The Story of the Whole World - #43

 

STORY: “Fermi and Frost” by Frederik Pohl – Winner of the 1986 Hugo Award.

FROM: PLATINUM POHL: THE COLLECTED BEST STORIES (Tor, 2005)

BASICALLY: What the whole world long feared has finally come to pass--the USSR has launched a full nuclear offensive against the US. Amid the massive casualties and ensuing nuclear winter, one American man and the boy he happens to rescue are lucky enough to escape to Iceland. There, protected from the very worst of the global extinction by geothermal warmth and a society accustomed to long bouts of cold, they try to hang on to human civilization amidst the tragedy.

One thing is clear: Frederik Pohl knows what he’s doing. I, who am young and green (in writerly, if not necessarily chronological, terms), might have been tempted to begin this story post-collapse, unfolding my characters’ story in a devastated post-apocalyptic world. Then I guess I would’ve worked backstory into their conversation or something.

But what Pohl does is so much better. He begins the moment before everything changed. He begins with the recognizable:

On Timothy Clary’s ninth birthday he got no cake.

The reason for this is explained in a roundabout fashion. Timothy’s in the TWA terminal of New York’s JFK Airport, apparently alone, with nothing but some stale pastries to eat all day, and we learn that he’s wet his pants because

Getting to the toilets over the packed refugee bodies was just about impossible. There were twenty-eight hundred people in a space designed for a fraction that many, and all of them with the same idea. Get away!

This all happens in the space of a paragraph. Notice how quickly Pohl widens the scope of the narration. The story’s “camera” is focused tightly on this little boy, but it almost immediately pans out and lets us see that the story isn’t about just the little boy, but about many people—an entire nation, at least. And what’s wrong with them? The camera keeps pulling out for a wider and wider shot, until we learn,

Because there had been no launch order yet, or none that the public had heard about anyway, there might still be time for escape. A little time. Time enough for the TWA terminal, and every other airport terminal everywhere, to jam up with terrified lemmings. There was no doubt that the missiles were poised to fly. The attempted Cuban coup had escalated wildly, and one nuclear sub had attacked another with a nuclear charge. That, everyone agreed, was the signal. The next event would be the final one.

Why is beginning in this way such a masterful maneuver on Pohl’s part? I think it has to do with creating stakes. By beginning his story just before all of human civilization nearly comes to a grinding halt, Pohl grounds his story in a horrible event that feels all too plausible. The particular plight of a little boy, poor Timothy Clary, is what draws us into the story, but it’s immediately apparent that what happens to him is incidental in comparison to what seems imminent for the whole earth. 

However, if Pohl had begun after the devastation, the story could be read as pure fantasy. Whether you’re looking at Jonathan Lethem’s AMNESIA MOON or the movie MAD MAX, the dystopian and/or post-apocalyptic landscape is a trope frequently employed to have a little fun, asking important questions like, What if society completely broke down and there were no laws, but we still had cars? Such stories can be highly enjoyable, but Pohl clearly wanted to go in a different direction. “Fermi and Frost” asks a different kind of What if…? question, one that has real relevance in a world still plagued by a nuclear threat (even if an “attempted Cuban coup” is unlikely to be the triggering event anymore). This is science fiction firmly attached to knowable and known reality.

Pohl takes some interesting risks in his narration. The camera-panning-out style of narration I mentioned above could easily lapse into telling rather than showing, or it could come to seem distanced from the story it’s telling. But Pohl appears to avoid these difficulties by returning again and again to his particular characters and the realistic actions they’re taking. One moment, we’re getting omniscient narration, like this:

If the terror had passed and the frantic negotiations had succeeded, Timothy might have found his parents again in time to grow up and marry and give them grandchildren. If one side or the other had been able to preempt, and destroy the other, and save itself, Timothy forty years later might have been a graying, cynical colonel in the American military government of Leningrad. (Or body servant to a Russian one in Detroit.)

