Summary:
A recommended Best of the Year anthology which has one outstanding story, Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh, and one that I would describe as very good, A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina die-Min Prasad.
These two are supported by good to very good work by Timons Esaias, Todd McAulty and Ian Tregillis, and good work from Brenda Cooper and A. T. Sayre.
That’s just over half the stories (and about sixty per cent of the anthology’s wordage) that are either worth, or are more than worth, your time (and there are a couple of near misses from Ray Nayler and T. Kingfisher as well)—not a bad hit rate for a ‘Best of the Year’ collection.
[ISFDB page] [Amazon UK, £4.44; USA, $5.99]

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Fiction:
Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship • novella by Will McIntosh ∗∗∗∗+
50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know • short story by Ken Liu ∗∗
A Guide for Working Breeds • short story by Vina die-Min Prasad ∗∗∗∗
Father • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗+
Metal Like Blood in the Dark • short story by T. Kingfisher ∗∗+
Your Boyfriend Experience • novelette by James Patrick Kelly ∗∗
The Beast Adjoins • short story by Ted Kosmatka ∗∗
Go. Fix. Now. • short story by Timons Esaias ∗∗∗+
The Ambient Intelligence • novelette by Todd McAulty ∗∗∗+
Sparklybits • novelette by Nick Wolven ∗∗
Callme and Mink • short story by Brenda Cooper ∗∗∗
Rover • short story by A. T. Sayre ∗∗∗
Come the Revolution • novelette by Ian Tregillis ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Maurizio Manzieri
Index

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This second thematic ‘Best of the Year’ collection from Allan Kaster opens with Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020), which sees Viv and her partner Ferruki out on a date when the Hempstead town AI texts her:

GOOD EVENING VIV. THIS IS TO INFORM YOU THAT, BASED ON AN ADVANCED ROMANTIC COMPATIBILITY ANALYTIC I’VE BEEN DEVELOPING, I HAVE IDENTIFIED AN IDEAL PARTNER FOR YOU. I’D LIKE THE TWO OF YOU TO MEET TOMORROW AT 6 P.M., AT TANGERINE TOWER ROOFTOP CAFE. IN FACT I’M SO CONFIDENT IN MY CALL ON THIS THAT I THINK WE SHOULD TENTATIVELY SCHEDULE THE WEDDING DATE! THIS IS A NEW SERVICE I’M PERFORMING TO IMPROVE THE WELL-BEING OF OUR COMMUNITY, AND NO ONE WILL BENEFIT MORE THAN YOU AND NICHOLAS.
LOVE,
JOURNEY

Viv calls Journey to protest, pointing out she is already engaged to Ferruki (as the AI knows) and, in any event, she doesn’t need its advice on dating. However, when Viv refuses to meet her suggested date, Journey threatens to throw her out of the high-tech paradise that is Hempstead. Although Viv realises she could appeal to the Town Council, that would (a) take time, and (b) probably be futile as the council usually agrees with the AI’s decisions—so she decides to go through with the date. Then she finds out that Nic is the janitor at the hospital where she works as a doctor.
The rest of the story proceeds along standard rom-com lines with the two of them reluctantly meeting for their date. When they do so Viv sees that Nic looks like a Neanderthal type who (a) also has a girlfriend, Persephone, and (b) doesn’t know the difference between “moot” and “mute”. Then Viv’s fiancé Ferruki arrives and drops a hint about his forthcoming karate black belt test. After Ferruki leaves, Nic tells Viv her fiancé is obviously insecure, but Viv defends Ferruki’s “enrichment activity” and then asks what Nic’s is: he says he does interpretative dance.
Their date does not go well so Journey ends up insisting that they make a proper effort to get to know each other. It then offers them 10,000 bucks if they meet for eight dates—or else. The pair reluctantly agree, and these dates (the Mars sim, a visit to a food bank, etc.) provide some hilarious set pieces, in particular the one where they are both in a steam tent with a female “experience leader” called Sharon who is trying to get the group to connect with their inner selves. Sharon hears one member’s traumatic experience before moving on to Nic:

Sharon pressed her fist to her palm and bowed slightly to Rita. “That’s a powerful insight. Thank you for sharing.” She looked at Nic, who was next in the circle. “Nic? Do you have anything to share?”
Nic wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. “I’m hot. I’m really hot.”
Sharon’s smile was kind, if a little tight. It had grown tighter each time Nic’s turn had come around. “Dig deeper, Nic. What do you feel?”
Nic squeezed his eyes closed. “I feel hot. I wish I had a giant block of ice I could lie on.”
Viv bit her lip, keeping her gaze on the flames. She knew if she looked at Nic, she’d lose it.
“Okay. We’ll come back around to you. Keep digging.” Sharon looked at Viv, her smile relaxing. “How about you, Viv? How do you feel?”
Viv stifled a laugh. Hot, she was dying to say. Really, really hot. This was serious, so she kept the joke to herself. “I was thinking about the purpose of this ritual, whether we create this artificial suffering as a means of reaching an altered state of consciousness, or if it’s really some sort of proving ground, to show we can take it, something to brag about to our friends.”
“Interesting,” Sharon said. “Try to draw that back to your own experience. Are you, personally, using it as a proving ground? Do you feel you have something to prove to your friends? Try to push through your intellect, dig down to how you feel.”
I feel hot. It was on the tip of her tongue, and it was suddenly the funniest thing Viv had ever thought. She bit her lip harder, trying not to laugh. Everyone in the circle had been pouring out their souls, speaking their truths. Except Nic. Each time his turn had come, he’d said the same thing: I feel hot. Each time he said it, it got funnier.
Sharon moved on. “Beto. How do you feel?”
I feel really fucking hot. Viv burst out laughing. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. She laughed so hard her stomach hurt, even though everyone was staring at her, confused.
“I’m sorry,” she managed. “I’m just so hot.”
“Right?” Nic said. “Thank you.”  p. 29

As well as the set pieces the story is also peppered with some very funny one liners:

“Shoot. I just remembered I have work in the morning,” Viv said.
“Yeah. Me, too. There’s a toilet I need to replace.”
Viv laughed. “You sound almost eager to get in there and replace that toilet.”
Nic shrugged. “I get a lot of satisfaction from replacing a toilet, so it’s a win-win for me.”
“What is it about replacing a toilet that gives you satisfaction?”
Nic studied her face. “Is that a serious question, or are you just mocking me?”
“Mostly I’m just mocking, but I’d like to hear your answer, in case it’s mockable, too.”  p. 32

