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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Infinite Arena Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports by Terry Carr The Infinite Arena: Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports by Terry Carr. A touch melodramatic, but conveys the sinking feeling of lost childhood treasures and relationships quite well. Alexander, Holmes. "Five-Inning Wonder." Saturday Evening Post 219.8 (24 August 1946): 24-25, 54, 57. A pitcher returns from the war with an injured hand; his career is on the line – can he come through in the clutch? Alexander, Skye. "Life, Death, Love, and Baseball." In Undertow: Crime Stories by New England Writers (Level Best Books, 2003). Repr. Pachter. In the strike summer of 1981, a gardener starts an affair with a photographer client that she first meets at a Red Sox game. Develops an intriguing, unsettling plot but then wraps up rather too quickly. Alexie, Sherman. "The Warriors." In One Stick Song (Brooklyn: Hanging Loose Press, 2000): 42-54. Memories of a Spokane Indian basketball star who hates baseball. The memories are of friendship, playground pecking orders, lust, and Strat-O-Matic. A prose piece that forms the center of a poetry collection. Algren, Nelson. "I Guess You Fellows Just Don't Want Me." The Last Carousel (1973). Repr. Bowering. An urban tall tale about a character named Ipso Facto, who, in one ballgame, almost steals a run by stealing the baseball. Amaral, Richard E. "Babe Herman in Cooperstown." Aethlon 29.1 (Fall 2011 / Winter 2012): 121-133. Magical-realist encounter with famed Dodger. Anderson, Poul, and Gordon R. Dickson. "Joy in Mudville." Fantasy and Science Fiction , 1955. Repr. Terry Carr, ed. The Infinite Arena: Seven Science Fiction Stories About Sports . Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1977. In the future, baseball is played on thousands of planets that try to emulate the culture of Earth. This one would figure to have some satire of American imperialism buried somewhere in its dreadful prose and stick-figure characters, but maybe it doesn't . Anderton, Seven. "The Big Win." Ten Story Sports 6.3 (October 1952): 11-33. Reclusive owner plucks fan from cheap seats and names him manager of a hapless big-league club; club responds to manager's exhortations and goes on a tear. Pleasant little story (despite lower-tier pulp conventions that allow mild profanity and the suggestion of premarital sex). The unseen owner turns out to be a little old lady delighted to make fan Joe Frost's dream come true and to justify his girlfriend Addie Miller's faith in him. Apple, Max. "Understanding Alvarado." American Review 22 (1975). In The Oranging of America and Other Stories (New York: Grossman, 1976), repr. New York: Penguin, 1981. 81-94. Repr. Wilber.Whether Achilles "Archie" Alvarado, Cuban baseball hero and revolutionary, will return to the United States to collect his big-league pension comes down to a single at-bat taken by a retired American slugger against pitcher Fidel Castro. Energetic, good-humored short story. For more fictional views of Castro on the mound, see Shepard, Wendel. Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations. Reviews of Vintage Science Fiction (1950s to mid-1980s) Book Review: The Best SF Stories from New Worlds 6 , ed. Michael Moorcock (1970) (stories by J. G. Ballard, Hilary Bailey, Carol Emshwiller, M. John Harrison, et al.) Paul Lehr’s cover for the 1971 edition. 3.75/5 (collated rating: Good) Welcome to a postmodern museum of disordered landscapes. J. G. Ballard paints a cratered England as a new Vietnam. Langdon Jones reduces the operation of the world to a series of sculptural machines. Hilary Bailey weaves a dystopic England changed beyond recognition in mere years. M. John Harrison’s characters interact with cardboard cutouts on an imaginary set. And Michael Moorcock’s Jerry Cornelius flits between India and Pakistan’s present and past. While there are a few duds, the cream of New Worlds will tantalize all fans of New Wave science fiction. Brief Summary + Analysis. Mal Dean’s illustration of J. G. Ballard’s “The Killing Ground” in New Worlds (March 1969) “The Killing Ground” (1969), J. G. Ballard, 5/5 (Very Good): “The meadows around the enclave formed the landscape of a drowned moon” (9). Ballard’s short fictions pull me into their orbits like old rusted screws and lost metal objects from under the floorboards to Melquíades’ magnet. “The Killing Ground,” perfectly illustrated in New Worlds (March 1969) by Mal Dean’s block print art, postulates a near future U.K. occupied by a technologically advanced America. Like the French holed up at the Battle of Dien Bien Phu (1954), a group of Americans are surrounded by British revolutionaries revolting against the English puppet government in London. Major Pearson interacts with three nameless American prisoners, a wounded African