FANTASTIC STORIES:

...Happily, there was not an avalanche of books in which people weaned on - ponderous theological prose suddenly tried to take wing...

...Eventually crushed, it marked a turning point in South Carolina history...

...But the basic idea was sound, and it may not have had the attention it really deserved...

...It can be prophetic, in the warn-ing rather than the predictive sense, and tells us something about our real dreams and fears...

...The controls and restrictions traditionally associated with Southern slavery were yet to emerge...

...Fantasy also has the func-tion of raising disturbing dreams and registering the changes in a society's self-awareness...

...Two deal disturbingly with death, and the third is about a prophet who persuades a desperate world to ask God for a sign...

...He notes, with detach-ment if not admiration, Hayes' tremen-dous capacity for work, his dawn to midnight regimen, his fanatical devo-tion to detail and thoroughness...

...We believe that we will be aided in our search...

...As they grew to numerical superiority they created and preserved a distinct and separate social and, occasionally, eco-nomic culture...

...Michael Moorcock's An Alien Heat (Harper, $.95) shows a time at the end of the world when technology has made it possible for the few re-maining human beings to live out every fantasy, and the race has be-come so decadent that the excited announcement by an alien creature of the imminent end of the universe is greeted with yawns...

...But there is also something a little too tributions, coupled with the leveling influence and mutual dependence of pioneer life, encouraged them to as-sume a posture which Wood describes as "unfree...

...By the 1720s, however, many of the conditions which allowed "unfree" slaves to flourish were changing...

...Its hero is a writer who has written a suppressed novel about a world in which the Allied forces won-and it is not our world...

...I'd like to suggest that the kind of fantasy which serves this function in our time is the kind we know as science fiction...

...But he never has...

...There is a consolation about this landscape...

...Three of his quarterbacks . . . and several assistants have had them," Vare writes...

...Also, by way of protesting that the Notre Dame athlete is expected to measure up to general academic standards, the authors disclose that the university has a system set up to monitor the athletes constantly-a sort of Distant Early Warning system to assure that no sneak attack from academia will knock a player out of the lineup...

...As a result, blacks, who were a majority of the population, were able to preserve "tra-ditions of behavior, speech and myth," and were able to sustain "social and...

...In Lords of the Locker Room Ral-bovsky concentrates on a subject large-ly overlooked in the other two books, namely the ways in which youngsters are affected by the autocratic aspects of the system...

...both leave the reader convinced that slaves shaped their own world to a far greater extent than historians have acknowl-edged until recent years...

...Genovese and Wood are well read together...

...They remained slaves...

...Alfred Bester's The Com-puter Connection (Berkley/Putnam, $6.95) is a light and fast-moving thing, but consider some of the things it touches: 1) people who are phys-ically immortal because they have died horrible deaths...

...FANTASTIC STORIES JOHN GARVEY A couple of years ago there was a lot written about a new approach to theology, one which is really a re-vival of the most ancient approach...

...A changed in-stitution eventually emerged, one char-acterized by a "heightened degree of white repression and a reduced amount of black autonomy...

...What emerges is a devastating por-trait of a man who has acquired an absurdly disproportionate moral and political influence over the city of Columbus and the state of Ohio by virtue of nothing more than total devo-tion to the mindless ethic of sport in America: victory as an absolute value...

...A Coach's World RICHARD "DIGGER" PHELPS and LARRY KEITH Crowell, $6.95 Lords of the Locker Room MARTIN RALBOVSKY Wyden, $7.95 Buckeye ROBERT VARE Harper's Magazine Press, $7.95 MICHAEL ROBERTS To borrow a line from the stand-up comics, one out of three ain't bad...

...Blacks did not, as some historians have argued, linger as ignorant, dependent and un-skilled laborers, but rather they "par-ticipated in-and in some way domin-ated-the evolution of that particular social and geographical frontier...

...Black Majority, drawn from limited sources available for one col-ony during parts of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, is gen-erally less satisfying in matters of slave culture and society, areas where Gen-ovese glows...

