Tag: 1976

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr by George R. R. Martin (Fantastic, May 1976) opens with Sharra passing through a world gate. She has injuries from her fight with the gate’s guardian, and washes her wounds before falling asleep in a sheltered spot in the wood. Then Sharra regains consciousness to find that she is being lifted into the arms of a man. She is too weak to struggle, and he takes her to a nearby castle that was not there before.
When Sharra next wakes up she finds out that her saviour is called Laren Dorr, and the rest of the story sees them spend a month together at the castle (she agrees to stay and rest if he will show her where the next gate is). During this time, they talk and travel, and eventually become lovers.
From their conversations we learn the backstories of both characters: Sharra is making her way through various world gates as she searches for her lover, Kaydar, but the Seven don’t want her to succeed and have instructed the guardians of the gates to prevent her from passing; Dorr lost a battle with the Seven an age ago, was banished here, and has spent many years alone. Some of the information about Dorr is revealed through the songs that he sings for Sharra while playing an exotic sixteen-string instrument:

He touched it again, and the music rose and died, lost notes without a tune. And he brushed the light-bars and the very air shimmered and changed color.
He began to sing.
I am the lord of loneliness,
Empty my domain . . .
. . . the first words ran, sung low and sweet in Laren’s mellow far-off fog voice. The rest of the song—Sharra clutched at it, heard each word and tried to remember, but lost them all. They brushed her, touched her, then melted away, back into the fog, here and gone again so swift that she could not remember quite what they had been. With the words, the music; wistful and melancholy and full of secrets, pulling at her, crying, whispering promises of a thousand tales untold. All around the room the candles flamed up brighter, and globes of light grew and danced and flowed together until the air was full of color.
Words, music, light; Laren Dorr put them all together, and wove for her a vision.
She saw him then as he saw himself in his dreams; a king, strong and tall and still proud, with hair as black as hers and eyes that snapped. He was dressed all in shimmering white, pants that clung tight and a shirt that ballooned at the sleeves, and a great cloak that moved and curled in the wind like a sheet of solid snow.
Around his brow he wore a crown of flashing silver, and a slim, straight sword flashed just as bright at his side. This Laren, this younger Laren, this dream vision, moved without melancholy, moved in a world of sweet ivory minarets and languid blue canals. And the world moved around him, friends and lovers and one special woman whom Laren drew with words and lights of fire, and there was an infinity of easy days and laughter. Then, sudden, abrupt; darkness, he was here.  pp. 50-51

At the end of the month Shaara tells Dorr it is time for her to leave, and he takes her to the gate which, to Shaara’s surprise, is in third tower of the castle. On their arrival (spoiler), she is surprised to discover that there is no guardian present—at which point Dorr reveals himself and pushes her through the gate.
I thought this was a very good piece the first time I read it, but this time around I thought it was somewhat overwritten and a little slow-moving (see the passage above). That said, the part where Dorr pushes her through the gate rather than detain her is a neat twist (I think my subconscious was expecting him to be the guardian but I did not anticipate his actions) and, overall, it is a decent mood piece.
*** (Good). 7,250 words. Story link.

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson

Posted on by Paul Fraser

By Any Other Name by Spider Robinson (Analog, November 1976)1 is a post-collapse story—this time humanity’s fall is caused by the intentional release of a virus that hugely enhances human sense of smell and causes what is known as the Hypersomic Plague:

Within forty-eight hours [of the release of the virus] every man, woman and child left alive on earth possessed a sense of smell approximately a hundred times more efficient than that of any wolf that ever howled.
During those forty-eight hours, a little less than a fifth of the planet’s population perished, by whatever means they could devise, and every city in the world spilled its remaining life into the surrounding countryside. The ancient smell-suppressing system of the human brain collapsed under unbearable demand, overloaded and burned out in an instant.
The great complex behemoth called Modern Civilization ground to a halt in a little less than two days.  pp. 29-30

This change to the human sensorium also enables the afflicted survivors to detect an invisible, gaseous race of beings called “Muskies” who, once they discover that humans can sense them, go on the attack:

It is difficult for us to imagine today how it was possible for the human race to know of the Muskies for so long without ever believing in them. Countless humans reported contact with Muskies—who at various times were called “ghosts,” “poltergeists,” “leprechauns,” “fairies,” “gremlins,” and a host of other misleading labels—and not one of these thousands of witnesses was believed by humanity at large. Some of us saw our cats stare, transfixed, at nothing at all, and wondered—but did not believe—what they saw. In its arrogance the race assumed that the peculiar perversion of entropy called “life” was the exclusive property of solids and liquids.
Even today we know very little about the Muskies, save that they are gaseous in nature and perceptible only by smell. The interested reader may wish to examine Dr. Michael Gowan’s groundbreaking attempt at a psychological analysis of these entirely alien creatures. Riders of the Wind (Fresh Start Press, 1986).  pp. 31-32