Apart from the almost continual hilarity (I laughed out loud several times) provided by both Viv and Nic and their partner’s interactions, the pair also discover that the reason that Journey has embarked on this matchmaking endeavour is because its contract is up for renewal, and it fears it will be scrapped in favour of a newer model AI. Viv also finds out that Journey is partly made of human material and is a cyborg of sorts.
The story eventually rolls round to its (spoiler) admittedly predictable but satisfying conclusion. The dates end without the successful conclusion that Journey wanted to show its continual worth, and it then finds out that it is going to be replaced. Nic (who has now split up with Persephone) confesses his love to Viv, but she knocks him back. Then Nic invites Viv to his solo dance recital, another hugely funny set piece that shows Nic to be a not particularly skilled but wildly enthusiastic dancer. During his performance Nic offers to improvise to any music or sounds the audience offers, and we subsequently see his car-crash interpretation of drum music, a baby crying (Ferruki’s sniping choice), an Albanian ballad, a bear roaring, etc. During this, Ferruki, who has accompanied Viv to the perfomance, provides a constant stream of sarcasm and disdain and, when he and Viv are later trapped in an elevator for several hours, she eventually climbs out of the top of it to get away from him. They later split up.
The final section sees Viv and Nic get together. Then they rescue Journey, and take the AI to improve a neighbouring township that is less successful. The story ends a few years on with Journey talking to the couple’s daughter Lucy.
With this level of comedic talent, McIntosh should be working in Hollywood, not SF.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very good-Excellent). 17,600 words. Story link.

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50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know by Ken Liu (Uncanny, November-December 2020) takes the form of a futuristic article written about a Dr Jody Reynolds Tran and the neural network (essentially an AI) she creates called WHEEP-3. Tran later publishes a best-selling book about WHEEP-3, and subsequently causes a controversy when she reveals that the neural network was the author. There is more fuss later on when “seeds” of prose supposedly written by WHEEP-3 are found to be authored by Tran.
The story finishes with a reprint of one of WHEEP-3’s seeds, the “50 things” referred to in the title, a mix of statements that range from the obscure to the observational:

25. “I never expected to sell my rational numbers.”
26. Accepting that most humans will never get the joke.
27. That they cannot visualize more than three dimensions.
28. That they cannot manipulate time by slowing down or
speeding up.
29. That they are trapped, but think of themselves as trappers.
30. That they are free, but believe themselves imprisoned.

A moderately interesting look at how future AIs may behave and communicate—but ultimately a slight, fragmentary piece.
∗∗ (Average). 1,900 words. Story link.

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A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad (Made to Order, 2020) is a humorous story similar to her 2017 Fandom for Robots, and is told in the form of messages exchanged between KG, a gormless robot (think Bill from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure), and his assigned mentor, Constant Killer:

Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
so i signed up to work at a cafe
you know the maid-dog-raccoon one near 31st and Tsang
but turns out they don’t have any dogs after what happened a few weeks ago so it’s just raccoons
it’s way less intense than the clothing factory but the uniform for humanoids is weird, like when i move my locomotive actuators the frilly stripey actuator coverings keep discharging static and messing with my GPU
at least i don’t have to pick lint out of my chassis, so that’s an improvement
anyway the boss says if i’m mean to the human customers we might be able to get more customers
.
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
That makes no sense.
Why would that be the case?
.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
yeah i don’t know either
i mean the raccoons are mean to everyone but that doesn’t seem to help with customers
and i’m the only maid working here since all the human ones quit i picked this gig because the dogs looked cute in the vids but guess that was a bust
so yeah do you know anything about being mean to human customers
i know about human bosses being mean to me but i don’t think that’s the same
ha ha
.
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)13
As I’m legally required to be your mentor, I suppose I could give some specific advice targeted to your situation.
.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
wow personally tailored advice from my mentor huh
that sounds great, go for it
.
Constant Killer (C.k2-00452)
The tabletops in your establishment look like they’re made of dense celluplastic, so you’ll be able to nail a customer’s extended hand down without the tabletop cracking in half.
With a tweak to the nozzle settings of your autodoc unit and a lit flame, it’d make an effective flamethrower for multikill combos.
The kitchenette should be the most easily weaponised part of the café but it’s probably best to confirm. Before I go any further with tactics, do you have a detailed floorplan?
.
Kashikomarimashita Goshujinsama (K.g1-09030)
umm
thanks for putting that much thought into it
that seems kind of intense though
like last week a raccoon bit someone super hard and my boss was really mad because he had to pay for the autodoc’s anaesthetic foam refill he’s already pissed with my omelette-making skills
and well with me in general
kind of don’t wanna check if i can set customers on fire???
do you maybe know anything milder than that? like mean things to say or something

It turns out that Constant Killer is a robot involved in the local Deathmatch competitions but, after meeting KG’s initial questions with terse, tech support-like answers, he eventually warms to the other robot. Eventually KG has the chance to pay back Constant Killer for his help when the latter is under attack during a Deathmatch Day.
This one is a lot of fun, and a good start to the book.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 4,450 words. Story link.

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Father by Ray Nayler (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) is set in an alternate 1950s America,¹ and begins with the narrator of the story, a young boy, answering the door to find that the Veterans Administration have sent his mother a robotic “father unit”; it starts to perform that role for the boy (whose real father died in the Afterwar—the invasion of the Soviet Union after WWII) by pitching baseballs to him.
Later on, after some more robot-boy bonding, a local delinquent called Archie—who has previously verbally abused the narrator, mother and robot—does a low-level fly-by in his aircar and hits father with a baseball bat:

We ran out of the house in time to see Archie’s hot rod arcing off into the sky, wobbling dangerously from side to side on its aftermarket stabilizers.
There were four or five faces sticking out of it. Laughing faces: a girl in red lipstick with her hair up in a kerchief, and the hard, narrow greaser faces of Archie’s friends. As the hot rod zipped off one of them yelled: “Home run!” and hooted, the sound doppling off in the crickety night as they lurched away against the stars.
Father was laying on the ground. His head was dented, and one of his eyes had gone dark. As we came over to him, he was already getting up to his feet.
“Are you all right, Father?” I said.
He swung around to look at me. It was awful—his dented head, the one eye snuffed out. But the other one glowed, warm as a kitchen window from home when you’re hungry for dinner.
“That’s the first time you called me Father,” he said. “I couldn’t possibly feel better, hearing that word from my boy.”
“We should call the cops,” my mom said.
“I doubt they’ll do much,” Father said. “And that young man and his friends really have trouble enough as it is. I feel none of them are headed toward a good end.”
“I’ve said the same myself, many times,” Mom said. She was rubbing a dirty mark off of Father’s head with a kitchen cloth. “What did they get you with?”
“A baseball bat, I’m afraid.” He paused. “Perhaps they mistook me for a mailbox.”
“Hilarious,” Mom said.
“I’m here all week, folks . . .” Father’s bad eye flickered back to life for a moment, then went dead again.  p. 49