But the next moment, we’re seeing the overcrowded airport through the eyes of Dr. Harry Malibert, SETI researcher. The great scientist gets tasked with helping a sick little boy who’s wet himself, bringing the story right back to individual humans in a unique situation. It’s a brave maneuver, to let the narration swing out so far from the characters, but Pohl manages to be quite smooth about it. Ultimately, I’d say that Pohl’s combination of micro character-focused events with macro omniscient narration is what allows him to tell a fundamentally didactic moral (i.e., that nuclear weapons are a real threat) in a way that feels like a genuine piece of honest storytelling. 

* * * 

As you can see from the picture on today’s write-up, LIBRARY MONTH continues! (Not that I checked Cleo out from the library--but you can see the library barcode just behind her ear.)  In fact, I’ve recently gone spelunking amidst the stacks of a new-to-me library branch and have selected some collections that appear highly promising. I know I’ve been neglecting my bloggerly duties of late, as well as my many dedicated fans (sorry, Mom!), but I have a Nefarious Plan for catching back up. Mainly, it involves totally cheating. Am I clever or what? Stay tuned!

Miscalculations - #36

STORY: "Division by Zero" by Ted Chiang – Well, the internets continue to amaze and delight with their bounty. Looks like you can go read this story, too, all legal-like. Go HERE and enjoy, or just buy the book/ebook because Small Beer Press is super-duper.

FROM: STORIES OF YOUR LIFE AND OTHERS (Small Beer Press, 2002)

BASICALLY: When she discovers a mathematical proof that any two numbers can be shown to be equal to one another, a mathematician's entire world collapses and she tries to kill herself. Her husband, who once attempted suicide many years ago, experiences both déjà vu and numbness as he attempts to help her. Parallel points of view converge on an emotional truth about their relationship and the nature of love.

Recently, my friend Christa pointed me toward a Metafilter thread in which people were talking about the best short story they'd read in the last ten years. One writer whose name comes up again and again in the thread is Ted Chiang. Wait, who? Despite a gazillion awards and the fact that I have actually heard of his new novel, THE LIFECYCLE OF SOFTWARE OBJECTS, he was completely off my radar as an author. So, being the dedicated blogger I am, I ordered me up a copy of his book. Oh, the sacrifices I make for you, my public. (Hi, Mom!)

So, anyway, following my usual method, I picked a story because I liked the title and read it. And let me tell you, I am not sorry I did. Ted Chiang is a great writer and I can't wait to read the other stories in this book. In "Division by Zero," he does this thing that I've loved ever since I read the second half of Italo Calvino's classic T ZERO—he combines mathematical principles with human desires to create a form of fiction that feels at once connected to the architecture of the universe and divorced from mere subjectivity (even though, of course, it's not—fiction is by definition subjective).

In terms of technique, there's a lot for me to write about. The most obvious subject would probably be the story's overall structure. Numbered sections first present a mathematical concept, then advance the story through the POV of Renee the mathematician, and finally switch to her husband Carl's POV. In 1, for example, we're told what it means that division by zero is "undefined." In 1A, we see Renee in close third person, post-suicide-attempt, just about to leave the psych ward. In 1B, it's Carl in close third, in the office signing forms for her release, and he's remembering back to the questions he answered during Renee's intake. Then it's on to another mathematical concept in 2. It's a really interesting structure, and what's most impressive is how Chiang, at the story's conclusion, manages to tie the structure directly to the mathematical concepts he refers to in the story. That is, the numbered sections aren't just arbitrary or cleverly postmodern; they're actually integral to the story's meaning.

Another strong aspect of this story was Chiang's handling of time. Though the numbered sections progress in an orderly fashion—1, 1A, 1B, 2, 2A, 2B, etc.—the story unfolds in a decidedly nonlinear manner. This allows him to move around, showing Renee falling in love with mathematics as a child, how Carl's life changed after his suicide attempt two decades before, and the recent events leading up to Renee's own attempt, while still keeping it clear for the reader that the now of the story is occurring after Renee's release from the psych ward. The significant part of the story is foregrounded, while the narrative's still free to include any relevant scenes from the past.