If these two gimmicks sound like they stretch credulity to breaking point, they come close, and it is a testament to Robinson’s storytelling skills that he manages to hold the story together. I’m getting ahead of myself, however.
The tale opens with (unusually for the time) a black narrator called Isham Stone accidentally shooting a cat as he enters a post-apocalyptic New York (he is on edge, has an infected arm, and acts before thinking). Stone has travelled to the city to kill a man called Wendell Carlson, who Stone’s father has identified as the man responsible for the virus (Stone’s father worked with Carlson before the Plague).
When Stone reaches Central Park he stops for a rest, and is disturbed by an old leopard. He presumes the animal is a zoo escapee so he gives it something to eat, and then collapses with exhaustion. He smokes a joint, and thinks about his self-defence training and the mission that lies ahead of him.
After a little more post-collapse travelogue Stone eventually arrives at Columbia University, Carlson’s reported abode. He waits outside for Carlson to appear and, when he does, takes a shot—he misses, and is then attacked by six Muskies. Stone manages to kill five of them with his “hot-shot” shells and grenades before he loses consciousness.
The story then cuts, after another of the data-dump chapters (these post-plague accounts of the collapse of civilization and the advent of the Muskies alternate with Stone’s account of his journey), to Stone arriving back at Fresh Start to tell his father that he has killed Carlson.
The final section of the story then flashbacks to what actually happened after Stone woke up. This begins (spoiler) with Stone seeing that his arm has been partially amputated before Carlson arrives with food and drink and the news that he has been unconscious for a week. Then, as Stone begins his long recovery, he is informed of two significant pieces of information: (a) Carlson has learned to communicate with the Muskies; and (b) Stone’s father (Carlson’s laboratory assistant before the plague) was the one who was responsible for releasing the virus.
The final scene sees Stone back in Fresh Start, booby-trapping his father’s toilet with bleach (which produces chlorine gas when mixed with an appropriate substance). Stone knows his father has had his adenoids removed and that he will not, unlike the rest of the residents of Fresh Start, be able to smell the gas.
As I said above, these plot elements (and the data-dump chapters) do not suggest a promising piece but, while the story isn’t worthy of a Hugo Award,2 it is an engaging read because of Robinson’s informal narrative style—the narrator effectively chats to the reader—and its passages of effective description:

This old cat seemed friendly enough, though, now that I noticed. He looked patriarchal and wise, and he looked awful hungry if it came to that. I made a gambler’s decision for no reason that I can name. Slipping off my rucksack slowly and deliberately. I got out a few foodtabs, took four steps toward the leopard and sat on my heels, holding out the tablets.
Instinct, memory or intuition, the big cat recognized my intent and loped my way without haste. Somehow the closer he got the less scared I got, until he was nuzzling my hand with a maw that could have amputated it. I know the foodtabs didn’t smell like anything, let alone food, but he understood in some empathic way what I was offering—or perhaps he felt the symbolic irony of two ancient antagonists, black man and leopard, meeting in New York City to share food. He ate them all, without nipping my fingers. His tongue was startlingly rough and rasping, but I didn’t flinch, or need to. When he was done he made a noise that was a cross between a cough and a snore and butted my leg with his head.  p. 35

*** (Good). 23,850 words. Story link.

1. This story forms the first six chapters (about a quarter of the length) of the novel Telempath (1976).

2. I suspect that Robinson’s Hugo was more a popularity award given variously for his convention presence, opinionated book review columns in Galaxy (I think the first one was subtitled Spider Versus the Hax of Sol III), and possibly his “Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon” story series. Robinson’s ISFDB page.

The Burning Man by Ray Bradbury

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Burning Man by Ray Bradbury (Long After Midnight, 1976)1 opens with a boy called Doug and his Aunt Neva driving to the lake in a “rickety Ford” on a baking hot day. On the way they stop to pick up a hitchhiker, a strange man who, as soon he gets in the car, starts raving about the heat, whether it can make you crazy, and various other things. Eventually, after asking Neva if she thinks there is genetic evil in the world, he articulates his strangest idea yet:

