The Best From Fantasy & Science Fiction Part 5

There were straps across his chest.

He turned toward the suitcase, his back to me. The hump was artificial, made of something like foam rubber. He unhooked the straps, opened the suitcase, and tossed the hump in. He said something, too soft for me to catch, and lay face down on the couch with his feet toward me. The light from the opened curtain fell on him. His back was scarred, little white lines like scratches grouped around a hole.

He had a hole in his back, between his shoulder blades, an un-healed wound big enough to stick your finger in.

Something came around the end of the couch. It wasn't a cat. I thought it was a monkey, and then a frog, but it was neither. It was human. It waddled on all fours like an enormous toad.

Then it stood erect. It was about the size of a cat It was pink and moist and hairless and naked. Its very human hands and feet and male genitals were too large for its tiny body. Its belly was swollen, turgid and distended like an obscene tick. Its head was flat Its jaw protruded like an ape's. It too had a scar, a big, white, puckered scar between its shoulder blades, at the top of its jutting backbone.

It reached its too-large hand up and caught hold of Detweiler's belt It pulled its bloated body up with the nimbleness of a monkey and crawled onto the boy's back. Detweiler was breathing heavily, clasping and unclasping his fingers on the arm of the couch.

The thing crouched on Detweiler's back and placed its lips against the wound.

I felt my throat burning and my stomach turning over, but I watched in petrified fascination.

Detweiler's breathing grew slower and quieter, more relaxed. He lay with his eyes closed and an expression of almost s.e.xual pleasure on his face. The thing's body got smaller and smaller, the skin on its belly growing wrinkled and flaccid. A trickle of blood crawled from the wound, making an erratic line across the Detweiler boy's back. The thing reached out its hand and wiped the drop back with a It took about ten minutes. The thing raised its mouth and crawled over beside the boy's face. It sat on the arm of the couch like a little gnome and smiled. It ran its fingers down the side of Detweiler's cheek and pushed his damp hair back out of his eyes. Detweiler's expression was euphoric. He sighed softly and opened his eyes sleepily. After a while he sat up.

He was flushed with health, rosy and clear and s.h.i.+ning.

He stood up and went in the bathroom. The light came on and I heard water running. The thing sat in the same place watching him. Detweiler came out of the bathroom and sat back on the couch. The thing climbed onto his back, huddling between his shoulder blades, its hand on his shoulders. Detweiler stood up, the thing hanging onto hhn, retrieved the shut, and put it on. He wrapped the straps nearly around the artificial hump and stowed it in the suitcase. He closed the lid and locked itI had seen enough, more than enough- I opened the door and stepped out of the closet.

Detweiler whirled, his eyes bulging. A groan rattled in his throat He raised his hands as if fending me off. The groan rose hi pitch, becoming an hysterical keening. The expression on his face was too horrible to watch. He stepped backward and tripped over the suitcase.

He lost his balance and toppled over. His arms flailed for equilibrium, but never found it He struck the edge of the table. It caught mm square across the hump on his back. He bounced and fell forward on his hands. He stood up agonizingly, like a slow motion movie, arching his spine backward, his face contorted in pain.

There were shrill, staccato shrieks of mindless torment, but they didn't come from Detweiler.

He fell again, forward onto the couch, blacking out from pain.

The back of his s.h.i.+rt was churning. The scream continued, hurting my ears. Rips appeared in the s.h.i.+rt and a small misshapen arm poked out briefly. I could only stare, frozen. The s.h.i.+rt was ripped to shreds.

Two arms, a head, a torso came through. The whole thing ripped its way out and fell onto the couch beside the boy. Its face was twisted, tortured, and its mouth kept opening and closing with the screams.

Its eyes looked uncomprehendingly about. It pulled itself along with its arms, dragging its useless legs, its spine obviously broken. It fell off the couch and flailed about on the floor.

Detweiler moaned and came to. He rose from the couch, still groggy. He saw the thing, and a look of absolute grief appeared on his face.

The thing's eyes focused for a moment on Detweiler. It looked at him, beseeching, held out one hand, pleading. Its screams continued, that one monotonous, hopeless note repeated over and over. It lowered its arm and kept crawling about mindlessly, growing weaker.

