prudishness, recounts his youthful days attempting to learn about the nature of sex. His father refuses to tell him. His school only hints in the direction of morality and control. And his friends are equally and hilariously confused. One childhood theory is that men grow a “little hairy monkey about inside their trousers” (117).

But what’s the SF twist? Part of the confusion centers around the stomach bulge that both women and men seem to suddenly have. One day, when the narrator was a kid, he saw a woman on the beach suddenly start screaming. As her fellow beachgoers attempted to shield her from onlookers, the narrator sees “this sort of huge fleshy roll” clinging to her and what looks like a “tentacle” (118). He recounts how he went in for measurements for his own fleshy device. This is a spectacular exercise in visceral unease all wrapped up in the childhood yearning to know and understand a world whose particulars and behaviors seem just out of reach.

I loved this one. One of the best social satires I’ve read in a while due to the heady brew of cringe, hilarity, and perverse fascination it evokes. One of those stories that would have found the perfect home in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions (1967). I wish Jorgensson published more.

“Thanatos” (1976), Vonda N. McIntyre, 3.25/5 (Above Average): In an ecologically devastated future devoid of mammals other than “a few rodents in laboratories and slums,” animal testing takes on an even more sinister shade (133). Allin, a capture member of a failed revolutionary movement whose members “knew they would end up dead” (131), ends up in a mysterious medical facility. Criminals forfeit their lives to “involuntary servitude” (130). A harrow sequence of events unfold that are not for all readers (sexual violence, extreme cruelty, etc.).

As with so many of McIntyre’s fiction, “Thanatos” continues her fascinating with technology prematurely and cruelly unleashed. Despite struggling with the story’s ending, I found it a meticulously exercise in constructing an utterly brutal and unforgiving hellscape. The story doubles as a condemnation of animal testing and the inhuman abuses of the prison system.

For superior McIntyre short stories, check out her collection Fireflood and Other Stories (1979).

“The Eyeflash Miracles” (1976), Gene Wolfe, 4/5 (Good): Nominated for the 1977 Nebula Award for Best Novella. The longest and densest story in the collection, “The Eyeflash Miracles” melds intertextual play with famous children’s fiction (The Marvelous Land of Oz) and a rumination on the nature of religion in all its syncretic manifestation.

“The Eyeflash Miracles” follows the adventures of the blind and precocious Little Tib as he journeys across a barely hinted dystopian, and automated, future. Interspersed are memories of his past before the deliberate destruction of his retinas and dream-like visions that entirely consume him. On his journey he meets with a variety of strange denizens including a layoff school superintendent who wants him to break into a government buildings and modify records, his side-kick school handyman Nitty (who genuinely cares for Little Tib), the proprietor of a roving Hindu/syncretic temple in a bus, and various stand-ins for Oz’s unusual characters. This is a fascinating conjuration of the archetypal religious journey, the unusual events and their interpreters and accompanying miracles, through the lens of childhood nostalgia made strangely manifest.

While I’ve seen the film version of Oz as a small child, I relied on others (see below) to identify the connections. That said, I’d suggest that “The Eyeflash Miracles” functions as a cohesive vision regardless of your previous knowledge. Here are two resources that break down all the layers of Wolfe’s story as my take is deliberately brief. For the Oz references, check out this Wiki. And here for a detailed plot and imagery breakdown.

I found Wolfe’s way of telling the most brilliant and quietly radical elements of the story. Other than Little Tib’s memories of sight and dream sequences, the story contains no visual descriptions. We follow the character of Little Tib who must use his hands and senses to understand his world. Recommended. That said, I’m not entirely a Wolfe devotee. My favorite Wolfe SF short story remains “Silhouette” (1975).

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