"Growing up in Edge City" by Frederik Pohl

Originally appeared in Roger Elwood and Robert Silverberg's Epoch. It was up for a Nebula. James Frankel considered it one of Pohl's best, collected it in Platinum Pohl.

Summary:

In a highly regimented yet protective mechanical society, a young man routinely hides his location from his proctors and goes off exploring Edge City. There he meets Dropouts, people like his parents who somehow were unfit for society.

Discussion:

Whoa, Nelly. This one is fire. Definitely, experimental in style--these solid chunks of text that give us insight into this isolated mind that one expects to be influenced in one direction--toward a sensitive feeling toward people who had been kind to him--but instead he lies about having met them and when he is older and in power, is driven to attack the people who had invited him to live with them and be loved. This is paradoxically moving and excruciating. The style is so uniquely tied to everything about the story. Brilliant. Not one of the greatest of the greats, but well worth the time.

"Day Million" by Frederik Pohl

For more a deeper look and for other ways of seeing this story, see this post.  It has been viewed ~1500 times.

First appeared in Frank M. Robinson's Rogue. Reprinted in nearly a dozen major retrospectives, byAnn VanderMeer & Jeff VanderMeer, James Patrick Kelly, John Kessel,  Leigh Ronald Grossman, Arthur B. Evans, Gardner Dozois, Martin H. Greenberg, David G. Hartwell, Kathryn Cramer, Ursula K. Le Guin, Brian Attebery, Robert Silverberg, Josh Pachter,  Martin H. Greenberg, James E. Gunn, Patricia S. Warrick, Joseph D. Olander, Brian W. Aldiss, Harry Harrison, Pamela Sargent, Robin Scott Wilson, Damon Knight, Dick Allen, Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr, Val Clear. Both Lester Del Rey and James Frenkel considered this one of Pohl's best.

Summary:

In the near or far future, a boy and a girl fall in love. But they are not like any boy or girl that we today might know.

 

Discussion:

The Aesthetics:

Someone asked me what the most disappointing but most lauded story I've read. This one came to mind. The biggest problem is the lack of fictive dream as John Gardner called it.  We never get to fall in love with our characters who are supposed to fall in love with each other. This was my complaint although one might focus on other issues. I don't care if I agree or disagree, but the aesthetics should be up to par. One could slip into and out of the fictive dream, which would probably be the best scenario in a situation like this, no matter how difficult the future might be to explain.

One major unanswered question: How and why is the narrator talking to us in this way? What is preventing our understanding? It addresses us (if we indeed are the adressees in the speaker's tale) as if we will object, but I doubt few SF readers actually ever do. If only the story were more pinned down in time and place, it might have suggested more of the fictive dream.

This suggests that the story is aimed in a different direction. Much as I like stories that break the fictive dream, we are rarely immersed in it here. Pohl could have done so as he had the skill, but chose not to. Perhaps he didn't want to. Why not? Did he not want or was he incapable of delivering the strangeness? Was he writing at the edge of what he could comprehend? Or was he purposefully thwarting expectations?

Robert Silverberg praises this "style" in Worlds of Wonder, yet almost in the same breath suggests it shouldn't be done again.

In this era, a number of writers were trying to rewrite what fiction means. This is probably why Harry Harrison and Brian Aldiss included it in the Nebula Award anthology, despite it apparently not making the cut. It may have been considered part of the New Wave, which Aldiss (especially) and Harrison sometimes championed.

The Thumbed Nose at Normies:

The British New Wave was more aesthetically driven while the American New Wave (exemplified by Harlan Ellison's Dangerous Visions) was more taboo driven. This story conveniently fits both parameters. Clearly there was cross-pollination between the two. It feels like a Dangerous Visions story, and perhaps it helped launch the idea in Ellison's brain.

This was first published in the men's magazine--intended as a rival to Playboy--as edited by Frank Robinson who was gay, which is a curious combination yet explains its publication.