Detweiler stepped toward it, ignoring me, tears pouring down his face. The thing's struggles grew weaker, the scream became a breathless rasping. I couldn't stand it any longer. I picked up a chair and smashed it down on the thing. I dropped the chair and leaned against the wall and heaved.

I heard the door open. I turned and saw Detweiler run out.

I charged after him. My legs felt rubbery but I caught him at the street He didn't struggle. He just stood there, his eyes vacant, trembling. I saw people sticking their heads out of doors and Johnny Peac.o.c.k coming toward me. My car was right there. I pushed Detweiler into it and drove away. He sat hunched in the seat, his hands hanging limply, staring into s.p.a.ce. He was trembling uncontrollably and his teeth chattered.

I drove, not paying any attention to where I was going, almost as deeply in shock as he was. I finally started looking at the street signs. I was on Mullholland. I kept going west for a long time, crossed the San Diego Freeway, into the Santa Monica Mountains. The pavement ends a couple of miles past the freeway, and there's ten or fifteen miles of dirt road before the pavement picks up again nearly to Topanga. The road isn't traveled much, there are no houses on it, and people don't like to get their cars dusty. I was about in the middle of the unpaved section when Detweiler seemed to calm down. I pulled over to the side of the road and cut the engine. The San Fernando Valley was spread like a carpet of lights below us. The ocean was on the other side of the mountains.

I sat and watched Detweiler. The trembling had stopped. He was asleep or unconscious. I reached over and touched his arm. He stirred and clutched at my hand. I looked at his sleeping face and didn't have the heart to pull my hand away.

The sun was poking over the mountains when he woke up. He roused and was momentarily unaware of where he was; then memory flooded back. He turned to me. The pain and hysteria were gone from his eyes. They were oddly peaceful.

"Did you hear him?" he said softly. "Did you hear him die?"

"Are you feeling better?"

"Yes. It's all over."

"Do you want to talk about it?"

His eyes dropped and he was silent for a moment "I want to tell you. But I don't know how without you thinking I'm a monster."

I didn't say anything."He . . . was my brother. We were twins. Siamese twins. All those people died so I could stay alive."

There was no emotion in his voice. He was detached, talking about someone else. "He kept me alive. I'll die without him." His eyes met mine again. "He was insane, I think. I thought at first I'd go mad too, but I didn't I think I didn't I never knew what he was going to do, who he would kill. I didn't want to know.

He was very clever. He always made it look like an accident or suicide when he could. I didn't interfere.

I didn't want to die. We had to have blood. He always did it so there was lots of blood, so no one would miss what he took." His eyes were going empty again.

"Why did you need the blood?"

"We were never suspected before."

"Why did you need the blood?" I repeated.

"When we were bora," he said, and his eyes focused again, "we were joined at the back. But I grew and he didn't. He stayed little bitty, like a baby riding around on my back. People didn't like me ... us, they were afraid. My father and mother too. The old witch-woman I told you about, she birthed us. She seemed always to be hanging around. When I was eight, my parents died in a fire. I think the witch-woman did it. After that I lived with her. She was demented, but she knew medicine and healing.

When we were fifteen she decided to separate us. I don't know why. I think she wanted him without me.

I'm sure she thought he was an imp from h.e.l.l. I almost died. Fm not sure what was wrong. Apart, we weren't whole. I wasn't whole. He had something I didn't have, something we'd been sharing. She would've let me die, but he knew and got blood for me. Hers." He sat staring at me blankly, his mind living the past "Why didn't you go to a hospital or something?" I asked, feeling enormous pity for the wretched boy.

He smiled faintly. "I didn't know much about anything then. Too many people were already dead. If I'd gone to a hospital, they'd have wanted to know how I'd stayed alive so far. Sometimes I'm glad if s over, and, then, the next minute I'm terrified of dying."

"How long?"

"I'm not sure. I've never been more than three days. I can't stand it any longer than that. He knew.

He always knew when I had to have it And he got it for me. I never helped him."

"Can you stay alive if you get regular transfusions?"

He looked at me sharply, fear creeping back. "Please. No!"

