Doc Phoenix, by Ted White (pulp short story, 1975)

[lb_lee]

"It's not irretrievably lost, you know. You can have it back."
"But--but--the life I've had--the things I've done--you can't just wipe them out, like wiping a slate clean!"
"No. But they can be integrated. Right now they dominate you. They can become only memories, part of the suffering you've known, but suffering from which you've learned, from which you have been tempered--like fine steel. Emotional health doesn't mean reshuffling your memories or selective amnesia. It means integration--wholeness. It means strength. It means becoming your own person."

Blurb: Doc Phoenix, a superpsychologist dream-diver, dives into the headspace of a corrupt politician who wants to change his ways... and maybe assassinate the good doctor afterward.

Why is it worth your time?: This is self-declared pulp, and it embraces that genre. Deep art it is not, but it is entertaining. Weird Heroes was a series with the self-proclaimed central message of "Respect life and enjoy it," and the idea of a hero who works to rescue people's minds from the inside out is a pretty great premise! If you just want a fun, humble psychological adventure, this is worth a shot.

Plural Tags: abuse low-focus, bodyhopping, otherworld, dreamfolk, visions

Content Warnings: contain spoilers; see comments

Access Notes: This short story was in the anthology Weird Heroes, vol. 2, edited by Byron Preiss at Pyramid Books. Unlike the sequel, this book has been digitized on Anna's Archive! Uncertain whether it is screenreadable.

Misc Notes: Got a book-length sequel, called the Oz Encounter (or Weird Heroes Vol. 5: Doc Phoenix: the Oz Encounter), which is also worth reading, though apparently that one has never been digitized! Obviously I should fix that.

Comments

Content Warnings

[lb_lee]

The assassin sent after Doc Phoenix appears to be a 12-15 year old girl, but she is in fact 28. In other works, this would be played for skeeze, but the Doc Phoenix stories are ones with conspicuously decent people as heroes; her youthful appearance is used purely to get into the compound, and Doc Phoenix nonviolently stops her and asks her if maybe she'd like to be her own person. (She does.) One of his team members, Moose, feels flustered around her and confused as to why, but it's not because he's into her when he thinks she's a kid; he recognizes that her levels of perception aren't what he expects from her youthful appearance, and the dissonance shakes him. When she KOs him, she's even careful to lay him down so he doesn't smack his head.

These works could so easily be creepy and awful and mind-controlly, but instead they're just really nice things to read.