Universe 10!

Our book today is Universe 10, the tenth installment in the great old science fiction anthology series by one of the best and sharpest-eyed editors the genre ever produced, Terry Carr. This slim volume is from 1980 – the copy I have is a hardcover, although I expect most of the loyal readers Terry amassed over decades of putting out top-notch anthologies knew his works by their paperback editions – and I’ve given away more copies than I can readily remember, all for the sake of one story in the book: “The Ugly Chickens” by Howard Waldrop. If you’ve known me for any length of time and our conversations have come around to science fiction, chances are that in addition to recommending Startide Rising and Damiano’s Lute and The Orphan, I’ve also recommended a small number of short stories. And in that number, right alongside “Scanners Live in Vain” or “Kith of the Elf-Folk” or “Brothers” or “Souls” I’ve also recommended “The Ugly Chickens” – and then handed you a copy of one or the other of the anthologies where Terry Carr included it. Because that’s what you kind of had to do, in the decades before the Internet: when it came to short stories, you had to go and physically find the thing somewhere and hand it to somebody if you ever expected them to read it.

But it occurred to me the other day – while browsing the Brattle bargain carts, naturally – that my affection for “The Ugly Chickens” has caused me to neglect revisiting the rest of the stuff in this volume, and when you’re dealing with an editor as borderline-infallible as Terry was, that’s clearly a mistake. So I recently read through the whole thing again, and the experience was both happy and sad: I smiled at some of the gems assembled here, and I missed the assembler.

The collection starts off with a decidedly off-form story by Michael Bishop, the right after that there’s “A Source of Innocent Merriment,” a typically smart and subversive piece by James Tiptree that opens with customary ease:

His eyes did not bear the look of eagles, his skin was not bronzed by the light of alien suns. Like most astro-explorers, he was a small, sallow, ordinary figure, compact and flexible, now sliding inconspicuously to paunch. His face, from the distance he had been pointed out to me, seemed ordinary too: boyish and a trifle petulant. He was sitting alone. As I came toward him through the haze and spotlights of Hal’s place, he glanced up, and the very bright blue of his eyes was striking even in the murk.

This collection also contains “And All the Skies are Full of Fish” by R. A. Lafferty, which got rave reviews from all the readers I knew back in 1980 but did nothing for me at all. It still does nothing for me at all, but at least I see a bit more of the worth they were seeing way back then. Likewise for “Bete et Noir” by Lee Killough, which I originally thought was included here solely because our editor seldom exercised a tight rein over his taste for high melodrama. I still think that, but the hammy way Killough goes about it right from the first notes appealed to me a bit more this time around:

On gray days, when the clouds hang in heavy pewter folds and the wind comes down cold and sharp as a blade, I think of Brian Eleazar. We stand facing each other in the sand garden, surrounded by the elaborate and alien patterns of rock outcroppings in a score of minerals and dune of a dozen different colored sands. The sand underfoot is fine and white as sugar over a deeper layer of red. Across it, between us, the trail of footprints shows scarlet, as though they were stepped in blood.

The volume also, delightfully, includes a couple of pieces of speculative nonfiction. It was a positive treat to read Eric Iverson’s “Report of the Special Committee on the Quality of Life,” for instance.

But inevitably, I keep coming back to “The Ugly Chickens,” Waldrop’s antic and surprisingly poignant alternate natural history of a certain flightless bird, which gets mentioned during the short city bus trip at the story’s beginning:

“I haven’t seen any of those ugly chickens in a long time,” said a voice close by.

A gray-haired lady was leaning across the aisle toward me.

“I used to live near some folks who raised them when I was a girl,” she said. She pointed.

I looked down at the page my book was open to.

What I should have said was: That is quite impossible, madam. This is a drawing of an extinct bird of the island of Mauritius. It is perhaps them most famous dead bird in the world. Maybe you are mistaking this drawing for that of some rare Asiatic turkey, peafowl, or pheasant. I am sorry, but you are mistaken.

I should have said all that.

What she said was, “Oops, this is my stop.” And got up to go.

My name is Paul Lindberl. I am twenty-six years old, a graduate student in ornithology at the University of Texas, a teaching assistant. My name is not unknown in the field. I have several vices and follies, but I don’t think foolishness is one of them.

The stupid thing for me to to would have been to follow her.

She stepped off the bus.

I followed her.

Of course, enjoying that story all over again (and feeling all over again the simmer of frustration over the fact that Waldrop is still virtually unknown, now even among the newer generation of sci-fi fans) gave me the strong desire to find and re-read all the dozens and dozens of anthologies edited by Terry Carr. Maybe I’ll snatch them up as they appear at the Brattle. You’ll be the first to know.