...C. S. Lewis, who wrote both fantasy and science fic-tion, noted that science fiction fans "like it thus ravenously, and . . . those who do not are often revolted by it...

...For example, Charleston's "unfree" Negroes had the resources necessary to buy and resell enough plantation pro-duce to effect an increase in prices...

...Both argue overwhelm-ingly for the contributions made by Africans and Afro-Americans to the new world...

...the social, economic, and even physical 'place of black Carolinians...

...But there are levels of terror in some of Hans Christian Andersen's tales, or in the Grimm fairy tales, that chil-dren really can't understand...

...The frontier society which valued assertive and resourceful servants was giving way to a plantation society and econ-omy which preferred obedient and sub-missive field hands...

...We be-lieve that there is a power about benevolence, that the good will win somehow, or ought to win, even in worldly terms...

...To his Ohio constituency he's a car-rier of an ideal-an ideal embodied in the ability to annihilate most of the opposition each year and knock off Michigan as often as not...

...Whereas Vare finds it sinister that fat-cat alumni dole out summer jobs to the jocks, Phelps ticks off the list like an honor roll: the brewer, the business-man, the Woolworth executive...

...The sign is given, everyone is convinced, and things get even worse...

...Not only were some of the best writers of fantasy, like Tolkien and Lewis, Christians...

...Hence, in many passages the author is able to capture the essence of Hayes, the inveterate ranter...

...and I have to admit liking a novelist who can start a book with a line like "Dressed in various shades of light brown, the Iron Or-chid and her son sat upon a cream colored beach of crushed bone...

...the few examples of deliberate theo-logical storytelling I saw were em-barrassing, a little like the dancing hippos in Fantasia...

...Vare obviously did the requisite re-search...

...The logical next question-What price is improper?-is never asked...

...Sur-prisingly, Hayes never developed an ulcer...

...African skills, knowledge and labor easy about it, if you are looking for our age's real dreams...

...Robert Heinlein's naive explo-ration of sex and community, Stranger in a Strange Land (Berkeley, $1.95), has been a cult-book among young people for years and influenced Charles Manson...

...He knocks many eminent-ly knockable entities, among them Little League and kiddie football...

...Wood's strength rests with his effort to show how and why slavery changed and evolved as it did (although admittedly the specifics may be peculiar to colonial South Caro-lina...

...But as Wood so ably demonstrates, slavery in that place and time was a fluid, elastic, maturing institution...

...Similarly, Phelps and Keith, unlike Vare put a totally benign construction on the fact that Notre Dame players- for no merit other than their athletic ability-receive economic and academic benefits beyond their scholarships...

...The only fantasy which adults felt able to accept was marked by a whimsy which many readers found too cloying (I find it impossible to get into The Hobbit or Wind in the Willows for that reason), a whimsy which made fantasy all right, which winked at the reader and said, "This isn't real...

...enabled colonial South Carolina not only to survive the "pioneer period" but to mature into an economically sound plantation society...

...4) three space voyagers who return home as embryos and grow into wonderful hermaph-rodites...

...Nothing there is really a challenge to them...

...The idea was that storytelling could serve as the most appropriate vehicle for religious thought, and given the way religious truths have of showing themselves in symbols, the idea seem-ed right...

...Ed-mund P. Joyce chairman of the Faculty Board in Control of Athletics gets a brief say early in the book: ". . . we're not willing to pay an improper price for success...

...Only one critic I know of-Leslie Fiedler-has suggested taking a seri-ous look at the popularity of science fiction...

...women's libera-tion ("bunch of goddam lesbians") and a host of other topics, and quotes freely, if inappropriately, from Shake-speare, Napoleon, Santayana, Patton (George), Lombardi, (Vince), Pasteur and Royal (Darrell...

...Robert Silverberg's Born with the Dead (Vintage, $1.95) is a trilogy consisting of three short novels...