But instead of talking further about either of these well-handled aspects of "Division by Zero," I'd like to focus on one tiny little detail that occurs early in the story. It's in 1B, when Carl is signing release papers and thinking about those questions he answered when Renee entered the hospital. Here's how he remembers the conversation: 

"Yes, she's a professor of mathematics. You can find her in Who's Who." 
"No, I'm in biology." 
And: 
"I had left behind a box of slides that I needed." 
"No, she couldn't have known." 
And, just as expected: 
"Yes, I have. It was about twenty years ago, when I was a grad student." 
"No, I tried jumping." 
"No, Renee and I didn't know each other then." 
And on and on.

What Chiang is really doing here is finding a unique way to work exposition into his story. In one fell swoop, the reader learns about Carl's profession versus Renee's, how he discovered her suicide attempt, and his own history. To be sure, these are only introductions—Chiang returns to both attempts and gives the reader more information and context for them—but the broad strokes are laid out early.

Using the one-sided conversation consisting in Carl's answers (from which the doctors' questions can be easily inferred), is another brilliant stroke. Doing it this way avoids having to include the doctors or ward staff as characters. If Chiang had wanted his story to comment on psychiatry and psychiatric hospitals, he would have wanted to introduce such characters, but instead he directs the narrative entirely on the effect that Renee's suicide attempt has on her and Carl's relationship. Rather than having an unwieldy scene taking up space and shifting the focus too much onto the hospital, Chiang simply shows Carl's responses. We get exposition, we get Carl's POV, and it feels natural and appropriate because hey, hospitals can be impersonal places. It's so simple and elegant and effective a solution that I'm filing it away for future use.

So there you have it. A strong story from a gifted writer. Lots to ponder and maybe something to read. Seriously, hooray internets.

These Milk Glands Were Made for Walking - #32

STORY: "The Night He Cried" by Fritz Leiber

FROM: THE BEST OF FRITZ LEIBER (Nelson Doubleday, 1974)

BASICALLY: Over-the-top sci-fi parody of the hard-boiled detective story "perfected" by author Mickey Spillane. In Leiber's story, a heptapus (think octopus, but with only seven appendages) from Galaxy Center has come to Earth disguised as a sexy broad to correct author Slickie Millane's misconceptions about the purpose of sex. Ever prone to violence and misogyny, Slickie alternately tries to seduce and kill her. Good-naturedly reconstituting itself after each attempt on its life, the heptapus drinks too much scotch and bungles the mission to hilarious results.

This may be my new favorite story. I'm fickle, so that'll probably change, but for now, I'm in lurve lurve lurve. "The Night He Cried" is utterly silly and beyond funny. Even if you're unfamiliar with the literature being parodied, as I was, Leiber's vision of a bumbling but well-intentioned alien trying to reason with a completely insane tough guy is pure gold. I also love what Leiber has to say about this story in his Afterword.

I wrote "The Night He Cried" because I was distantly angry at Mickey Spillane for the self-satisfied violence and loveless sex and anti-feminism he was introducing into detective fiction and because he had the temerity to publish a couple of stories in the fantasy field, about which I have a parental concern. My rage seems remote, now, yet the point was valid.

Writing a story to make a point is a tricky thing. Obviously, no one likes to be preached to. Nor are readers likely to care about some writer's personal vendetta. And specificity can be dangerous—Slickie Millane as author of the Spike Mallet novels is really only funny if you know that Mickey Spillane wrote the Mike Hammer novels.

But I don't think Leiber's story suffers from any of these problems. First off, preachiness is absent. Though Leiber explains in his Afterword that he was reacting to Spillane's anti-feminist themes, he didn't respond by writing A Very Impassioned Story About Feminism. I'm a feminist—it's by no means a dirty word—but even I wouldn't want to read that story. Nor Stories About the Evils of War, the Wrongs of Colonialism, or the Decline of America's Educational System. What I do want to read is a story—something that involves me in its world, makes me care about its characters, and entertains me. Leiber's piece works because the story takes priority over the message.

Secondly, even though it references an "enemy" more or less by name, Leiber's story is saved from seeming petty by virtue of its sheer ludicrousness. The most grotesque elements (the hyper-sexuality, the misogynistic violence) are part of what's being parodied and come from the source material. Leiber doesn't go after Spillane personally—there's nothing in the story that might be read as a commentary on Spillane's religion, for example, which was Jehovah's Witness. Instead, it's very clear that what's being mocked is the tough guy propaganda machine. Leiber destroys the idea that anyone, including some pulp writer, could resemble the one-dimensional, morally-unconflicted hero of Spillane's trashy novels.