"But you'll stay alive."

"In a cage! Like a freak! I don't want to be a freak anymore. It's over. I want it to be over. Please."

"What do you want me to do?"

"I don't know. I don't want you to get in trouble."

I looked at him, at his face, at his eyes, at his soul. "There's a gun in the glove compartment," I said.

He sat for a moment then solemnly held out his hand. I took it He shook my hand, then opened the glove compartment He removed the gun and slipped out of the car. He went down the hill into the brush.

I waited and waited and never did hear a shot.

Novelist and critic Joanna Russ teaches English at the University of Was.h.i.+ngton. When our starting book reviewer, Algis Budrys, tires, our favorite relief reviewer is Ms. Russ. Here she offers a fascinating article (in response to some critical letters) which tells why critics are such sn.o.bs and are so vitriolic, among many other things.

Books: In Defense of Criticism

JOANNA RUSS.

Critics seem to find it necessary, at least once in a career, to write a statement defending criticism per se. Shaw, Pauline Kael, Eric Bentley, and James Blish have all done it. That I'm doing it too, doesn't prove I'm in the same league, but it does indicate the persistence of the issues involved and that theyoccur outside, as well as inside, science fiction.

I have tried to speak to general issues rather than "defend" my own criticism. Issues are, in any case, more important than personalities, although there is a (small) section of fandom which sees in aesthetic or political disagreement nothing but personal squabbling motivated by envy. It's not for me to judge how good my criticism is; if enough readers think it's bad, and the editor thinks so too, presumably h.e.l.l stop printing it although writing book reviews (except for places like the New York Times) is underpaid, overworked, and a labor of love. The problem is usually to recruit reviewers, not discourage them.

Here are some of the complaints that keep coming up.

1. Don't shove your politics into your reviews. Just review the books.

I will-when the authors keep politics out of their stories. But they never do; in fact, it seems absolutely impossible to write anything without immediately making all sorts of a.s.sumptions about what human nature is, what good and bad behavior consists of, what men ought to be, what women ought to be, which states of mind and character are valuable, which are the opposite, and so on. Once fiction gets beyond the level of minimal technical competence, a reviewer must address these judgments of value.

Generally, readers don't notice the presence of familiar value judgments in stories, but do notice (and object to) unfamiliar ones as "political." Hence arises the insistence (in itself a very vehement, political judgment) that art and politics have nothing to do with one another, that artists ought to be "above"

politics, and that a critic making political comments about fiction is importing something foreign into an essentially neutral area. But if "politics" means the relations of power that obtain between groups of people, and the way these are concretely embodied in personal relations, social inst.i.tutions, and received ideas (among which is the idea that art ought not to be political), then such neutrality simply doesn't exist Fiction which isn't openly polemical or didactic is nonetheless chock-full of politics. If beauty in fiction bears any relation to truth (as Matthew Arnold thought), then the human (including social and political) truth of a piece of fiction matters, for aesthetic reasons. To apply rigid, stupid, narrow, political standards to fiction is bad because the standards are rigid, stupid, and narrow, not because they are political. For an example of (to my mind) profound, searching, brilliant, political criticism, see Jean-Paul Sartre's Saint Genet.

2. You don't prove what you say; you just a.s.sert it.

This statement is, I think, based on a cognitive error inculcated (probably) by American high school education. The error is that all proofs must be of the "hard" kind, i.e., cut-and-dried and susceptible of presentation in syllogistic form. An acquaintance with the modern philosophy of science would disabuse people of this notion; even a surprising amount of scientific proof is not of this kind. As philosophers since Plato have been pointing out, aesthetic and moral matters are usually not susceptible of such "hard" proof.