...But Ralbovsky's manner of argument is likely to convince no one.albovsky's manner of argument is likely to convince no one...

...This could be why novelists like Walker Percy, in Love in the Ruins (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $7.95) and Doris Lessing, in Memoirs of a Survivor (Knopf, $6.95), have turned to future settings...

...the landscape reinforces them...

...Robert Vare's Buckeye, by contrast, is entertaining and incisive...

...Instead, the book plunges into a sur-feit of X's and O's, an overdramatized minute-by-minute account of the days leading up to the big UCLA game, triviality and minutiae-enough, in short, to tax the endurance of even the stoutest believer in the proposition that the winning of a basketball game is a matter of consequence...

...There is nothing in A Coach's World to indicate that the question ever crossed Digger Phelps' mind...

...This is the same Woody, of course, who agonizes over the task of finding a movie for the night before the game that won't be too much for the psyches of his impressionable lads...

...And, while Lords of the Locker Room attacks the issues head-on, it loses considerable impact because of an unrelieved humorless, polemical tone...

...This is not to say that Vare relates every aspect of the Hayes story with a subtle sneer...

...The hero de-cides to fall in love because he hasn't done that yet...

...A lot of people who were involved with po-litical action enjoyed Tolkien and kept on working, maybe refreshed a little by their contatt with something as basic as fantasy...

...A kind of fantasy renaissance occurred during the six-ties, beginning in a time of heighten-ed political consciousness with the surprising success of J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy...

...Considering the high ideals for which Notre Dame has al-ways stood, might it not be better to let athletes fail or succeed, find jobs or not find jobs on their own...

...By offering alternative presents, or pictures of the future, science fiction says something important about where we are and it does this in a way con- ' ventional fiction can't...

...The trend continues: C. S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia (Macmil-lan, $6.95) has enjoyed a revival, and Richard Adams' Shardik (Simon & Schuster, $9.95) is a best seller...

...The "coarse strength" Lewis referred to was a kind of ferocity, a lust apparent in science fiction and not in fantasy...

...He's just a carrier...

...On Watergate, he emoted thusly to Vare: "The way I see it, Nixon had to cover up to win the election...

...occasionally, economic self-sufficiency...

...both, to varying degrees, describe a separate black culture...

...Here are some other products of that "fierce curiosity": in Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream (Avon, $1.95) Adolph Hitler grows up to become a science fiction writer who writes novels about fascist conquest and makes appreciative critics thank God that such perversity could never come into real power...

...Fantastic stories of one sort or an-other have been around since man learned to use words, and they have frequently served as the tribe's way of handing on its theological and moral principles, as well as its way of dealing during waking hours with its dreams...

...If we do not be-lieve in kings we believe at least that power may be used by good people for holy reasons, just as it can be used for evil by evil people...

...But Tolkien got beyond whimsy into epic valor and glory, and sudden-ly wonder, awe, and terror were all right again...

...Following it, whites more clearly "defined...

...But in practice the objection was groundless...

...And having been so serious about it, I should mention that it really is fun to read the stuff...

...Hayes turns, pragmatist, relents, and in Pasadena there is a tacit under-standing that players are permitted to entertain women in their motel rooms...

...What is remarkable is not that this form is suddenly popular again, but that it ever stopped being popular...

...After view-ing Easy Rider, the lads had barely gotten by Minnesota...

...He thought it might require a psycho-analytical explanation, and wrote his own science fiction, he says, to exor-cise this "fierce curiosity...

...They think they can make a comeback in the classroom the way they do in a game...

...The repulsion of the one sort has the same coarse strength as the fascinated interest of the other...

...Like community dancing, singing, or game playing, in recent years we have considered it acceptable in children, shameful in adults...

...Each of these books addresses in its own way the uniquely privileged, pow-erful and influential status that goes with being coach of an athletic team in this country...

...My first reaction would have been: Well, shoot, we've done something wrong, but we can't make it right by letting the whole god-damned world know about it...