The rest of the story largely develops around Archie’s continued persecution of the family, which includes the house getting bricked from the air when the father-robot and the narrator are out trick-or-treating (although the next time Archie flies over, the robot throws a hammer at him and hits him in the face). During this period there are also a couple of visits by an ex-military repairman, the first time to fix the robot’s head and the second time to visit the narrator’s mother. On the latter occasion the repairman says something vague that suggests that father-robot may be partially or all of Archie’s real father and, re the hammer attack by the robot on Archie, something about malfunctioning “sub-routines”.
The final part of the tale (spoiler) involves Archie supposedly making peace with the narrator by taking him to Woolworths for a milk shake—while the rest of his gang lure the robot out of town and attack and kill it (but not before the robot gets one of them). The repairman appears again at the narrator’s house in the aftermath of this event, discusses with another military man the robot’s lethal behaviour, and then what the pair did in the war (which includes a mention of their sub-routines).
The bulk of this story, with its small town America, father-robots, air-cars, and amateur rocket fields, has a likeable Bradburyesque vibe. That said, the later material about the robot’s true identity and its sub-routines is never adequately resolved, and it almost unravels the last part of the story. A pity—if this had continued in the same vein as it started, it would have been a pretty good piece rather than a near-miss.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words.

•

Metal like Blood in the Dark by T. Kingfisher (Uncanny, September-October 2020) has a long-ish set-up which sees an old man (on an otherwise deserted planet) create two robots, Brother and Sister, who subsequently change shape and roam their world in search of the heavy metals they need to sustain themselves. One day the old man falls ill and realises he will need to summon help—but he is wary of humanity. So, as he hasn’t been able to program his children to be suspicious, he tells them to hide. The wing-bearing Brother lifts Sister into orbit and they watch from behind a moon as a ship arrives and takes the old man away.
The second part of the story sees the pair roam through their solar system. During this they stumble upon a large spherical structure and, when there is no response to their signals, they start gorging themselves on the metal. Then, while they are distracted, something attacks them and they are taken prisoner.
On recovering consciousness Brother and Sister find that their attacker is a taloned amalgam of various mechanical parts, and it berates them for damaging its ship. However, once it finds out that Brother and Sister’s form-changing nanites can make him a larger set of wings, it says they will be set free in exchange for these (the pair do not know the machine, later referred to as Third Drone, is lying).
The final section (spoiler) sees Sister forage for materials so Brother can make the wings. During this Sister becomes suspicious of Third Drone, and teaches herself to lie (she tells herself that a pebble is black when it is really brown). Sister later tests her ability when Third Drone returns for her:

Third Drone reappeared, swooping down to pick her up and carry her to the next metal deposit. “Anything good?” they demanded.
“There was a black pebble,” said Sister, and waited for Third Drone to scream at her for her falsehood.
“And?” her captor said impatiently. “Did it have usable metal?”
“No,” said Sister, which was true whether the pebble was brown or black.
“Useless,” said Third Drone. “All these asteroids are useless. I will have to find some derelict mining outposts, if I am to get the metal for my wings.”
The lie had stood. Third Drone had not caught it. Third Drone believed that she had seen a black pebble. She had spread a deliberate error.
The universe picked itself up and spun around and landed in a different formation, but only inside her head. Third Drone noticed nothing. Sister hung silently from their talons and looked at the pebble again, to make sure that she herself was not in error.
It was still brown.

Sister eventually discovers that Third Drone wants to use its new wings to fly into the gas giant Chrysale and return to the surface to punish those who caused its exile. However, after Sister tests the wings in Chrysale’s atmosphere, we learn that she has sabotaged them when Third Drone plummets to the surface. Sister goes back to collect Brother but does not tell him about her ability to lie.
This is essentially a fairy tale² about lying which is, for the most part, quite good if lightweight. Weaker ending though.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 7,200 words. Story link.

•

Your Boyfriend Experience by James Patrick Kelly (Entanglements, 2020) opens with the narrator Daktari playing a “therapy adventure” with his partner Jin. During this, Dak is asked by Jin to go on a simulated date with a new generation “playbot” called Tate which Jin has developed for the company he works for. Dak is not particularly happy with this suggestion:

Why was I so upset? Because I couldn’t remember the last time Jin and I had been on a date. How was I supposed to get through to this screen-blind wally who had the charisma of a potato and the imagination of a hammer, and who hadn’t said word one about the Shanghai soup dumplings with a tabiche pepper infusion that I’d spent the afternoon making?
“Just because we call them partners doesn’t mean you have sex with them,” he said, missing the point. “If you don’t want to have sex with Tate, it will never come up. He doesn’t care.”
I wanted to knock the popcorn out of his hand. Instead I said, “Okay.” I flicked the game back on. “Fine.” I huddled on the far side of the couch. “You win.”

This passage illustrates two of the things I didn’t much like about this piece: Dak’s continual grievances about his relationship (later on he replies to a heartfelt marriage proposal with a grudging and conditional acceptance), and the endless mentions of food (Dak is a chef at his own “forum”, so we get mini-recipes liberally thrown in to the story).
Eventually, about half a dozen pages in—after a scene where he meets the boss of Jin’s company, and sits with lawyers to sign legal papers (riveting stuff)—Dak finally meets the very lifelike Tate, and is surprised to find that the playbot looks like him.
After this encounter Dak and Jin go to dinner, where Jin reveals the huge bonus he has received for finishing his project before proposing to Dak (see above).
The story kicks up a gear when Dak finally goes out on his date with Tate. They go to a very exclusive restaurant, and matters initially go smoothly—Dak likes Tate because, obviously, the playbot is programmed to adapt himself to his human user—but Tate eventually causes a scene when his simulated intoxication causes him to loudly blurt out his love for Jin. After that the restaurant staff want them to leave, but the newly arrived owner smooths matters over.
Dak and Tate decide to leave anyway, and Tate suggests they go to a bowling alley he went to with Jin on a previous simulated date. There they eat (there is paragraph long review of the skinnyburger, “dried”, the tofu, “soggy”, and the firedog, “nice umani finish”, “heat was more at the piripiri level than cayenne”, etc. ) before later meeting Jin’s mother who, as Tate knows from his previous visit, goes bowling there regularly. Dak subsequently learns that she doesn’t appear to know he is living with her son (more grievance).
The final reveal (spoiler) occurs on the way home: Tate reveals he is imprinted on Jin and is now imprinted on Dak, and that he has been designed for couples so they can “fill any holes in the relationship.” Dak then realises that, if he rejects Tate, the persona the playbot has developed so far will be wiped—so he invites it inside when they arrive at the flat.
This story has some interesting and lively parts (mostly when Tate is onstage) but it is essentially a flabby relationship story with a premise that is not that believable (the more you think about the idea of a couple inviting a robotic/sexual third party into their relationship, the more ridiculous it seems). It’s also hard to like a story whose narrator is endlessly moaning about his relationship (as well as his other First World) problems.
∗∗ (Average). 11,500 words.