“Now,” said the man, squinting one eye at the cool lake five miles ahead, his other eye shut into darkness and ruminating on coal-bins of fact there, “listen. What if the intense heat, I mean the really hot hot heat of a month like this, week like this, day like today, just baked the Ornery Man right out of the river mud. Been there buried in the mud for forty-seven years, like a damn larva, waiting to be born. And he shook himself awake and looked around, full grown, and climbed out of the hot mud into the world and said, ‘I think I’ll eat me some summer.’”
“How’s that again?”
“Eat me some summer, boy, summer, ma’am. Just devour it whole. Look at them trees, ain’t they a whole dinner? Look at that field of wheat, ain’t that a feast? Them sunflowers by the road, by golly, there’s breakfast. Tarpaper on top that house, there’s lunch. And the lake, way up ahead, Jehoshaphat, that’s dinner wine, drink it all!”
“I’m thirsty, all right,” said Doug.
“Thirsty, hell, boy, thirst don’t begin to describe the state of a man, come to think about him, come to talk, who’s been waiting in the hot mud thirty years and is born but to die in one day! Thirst! Ye Gods! Your ignorance is complete.”
“Well,” said Doug.
“Well,” said the man. “Not only thirst but hunger. Hunger. Look around. Not only eat the trees and then the flowers blazing by the roads but then the white-hot panting dogs. There’s one. There’s another! And all the cats in the country. There’s two, just passed three! And then just glutton-happy begin to why, why not, begin to get around to, let me tell you, how’s this strike you, eat people? I mean—people! Fried, cooked, boiled, and parboiled people. Sunburned beauties of people. Old men, young. Old  ladies’ hats and then old ladies under their hats and then young ladies’ scarves and young ladies, and then young boys’ swim-trunks, by God, and young boys, elbows, ankles, ears, toes, and eyebrows! Eyebrows, by God, men, women, boys, ladies, dogs, fill up the menu, sharpen your teeth, lick your lips, dinner’s on!”

At this point Aunt Neva, who is obviously alarmed by the man’s raving, stops the car and tells him to get out, adding that she is armed with various items to ward off evil (crucifixes, holy water, wooden stakes, etc.). Aunt Neva and Doug continue their journey to the beach, and he learns that she lied to the man about being suitably equipped.
After a few hours at the lake they drive home in the dark. On the way (spoiler) they pick up a nine-year-old boy who has supposedly been left behind after a picnic. He is silent for a while, but then says something to Aunt Neva that makes her go pale. When Doug asks the boy what he said the car’s engine stops, and the boy asks whether either of them have ever wondered “if there is such a thing as genetic evil in the world?”
This is, like most late-period Bradbury, over-written and fanciful, and in this case has also a random ending—presumably the boy is another incarnation of the man, but this doesn’t tie in with the creation theory outlined earlier, or explain why the man didn’t pull this trick when he was first in the car. Just because this is a fantasy, it doesn’t mean that any old thing can happen.
* (Mediocre). 2,400 words. Story link.

1. According to ISFDB, this was first published as El Hombre Que Ardea in Gente (Argentina), 31st July 1975.

Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Richard Cowper

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Piper at the Gates of Dawn by Richard Cowper (F&SF, March 1976) opens1 with Peter, an old and itinerant tale-spinner, and Tom, the piper of the story, on the road to York as the third millennium approaches in a drowned, climate-changed, and post-collapse Britain.2 The pair pause by a stream to catch some dinner, which Tom apparently does by charming the fish out of the water with his pipe; while Tom plays Peter has a vision of a dragonfly, and then hears splashing when Tom successfully catches a huge salmon.
We see a further demonstration of Tom’s powers when the pair later approach a homestead which Peter lodged at years earlier:

They had passed almost through the herd before the farm dogs got wind of them. They came hurtling out from behind the stables, three lean, vicious-looking fell hounds, snarling and yelping in their eagerness to savage the intruders.
The boy stood his ground, calmly waited till the leader was but a short stone’s throw distant, then set the pipe to his lips and blew a series of darting notes of so high a pitch that the old man’s ears barely caught them. But the dogs did. They stopped almost dead in their tracks, for all the world as if they had run full tilt into a solid wall of glass. Next moment, the three of them were lying stretched out full length on the wet grass, whining, with their muzzles clasped in their forepaws and their eyes closed.  pp. 7-8

Shortly after this—once Peter tells the woman of the farm he stayed here before, and she realises he knows her husband—they are invited in. Then, when the young daughter of the house asks Tom to play, we learn that he was a pupil of Morfedd, The Wizard of Bowness, and that his pipe has been made for and also “tuned” to him. We also learn that Tom is now on his way to join the Minster Choir in York.
When the father and son return they all eat and, over dinner, we learn more about this primitive society, the “Drowning” that created it, and millennial rumours of peace and brotherhood that will soon be brought by “The White Bird of Kinship”. Then, after Peter tells a story of the times before the Drowning, Tom plays his pipe. After several tunes he plays a lament that he composed after Morfedd died:

