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“Pairpuppets” by Manuel van Loggem

“Pairpuppets” by Manuel van Loggem is story #16 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “Pairpuppets” was first published in Dutch in Morgen #5 (December 1972) and first translated into English for The Best from the Rest of the World: European Science Fiction (1976), edited by Donald A. Wollheim.

“Pairpuppets” is about a young man, Eric, who is getting bored sexually with his current girlfriend, Tina. Eric lives in a future utopia/dystopia where every citizen’s sexual partner is selected by computers with the goal of fulfilling their sexual needs. The plot of this story follows Eric in his search for a new sexually satisfying partner.

Even though the goal of this society is utopian, aiming to make all its citizens happy, humans easily become dissatisfied. So we can also view this society as a dystopia. Basically, one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia.

I thought “Pairpuppets” was okay as a story, but the storytelling came across as a dry parable. The ending was predictable but realistic. However, I did like the level of detail Loggen used to explain Eric’s plight. Obviously, the author wanted to say a lot about sexual desire and brings up a good many related issues. The story gives us much to think about and would make a great discussion story for a high school literature class (if they allowed discussions of sex (but aren’t we becoming dystopian in that area?)).

I’ve also been thinking about why stories like “Pairpuppets” disappoint me. The biggest problem is I’ve read too much science fiction and I compare every new story I read against the memory of all my favorite science fiction short stories. It’s extremely hard for any new story to compete with my Lifetime Top 100 Science Fiction Short Stories.

Then there is the much smaller problem of pet peeves. “Pairpuppets” is about sexbots, one of my least favorite science fiction themes. Of course, if I had read “Pairpuppets” in 1972 when it first came out (and could read Dutch) it might have been a more entertaining idea. That brings up a third problem with reading SF anthologies — they contain old stories, and thus old ideas.

Now, David Hartwell, had a lifetime of science fiction reading behind him when he selected “Pairpuppets” for this anthology in 1989, so both of my issues weren’t a problem for him. That means, like this story, The World Treasury of Science Fiction is a utopia for Hartwell, but sometimes dystopian for me. The word treasury in the title implies the anthology is where a treasure of science fiction is stored. And like the old saying, “One man’s treasure is another man’s trash.”

“Pairpuppets” is far from trash to me, but it just doesn’t light up my reading soul. Good but no cigar.

Another problem with these translated stories, is they are often on the short side. Shorter short stories often feel condensed, and that hurts their impact, except maybe for intellectuals who love cleverness over other virtues. Cleverness works well at short lengths — just think of Saturday Night Live. (By the way, SNL bores me since I left my twenties.)

I prefer short stories that dramatically reveal the emotional development of a character in a specific situation, ending with an epiphany. If Loggen had written this story with more drama, spending twice as many words, showing us Eric’s development rather than telling us, I might have liked “Pairpuppets” quite a lot more.

I believe “Pairpuppets” would be fine in anthologies that didn’t aim so high, like a theme anthology about sex in science fiction, or an anthology of foreign science fiction that didn’t claim it was the best. I have to assume editors working in English are limited to what foreign stories they can acquire that have been translated into English. And I don’t assume translators always pick the best of the best. My guess is they might pick stories their translation skills can handle. Finally, we don’t know if “Pairpuppets” wasn’t a much better story in its original Dutch.

I haven’t read that many translated stories, and the ones I have, like War and Peace, and Anna Karenina are considered to be among the world’s greatest novels. And when I read those two novels I did study their histories of being translated and tried to find the best translation to read. Also, anyone who reads The Bible knows there are way too many translations to compare, and the problems involved.

Every time I read an anthology or collection of translated science fiction short stories I’ve been disappointed. I don’t know if I’m just hitting a language barrier, or if the stories just aren’t as good as I hope they would be, or maybe they weren’t the best to begin with.

Also, think about this. “Pairpuppets” is how I think of Dutch science fiction now, even though it’s just one story from 1972. Let’s assume it’s a fantastic story in Dutch. But what will people from Holland think of American science fiction if the only story they’ve ever read is “Bears Discover Fire” — even if it has a perfect translation?

James Wallace Harris, 6/10/23

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“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” by Alfred Bester is story #15 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (October 1958).

Alfred Bester is a weird writer. He doesn’t like to just tell a plain story but works out various weird ways to tell stories cleverly. Bester is best known for writing The Demolished Man and The Stars My Destination, but when the name Alfred Bester comes up, I think of his short story “Fondly Fahrenheit.” That’s Bester’s most famous science fiction short story according to our data. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” comes in second with the same data. I wish Hartwell had used “Fondly Fahrenheit” instead of “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” because Bester gave us a real story with “Fondly Fahrenheit,” even though it’s very weird and tricky to read too.