...Unfortunately Digger Phelps, coach of the Notre Dame basketball team, and Larry Keith, his collaborator, lose sight of the lofty aims they seem to have started with, and A Coach's World degenerates into an example (and not a particularly entertaining one) of the "gee whiz" genre of sports literature...

...We want to be as good as we can without sacrificing our princi-ples...

...He carries on about the decline of respect for Amer-ican political figures ("It wouldn't surprise me if they got to Lincoln before too long...

...A Coach's World views the same phenomena from a diametrically op-posite moral standpoint...

...That was never in question...

...For all his incessant talk about prin-ciples, Hayes' code is a moral muddle...

...The trouble is that this is an id-eological tract which attributes the very worst motives to just about every-body involved and makes some ludi-" crous, not to say unsupportable, premises-for example, that Catholic schools have more zeal than non-Catholic schools for gaining prestige through athletic success...

...Roll, Jordan Roll, while clearly the most comprehensive book yet on slavery, tends to slight the de-veloping institution...

...Some move-ment people had stupid objections to this-it was escapist, therefore a re-treat from the struggle...

...But these beliefs are not at all self-evident...

...You've got to understand," a professor explains, "that athletes are born optimists...

...Still, fantasy wasn't considered adult...

...Now," Hayes says, "I have my coaches scout the movies we see so these kids won't get hurt...

...We deal with good and evil in a way that is some-how familiar to us...

...In a sense they had something: it is subversive of purely political thinking to imply that there is a wider world, with larger concerns, than the one the movement wanted to define...

...This sort of fantasy allows us to use our minds in ways the world tries to discourage, by allowing us to imagine that the future is not determined, and things don't have to be the way they are...

...2) a nice man who therefore tortures people to death, because he admires them and wants them to live forever...

...Philip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle (Berkeley, $1.25) describes another alternative world in which Germany and Japan have won World War Two...

...there is something satis-fying about the enlargement of horizons which fantasy involves...

...He is an uncompromising discipli-narian-until he senses mutiny among the players over the prospect of another joyless, heavily-supervised Rose Bowl trip...

...There is, for instance, a sense of things being fitting and proper in the accounting of Digger Phelps' perquisites and emoluments: the high salary, the television show, the free automobile...

...Equally important, through perserverance he gained Woody Hayes' confidence to the extent that the Ohio State football coach felt comfortable ranting in Vare's presence...

...Certainly there is reason to worry about the well-being of the millions of youngsters in the keeping of would-be Vince Lombardis, and certainly there is much worthy of criticism in the or-ganization of sports for children...

...Skilled and indus-trious blacks who hired their time, bought and sold commodities and live-stock, or were involved in boating, or worse yet, were armed during periods of crisis were, as the society changed, viewed anxiously by the white minority...

...In their re-flection of the glory and grandeur of Woody Hayes, the pages of Buckeye demonstrate the vast appeal and en-during attraction of that ideal...

...To oversimplify one of Wood's theses, the process of assertive, "un-free" blacks resisting increased white controls culminated in the Stono re-bellion of 1739...

...Ordinary fan-tasy tends toward a cloudy archaicism -it is set in kingdoms, not democ-racies, and it involves princes and witches rather than policemen and psychiatrists...

...Or maybe it's that they think they are immune...

...Surprised by Joy, Harcourt, $2.25...

...Hell, I'd have done the same thing if any of my coaches had done something and I found out about it...

...Myth and reality touch here, but I don't know of any good studies of the phenomenon...

...That anxiety translated into increased controls and regulations over the black majority-"In a variety of ways [the slaves] were being pushed from the dubious position of unfree laborers to a degrading status of racial slaves...

...These presuppositions do well in the archaic world of Tolkien or Lewis...

...Andersen's The Sha-dow is a good example, and so is the medieval dance of death...

...It isn't witches we are scared of...

...3) the takeover of a Cherokee physicist by malevolent computers...

...It is easy to see why Christians have enjoyed watching all this...