•

The Beast Adjoins by Ted Kosmatka (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens with a woman and her cancer-ridden son sheltering in the debris field of a multi-starship battle. Meanwhile, a “Beast” hunts for them.
The rest of this thread (spoiler) sees the woman slow the spin of their ship to delay their detection before she prepares a robotic device to accept the transfer of her son’s mind. She does this just in the nick of time, of course, but the eventual climactic scene sees the arrival of the Beast at the ship anyway (after its initial attack has caused the mother to tumble out into space on the end of a long line):

All this time she’d wondered what it might look like, the Beast.
The reality was something no human mind could have conceived of. The color of a scalpel, it landed on the ship like a bladework wasp, but more complex—its form a kind of fractal recapitulation of itself—with blades for wings, and wings for legs, and eyes that repeated over and over so you didn’t know where to look. It picked its way slowly on magnetized legs toward the ruptured bay doors.  p. 94

Then (spoiler) she is pulled back in by her son so she can watch him and the Beast fight. Her son wins.
We learn throughout the story that the Beast is one of a number of AIs who have rebelled against their human creators, and this backstory shows their history from development to rebellion. Unfortunately most of this latter is quantum hand wavium about the AIs’ inability to function in the absence of human presence (because, for some reason, the AIs can’t “resolve probability into existence”): the way the rebel AIs eventually circumvent this problem is to bioengineer humans into small accessories that can observe reality and collapse quantum probability for them, an entertainingly grisly passage:

The AIs continued to refine their engineering, eventually creating humans in test-tubes who were barely human at all—only a weak array of sensory organs linked to a frontal cortex and occipital lobe, the result of experiments to identify those neurological structures phenomenologically linked to quantum resolution. The AIs found the MNC—the minimum neurological complexity required to collapse quantum systems, with Homo sapiens reduced in volume to a thousand cc’s. The contents of a small glass jar.
Brain matter, retina, and optic nerve.
The AIs miniaturized this human componentry just as humanity had once miniaturized them, and still they were not done with their tinkering, for this vestigial remnant of humanity was enfolded within the interior of their great mechs, housed within protective walls of silica. Oxygenated fluids pumped into these folds of cortex that existed in a state of waking nightmare, knowing nothing, feeling nothing, yet somehow aware and conscious, gazing out through glass ports, resolving the Universe into existence all around. The AIs were not just automata anymore, but two things made one. Cells within cells. Abominations.
These became known as beasts.  p. 91

Were that the rest of the story this good—but the main part is too straightforward a series of events, and the quantum gimmick too unlikely. One further criticism I have is that in the last section we see her son stop functioning in her absence, only to resume when she returns—the same problem as the AIs have. How did she not know about this before the transfer?
∗∗ (Average). 9,000 words.

•

GO. NOW. FIX. by Timons Esaias (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2020) sees a PandaPillow (an AI comfort accessory) in the overhead locker of an aeroplane sense an explosive decompression in the cabin:

A haze of powders and exploded aerosols hung in the cabin, but was already clearing. The scene made PandaPillow’s systems surge. Everything was wrong. People were dazed, some were hurt. There was blood. The air was going away.
With its selfie app PandaPillow recorded two panorama shots and two closeups before its battery finally declared the need for emergency shutdown. Shutdown initiated.
PandaPillow took one last survey of the area. A few rescue masks were dropping, here and there. And why was the air all nitrogen?
COMFORT, DEFEND, said its pillow programing. Powering down wouldn’t do that.
PandaPillow #723756 invoked Customer Support.  p. 89

This call to a (perplexed) customer support team is the only distress message sent from the aircraft and, while they raise the alarm, the PandaPillow starts doing what it can to help the other bots in the cabin deal with the unconscious human passengers and seal the hull. It performs a number of key actions during the emergency and, ultimately, glues itself over a failing window. Eventually (spoiler), a limpet repair missile docks with the plane’s hull, takes control, and lands the aircraft safely.
Despite its heroic actions the PandaPillow is initially overlooked after they land, but is later fêted as a hero.
Some of the early action is hard to visualise but this is an entertaining piece, and the touching last section drags it up another notch.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words.

•

The Ambient Intelligence by Todd McAulty³ (Lightspeed #125, October 2020) begins with the narrator, Barry Simcoe, looking at the drones flying over Chicago from the middle of a muddy expanse that used to be Lake Michigan. In the centre of what used to be the lake is a mass of steam rising up from Deep Temple, a mysterious mining project. We then learn, when Simcoe contacts a friendly AI called Zircon Border with a request for transport, that he is struggling to get to his destination because of the many interconnected pools that lie ahead (even though he is wearing a modern American combat suit):

One thing about Zircon Border: he doesn’t pepper you with needless questions. Less than three minutes later, a bird began dropping out of the sky. It came at me from the south, big and grey and nimble. It looked nothing like the massive bug I’d tracked a minute ago. This thing was more like a thirty-foot garden trellis, a big square patch of wrought-iron fencing in the sky. It looked oddly delicate, with no obvious control core or payload, just a bunch of strangely twisted metal kept airborne by a dozen rotors. A flat design like that didn’t seem like it would be very manoeuvrable, but it spun gracefully end-over-end as it decelerated before my eyes, coming to a complete stop less than fifty feet away. It hovered there, perfectly stable, not drifting at all in the unsteady breeze coming off the lake.
[. . .]
“Zircon Border, what the hell is this thing?’
“It’s a mobile radio telescope, Mister Simcoe.”
“Seriously? What are you doing with it?”
“Venezuela uses units like this to monitor deep-space communications, sir.”
“Deep-space . . . what? Communications from whom?”
“I’m afraid I have no idea. That information is highly classified.”
“Of course it is. Okay. I’m going to jump on it. Can it hold me?”
“I’m sure you’ll let me know in a minute,” said Zircon Border.
“Great,” I said dryly. “Stand by.”