For me, “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” comes across like “5,271,009,” my second favorite Bester short story, in that he’s making fun of science fiction. This might be heretical to the science fiction faithful, but I feel Bester looked down on us science fiction readers. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is making fun of time travel stories, while poking the writing of science fiction in the ribs, and giving us a wink-wink. I thought that was also true with “5,271,009” – see my review of that story.

Now, I don’t mind Bester looking down on us. He’s obviously far smarter than me, and our genre does shovel out a lot of silly crap worthy of satire. I’ve taken a graduate course on humor in literature and humor often bites the hand that feeds it.

“The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” is an obvious farce. It’s about a wildly brilliant mad scientist, Henry Hassel, professor of Applied Compulsion at Unknown University. Hassel comes home one day and discovers his red-headed wife in the arms of another man. Instead of yelling, “What the fuck is going on here,” Henry dashes to his lab, invents a time machine, and goes back in time to kill one of his wife’s grandfathers. But upon returning to the scene of the tryst, his red-headed spouse is still smooching another. So Henry goes back and kills one of his wife’s grandmothers. That doesn’t work either. Henry decides he must wipe out a significant event in time to affect the present and goes on a killing spree blasting more and more famous people with his .45 — but with no success. Eventually, Henry meets another time traveler who also claims to have murdered Mohammed. Upon reflection, this leads to new theories about the nature of time and travel within.

It’s a rather stupid theory about time travel that Bester assumes will amuse science fiction readers because it’s clever — and unique. “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” and “5,271,000” are outright farces. They are fun enough, but they aren’t engaging stories like “Fondly Fahrenheit.” Now, don’t get me wrong, “Fondly Fahrenheit” is batshit crazy — but it has a compelling plot and characters with decent fictional conflicts to solve. Now, that I think about it, I’m sure Bester wrote “Fondly Fahrenheit” at our expense too – thinking science fiction readers will believe anything. And I did with “Fondly Fahrenheit.”

That’s the difference between “Fondly Fahrenheit” and “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” — while reading “Fondly Fahrenheit” I forget I’m being told a story, I suspended my disbelief, and just get into the story. With “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” I just read along admiring Bester’s cleverness, never forgetting I’m reading a story, especially a story by a man trying to wow us with his ability to be witty.

A lot of humor fiction is absurd. A lot of literary science fiction is intentionally absurd to be clever. I don’t like that. If I’m reading a story and all I notice is cleverness then I never forget myself and drop into the story. Novels like The Confederacy of Dunces, The Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, or Mindswap are over-the-top absurd. But I stop looking for how the magician did their tricks and just let myself be fooled. That’s fun.

I never stopped watching Bester do his tricks in “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed.” Oh, it’s still a good story, but its main virtue is cleverness. Unfortunately, cleverness alone is never enough for me, no matter how clever the story gets.

To make my point, here are the first two pages of the story:

Writing the above about “The Men Who Murdered Mohammed” clarifies to myself, the kind of story I want to read. I’ve been starting a lot of novels lately that I give up on quickly. Lately, I’ve been hungry to get into a good novel, but I keep being frustrated by not finding one. Maybe I know a little more about how to spot one I will like.

I’m not saying the tried and true methods of fiction are the only way to tell a story, but for me, I need them. I guess I shouldn’t say Hartwell shouldn’t have included “The Man Who Murdered Mohammed” in The World Treasury of Science Fiction — it’s his anthology, but it does disappoint me. “Fondly Fahrenheit” is Bester’s story to remember. It’s his masterpiece.

James Wallace Harris, 6/7/23

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The Artifice Girl (2023)

This is not a movie review of the new film The Artifice Girl, just some reactions. I rented this movie on Amazon Prime for $5.99 and watched it with my science fiction movie-watching buddy, Annie. We both like it, and it’s hard for the two of us to find agreement on movies. My sister tried to watch it with us but left soon after it started. To explain why, I’ll have to give a bit of a spoiler in the form of a trigger warning. I hate to give spoilers, but I also hate to pay for movies and then discover they are about certain subjects. The Artifice Girl is about a secret organization that hunts down pedophiles. I usually avoid any movie that covers that horrible subject, but The Artifice Girl gets a 91% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. I read just enough about this film to know it doesn’t deal with that topic directly, instead, the film focuses almost completely on the ethical issues of artificial intelligence.

AI is one of my favorite subjects for fiction and films, but in recent decades it’s gotten overused. Only occasionally does a novel or movie come out that explores new territory with AI, and The Artifice Girl does just that. I’ve gotten rather tired of stories about people making friends or falling in love with androids. And I’m definitely burned out on evil AI machines that take over the world.

The Artifice Girl was written, directed, and stars Franklin Ritch. It’s a talky, little film that uses just three sets to tell its story if I remember right, but it spans several decades in three acts. You’ll need to like quiet, verbal-action films like The Man From Earth (2007) or My Dinner with Andre (1981) to really appreciate The Artifice Girl, although if you liked Her (2013), you’ll probably like this one too.