As suggested above, the style itself is a thumbed nose at our conception of story should be but it also  rejects our idea of normative sexuality. But it does so, so strangely. Yes, it is still trangendered individuals, but in a way that it is still normal. If it could be labeled as such. It wants to make the strange as normal as possible. It is but is not.

However, the future changes genders based not on the individual but on what outsiders view the genetics should be. In a sense, it doesn't understand that it is presenting the same problem to the next generation. It isn't even nature developing one's gender, but human beings telling people what their gender is. Pohl's narrator suggests this is just like giving a scholarship to Julliard for people talented at making music, but this is done without consent before an individual could decide for themselves.

The Science:

This suggests one of the potential scientific problems with the text. On one hand, maybe in the future, we think we might be able to guess by an arrangement of genes who will desire might desire to be transgender, but it neglects our understanding that not only is phenotype determined by genetics developing, which influences the development of other genes but also by nurture. Also, it would be far simpler to add or remove the Y chromosome, so that one would not have to continually repress one's gene expression. Yet the Y and the X are maintained as is. But it still seems improbable that one could guess what phenotype one would want to express. Instead of freeing of gender, it might be a shackling of gender. This might create more problems than it prevents.

 When I first read it, I didn't challenge its suppositions, assuming "Day Million" meant [a] Day [a] Million [years from now]. I think (the text says about 10,000 years from now, so maybe I accepted that). Some far future, anyway. In Pohl's essay "On Velocity Exercises" from the Those Who Can anthology (see discussion of that essay here), that this was supposed to be a million days from the beginning of the Christian era. That would mean, more or less, Novembber 23, 2737. That would have been ~770 years from when Pohl originally wrote this. 

However, if one were to project from the publication date, then it would suggest Christmas Eve or Christmas in 4703. Either way, we are still a far cry from 10,000 years from now. Perhaps Pohl rounded and did a quick mental calculation using 100 days in a year instead of 365.25 (accounting for leap year). This suggests that maybe Pohl wrote this a little too hastily, perhaps without double-checking himself.

One character has a centrifuge for a heart. That doesn't make sense based on what we know about centrifuges which separate the parts of a solution/suspension such as that contained in a cell in order to study the parts of each. Why would a creature want to separate out the parts of their blood? It would probably be poor at holding oxygen post-separation. Or maybe the centrifuge is more metaphorical, suggesting that the blood is flung out to the parts of the body by some high-speed rotary device. However, one problem would be a huge blood pressure, which means a different constitution from what we have today, or they'd all be dead seconds after creation of the heart. The other problem would be the difficulty of oxygen distribution, which  would be a lack of time for this to occur.

It also discussed osmosis as one method of oxygen distribution, which make sense unless we are talking about beings at least as small as frogs with large surface areas.  

On the Whole:

As the above link suggests, there is much to appreciate. It is flawed. But it is probably best appreciated as a kind of speculative essay.

 

Frederik Pohl's Velocity Exercises and thoughts on style: "Grandy Devil," "Punch" and "Pythias"

"Grandy Devil" first appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Reprinted by Robin Scott Wilson.
This was reprinted as one of Pohl's best (~the top 15% of his stories up until this point, 1974? or perhaps from the 1940s through the 1960s).

Summary: A young man learns who the strange people who visit the house which has been in family's hands for generations.

"Punch" first appeared in Playboy. Reprinted by Avram Davidson, Groff Conklin, the editors of Playboy, Isaac Asimov, Martin Harry Greenberg, Joseph D. Olander, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Robert Weinberg. This was reprinted as one of Pohl's best (~the top 15% of his stories up until this point, 1974? or perhaps from the 1940s through the 1960s). Read online.

Summary: A kind group of aliens offer humanity many gifts, including warships to venture into space.

 

"Pythias" first appeared in H. L. Gold's Galaxy. Reprinted by Martin H. Greenberg, Charles G. Waugh, Jenny-Lynn Waugh. Read online.

Summary: A young visits an old friend in the hospital, who had just protected the Senate from a hand grenade meant to blow up the proceedings.