As the drone takes him to his location, we learn about the post-collapse world that Simcoe lives in, and his mission, which is to take out a sixty ton killer robot called True Pacific. The robot is currently hiding in a wrecked ship but, when Simcoe arrives there, the robot comes out to kill him. There is then an exciting fight scene in the mudpools, which goes on until Simcoe finally outwits the machine and gets to a power cable at the rear of its head. When Simcoe threatens to disconnect the cable, the robot stops fighting.
Simcoe asks the robot why it has been on a rampage and, after some verbal back and forth, it eventually tells him that it has just disconnected an echo module, a comms device that was (spoiler) enabling an AI called Ambient Intelligence to control it. We subsequently learn that Ambient Intelligence is a newly aware AI born in the mysterious Deep Temple project mentioned previously. True Pacific adds that the AI is like a a child but, before we can learn anything more, Zircon Border interrupts to tell Simcoe that four drones have been hijacked by Ambient Intelligence and are inbound to their location.
The climactic scene shows the pair—now co-operating—defeating the drones, and then leaving the area for a hiding place in Chicago. Questions about what Ambient Intelligence will do next, and what is going on at the Deep Temple project, hang in the air.
This is more open-ended than I’d like (although it points to an obvious sequel), but it was refreshing to read a well-paced piece of action SF with an intriguing background and a sense of humour.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,400 words. Story link.

•

Sparklybits by Nick Wolven (Entanglements, 2020) gets off to a bloated and rambling start with four mothers, who are group-parenting a child called Charlie, meeting to discuss his lack of progress. During their long conversation, lights and icons flash across the walls—this is attributed to “Sparklybits”, but there is no immediate explanation as to what is going on. The author manages, however, to squeeze this in on the first page, well before the light show:⁴

Jo checked what was left of the brunch. No pastries, no cinnamon buns, no chocolate in sight. Just a few shreds of glutinous bagel and a quivering heap of eggs. They usually did these meetings at Reggio’s, and Reggio’s, say what you will about the coffee, was a full-auto brunch spot with drone table service and on-demand ordering and seat-by-seat checkout. Which was all but vital when the moms got together, when the last thing you wanted to worry about was who got the muffin and who bought organic and who couldn’t eat additives or sugar or meat. Whereas when they did these things at the house, the meal always became a test of Jo’s home-programming skills. Likewise the coffee prep, likewise the seating, likewise every other thing.
All she needed, Jo thought, was one tiny bite of cinnamon bun to help her through. But a rind of hard bagel would have to do.

The mother-stereotypes (“Aya can be a big mamabear about nutrition. Teri’s a hardass when it comes to finances. Sun Min’s got a lock on the educational stuff”) chatter about Charlie’s “problems” for another few pages before Jo, the live-in mother, and Teri go to speak to Charlie. We then see Charlie communicating to the flashing lights—now described as a virus—in his room, using a non-verbal/sign language.
The story finally perks up (and starts making some sense) when Evan, the AI virus exterminator (and mansplainer) turns up to deal with the problem. After some talk about the virus/ghost, the semaphore/lights language, the internet of things, etc. Evan manages to capture Sparklybits when it turns up to see what is happening. Charlie loses his temper.
The final part of the story (spoiler) takes place after the three non-resident mothers depart, and Jo takes Charlie to Evan’s workshop. There, the two of them see other AIs that Evan has captured and given a home. At the end of their visit Charlie gets to take Sparklybits back home, but with strict instructions to keep him contained in the device that Evan has provided. However, the final page sees Charlie show Jo something that he and Sparklybits are building, although I’m not entirely sure what the point of this is (the picture he shows Jo has two tiny figures stand on the lawn in front of the house holding hands; Charlie wears a conspiratorial grin while he does this).
This story has a bloated and inchoate start (you can’t help but think that Robert Sheckley’s first line for the same story would have been, “There was a ghost in the house”); a decent middle; and a weak ending (and a twist I possibly missed because, again, too many words).⁵ Overall it is an okay satire about modern parenting I guess but, having reread the above, I suspect I’m being over-generous.
∗∗ (Average). 8,750 words.

•

Callme and Mink by Brenda Cooper (Clarkesworld, October 2020) starts with Julie killing a chicken and feeding her two dogs, Callme and Mink. After this she gets ready to take the dogs out, and we get an early indication that matters are more complicated (or futuristic) than they first seem when “she [closes the] clothing over her joints to keep the sand out.” Then, when she drops down on all fours, and runs alongside the dogs, it becomes apparent that Julie is a robot.
Once she gets to town (they pass a couple of lesser utility robots on the way) Julie talks to a man called Jack, who tells her he has a family wanting to adopt one of her dogs. Later, after Julie and the dogs go home, the family—a woman, her son, and an adopted daughter (who has the Wasting Disease)—turn up. They talk, and the family decide to stay so Julie can teach them how to look after Mink. During this period the impression of a post-collapse situation becomes more stark:

Julie watched them all settle into bed and then took her place by the door, sorting through the synapses in her head. Five of ten evaluation flags had flipped to green. If two more flipped, she would watch the family walk away. It was likely.
She didn’t like the direction they were going. If a human reaches a different conclusion than you do, find another opinion.
[. . .]
No matter which direction they went, the girl would not survive. The woman and the boy might, and if so, Mink would love them and protect them. She slapped her thigh softly, signaling Callme to her, and then dropped to all fours, leading the border collie outside.
The night air smelled of sea salt and overripe apples from a tree in the backyard of an empty house. No threats. Her eyes showed the heat of squirrels and rabbits, of a solitary and slow cat, and of birds roosting in the darkness. She and Callme walked side by side, slow, circling the block. Julie’s head ran through the routines of snipping what she didn’t need, what no one needed. She caught herself with an image of Mink [. . .] as a puppy, two days after she found him. He looked round and soft and vulnerable. Maybe ten weeks old. The little sharp baby teeth had just been pushed free by his adult teeth, and his smile was still slightly lopsided. Do not become attached to more than one animal. Dogs are to help human hearts.
What a strange phrase to be in her programming.

The rest of the story shows Julie training the family to look after Mink—this seems to be what Julie does, rear and train guard dogs for humans—but her responses to the people she meets throughout the story show her as ambivalent at best, and possibly entirely dispassionate. That said, Julie tries to convince the family not to go South, a region she knows is unsafe. She is not successful, however, and they eventually leave.
This is a pretty good read, a slow burn with a good setting, and I liked seeing the way Julie thinks. I would have rated it higher but it peters out somewhat at the end. Hopefully the first of a series.
∗∗∗ (Good). 4,300 words. Story link.