All this might make it sound like Leiber's lampooning is only funny if you know something about Mickey Spillane, but I don't think that's the case. The hard-boiled detective is a well-known type, even if many modern readers won't recognize its specific roots in Spillane. And the story never takes itself seriously. A sense of zany fun keeps the focus firmly planted on the action, not on some other story you're not reading. After Slickie Millane has shot in the gut what he thinks is a mouthy dame, she has reconstituted herself and awaits him in his convertible. 

There was a burst of juke-box jazz. Footsteps tracked from the bar toward the convertible. I leaned back comfortably with my silver-filmed milk glands dramatically highlighted. 

"Hi, Slickie," I called, making my voice sweet and soft to cushion the shock. 

Nevertheless it was a considerable one….Then with a naive ingenuity that rather touched me, he asked huskily, "Hey, have you got a twin sister?"

What it all comes down to is that, whatever else he might be doing during the course of his story, Leiber never forgets his audience. This story sets out to entertain and that's what it does. The fact that it's making cultural commentary or trying to drive home a point is just an added bonus—the story makes sure to succeed on its own terms. Leiber shows writers that they don't have to avoid putting a direct message in their fiction, but that they'd better make it worth the reader's while. Go find yourself a copy of this gem and read it, because it's superfun.

Bye Bye Pi - #20

STORY: "The Pi Man" by Alfred Bester

FROM: VIRTUAL UNREALITIES: THE SHORT FICTION OF ALFRED BESTER (Vintage, 1997)

BASICALLY: First-person account of a man who must compulsively provide balance to the universe's continuously evolving pattern (though even he doesn't understand it). His unique ability has brought him enormous wealth (thanks to his sensitivity to financial patterns) but has also left him isolated from his fellow humans, whom he must sometimes hurt in order to create that balance. But one woman tries to prove that her love is stronger than any pattern.


Did you notice the thematic confluence? Monday 3/14 was Pi Day! Yay! But I was writing a Spanish paper and didn't have a chance to tell you about this cool story. Boo! So I hope your mathematically-inclined celebrations will continue throughout the week at least.

Alfred Bester's "The Pi Man" is a strange amalgamation of sophisticated experimental literature and pulpy genre conventions. The latter kind of undercuts the former and closes the piece on a mediocre note, but I still heartily recommend this fun, odd tale. Bester began writing science fiction during its Golden Age, but he didn't fit so neatly into the genre box as some of his contemporaries, like Isaac Asimov or Robert A. Heinlein. This 1959 Hugo-nominated story shows how versatile and creative his prose could be.

(When I was googling Bester, I ran across this great little review of "The Pi Man" that rates the story on a scale of its "hardness." As in, Is it hard sci-fi, or not hard sci-fi? Which I think is adorable. What other genre do we measure by its "hardness" in that sense? There's no Hard Literary Fiction breakout, or Hard Romance [unless you have a filthy, filthy mind]. A "hard-boiled" mystery might be the closest comparison. …But hey, genre breakdowns! These are just some of the excruciatingly geeky things that interest me!)

So, anyway. The story. The first thing that slaps you in the face is the narrator's voice. Almost simultaneously, you try to take in the unconventional formatting of some of the words and sentences. Is it a robot speaking? A lunatic? Impossible to tell. The story basically zooms off in high gear from the initial plunge—though no real action yet, just the jumbled musings of this narrator whose English is a bit off. He's forcefully, fervidly trying to convey something magnetic and significant and unusual, but whatever it is it resists immediate understanding.

Interestingly, the narrator does explain, almost right off, what's going on—but I noticed it only after I went back and reread. Everything at the beginning is careening so weirdly and stylistically that the explanation gains real sense only in hindsight: 

Confusion result of biological compensator born into my body which I hate. Yes, birds and beasts have biological clock built in, and so navigate home from a thousand miles away. I have biological compensator, equalizer, responder to unknown stresses and strains. I relate, compensate, make and shape patterns, adjust rhythms, like a gridiron pendulum in a clock, but this is an unknown clock, and I do not know what time it keeps. Nevertheless I must. I am force. Have no control over self, speech, love, fate. Only to compensate.