3. Then your opinion is purely subjective.

The a.s.sumption here is that matters not subject to cut-and-dried "hard" proof don't bear any relation to evidence, experience, or reason at all and are, therefore, completely arbitrary. There is considerable indirect evidence one can bring against this view. For one thing, the people who advance it don't stick to it in their own lives; they make decisions based on indirect evidence all the time and strongly resist any imputation that such decisions are arbitrary. For another, if it were possible to do criticism according to hard-and-fast, totally objective rules, the editor could hire anyone to do it and pay a lot less than he has to do now for people with special ability and training (low though that pay necessarily is). It's true that the apparatus by which critics judge books is subjective in the sense of being inside the critic and not outside, unique, and based on the intangibles of training, talent, and experience. But that doesn't per se make it arbitrary. What can make it seem arbitrary is that the whole preliminary process of judgment, if you trace it through all its stages, is coextensive with the critic's entire education. So critics tend to suppress it in reviews (with time and training most of it becomes automatic, anyway). Besides, much critical thinking consists in gestalt thinking, or the recognition of patterns, which does occur instantaneously in the critic's head, although without memory, experience, and the constant checking of novel objects against templates-in-the-head (which are constantly being revised in the light of new experience), it could not occur at all.* [* I used to inform people of the endings of television plays (before the endings happened) until my acquaintances gently but firmly informed me they would rather the endings came as a surprise.When asked bow I knew what was coming, by friends who enjoyed such an odd talent (and some do), I could explain only pan of the time. The cues people respond to hi fiction or drama are complex and people are not always fully conscious of them.]

Hence angry readers can make the objection above, or add: 4. Everyone's ent.i.tled to his own opinion.

Have you noticed how often people say "I feel" instead of "I think" or (G.o.d forbid) "I know"? Kids who discover "It's a free country!" at seven graduate to "Everyone's ent.i.tled to his own opinion" by fourteen. The process of intimidation by which young people are made to feel humanly worthless if they don't appreciate "great literature" (literature the teacher often doesn't understand or can't explain)! is one of the ghastly facts of American education. Some defenses against this experience take the form of a.s.serting there's no such thing as great art; some, that whatever moves one intensely is great art. Both are ways of a.s.serting the primacy and authenticity of one's own experience, and that's fine. But whatever you (or I) like intensely isn't, just because of that, great anything, and the literary canon, although incomplete and biased, is not merely an insider's sn.o.bbish conspiracy to make outsiders feel rotten. (Although it is certainly used that way far too often.) The problem with literature and literary criticism is that there is no obvious craft involved-so people who wouldn't dream of challenging a dance critic's comments on an a.s.soluta's line or a prima donna's musicians.h.i.+p are conscious of no reason not to dismiss mine on J. R. R. Tolkien. We're all dealing with language, after all, aren't we? But there is a very substantial craft involved here, although its material isn't toes or larynxes. And some opinions are worth a good deal more than others.

5. I knew it, You're a sn.o.b.

Science fiction is a small country which for years has maintained a protective standards-tariff to encourage native manufactures. Many readers are, in fact, unacquainted with the general canon of English literature or the standards of criticism outside our own small field. Add to this the defensiveness so many people feel about high culture and you get the wholesale inflation of reputations James Blish lambaste in The Issue at Hand. Like him, I believe that somebody has to stop handing out stars and kisses: If "great writer" means Charles d.i.c.kens or Virginia Woolf (not to mention William Shakespeare), then it does not mean C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien, about whom the most generous consensus of mainstream critical opinion is that they are good, interesting, minor authors. And so on. [ Or oddities that entered the curriculum decades before and refuse to be dislodged, like "To a Waterfowl." For some reason students often end up with the most sophisticated, flawed, or least-accessible works of great writers: twelve-year-olds reading Romeo and Juliet, toe example, or Silas Marner.]

6. You're vitriolic, too.

It's true. Critics tend to be an irritable lot Here are some examples: "That light-hearted body, the Bach Choir, has had what I may befittingly call another shy at the Ma.s.s in B minor." (George Bernard Shaw, Music in London, v. ii, Constable & Co., Ltd.. London, 1956, p.

55.).

" This eloquent novel,* says the jacket of Taylor Caldwell's The Devil's Advocate, making two errors in three words. . . ." (Damon Knight, In Search of Wonder, Advent, Chicago, 1967, p. 29.) ". . . Mr. Zirul has committed so many other failures of technique that a whole course in fiction writing could be erected above his hapless corpse." (William Atheling, Jr. [James Blish], The Issue at Hand, Advent, Chicago, 1964, p. 83.) Why do we do it?