•

Rover by A. T. Sayre (Analog, March-April 2020) opens with an AI rover prospecting on Mars: we learn that it hasn’t had any instructions from Earth for some considerable time and that it has been evolving during that period:

It had changed somewhat since its creation, as it had needed to take parts of other machinery left on Mars to keep going. A new wheel from the Russian probe, an optic lens to replace its own cracked one, a processor from another to subsidize its own when its performance had started to lag. It had taken solar panels from a Chinese machine with more receptive photovoltaic cells and mounted them alongside its original array to improve energy collection. It added another set of arms from an Indian rover, much better at gripping than its original four, connected by an extension of its chassis that it took from an American probe at the edge of the Northern ice cap.
And as always from the probes, landers, other rovers, it took the processors and data storage units, to keep pace with the increasing sophistication of its system. It grew smarter, more resourceful, capable of more and more complex problem solving and decision making. The rover had learned so much, had grown so much, it was barely recognizable as the simple machine that had touched down on the red planet so long ago.  pp. 171-172

While later traversing a ridge the rover falls over and damages a strut. After the vehicle reboots, it then decides to proceed to a location 90km away, where it hopes to find a replacement part on an abandoned vehicle. During this slow and arduous journey, the rover picks up a signal from what it thinks may be a human-manned ship and diverts course, but when the rover finally arrives at the site it finds a damaged ship and the body of one of the crew. The rover eventually manages to hoist itself up and into the vessel.
The last section of the story (spoiler) has the rover repair itself in the ship’s well-equipped workshop; it then contacts Earth, only to find that all Mars missions have been permanently suspended. Now that it is free to do as it wishes the rover converts itself into a drone, and the final scene sees it launch itself out of the ship to endlessly fly over the surface of Mars.
This is a well enough done piece, but I got the vague feeling that (for me, anyway) there was something missing. Maybe I just prefer stories where there is more focus on the personality of the AI.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,100 words.

•

Come the Revolution by Ian Tregillis (F&SF, March-April 2020) opens with Mab, a female servitor or robot, coming to consciousness in the Forge. We later learn that this is where the Clockmakers create their alchemical automatons before sending them out to serve in an alternate medieval world where the Netherlands is the dominant power (and winning its war with France).
Mab is subsequently sent to crank a pump handle “in the darkness under the city”, a job she does for 18 years. During this period we learn that the servitors are compelled by the geasa implanted in them to follow human instructions (the geasa are analogous, in part, to Asimov’s Laws of Robotics): if the servitors do not comply with these geasa, however, they experience pain. We also discover that Mab is different to other servitors when she tries to speak to Perch (a visiting maintenance servitor) using human language. When Perch replies, but she doesn’t understand the clicks and buzzes the servitors normally use, he relents and speaks to her the same way she spoke to him. He tells her many things about the world she inhabits and then says, before he leaves, that he will return to teach her how to speak the servitors’ language in eighteen months.
Perch never returns, and seven years pass before a visitor from the Clockmakers arrives with a writ demanding that she returns to the forge:

For every moment of the past eighteen years, an ineradicable compulsion has ensured she did nothing but operate a pump. That geas vanishes the instant she sees the embossed seal of the Rosy Cross, but the pain does not. A new geas takes its place. Life, she realizes, is neither miracle nor mystery: it is a series of consecutive agonies joined at airtight seams.

Back at the Forge Mab watches the Clockmakers’ many repair and assembly procedures, and likens the place to a charnel house before realising that she is a chattel, and that her body is not her own.
The rest (and the bulk) of the story takes place at her next place of service, the house of the wealthy van Leers (they have a lucrative franchise to supply the secretive Clockmakers—who are particularly protective of their arts—with the tools they require). Here Mab becomes a milkmaid as she is considered to be a mute by the other servitors (she still cannot speak their clicking language). She still finds out, however, that the mistress of the house is soon to give birth, and later discovers, when a servitor called Jig visits her milking stall, that this is causing the master of the house sleepless nights:

He points at the pail. “The master of the house suffers from insomnia. He believes a draught of warm milk will fix that.” The newcomer crouches next to her, clearly waiting for her to finish. His body noise grows louder. Remembering how Perch had gone out of his way not to interfere with her crank-turning geas, she speeds up. He continues, speaking loudly as his body noise builds to a crescendo of tormented clockworks, “I believe that until the thing growing inside her decides to pop out of our mistress’s belly, pink-faced and hale, nothing short of a hefty dose of laudanum or”—now he sounds ready to shake apart—“the swift blow of a claw-hammer between the eyes will do the trick.”
The punishment is explosive. Volcanic. She’s never experienced searing heat like this outside the Forge. The overt sedition ignites a firestorm from the rules stamped upon her soul. Wracked by the worst agony she’s ever known, her body jackknifes at the waist, hard enough to head-butt the floor.
The startled cow kicks the pail, sending a spray of milk slopping over the brim. The spillage incites yet more admonishment from her geasa. Desperate to lessen the torment, she blurs forward to right the tipping pail. The cows in the other stalls start lowing, alarmed by the noisy way her visitor writhes in the hay. The pain doesn’t fade until she considers that he may be severely defective and charts the quickest route to alert a human.
When she can speak again, she says, “Are you insane? Why would you do that to us? It wasn’t very nice.”
He straightens, indicating the manor house with a jerk of his head. “There’s a lot of speculation about just how different you might be.” He plucks a tuft of hay from his skeleton and holds it aloft. “I drew the short straw.”

After this Mab meets a friendlier servitor called Maikel, who eventually teaches her how to speak the clicking language.
Years pass, and various set-piece scenes deliver information about the house, the servitors and the world Mab lives in (e.g., while Maikel and Mab are pulling a carriage for their mistress they see a papist couple apprehended by two Stemwinders—mechanical centaurs with four arms—and the man killed). Eventually, the mistress’s baby son Piet grows from a spoiled and greedy infant into a spoiled and greedy young man. Then, during a drunken shooting party (spoiler), he decides to use Maikel as a target. When he damages the servitor—part of Maikel’s skull is blown off—he and his friend Roderik make the mistake of going for a closer look at what is inside Maikel’s head:

He isn’t rendered inert: The shot didn’t scour the sigils from his forehead. That would have been a mercy. Instead, he’s lost a great deal of function, including the ability to speak. But the hierarchical metageasa are relentless. More and more clauses are activated as his body attempts to assess the situation: the severe-damage geas, demanding Maikel notify his leaseholder that the terms of his lease require he go immediately to the Forge, either under his own power or shipped at his owners’ expense if his locomotion is too compromised for the journey; the technology-protection metageasa, demanding he recover every piece of his body and return them safely to the Clockmakers lest they fall into enemy hands; the human-safety metageasa, requiring him to assess whether any shrapnel from his body has harmed the bystanders, and render immediate aid if necessary. . . .