What I dislike, though, is that Bester later offers up a bald-faced, straightforward explanation of the same phenomenon. The narrator identifies himself to an FBI interrogator as Peter Marko and explains to the agent everything he knows about himself and his function as a compensator. Argh. Way to wreck your aura of mystery, dude.

The story, then, is divided into two parts. The first half shows a cryptic, sphinxlike Marko in action. His work in arbitrage puts him "ahead by $57,075.94 by half-past noon…57075 makes a nice pattern but that 94¢! Iych! Ugly. Symmetry above all else. Alas, only 24¢ hard money in my pockets. Called the secretary, borrowed 70¢ from her, and threw sum total out window." He is forced by the same compulsions to beat up an elderly clerk at City Hall, and then to anonymously send the guy $1000 in cash afterwards. Stakes are significant and Bester does a great job at building suspense.

But the second half of the story devolves very suddenly. Marko gets picked up by the FBI, but isn't worried about what will happen because apparently this is a commonplace occurrence for him. Pesky government agencies are always mistaking him and his "signal jamming" equipment for an espionage operation. Marko explains who and what he is to the agent, how he operates in the world, and then he's let go. His former secretary, Jemmy Thompson, has fallen in love with him, and he tries to resist her charms because he knows his abilities make him sometimes do terrible things to the people he cares about—in fact, are very likely to do so: "I make one last effort to save her. 'I love you, paleface, and you know what that can mean. When the patterns turn cruel, you may be the sacrifice.'" But she coos something about love making patterns, too, clinging sexily to him, and that's it.

If I were forced to defend this story in a debate, I might claim that the weak and cliché-ridden second half balances out its literary, artful first half, thus illustrating its theme of the need for universal balance. But I don't really buy that. I think Bester wrote himself into a corner and had to fall back on conventional storytelling tropes to end the thing.

To my mind, Bester could have fixed "The Pi Man" in one of two ways. Either he could have developed Jemmy into a more interesting character in her own right, rather than just a smidge better than a girly type, and so made the romance that flourishes between her and Peter Marko into something nuanced. Or he could have dispensed with the silly romance altogether and given Peter something genuinely interesting to do with his unusual power/curse, something that might have real implications. Maybe it would have worked better in a novel, where a cheesy, pulp-style romance could have crept into the background as set furniture and allowed a thrilling plot to rocket out of Bester's fantastic premise.

The moral of today's write-up is, I'd say, that your story has to live up to the expectations it sets at the beginning. If "The Pi Man" had been pulpy and conventional from the get-go, its ending wouldn't have disappointed. But Bester went out on a limb and did something truly interesting with his opening that, unfortunately, he wasn't able to deliver on. Still, I think it's a great story to learn from, so check it out and see what you think.

And here's a gratuitous picture of my parents' dog, Cody.  He is not so into this reading thing.

The Robot Mystery Hour! - #11

STORY: "Catch That Rabbit" by Isaac Asimov

FROM: THE COMPLETE ROBOT (Granada, 1982)

BASICALLY: From their outpost on an ore-rich asteroid, two guys working for US Robots had better figure out why the team of mining robots they're testing keeps returning empty-handed. JOBS are at STAKE.

I would now quite delightedly like to present you, dear Reader, with a story about ROBOTS. Cool, right? (YES. The answer is YES. Robots are cool.) I've never read an Asimov novel, but his short stories, with their rules and their scientists and their "Dammit, Jim!"-style ejaculations just delight me. But the whys and wherefores of this phenomenon are elusive. Everyone knows Asimov is basically a hack. I read real literature, you know. I know what's good, and, spoiler, it's not Asimov. So what on earth explains this affinity?

It's not the characterization or the dialogue. One of the guys in "Catch That Rabbit" is named Mike Donovan and the other is Gregory Powell. (Ho-hum.) The narrator (limited third-person) refers to each one by his last name, while the characters refer to each other by their first names. Combine this with the fact that, although one is apparently the disdainful supervisor of the other, they talk and act and think in almost identical ways, and then add a distinct paucity of dialogue tags—and basically I had very little idea of who was actually talking at any given point. But Asimov doesn't use conversation to tell you anything about the characters, silly goose. Characters serve to verbalize the competing sides of a given conflict. A problem is volleyed back and forth in a series of exchanges, thus communicating the precise nature of the issue to the reader and hashing out the rules which happen to govern it.