First, there is the reactive pain. Only those who have reviewed, year in and year out, know how truly abominable most fiction Is. And we can't remove ourselves from the pain. Ordinary readers can skip, or read every third word, or quit in the middle. We can't We must read carefully, with our sensitivities at full operation and our critical-historical apparatus always in high gear-or we may miss that subtle satire which disguises itself as cliche, that first novel whose beginning, alas, was never revised, that gem of a quiet story obscured in a loud, flashy collection, that experiment in form which could be mistaken for sloppiness, that appealing tale partly marred by (but also made possible by) naivete, that complicated situation that only pays off near the end of the book. Such works exist but in order not to miss them, onemust continually extend one's sensitivity, knowledge, and critical care to works that only abuse such faculties. The mental sensation is that of eating garbage, I a.s.sure you, and if critics' acc.u.mulated suffering did not find an outlet in the vigor of our language, I don't know what we would do. And it's the critics who care the most who suffer the most; irritation is a sign of betrayed love. As Shaw puts it: ". . . criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man [sic] a critic. . . . when people do less than their best, and do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage or platform. ... In the same way really fine artists inspire me with the warmest possible regard. . . . When my critical mood is at its height personal feeling is not the word; it is pa.s.sion. . . ." (Music in London, v. i, Constable ft Co., London, 1956, pp.

51-52).

But there are other reasons. Critical judgments are so complex (and take place in such a complicated context), the vocabulary of praise and blame available in English is so vague, so fluid, and so constantly s.h.i.+fting, and the physical s.p.a.ce allowed is so small that critics welcome any way of expressing judgments that will be both precise and compact. If vivid be added thereunto, fine-what else is good style? Hence critics, whenever possible, express their judgments in figurative language. Wit is a form of condensation (see Freud if you think this is my arbitrary fiat) just as parody is a form of criticism (see Dwight McDonald's Modern Library collection thereof).

Dramatization is another. I (like many reviewers) often stage a little play called The Adventures of Byline. Byline (or "I") is the same species of creature as the Kindly Editor or the Good Doctor, who appear from time to time in these pages. That is, she is a form of shorthand. When Byline rewrites story X, that doesn't mean that I-the real, historical personage-actually did or will or wish to rewrite story X, or that I expect its real, historical author to rewrite it to Byline's prescription, any more than my saying that "my" copy of Bug Jack Ban-on tried to punch "me" in the nose means that such an event really happened. Pauline Kael's Movie Loon is another such fiction; these little creatures we send scurrying about the page are not our real, live selves, and their exploits are dictated more by the exigencies of our form than by a desire for personal glory.

7. Never mind all that stuff. Just tell me what I'd enjoy reading.

Bless you, what makes you think I know? (See, there goes Byline.) Actually, critics can make educated guesses from time to time about the tastes of some groups of readers. Editors must, such judgments being their bread and b.u.t.ter-and look how often they fail. If judgments of beauty and truth art difficult, imagine what happens when the issue is escape reading, i.e., something as idiosyncratic as guided daydreams. Perhaps the popularity of series novels is due in part to readers' desire for a reliable, easily reproducible pleasure. [Though Dune is, strictly speaking, science fiction. Wilson was talking about tbe-gnat-kader syndrome, and the heroic atmosphere Dune shares with heroic fantasy.] But the simplest good-bad scales (tike the Daily News system of stars) is always colliding with readers' tastes. Some writers and publishers, in order to be sure of appealing to at least a stable fraction of the market, standardize their product This can be done, but it tends to eliminate from fiction these idiosyncratic qualities other readers find valuable, art being of an order of complexity nearer to that of human beings (high) than that of facial tissues (low).

Now back to the topic of heroic fantasy, which occasioned the foregoing.

I know it's painful to be told that something in which one has invested intense emotion is not only bad art but bad for you, not only bad for you but ridiculous. I didn't do it to be mean, honest Nor did I do it because the promise held out by heroic fantasy-the promise of escape into a wonderful Other world-is one I find temperamentally unappealing. On the contrary. It's because I understand the intensity of the demand so well (having spent my twenties reading Eddison and Tolkien; I even adapted The Hobbit for the stage) that I also understand the absolute impossibility of ever fulfilling that demand.