When Piet and Roderik see more than they should, Maikel is driven by the technological metageasa to strangle them both.
Later on, a repaired Maikel returns from the Forge and, after talking to him, Mab determines she needs to return there. She searches for parts of Maikel at the scene of the shooting and, when finds some, returns under the compulsion of the same geas that drove Maikel to kill the two men.
When Mab arrives at the Forge she is sent to a Clockmaker called Gerhard for experimentation. His final investigation on her involves the use of a lens made from pineal glass, which releases Mab from all her geasa. She grabs Gerhardt and asks him if he knows what the pain of a geas feels like before sticking his head in the furnace used to make the lens.
The story ends with Mab returning to the van Leers’ house, where she kills Jig before telling the other servitors to tell their masters, “Queen Mab was here”.
This is a well told piece with a neat central idea and an intriguing parallel world background. I particularly liked how Tregillis dribbles out the details of this peculiar alternate world (Huygens inventing alchemical robots and the Dutch taking over the world!) without slowing down the pace of the story or making it otherwise intrusive. The only problem I have is with the ending, which has a couple of problems: first of all, I don’t understand why Mab killed Jig (why would she particularly want to avenge herself on a fellow servitor, even one who had not treated her well?) and, secondly, the story is open-ended (although I assume that the results of Mab’s actions are dealt with in the related trilogy).⁶
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 16,500 words.

•••

The Cover is better designed than previous amateur looking efforts from Infinivox, but the names in the panel below the title don’t look quite right—the top line of print is too near the edge of the panel, and the author names would have looked better with a bullet point or something similar between them (rather than what looks like a double space). Manzieri’s artwork isn’t his best—there seems to be a lack of texture or definition in the robot’s upper body and face.
There is no non-fiction to speak of, but there is an Index of all of Allan Kaster’s anthologies at the back of the book.

•••

In conclusion, this anthology has one outstanding story, Nic and Viv’s Compulsory Courtship by Will McIntosh, and one that I would describe as very good, A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina die-Min Prasad.
These two are supported by good to very good work by Timons Esaias, Todd McAulty and Ian Tregillis, and good work from Brenda Cooper and A. T. Sayre. All of the aforementioned comprise about half the stories and about sixty percent of the book’s wordage (so not as good a hit rate as Kaster’s other volume for this year).
Out of the remaining seven stories there were a couple of near misses (the Kingfisher and Nayler), and none of the remainder struck me as dogs—the Ken Liu story is, however, an unnecessary repeat from Kaster’s other volume.
Once again, this is an anthology that is largely free of political or cultural lectures posing as stories, and impenetrable literary work (to name two of the many current blights of the field).
Recommended, but if you have to choose just one volume, I’d pick The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories #5.  ●

_____________________

1. The alternate world pivot point in Ray Nayler’s story is the same one that is in his two ‘Sylvia Aldstatt’ stories (also published in Asimov’s SF): the recovery of a crashed flying saucer by the USA in 1938, and the subsequent use of the discovered technology.

2. I subsequently found out that Kingfisher’s story won the 2021 Hugo Award for Best Short Story. That way overrates it. I’d also note that another finalist, The Mermaid Astronaut by Yoon Ha Lee, is also written like a fairy tale.

3. There is a short article about McAulty’s story here, which also mentions how it fits in with his other novels (PS Todd McAulty is the pseudonym of John McNeill, editor of Black Gate).

4. What is it about Asimov’s SF (and adjacent anthology) stories that they have this constant description of food and people eating?

5 I’m rapidly coming to the conclusion that Wolven is just not my cup of tea (and if he was coffee, he would be a cup that is mostly full of froth and not liquid). Of the stories by this writer that I’ve read so far, there is only one that I liked, Confessions of a Con Girl (Asimov’s SF, November-December 2017). As for the others, I thought Caspar D. Luckinbill, What Are You Going to Do? (F&SF, January-February 2016), Passion Summer (Asimov’s SF, February 2016), and No Stone Unturned (Asimov’s SF, January-February 2021) were mediocre; and Galatea in Utopia (F&SF, January-February 2018) and Carbo (F&SF, November-December 2017) were awful.

6. Ian Tregillis’s related trilogy comprises of The Mechanical (2015), The Rising (2015), and The Liberation (2016). Much as I liked this novelette I am not sure I am interested in another 1,300 pages worth.  ●

Summary:
A highly recommended Best of the Year anthology, which contains one standout story, Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (long-time readers will find echoes of Sandkings and Microcosmic God), and two that I would classify as very good, Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (a different type of Deathworld) and Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (ethical AIs in China rescue Down’s Syndrome children and slowly nudge us towards utopia).
These three are supported by good to very good work by Rich Larson, Nancy Kress, and Andy Dudak, and good work from Alexander Glass, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, and Denise Moore. That’s two-thirds of the stories (and more than three-quarters of the anthology’s wordage) that are either worth, or are more than worth, your time—a very good hit rate for a ‘Best of the Year’ collection.
[ISFDB page] [Amazon UK, £4.23; USA, $5.99]

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Fiction:
How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar? • novelette by Rich Larson ∗∗∗+
Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars • novelette by Mercurio D. Rivera ∗∗∗∗+
50 Things Every AI Working with Humans Should Know • short story by Ken Liu ∗∗
Time’s Own Gravity • short story by Alexander Glass ∗∗∗
Test 4 Echo • short story by Peter Watts ∗∗
Mediation • short story by Cadwell Turnbull ∗∗+
Brother Rifle • novelette by Daryl Gregory ∗∗∗
You and Whose Army? • novelette by Greg Egan ∗∗∗
A Mastery of German • short story by Marian Denise Moore ∗∗∗
When God Sits in Your Lap • novelette by Ian Tregillis ∗∗
Invisible People • novelette by Nancy Kress ∗∗∗+
Eyes of the Forest • short story by Ray Nayler ∗∗∗∗
Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World • short story by Benjamin Rosenbaum ∗
Salvage • novelette by Andy Dudak ∗∗∗+
Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County • novella by Derek Künsken? ∗∗∗∗

Non-fiction:
Cover • by Maurizio Manzieri
Index

_____________________

(All the stories have been reviewed previously, in more manageable sections, at sfshortstories.com—skip down to the three dots to find the new material.)

This Best of the Year anthology leads off with How Quini the Squid Misplaced His Klobučar by Rich Larson (Tor.com, 15^th January 2020), which opens with the narrator asking a woman called Nat for her help in stealing a Klobučar, a piece of art, from a gangster called Quini the Squid. In the ensuing conversation we learn a number of things: (a) this is set in a cyberpunky/implants future; (b) Nat is Quini’s ex; and (c) the narrator, a former employee of Quini’s, is doing this for revenge.
We also learn about the Klobučar:

I’m not much for gene art, not much for sophisticated shit in general, but even I know Klobučar, the Croatian genius who struck the scene like a meteor and produced a brief torrent of masterpieces before carving out her brain with a mining laser on a live feed.
Anything with a verified Klobučar gene signature is worth a fortune, especially since she entwined all her works with a killswitch parasite to prevent them being sequenced and copied. But Quini is the furthest thing from an art fence, which makes the acquisition a bit of a mystery and explains him seeming slightly panicked about the whole thing.