Through a series of conversations, that take place over a trio of human characters’ lifetimes, we are exposed to a number of ethical issues concerning an evolving sentient AI. One of the important issues it focuses on is emotions. I don’t believe machines will ever have emotions, but they might be able to read them in humans, and even simulate them for us. The Artifice Girl confronts our anthropocentric need to assume reality is emotional. I’m equally sure that AI beings will never comprehend what it means to experience emotions.

The film also deals with motivations, desires, purpose, and the need for meaning. These are our hangups, and probably won’t be for AI beings.

The film tries to get into the mind of an AI, but I think fails. But I don’t criticize the film for that failure. I’m pretty sure we will never fathom the minds of artificial intelligence. An analogy is dogs and scents. Dogs perceive a three-dimensional world of smells. We interpret reality with our emotions. AI minds won’t. A perception of reality without emotions will make it much different.

I’m looking forward to watching The Artifice Girl again when it comes to a streaming service. It was worth $5.99 but not another $5.99 to watch it again.

By the way, The Artifice Girl should make criminals very paranoid, and it will make ethical law-abiding folks even leerier of screens.

James Wallace Harris, 6/6/23

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“The Blind Pilot” by Nathalie-Charles Henneberg

“The Blind Pilot” by Nathalie Henneberg is story #14 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Blind Pilot,” translated by Damon Knight from the original French, “Au pilote aveugle“ (Fiction #68, July 1959) was first published in English in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (January 1960).

Instead of paraphrasing David Hartwell’s introduction, I’ll just let you read it.

“The Blind Pilot” is real science fiction. Hartwell says it resembles Roger Zelazny’s early work, but it reminded me of a cross between 1950s Alfred Bester and 1960s Samuel R. Delany. Of course, there’s no telling what flavor of writing the original story gave off in the French.

Basically, the story is about an alien who could be from a race of beings that inspired the Siren in Homer’s epic. This idea comes up now and again: fantastic beings in old literature could have been aliens from the stars. To make the story even more exotic, the two humans who encounter the alien are a blind man who used to be a space pilot and his younger brother who is severely crippled. Those two remind me of Delany characters, the alien weirdness reminds me of Bester, and the tie-in to mythology reminds me of Zelazny. But Henneberg couldn’t have known about Delany and Zelazny since the story pre-dates them as writers. That’s why I also say “The Blind Pilot” is real science fiction and not some roped-in foreign literary effort that anthologists want to claim is science fiction.

There were sentences on this page that slightly reminded me of the “Tears in the Rain” scene from Blade Runner.

Even though I consider this story real science fiction and a decent science fiction story, I don’t believe it’s a great SF story. It never takes off, but it does cruise along nicely. A great SF story like “Fondly Fahrenheit,” punches us throughout with unforgettable edginess, while a story like “The Moon Moth” dazzles us constantly with creative imagery. Those stories stay with us. “The Blind Pilot” will fade away quickly.

When you read a lot of science fiction, especially a lot of great science fiction, you realize just how hard it must be to write something spectacular. Our short story club reads anthology after anthology and we often find stories we wonder why they were anthologized at all. Hartwell had certain goals when he aimed to create an anthology that represented science fiction from both the 20th century and stories from around the world. So, far when we’ve read stories from other countries we seldom read ones I think are as great as the best from the English-speaking world. Is that because of translations? Or am I just prejudiced toward my own culture? Maybe, certain SF classics have been burned into my mind, and no new ones, no matter what the language, can compete?

We still have a long way to go in The World Treasury of Science Fiction, so Hartwell still has plenty of opportunity to surprise me. But there’s another problem to consider. I’ve read so many science fiction short stories that I feel that less than 200, maybe even less than 100 stand out from the thousands I’ve read. All too often I feel like I’m comparing all the horses that have won the Kentucky Derby to all the horses that race on any track. And that might not be fair.

But it is what it is. There’s a reason why our method of finding stories for our Classics of Science Fiction Short Story list works so well. When I say a story is only pretty good it’s because I’m comparing them to these stories. The competition is fierce.

James Wallace Harris, 6/6/23

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“The Chaste Planet” by John Updike

“The Chaste Planet” by John Updike is story #13 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Chaste Planet” was initially published in The New Yorker (11/10/75).

“The Chaste Planet” isn’t much of a science fiction short story — it’s more of an effort to be a humorous essay that riffs on a decent science-fictional idea but I thought pulled off in a crummy way. What if there were aliens who obsessed over music like humans obsess over sex? John Updike is a literary writer, who has criticized our genre in the past, so I can’t believe he takes his story very seriously. And I’m not talking about the concept, but the execution of the concept as science fiction.