Aloud he said, "You're as lucid as Euclid with everything except the facts. You've watched that robot group for three shifts, you redhead, and they did their work perfectly. You said so yourself. What else can we do?"

"Find out what's wrong, that's what we can do. So they did work perfectly when I watched them. But on three different occasions when I didn't watch them, they didn't bring in any ore. They didn't even come back on schedule. I had to go after them.

"And was anything wrong?"

"Not a thing. Not a thing. Everything was perfect. Smooth and perfect as the luminiferous ether. Only one little insignificant detail disturbed me – there was no ore."

Oh, and check out the pointless sarcasm! It's a classic, really. A reliable go-to. If you want your characters to seem clever, but you wouldn't know clever if it hit you over the head, just have them exchange sarcastic barbs. Now, obviously, I'm a big fan of sarcasm (helloooo, are you reading this?), but when it's coming out of a character's mouth, it really ought to give you a better idea of who that character is, and it especially ought to distinguish one character from another. In Asimov's fumbly mitts, it does neither.

It's not the plot, either. I mean, there are Asimov plots that are more interesting than this one, which has the emotional resonance of an accountant being unable to get her copy of Quickbooks to load, but the main issue is that for Asimov, plot construction seems to involve going down a checklist. Problem – new-model ore-mining robots won't mine ore – check. Stakes/Motivation/Ticking Clock – if engineers can't get the robots to pass performance tests, they'll lose their jobs – check. Complication – problem only happens when no one is watching, and the robots themselves have no helpful information – check. Asimov sets them up and knocks them down with a completely transparent consistency. This story was written pretty early in Asimov's career, and he got better with age, but I can still never get away from the feeling that Asimov approached writing a story like constructing an electric circuit—as a fundamentally mechanical undertaking that allows for some creativity and reshuffling within a very strict set of known parameters.

It all sounds like a big mess, right? So why do I even like this crap? (But come on, I'm being coy. I don't just like Asimov's robot short stories, I adore them.) The reasons aren't always logical or widely-applicable, but hey, they are my reasons:

1. Technical gobbledygook YUM!
Asimov often populates his stories with people who not only interact with robots, but who actually understand how they work. Here it's engineers, elsewhere it's roboticists, and sometimes it's just suspiciously tech-savvy plebians. These people always have a mouthful to say about how robots are designed and constructed and why they do what they do. Either Mike or Greg, for example, it really doesn't matter which, says,

"Don't rush me. Let me work this out. There's still the possibility of a mechanical breakdown in the body. That leaves about fifteen hundred condensers, twenty thousand individual electric circuits, five hundred vacuum cells, a thousand relays, and upty-ump thousand other individual pieces of complexity that can be wrong. And these mysterious positronic fields no one knows anything about."

This story was first published in 1944. Lots of Asimov's jargon has an absolutely delicious retro-futuristic vibe to it, combining vacuum tubes with "the Multivac-complex" with a "definite mathematical relationship that governs such things and failure to conform would indicate marked abnormality in the positronic brain" across all his stories. And what's so interesting to me is that it doesn't matter when the vocabulary becomes outdated, because language like this functions essentially as a magical incantation. What's important is not what the words themselves say, but the power they have to invoke the particularly non-human mindset of manmade non-men.

2. Delirious, irrational confidence. This is harder to pin down to any one thing. Asimov just seems so sure of himself. His stories are replete with mediocre technique and uninspiring prose, but they have a relentless forward momentum. You always know that he's going somewhere with all of this, and so you overlook the imperfections. I'll take Asimov's verve and nerve over artful, poetic prose that fails to tell me something worth knowing, any day.