American soldier, a young soldier with a bag filled with books, and their captain who tries to clean the Kennedy Memorial near where the prisoners are held. The historical parallels postulate an America on the rampage with Vietnam-esque conflicts breaking out across the world. Pearson seems to believe that a New Order will emerge, an awakening, a moment of change: “It’s achieved everything” (13). The brutality perpetrated by Tulloch brings everything down to earth. Beautiful. Stark. Intense. Charles Platt’s illustration of Harvey Jacob’s “Gravity” in New Worlds (August 1969) “Gravity” (1969), Harvey Jacobs, 4/5 (Good): Charles Platt’s illustrations for Jacob’s “Gravity” pair the heroic figure of the astronaut with the symbol of mundane daily existence, a visit to the supermarket. Jacob’s crass and hilarious tale tells of the adventures of the earthbound Bogardus Blik, who works a computer for the space program and romps with a heroic astronaut’s wife. While popping aphrodisiacs (“clams on the half-shell and navel oranges”) and watching the launch of his program’s rocket, Bogardus mythologizes himself. His earthy quest to bed the wives of heroes is but another sad manifestation of phallic posturings of the American space program. I find all of this humorous as Harvey Jacobs, according to Michael Moorcock, was involved in the promotion of the Moon Landing (which happened a few months after his story was published). Charles Platt’s illustration of Harvey Jacob’s “Gravity” in New Worlds (August 1969) Stories that subvert the cult of the astronaut—from Barry N. Malzberg’s nihilistic black comedies to C. M. Kornbluth’s “The Rocket of 1955” (1939), a dark flash fiction piece about swindlers preying on the dream of exploration—appeal to my overwhelming need to poke holes in grand narratives, to admit that humans are humans, and that history is no heroic wax museum cavalcade of what now should be. And Harvey Jacobs’ raunchy and lighthearted take on the “personal” side of the Space Race is a nice foil to the sad intumbated wheezes of Malzberg’s astronauts propping up show columns while sinking into Venusian mud or whispering “‘I’m demoralized” to a welfare officer. While Malzberg adheres to a relentless ideology of the dehumanization of modern man, Jacob flings rotten fruit with a giggle and a smile. “The Eye of the Lens” (1968), Langdon Jones, 4/5 (collated rating: Good*): Preliminary Note: This anthology combines all three parts of the “The Eye of the Lens” triptych. I’ve reviewed them previously here. I’ve reproduced my original review of each section of the triptych with slight edits below. “The Hall of Machines” (1968) , short story, 5/5 (Masterpiece): Part I of the “The Eye of the Lens” triptych. An observer researches the endless hall of machines, various earthly and human processes made mechanical, and speculates about the nature of the hall and presents “a picture that is far from complete, but which is remarkable in its specific detail” (38). The entire hall and its machines is in motion, the Earth transformed mechanically, the world’s denizens move between and among the machines… Aquinas’ prime mover has set it all in motion, and it ratchets, wiggles, switches, twitches, manipulates, and cycles before the observer. There are clear references to Borges’ story “The Library of Babel” (1941), notable the discussion of the nature of dimensions of the hall (is it infinite?), but Jones moves in other original directions. The story is possessed by an almost meditative examination in excessive and obsessive detail of the workings of the machines, each reflecting in some way the process it embodies. For example, the “Machines of Movement” in the “Interlocking Machine Room,” “on entering the room I found it to be full of giant metal crabs” (41) where “all the legs of these machines are connected by free-moving joints to the legs of the other units, and a movement of one causes an adjustment to the position of the other. The whole room is in motion, and the machines twitch each other with an action that appears almost lascivious in nature” (42). The Earth as a vast series of interconnected systems that trigger other systems, ad infinitum. One Machine of Death is “very large, sprawling, and complicated” and “appears to be completely functionless”—the researcher speculates that it “was constructed to be entirely symbolic in nature” (45), perhaps meant to end lives that no longer exist to end. And another Machine of Death takes the form of a wall of metal, a single waste pipe exudes a stream of blood… The Earth as Machine. Beautiful, haunting, I will remember this story for a long time. “The Coming of the Sun” (1968) , short story, 4/5 (Good): Part II of the “The Eye of the Lens” triptych. Structured as a series of paragraph poems or individual scenes, that relate thematically to each other and are organized in sequence.

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