The current popularity of heroic fantasy scares me; I believe it to be a symptom of political and cultural reaction due to economic depression. So does Robin Scott Wilson (who electrified a Modem Language a.s.sociation seminar by calling Dune a fascist book), and Michael Moorc.o.c.k (see his jacket copy for Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream, a novel which vehemently denounces the genre in the same termsWilson does), and the writers of Bored of the Rings, the Lampoon parody, from which came "Arrowroot, son of Arrows.h.i.+rt"

Briefly, to answer other statements in the letters: I apologize for implying that Tolkien's hobbits and Ents (or his other bucolic-comic creations) are as empty-sublime as the Big People's heroics. But I agree (see question 5) that Tolkien is a good, interesting, minor writer whose strong point is his paysages moralists. Ditto C S. Lewis, in his Narnia books. As for other writers mentioned, only strong, selective blindness could miss the Vancian cynicism or the ma.s.sive Dunsanian irony (sometimes spilling over into despair) which make their heroism far from simple or unquestioned-by-the-authors-them-selves. As for the others, I find them ghastly when uncorrected by i comedy, or satire (Morris, sometimes), or (in Beagle's case) the nostalgic wistfulness which belongs to fantasy per se rather than the publisher's category (that, historically, is what it is) of heroic fantasy. I don't need to bad-mouth Pool Andersen, James Blish having already adequately done so, calling him (in his heroic phase) "the Thane of Minneapolis. . . . Anderson can write well, but this is seldom evident while he is in his Scand avatar, when he seems invariably to be writing in his sleep." (The Issue at Hand, p. 72.) That our literary heritage began with feudal epics and marchen is no reason to keep on writing them forever. And daydreams about being tall, handsome (or beautiful), n.o.ble, admired, and involved in thrilling deeds is not the same as the as-if speculation which produces medical and technological advances.

It isn't the realists who find life dreadful. It's the romancers. After all, which group is trying to escape from life? Reality is horrible and wonderful, disappointing and ecstatic, beautiful and ugly. Reality is everything. Reality is what there is. Only the hopelessly insensitive find reality so pleasant as to never want to get away from it But pain-killers can be bad for the health, and even if they were not, I am d.a.m.ned if anyone will make me say that the newest fad in a.n.a.lgesics is equivalent to the illumination, which is the other thing (besides pleasure) art ought to provide. Bravery, n.o.bility, sublimity, and beauty that have no connection with the real world are simply fake, and once readers realize that escape does not work, the glamor fades, the sublime aristocrats turn silly, the profundities become simplifications, and one enters (if one is lucky) into the dreadful discipline of reality and art, like "In the Penal Colony." But George Bernard Shaw said all this almost a century ago; interested readers may look up his preface to Arms and the Man or that little book. The Quintessence of Ibsenism.

It's disheartening to see how little has changed. On the other hand, there is no pleasure like finding out the realities of human life, in which joy and misery, effort and release, dread and happiness, walk hand in hand.

We had better enjoy it It's what there is.

-Joanna Russ It is the year 2783. Suddenly the galaxy is invaded by a horde of alien beings, the Zorphs. They enslave all planets in their path. You, as Captain of the Avenger, the great Terran wars.h.i.+p, will range interstellar s.p.a.ce, seeking out and destroying the forces of Zorph. This is but a bare outline of the ultimate in computer games . . .

Zorphwar!

STAN DRYER.

Megalo Network Message: June 10,1977 Source: P. T. Warrington, Headquarters, Los Gringos, California Destination: W. S. Halson, Programming Services, Wrapping Falls, New York Subject: Schedule Compliance in Programming Services Bill, Old Buddy, I think you have problems.

J.L. was down this morning b.i.t.c.hing about your performance. The PERT printout indicates you have slipped schedule on Accounting Project 8723 by two months. In addition, your usage of centralcomputer facilities is running 42 percent over budget Remember that the Megalo Corporation is not in business for its health. Accounting is depending on Program S723 to keep track of profitability in the entire Computer Products Division.