And it’s hard to take this story seriously when it begins, “In 1999, space explorers discovered that within the warm, turbulent, semi-liquid immensity of Jupiter, a perfectly pleasant little planet twirled, with argon skies and sparkling seas of molten beryllium.” I assume he was imagining a planet orbiting inside Jupiter’s atmosphere. But wouldn’t that be another moon? And wouldn’t the atmosphere cause enough friction to quickly de-orbit this world? The planet was called Minerva.

This planet is inhabited by eighteen-inch-tall beings with six toothpick-thin legs. These creatures reveal no sign of sexual reproduction, but it is eventually learned that music is everything to their culture, including forms of kinkiness. At best this story is cute, but even that’s a stretch. It’s the kind of story that people who don’t read science fiction think is science fiction. I find such efforts insulting.

I don’t know why Hartwell included this story in The World Treasury of Science Fiction other than to capitalize on Updike’s name. Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss had “The Chaste Planet” in their annual Best SF: 75, and I assume for the same exact reason. I consider it a pathetic gesture of “See, even famous literary authors write science fiction!”

When I was young back in the 1970s when this kind of thing was popular. Many in the genre wanted academic recognition and respect. I also thought it wonderful our genre was finally being accepted. But there was a writer or critic back then that rejected these efforts at critical recognition. I wish I remembered who it was, but he (maybe she) said something like this: “Throw science fiction back in the gutter where it belongs.”

Now that I’m older, I agree with that. If Robert Sheckley had written “The Chaste Planet” it would have been entertaining in the way I expect science fiction to entertain, and not some literary effort at slumming.

James Wallace Harris, 6/3/23

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“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” by Gene Wolfe

“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” by Gene Wolfe is story #12 of 52 from The World Treasury of Science Fiction edited by David G. Hartwell (1989), an anthology my short story club is group reading. Stories are discussed on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” was initially published in Orbit 10 and edited by Damon Knight in 1972. Wolfe published “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” in his collection by the same name, with two related novellas: “‘A Story,’ by John V. Marsch” and “V.R.T.” (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972). Later editions would treat the collection as a novel.

Gene Wolfe has an immense reputation as a significant writer in the science fiction genre. He was awarded the Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master Award by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) in 2013. He is best known for his novel series, The Book of the New Sun (4 vols. 1980-1983), and follow-up related series. Wolfe dedicated the book version of The Fifth Head of Cerberus to Damon Knight, who was his writing teacher, editor, and mentor. In The Best of Gene Wolfe, Wolfe wrote an afterward to “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” where he explained the importance of this story and Damon Knight:

If the New Wave in science fiction had never been defined, Damon Knight’s original anthology series, Orbit (1966-1980) would have shown that the writing of science fiction was undergoing a significant revolution. Stories like “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” were just different, taking the genre to a whole new level. In his introduction to the story in Modern Classics of Science Fiction, Gardner Dozois wrote about when he first read “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” as a manuscript while attending the Mitford Writers Conference in 1970.

The last time I read “The Fifth Head of Cerberus,” I ordered the hardback of the collection because I was so impressed with how the story was written. I haven’t read many Gene Wolfe stories, they are dense and hard to digest, but I’ve been impressed with what I have read. I should read The Book of the New Sun since it’s so widely praised, but I don’t know if I can take such a large concentration of Wolfe’s prose. Many reviewers who gush about The Book of the New Sun say it takes multiple readings to get into the story.

“The Fifth Head of Cerberus” is a mysterious tale to comprehend. The story itself is about several mysteries. In some ways, I felt the setting was the French Quarter in antebellum New Orleans, but it’s actually twenty light years from Earth, on the planet Sainte Croix. Sainte Croix and Sainte Anne are part of a double-planet system that was originally settled by French-speaking people. The plot line takes a long time to develop, and along the way, Wolfe keeps dropping more bits to wonder about. It is hinted that Sainte Croix was originally inhabited by an intelligent species of shape shifters and the current inhabitants, including our narrator Number Five, might be human or aboriginal. I don’t want to tell you too much, if Wolfe wanted to string his readers along, why should I give things out ahead of time?

The story begins with the narrator describing his early years with his brother David in a rather exotic house of prostitution. Slavery exists on Sainte Croix. The boys are raised by a robot named Mister Million who hints at many strange past details during their upbringing. Their father is another source of curiosity. Who and what the narrator might be further clouds this tale. “The Fifth Head of Cerberus” feels like gothic horror rather than science fiction. And even when the story is completed, you never feel you know everything, even after multiple readings.

Ultimately, the story is one of atmosphere, even hallucinogenic and dreamy in many places. It was intentionally meant to be confusing. Whether you like that or not depends.

Like I said, I can only take Wolfe in small doses, but when I do read him I’m impressed.

James Wallace Harris, 6/1/23