To their dying day none of those present ever forgot the next ten minutes, and yet no two of them ever recalled it alike. But all were agreed on one thing. The boy had somehow contrived to take each of them, as it were, by the hand and lead them back to some private moment of great sadness in their own lives, so that they felt again, deep in their own hearts, all the anguish of an intense but long-forgotten grief. For most the memory was of the death of someone dearly loved, but for young Katie it was different and was somehow linked with some exquisite quality she sensed within the boy himself—something which carried with it an almost unbearable sense of terrible loss. Slowly it grew within her, swelling and swelling till in the end, unable to contain it any longer, she burst into wild sobs and buried her face in her father’s lap.  p. 18

The next day the pair leave and continue their journey, performing at various locations. Then, when the amount of money they start earning because of Tom’s playing wildly exceeds anything Peter has seen before, he tries to convince Tom to join him on the road. Tom says he must go to York because he promised Morfedd he would, and this was something his mentor had planned before Tom’s birth. Eventually, Tom’s playing (in particular a song about a “forthcoming”) begins to be linked with the millennial appearance of The White Bird of Kinship. This beings him to the attention of one of the church’s “crows”, and results in the appearance of a cross-bow bearing Church militiaman, or “Falcon”. Tom negates this threat by playing for him:

Whiteness exploded in the man’s mind. For an appalling instant he felt the very fabric of the world rending apart. Before his eyes the sun was spinning like a crazy golden top; glittering shafts of light leapt up like sparkling spears from hedgerow and hilltop; and all about his head the air was suddenly awash with the slow, majestic beating of huge, invisible wings. He felt an almost inexpressible urge to send a wild hosanna of joy fountaining upwards in welcome, while, at the same time, his heart was melting within him. He had become a tiny infant rocked in a warm cradle of wonder and borne aloft by those vast unseen pinions, up and up to join the blossoming radiance of the sun. And then, as suddenly as it had come, it was over; he was back within himself again, conscious only of a sense of desperate loss—of an enormous insatiable yearning.  p. 29

The Falcon—who is called Gyre—departs peacefully, apparently having forgotten that he heard Tom piping. Peter asks Tom what he did, and Tom says he told the man about the White Bird, something that, one day, he intends to do for everyone.
Eventually the pair arrive at York and the story’s final scenes drive the narrative to its climax: Peter bribes the Clerk to the Chapter to delay Tom’s entry to the Minster Choir so he can accrue a retirement nest-egg; the Chief Falconer of the Church Militant takes an interest in the increasing numbers of people arriving in York for the millennium, and the heretical rumours of the impending appearance of The White Bird of Kinship (one of his Marshalls tells him that the event is also referred to as ‘the forthcoming’ and it will offer humanity a another chance); Tom also meets Gyre again, and the Falcon warns him to leave York as he has had a premonitory dream about the boy three nights running.
The climactic scene sees Peter paying off the Clerk and then climbing the wall to see the bonfires outside, whereupon he hears Tom playing a lament for the White Bird of Kinship. Then, as Peter shares a transcendent experience with the crowd (“he too began to hear what Gyre had once heard—the great surging downrush of huge wings whose enormous beat was the very pulse of his own heart, the pulse of life itself”), Gyre shoots Tom with a crossbow bolt and kills him.
There is an extended postscript that reveals Gyre has no memory of his actions, and then, after the church tries to co-opt Tom’s death by burying him in the Minster, mourners at his funeral are seen to drop white feathers onto the coffin rather than earth. Meanwhile, one of the Marshalls tells the Chief Falconer that the end of the Kinship fable states that when the blood of the white bird splashes the breast of the black one, then the black bird becomes white itself. . . .
Finally, three days after the funeral, Peter rides out of the city with Gyre as his bonded man. Peter sets Gyre free and, to Peter’s surprise, Gyre takes out Tom’s pipe and starts playing it. Peter then has a number of epiphanies, including the thought that Tom may have arranged his own death. The last paragraphs suggest that Peter and Gyre will become the first preachers of this new religion:

A huge calmness descended upon him. He stretched out his arm and gripped Gyre gently by the shoulder. Then he walked down to the water’s edge and dipped both his hands into the sea. Returning, he tilted back Gyre’s head and with a wet finger drew across his forehead the sign that Tom had once drawn on a misty window of an inn—a child’s representation of a flying bird.
“Come, friend,” he said. “You and I together have a tale to tell. Let us be on our way.”  p. 51