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Velocity Exercises

What are they?

In his essay on style in the anthology, Those Who Can, these are three stories Pohl pointed to as having fit the definition. Pohl used a number of terms and definitions that make it difficult to pinpoint.

"Three-word stories": Pohl wrote, "not that every one of them is exactly three words; it may be a little more or less." Rather, I think he refers to the turn the story makes which may depend on three-word revelations that cast the story in a new light. In "Punch" it's "Neither do we," and in "Punch" it's "But I can."

"Twist-ending" or "one-punch" stories: two other names Pohl lent to this idea, which Pohl telegraphs by calling one "Punch." These, he says, were popular in magazines like Liberty and Collier's. He's a bit dismissive, but the anthologies these appeared in had multiple printings, which is rare for anthologies. The magazines were popular in Pohl's youth, but they folded, but I suspect that had more to do with the changing economy than the stories themselves given the popularity of anthologies that appeared decades after the magazines folded. Moreover,  Collier's published Hemingway, Faulkner, and Heinlein whose work could not easily be summed up by this.

Velocity exercises: What is the velocity in the exercise? A story that can be written quickly? A story that can be read quickly? He doesn't say. He does call it a haiku--a kind of compressed story told in 2000 words or less, which may be a narrative form more akin to, say, the sonnet and its iambic pentameter and final turn, especially.

Pohl adds that the important thing to these stories, despite the emphasis on the "turn" or "twist," is not to diminish the story that proceeds the change. He does invest in the main story, but it's unclear where these represent a departure from other stories of this kind.

Now Pohl's essay is supposed to be about style. I suspect that the two short short stories ("Day Million" and "Grandy Devil") were selected for Pohl by Robin Scott Wilson so as to give Pohl a path to illumine what style in a story might be. Rather, Pohl took the essay in the direction of form, which is somewhat informative but not fully. The gist of what Pohl had to say about this was

"In the act of solving these problem [character, plot, scene, setting, theme] style is created. If it is appropriate, it is good; if it is inappropriate it; and that is the Whole of the Law."

The last is an allusion to Aleister Crowley, suggesting that the writer seek out his own true path. A bit mushy and not entirely useful for a writer seeking advice. This suggests that he may not know himself except on a subconscious level. He does suggest that parodists copy other writers' styles and when it does so inappropriately to the story in question, "the results are comic."

James Gunn in addressing his own style in his most famous story [the Nebula-nominated "The Listeners"] says essentially that style should be seen but not heard--a very different conclusion. Yet, Gunn goes into more depth, suggesting that style in part comes out of revision, seeking better words to express one's meaning. Most surprisingly, Gunn invites disagreement: "don't let me get by with that! disagree!" which echoes the old, long lost ways of academia that invited people to disagree, to let people own their own opinions and to have discussions, rather to be told what to think.

What's interesting about several of these stories ["The Listeners" and "Grandy Devil"] and the above quote alluding to Crowley, too, is that they borrow from other writers, invoking a kind of style that comments on and illumines the work of each. 

In "Grandy Devil" Pohl has a series of "begats" that calls on the Bible where historical lineages are of critical importance as it is here as well.

Gunn's "The Listeners" quotes famous works to put them in a context of communicating with aliens, which both illumines and alters the theme in that they comment on Gunn's own spare, clear style.

 

Commentary on individual stories:

"Grandy Devil": In some ways this is the most fun, but the least provocative. Unless you consider the mystery of one's lineage important. There's also the idea that we don't always understand the history of conflicts that we walk into as young people.

"Punch": This is the most famed and recognized of the three, but perhaps the least interesting. Beware of those bearing gifts. "I fear the Greeks even when bearing gifts."--Virgil's Aeneid. But still fun and provocative, nonetheless.

"Pythias": The most brilliant of the three, this tells the story of a man who kills a friend in order to obtain the secret of telekinesis and hold it for himself. It presents itself as doing the greater good thing, but we see that it's just selfishness and greed--a parable applicable to every political faction ever.