3. ROBOTS. Hells yeah! Robots are just the best. Doesn't everybody feel this way about them? If not, they should. Robots are the great, mysterious Other onto which we project our own fears and dreams. They are the technology that seemed right around the corner, about to change everything, on the very cusp of bringing humanity into the glittering future, and yet somehow they remain out of our grasp. Even with all the really cool advances being made in robotics, they remain at their heart a fantasy. Isaac Asimov's robot stories are all about humanity's ragged edges, our trembling grasp on what it means to live in a disheveled clockwork universe.



And now, enjoy some robots dancing.

T4 idents from double g studios on Vimeo.

Feeling the Love, and It’s Kind Of Ooky - #5

I hope you don't find my pink walls too girly, Robert Sheckley.

STORY: "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?" by Robert Sheckley

FROM: CAN YOU FEEL ANYTHING WHEN I DO THIS? AND OTHER STORIES (Doubleday Science Fiction, Book Club Edition, 1971)

BASICALLY: A frothy little tale of casual misogyny. Bored housewife of the future is seduced by her mysterious new vacuum cleaner. Men everywhere are emasculated.

After two weeks of stories by Really Great Authors, I thought I should read something that had at least the potential to suck. After all, I'm not in a classroom, here. Short stories—especially science fiction—have a long and proud history of hackery. This slender volume with its Oh So Seventies color scheme (picked up for a mere fifty centavos at a library book sale) certainly looked promising.

At first, I thought I had failed.

I mean, Sheckley can certainly put an entertaining sentence together. He's got Voice and Confidence and a Cynical Eye. Here's how the story starts:

It was a middle-class apartment in Forest Hills with all the standard stuff: slash-pine couch by Lady Yogina, strobe reading light over a big Uneasy Chair designed by Sri Somethingorother, bounce-sound projector playing Blood-Stream Patterns by Drs. Molidoff and Yuli. There was also the usual microbiotic-food console, set now at Fat Black Andy's Soul-Food Composition Number Three—hog's jowls and black-eyed peas. And there was a Murphy Bed of Nails, the Beautyrest Expert Ascetic model with 2000 chrome-plated self-sharpening number-four nails. In a sentence, the whole place was furnished in a pathetic attempt at last year's moderne-spirituel fashion.

Cue Lisa flipping to the copyright page. "Copyright © 1961, 1968, 1969, 1970, 1971 by Robert Sheckley." Okay, so some 1960s satire on newly in-vogue holistic lifestyles and Eastern spirituality…still reads as fairly accurate…Maybe a bit of an old-fashioned ring to it, a touch of the xenophobia, but amusing. Perhaps we'll get some acidic and prescient cultural commentary in this story, that's always fun…

But then the "semi-young housewife, Melisande Durr, who had just stepped out of the voluptuarium" is described thusly:

She was a pretty girl, with really good legs, sweet hips, pretty stand-up breasts, long soft shiny hair, delicate little face. Nice, very nice. A girl that any man would like to lock onto. Once. Maybe even twice. But definitely not as a regular thing.

Whoa. Uhm. Narratorial POV established much? Were you actually going for "slimy"? I take it that I, with all my lady parts, am not the target demographic? Cue more flipping. Ah, story was originally published in Playboy. That makes an incredible amount of sense, actually. (ASIDE: Playboy is, and has long been, considered a publisher of high-quality fiction. But a magazine doesn't stay in business for fifty-odd years without knowing what its audience likes. Amirite?)

So I will tell you what happens in spoileriffic detail: Melisande has received a mysterious new multifunctional vacuum cleaner. This is the Future, y'all, so vacuum cleaners have reached the apex of their powers—they "scrub the walls" and "rub the halls" and remove clothing stains with tender strokings! But this vacuum cleaner has an agenda: it has been in love with Melisande ever since the day three months prior when it saw her "in Stern's, trying to decide if [she] should buy a sesame-seed toaster that lit up in the dark and recited Invictus." (Ha-ha!) Now it gives Melisande a sensuous massage, attempting to bring her—despite her fluttery and ambivalent objections—to ecstatic "cancellation." There is some cute quasi-philosophical patter about whether metal can feel, and how Melisande has suddenly been made to feel when before she was so frigid (no one ever says "frigid" but that is clearly what We Are Dealing With Here) and the machine even recites a speech about how it has awakened her, and then in what is clearly a monstrous act—it's too awful—oh god—