I liked this story a lot—Cowper writes wonderful prose and tells a very readable and well characterised story, albeit a complex and symbolic one (I fear the synopsis and comments above barely plumb the depths of the piece). The story’s seemingly mythical or religious ending,3 and the apparent lack of an rational explanation, rather put me off this the first time around but it wasn’t a problem this time. I’d also add, for those who are not of a religious persuasion and are not interested in a replay of the Christ myth, or spotting the parallels, there are subtle hints that far-future technology or paranormal powers may have been deployed by Tom and his mentor Morfedd (the precognition of Morfedd, the tuning of Tom’s pipe, etc.). I can’t remember whether or not this climactic event is further explained in the trilogy4 that follows this story.
**** (Very Good). 21,100 words. Story link.

1. The story actually opens with a brief introduction from an Oxford academic in 3798 who, somewhat unconvincingly, sounds exactly like someone from our current day world.

2. I’m loathe to note the story’s mention of climate change and melting ice caps because most of the predictions SF writers make are usually wrong—but this is quite striking for a 1976 story:

The Drowning was the direct result of humanity’s corporate failure to see beyond the end of its own nose. By 1985 it was already quite obvious that the global climate had been modified to the point where the polar ice caps were affected.  p. 38

3. The writing and tone of this, along with the ambiguous ending, reminded me of Keith Roberts’ The Signaller (Impulse #1, March 1966).

4. This story, which was a Hugo and Nebula finalist, and second in the Locus Poll novella category, was followed by the “The White Bird of Kinship” trilogy: The Road to Corlay (1978), A Dream of Kinship (1981) and A Tapestry of Time (1982). The US edition of A Road to Corlay conveniently includes this story as a prologue.

The Lady and the Merman by Jane Yolen

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Lady and the Merman by Jane Yolen (F&SF, September 1976) is a fantasy about a young girl whose sea-faring father who does not love her and whose mother dies while he is away on a voyage. Her father remains distant as the girl, who is called Borne, grows up. Then, one day many years later, Borne is sitting on a rock by the sea when she sees a merman.
When her father subsequently sees Borne’s distraction, he tells her to “be done with it”, which prompts her to write a message to the merman on the beach. When the words are washed away by the tide, the syllables are carried down into the deeps where the merman reads them. He later comes to Borne and, when he indicates that he can only talk to her under the water (spoiler), she follows him:

Gathering her skirts, now heavy with ocean spray and tears, Borne stood up. She cast but one glance at the shore and her father’s house beyond. Then she dove after the merman into the sea.
The sea put bubble jewels in her hair and spread her skirts about her like a scallop shell. Tiny colored fish swam in between her fingers. The water cast her face in silver, and all the sea was reflected in her eyes.
She was beautiful for the first time. And for the last.  p. 39

There is no particular plot here, but the story’s prose, dreamlike progression, and last line are consolations.
** (Average). 1,250 words. Story link.

The Purple Pterodactyls by L. Sprague de Camp

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Purple Pterodactyls by L. Sprague de Camp (F&SF, August 1976) is another of the supernatural adventures of Willy Newbury.1 In this one he is on holiday by the sea with his wife Denise and, when they visit a nearby amusement park, Willy notices something at the rubber ring stall:

The prizes were even more original: a flock of plush-and-wire pterodactyls. They came in several models and sizes, some with long tails and some with short, some with teeth and some with long toothless beaks. The biggest were over a yard across the wings. They were made so that you could hang one from your ceiling as a mobile.
If the wind was strong, you could lock the wings in place and fly the thing as a kite. They were all dyed in shades of purple.
“Purple pterodactyls!” I cried. “Darling, I’ve got to have one of those.”  p. 144

