sleepless thoughts

Let's just say I'm up this early because I'm not feeling too well, and trying to put myself to sleep reading The New Yorker, where on page 46 of the 11/28 issue, in the middle of George Packer's profile of Peter Thiel, we find the venture capitalist's diagnosis of when "the collapse of the idea of the future" began. He dates it to the oil shock of 1973, and says you can measure it in "the collapse of science fiction." He says that before then it was all sweetness and light. He says - I can hardly believe I'm typing this - "the anthology of the top twenty-five sci-fi stories in 1970 was, like, 'Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon,'" whereas now it's all full of depression and danger.

Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon?

I'm looking at a list of the Hugo and Nebula nominated SF published in 1969 (awards given in 1970) and 1970, and while some of them are reasonably positive stories - including a couple of award-winning novels which might, if you're willing to be misleading, be summarized as "Me and my friend the androgyne went for a walk on the glacial field" and "Me and my friend the Pierson's Puppeteer went for a walk on the Ringworld" - it also includes such cheerful charmers as Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, Wilson Tucker's The Year of the Quiet Sun (in which racism wins out), Joanna Russ's And Chaos Died, Robert Silverberg's "Passengers" (in which homosexuality is the ultimate horror), James Tiptree's "The Last Flight of Dr. Ain" (in which everybody dies, literally), and last but not least Harlan Ellison's "A Boy and His Dog" (oy).

If we want an anthology with a slightly wider chronological view, it so happens that 1970 was the year of publication of The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, volume 1, SFWA's choice of the all-time greatest pre-1965 SF short stories and novelettes. And yes, while some of the 26 stories, like Weinbaum's "A Martian Odyssey" and Murray Leinster's "First Contact" (in both of which humans meet aliens and make peace), even - if you look at it that way - Fred Brown's "Arena" (the interstellar war does stop, doesn't it?), are fairly positive stories about a beckoning future, it also contains Asimov's "Nightfall", Judy Merril's "That Only a Mother", Kornbluth's "The Little Black Bag", and then, in a consecutive five-puncher near the end of the book, Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life" which is almost the essence of an SF horror story, Tom Godwin's infamous "The Cold Equations", Bester's virtuosically nasty "Fondly Fahrenheit" (me and my friend the robot share a psychopathic breakdown), Damon Knight's hiddenly cruel "The Country of the Kind", and Daniel Keyes' brilliant tearjerker "Flowers for Algernon", the cumulative effect of which could send you suicidal, and which certainly shook me up when I read them all for the first time in a lump on encountering this book a couple of years later.

Me and my friend the robot went for a walk on the moon. GMAFB, Mr. Thiel. You know as little of SF as the article shows you knowing about politics or humor.

two concerts

1. SF Symphony on Wednesday. I already had tickets to this one, because I wanted to hear Gil Shaham, whom I'd recently heard play unaccompanied Bach, in a Brahms concerto. Then I was called in last-minute to review it. This involved making a special trip ahead of time to turn in my existing tickets for something else, as you can't do that the day of the concert. (It was OK: I had to go up anyway to confirm that a fact I was looking for was not in a rare book held by the UC Berkeley library, as indeed it wasn't.) Sitting in the close-up reviewer seats probably improved the positive slant on my review, such was the intimacy of Shaham's performance. I don't feel I captured the essence of that, though I could certainly feel it, as well as I did the profound weirdness of Schoenberg's orchestration of Brahms' G-minor piano quartet, a work which, such is the deep impact of the arranger on this echt-Brahms piece, sounds as if it was written at no known date in musical history.

2. The New Esterhazy Quartet, Sunday afternoon as the sun was setting on that dark and echoing bunker known as All Saints Church in Palo Alto. The program was of "Haydn & His Students," which attracted me. This group, as its name implies, specializes in Haydn, and standard Haydn is what they do best. Op. 20 No. 2 is not standard Haydn. This coarsely dramatic piece came out with a Baroque restraint, its drama tampered down to wistfulness. It sounded as if it was by Corelli. I'm not complaining, exactly. From Haydn's most famous pupil, Beethoven, we had Op. 95. A knotty mature Beethoven quartet like this one is rather outside of this group's range, and it felt like wandering around in the dark (by this time it was pretty close to dark even inside the church), except for the scherzo and the finale coda, which snapped together fairly well.

The two obscure works by lesser-known composers were more interesting. A brief D minor quartet by Beethoven's drinking and whoring buddy Baron Zmeskall (also the dedicatee of Op. 95) concluded with a lively rustic finale. And last, the Op. 94 No. 3 in F minor by ron_drummond's favorite, Anton Reicha. (And the almost textless program leaflet bore a credit: "Thanks to Ron Drummond for supplying performance materials for the Reicha Quartet.") This was fun and full of unexpected things. The first movement is based largely on an unpromising-sounding rhythmic motif, something Beethoven would do, but Reicha's elaborations on it are more Italianate, in a Mozartean style perhaps, than Beethovenian. Only the occasional cross-bar notes really betray Haydn's influence. The slow movement starts with formal loud/soft call/response phrases, and features imaginative flights in the cello line. The austere minuet has pairs of instruments playing in canon, but surprisingly does not return to this minimal scoring in the da capo. The finale won my favor with a reminiscence of the Pastorale Symphony's scherzo, countrified throbbing drone passages over which the first violin played off-key, or are you telling me that last feature was not deliberate?