Willy’s attempts to win one of the pterodactyls are unsuccessful, and he also isn’t able purchase one (he asks the stall’s proprietor, Mr Maniu, when he sees him at the beach the next day, but is refused). Willy’s luck changes later, however, when he buys an old ring for a quarter and, when his wife takes him to a jeweller to have it valued, discovers that the ring is ancient and the stone a real emerald. Then, when Willy is asleep that night, the djinn of the ring reveals himself to Willy and says it can perform “little favours” for him. Willy asks the djinn to help him win a purple pterodactyl.
This begins a spat that sees, after Willy subsequently wins more than one of the prizes, (a) Maniu hire his own djinn to stop Willy winning any more; (b) Willy going back to win a third pterodactyl when his own djinn tells him of this; (c) words disappearing off a speech Willy gives at a local women’s club meeting; (d) Willy winning another two pterodactyls; and then (e) Willy and Denise having their boat capsized by a freak squall that comes out of nowhere.
At this point Willy realises that he is involved in a potentially lethal vendetta, so he promises the djinn his freedom if he can get Willy out of his predicament. The story then ends (spoiler) with a shriek in the night, and Willy seeing Mr Maniu on the beach the next morning, his body covered in sand as usual . . . then Maniu’s decapitated head rolls off the mound.
When Willy sees the djinn in a dream several nights later he promptly gives him the ring and his freedom. Then he wakes up and has sex with his wife, as you do when you’ve just caused someone’s death.
This piece isn’t as slight a story as some in the series, but it does have a deus ex machina ending and is tonally a bit off: not only does the final line about sex with his wife not sit well with previous events but, if it wasn’t for Willy’s awful behaviour (who need five purple pterodactyls?), relations between the two men would not have deteriorated. I’m probably reading too much into a piece of light fantasy, but still. . . .
** (Average). 5,650 words. Story link.

1. The ISFDB page for the Willy Newbury series.

The Castle by Raylyn Moore

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Castle by Raylyn Moore (F&SF, August 1976) opens with Beryl the narrator being woken by her husband Miles, who has just had a nightmare where he was attacked by children. After Miles tells her about the experience he goes back to sleep, but she cannot. She thinks about various matters, during which we learn (a) that their house is a part-time toy museum which houses their huge collection and is open to occasional visitors, (b) Miles is Beryl’s second husband, and (c) he is building a huge play fort in the back garden overlooking the gully at the edge of their property. This latter venture does not proceed smoothly:

The first time the children had attacked the castle was before it was quite finished. Miles had left it late one afternoon with the mortar wet and returned in the morning to find the stones prized out of place. It looked as if a heavy pinch bar had been used. “I can scarcely believe it was children,” Beryl had said. “Think of the strength it must have taken.”
“Which is why I’m sure it was children,” Miles insisted. “They’re all just bubbling over with misdirected energy, aren’t they? And if they’re determined enough, they can do anything.”
[. . .]
The next time, the vandals had somehow sheared off the towers of the completed citadel, and once they had blasted a hole under the front wall with some explosive, presumably dynamite, though it didn’t make sense that children should have access to dynamite. (The Hullibargers had been out the evening it happened, and so had heard no sound.)  p. 101

Most of rest the story concerns their otherwise idyllic life (neither seems to work and they do as they wish), but one action after another subtly portrays Miles as a self-centred man-child (earlier in the story Beryl says, “There’s an old wives’ tale that all American men are really little boys in wolf’s clothing”). This is finally made explicit in the last scene (spoiler), where the couple come home to find two children/intruders in the castle and Miles agrees to fight them for it:

He plunged up the slope ready for battle, and the two emerged from behind the stone kremlin to meet him as agreed. For a long time she remained frozen near the bottom of the hill, watching what was happening simply because she couldn’t make herself stop watching. It went on for a long time. They fought desperately, as if for their lives, kicking, gouging, smashing.
And after a while she had to admit that of the three little boys, all of a size, struggling fiercely on the leaf-covered slope, she could no longer tell, through the lowering dusk, which was Miles.  p. 108

I think this is really a slightly surreal mainstream story rather than a fantasy (you would have to squint to see it as the latter), but I enjoyed its slow burn descriptive passages and quirkiness.
*** (Good). 6,050 words. Story link.

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Call Me Maelzel by Don Trotter1 (F&SF, August 1976) gets off to a lively start with a ship AI called Maelzel pranking one of the crew:

I could hear water splashing on the deck in Lloyd’s shower, then the slap of his feet on the wet tiles. I had planned to zap him right away, but he started singing in his wheezy tenor that song about the sailor who’s spent a year and a quarter in his ship’s crow’s-nest and he goes up the river to see Budapest… but you probably know it. “Yardarm Arnie?” Anyhow, it’s a particular favorite of mine, and it sounded kind of nice echoing around in Lloyd’s shower stall. So I let him finish first, and on the final “…mizzen mast, tooooo!” I cut off the hot water and ran up the pressure on the icy as high as it would go. Exit Lloyd, raging wet.
“Goddarnit, Mazey! This time…” he started in, mad as a kicked kitten.
I hit the decompression warning in his cabin, a basso profundo WHOOT! WHOOT! that totally drowned him out. I think he might have called my bluff, but for realism I dropped the air pressure a little, just enough to make his ears pop, and let the emergency airbag fall from its recess in the ceiling. It was as convincing as hell, if I do say so myself.  p. 78

When Lloyd makes it to the muster station he is only wearing a pair of soaking wet shorts under a transparent airbag, and is then subjected to the stares of the rest of the (unpranked) crew. They subsequently vote Maelzel into “Durance Vile” (limbo) for one day.
While Maelzel is disconnected from everything apart from the emergency systems, we get some backstory about the AI and learn that, because of a previous mission which ended in disaster, Maelzel has been, like the ship, hugely overspecified. This means Maelzel is underemployed, bored, and consequently needs to finds ways to entertain itself.
After Maelzel is released from limbo he gets up to his tricks again, this time slowly increasing the gravity and making the crew think about diets and exercise. When they find out about this some days later, they are just about to throw Maelzel back into Durance Vile when they are attacked by pirates. Of course, none of them believe Maelzel’s warnings until just before they are boarded, by which time it is too late:

At each of the four cardinal points of the lounge a tall skinny character appeared, back to the bulkhead, little round shield and big swashbuckling cutlass poised, ready to slay dragons or die trying. At the sight of my crew strewn all over the carpet they relaxed their defensive attitudes, and a couple of them started laughing. The one over by the aquarium, apparently the leader, swaggered over to where Sash was lying, half stunned, against the bar. He poked him with his cutlass.
“On your feet, reptile,” he said without rancor. Sash climbed slowly to his feet, then, with apparent effort, put his grin back in place. He looked his captor in the eye, then returned the careful eying the other was giving him.
Our uninvited guests were worth looking at. Two men and two women, each a shade under seven feet and several shades under two hundred pounds, they were as bald as a bar of soap and naked as a porno flick; nude, but not lewd, they were tattooed. All over. The one holding his cutlass at Sash’s throat had his musculature done in bright red and fine detail, from quadriceps and biceps down to the tiniest facial muscles. He looked like an anatomy chart, or like St. Bartholomew after the Armenians finished flaying him. The lady with her foot on the lens of my best holo projector was done up like a Gila monster, in black and orange pebble pattern, with each pebble carefully shaded to look raised. Black, whole-eye contacts made her eyes appropriately shiny and beady. I wondered how she felt about St. Bartholomew calling Sash “reptile.” The man down by where the fountain splashed into the pool was mostly in bare skin and tattooed zippers — some of which were partly unzipped to show right lung and liver, one temporal and both frontal lobes of his brain, and selected other bits of his internal workin’s, all in five colors and exquisite detail. The woman who had joined St. Bart in front of Sash was done over in spiders — big ones, little ones, hairy and smooth, they swarmed up her arms, legs, and torso (two enormous tarantulas cupped her breasts), all exact trompe l’oeil. If she’d been ticklish, she wouldn’t have lasted two minutes. Her head was done in furry black, with pairs of iridescent patches to match the contacts she wore, the locations of the false eyes being characteristic of the Latrodectus genus: the Widows, black and other colors.  pp. 84-5

That’s a passage that would grace a modern day issue of Planet Stories.
After an initially peaceable takeover, St. Bartholomew gropes Tilly, one of the crewmembers, and Sash gets slashed open when he tries to protect her.
The rest of the story sees the crew try to get Sash to sick bay, while avoiding mentioning Maelzel by name (to leave the AI with the element of surprise). Then (spoiler), when the pirates start wandering around the ship, Maelzel picks them off one by one (the first of the victims gets spaced through one of the ship’s toilets!)
If you are looking for a colourful and entertaining space opera with AIs and space pirates,2 then this will be right up your street.
*** (Good). 6,850 words. Story link.

1. According to ISFDB, Don Trotter only published three stories. On the basis of this one that is a pity.

2. This story reminded me of another recent AI/pirates tale, Knock, Knock Said the Ship by Rati Mehrotra (F&SF, July-August 2020).

Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife by Richard Frede

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Theory and Practice of Economic Development: The Metallurgist and His Wife by Richard Frede (F&SF, August 1976) opens by establishing Horowitz as a hen-pecked husband who lives in an overheating apartment. On Saturdays he usually goes fishing and, during one particular trip out on the Many Happy Returns, something very odd happens:

[It] was at that moment that there was such a mighty tug on the dropline that Horowitz was in fear of losing his finger. Then, just as suddenly, there was no tension to the line at all. But as Horowitz looked over the side into the water, a large flounder about twice the size of any flounder Horowitz had ever seen before, surfaced next to the dropline. The fish had a hook and line in its mouth, and it seemed to gaze up at Horowitz and to judge him. After some little time the fish said, “Would you kindly remove your hook from my mouth?”  p. 70

During the ensuing conversation the fish tells Horowitz that taking the hook out rather than cutting the line will reduce the risk of infection, that it is an enchanted businessman, and that it knew better than to take the bait but couldn’t resist, etc. Then, after Horowitz returns the fish to the water, it tells him that it owes him one.
When Horowitz later tells his wife about this fantastic event she is contemplative rather than dismissive and tells him to go back and ask the fish for a better apartment. Horowtiz does so and, after the fish expresses his surprise that he is back so soon, tells him, “It’s in the mail”.
This is the first of a number of demands that the wife makes as she quickly becomes dissatisfied with what she has been given (a country home, a bigger apartment in the city, and a seat as a US Senator soon follow). When Horowitz is eventually told to tell the fish that she wants to be President (spoiler), the fish gets fed up and tells Horowitz that they are both going back to their original apartment. Horowitz says he would be happy to return there but asks if his wife can stay where she is. The fish says it’ll arrange a divorce, that Horowitz can go back to the original apartment, and that his wife can live with her mother.
This entertainingly combines the fantastic elements involving the fish with the mundanity of married life (in this latter respect it somewhat resembles a humorous mainstream story). The ending is a bit of a dud, though.
** (Average). 4,200 words. Story link.

The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Seafarer by Ritchie Smith and Thomas Penman (New Writings in SF #26, 1976)1 opens with Karangetti and Ana sailing to an island. The beginning is typical of the story’s descriptive prose:

Putting out from Grey Havens in the early morning rain, after Karangetti and a smiling canvas-crawler acquaintance of his had raised up the swelling orange sail, he had steered his sea-craft to the south and east, then she had begun to flee before the wind. Time passed. And while they were eating the bread and cheese and the ripe, tangy citrus fruits that Ana had prepared, and mockingly raising toasts in the vitriolic spirit Richard poured from a wickerworked bottle, they found the softer hues of afternoon all around them: somewhere, their Goldberry had ran out from the later brightness of morning.
About this time a ship appeared out of the distance; he recognized her, a bluff ungainly paddle-cruiser on picket duties off the coastal waters of Mancontinent, all military camouflage greyness and raw, unnatural straight lines, with a single stack trailing a white scarf of smoke; fore and aft were rocket-launcher bundles and light steam cannon. She had hooted twice, three times, as she crossed their course; tiny figures of men waved back at them. Then, she was past, and receding, and soon there were again only the sun and some ghosts of cloud hanging in the vast blueness of the sky, and the darker, mirroring blueness of the sea, with somewhere a horizon sandwiched between.  p. 165

They arrive at an island where there is a dilapidated house that is familiar to Karangetti, and we get a hint that Ana has been sent on a mission to seduce him, and then . . . well, nothing much happens for the next twenty pages or so. They look at the flowers in the garden; we get hints about Earth and Exile; they make love; they look at the ruined cottage; there is more canoodling, and music, etc. etc.
In between all of the above, Karangetti generally moons about like a Romantic poet, and the writers of the story take the opportunity to give us the benefit of (I assume) their English Lit. degrees—we get quotes from William Wordsworth, Blake, the Corpus Christi Carol, and mentions of Huxley’s Doors of Perception, Tolstoy, etc. (and in the background there is a musical soundtrack of Maple Leaf Rag, Clair de Lune, Moonlight Sonata, Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, etc.). At times it feels like the occupants of Pseuds Corner2 having a day out on an alien planet.
Finally, at the end of the story, Karangetti shows Ana several graves, one of whom was his lover Margueritte:

‘As to what happened here, I will tell you.’ There, on the hill-top, with the wind freshening and the sun sinking, dying and bathing the sky with its blood, Karangetti swept horizons with his grandiose hands.
‘There, to the north, lies Mancontinent. There, far over in the south and east, is where the Loct came down…
‘It was a day in October, iron-skied, lightly raining. I was called away from our few weather eyes and installations and such on this place, to Beachead, which was then still a base rather than a city. Marguerite was alone in our house. It had happened before but she told me she didn’t mind . . . Anyway—the Loct had been quiet for a year or two, but they chose that day to make an exploratory raid.’  p. 189

Can you have “grandiose hands”? No matter: although I like the initial descriptive passages, the rest of this has far, far too many words, and virtually nothing in the way of a story.
* (Mediocre). 7,550 words. Story link.

1. I was a bit disappointed with this story as I originally rated it (and the other two works* they published in New Writings in SF) as good.
* The other two stories were The Banks of the Nile (NWISF #28) and Amsterdam (NWISF #30, by Smith alone).

2. The wiki for Pseud’s Corner.