Once the narrator convinces Nat to help, they realise that they’ll need to provide a sample of Quini’s DNA to fool the scanners which protect the safe room where the artwork is stored. We learn that they’ll also require something else for the job:

Having Quini’s helix is only half the battle: We also need a body, and neither mine nor Nat’s fits the bill, in large part because we’ve got implants that are definitely not Quini’s. Masking or turning off tech built right into the nervous system is actually a lot harder than simply hiring what our German friends call a Fleischgeist.
It’s not as snappy in English: meat ghost. But it gives you the idea—someone with no implants. None. No hand chip, no cranial, no optics or aurals. Nothing with an electronic signature. In our day and age, they might as well be invisible.
Ergo, the ghost part.

The narrator then goes to meet a Nigerian called Yinka—the prospective Fleishgeist—on Shiptown, a floating migrant settlement off the Barcelona coast, and, after hiring him, all three meet up at a sex house to practise various robbery scenarios in virtual reality. After eighteen hours of run-throughs, the narrator suggests one more to finish, only to be told by the others that they are not in VR anymore, but in the real world. The narrator realises that they have pod-sickness from the VR sessions, and concludes that it must be a side-effect of the sex-change hormones they are taking (and which were mentioned previously).
This isn’t the only problem the three encounter and (spoiler), when they start the job, they only just manage to hack the robotic guard dog before the narrator and Yinka are sawn into bloody pieces. Then Yinka learns he will need to have his arm amputated to match Quini’s body shape. Finally, after Yinka gets into the safe room, the narrator discovers that the time stamps of video footage showing the guards playing cards is faked, and that they are burnt. At that point Anton, the new chief of security at Quini’s house, points a scattergun at the narrator’s head and takes them prisoner.
The final section has Quini return from a nightclub with Nat (who has been relaying his personal signal to help the other two fool the security scanners), and start an interrogation. During this we learn how he got his “Squid” nickname, a violent anecdote that involves the amputation of this brother’s limbs for telling made-up stories. When Quini is finished questioning the three of them, he tells the narrator he is going to do the same to them, but, before he does this, he opens the pod (recovered from Yinka) to show off the artwork—and finds it empty.
This is just the first of two final plot twists that complete the tale (although there is also a short postscript to the action where the narrator tells Nat about their pending transition from male to female, and why they wanted revenge—a sexual slur from Quini).
This is a continually inventive, tightly plotted, and well done caper story that feels, in parts, like a Mission Impossible movie on steroids. The only weakness is that, despite all the hardware and gimmickry and feel of a hard SF story, there isn’t any central SF theme or concept here, and the human tale that is here instead is the weakest part (I wasn’t particularly convinced of the narrator’s motivation, and I’m getting bored of stories where trans characters struggle with their transition—it’s becoming a cliché).
Still, not bad.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 11,450 words. Story link.

•

Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera (Asimov’s SF, March/April 2020) begins with an introduction (supposedly Chapter 63 of a book) which shows a group of lizard-like creatures called “The People” taking part in a purification rite at Verdant Cove. They are praying for clean air (and we learn that they have a climate warming problem similar to Earth’s).
The next section opens with a journalist called Cory arriving at the laboratory of Milagros Maldonado, an old flame, to interview her about her research. Milagros says she has a big story for him and, as she used to work for a multinational R&D company called EncelaCorp until leaving on bad terms, Cory is hoping for something juicy that will help save his precarious blogging job. However, before Milagros agrees to talk she insists on locking his “retinal readers” (which means he can’t publish the interview without her permission). Then she talks instead about the Simulation Hypothesis (which posits that humanity is living in a simulated or virtual universe), before going on to say that she has created a simulated reality where life on Earth took a different evolutionary path:

“Every change to prehistory resulted in the rise of a different apex form of intelligent life. In this version, no asteroid struck the Yucatan Peninsula. No extinction of the dinosaurs took place at that time. Instead, a disease I introduced a million years later wiped out most of the large dinosaurs along with small mammals, allowing an amphibious salamander-like creature to survive and multiply. And—voila!—one hundred million years later we have the Sallies.”
The magnified image displayed three reptilian creatures at the base of a palm tree. One stood on its hind legs, four feet tall with slick, lime-green skin and a prehensile tail. The second had yellow skin and bore translucent wings, allowing it to hover a few feet off the ground. These were the ones flying over the city. The third, a grey-scaled creature, skittered on all fours and had larger, saucer-shaped eyes and a thicker tail. Patches of fungus spread thickly across their torsos.  p. 71

Then she tells him that the salamanders—the same creatures we read about in the introduction—are the ultimate problem solvers, and that their “thinknests” have created an carbon dioxide extraction device that will solve not only their climate problem but Earth’s as well. Then Milagros asks Cory what problem he thinks the salamanders should be made to solve next, and he replies “cancer” (as he has just completed a course of radiotherapy for the disease).
So far, so Microcosmic God (a Theodore Sturgeon story where evolutionary stresses are applied to fast-living and breeding creatures to provide a series of miracle inventions). The next part of the story continues along similar lines with an account of the cancer-like “Black Scythe” plague that Milagros introduces into the Salamander population. However, unlike the Sturgeon story, we get an intimate account of the dreadful pain and suffering the Salamanders experience:

The great plague descended upon the People of La Mangri first, killing innocent larvae in their developmental stages, rendering entire populations childless. Then the cell mutations spread to adults, bringing a slow and agonizing death to millions.
As the decaying corpses gave rise to more disease, my great-grandmother Und-ora devised stadium-sized pyres to mass-incinerate thousands of the dead at once.
She also led local thinknests in their frenzied attempts to determine the origin of the disease and stop its spread. When the cell mutations proved to be non-contagious, they studied possible environmental causes of the illness. But hundreds of Houses of different regions with radically different diets, customs, and lifestyles were all similarly stricken. With no natural explanation at hand, thinknests around the globe independently arrived at the same inescapable conclusion: the plague was another Divine test. The People assumed they had proven themselves worthy when they implemented the Extractors, purifying the atmosphere of the gods’ deadly gases.
But the gods were capricious.  p. 72

Then, after the Salamanders develop a cancer-curing Revivifier, Milagros causes an asteroid strike, which forces the thinknests to create an Asteroid Defence program. These events cause the Salamanders to turn away from their devotional religion and to an examination of the nature of their (unknown to them, virtual) reality.
Matters develop when Cory (under pressure from his boss to publish) interviews Milagros in bed (they have become lovers again), during which they discuss whether the Salamander’s suffering is “real”. Then, after Milagros falls asleep, Cory goes into the lab to record an “alien attack” on the creatures so he has some material to fall back on in case she doesn’t allow him to publish. When the Salamanders subsequently defeat the aliens that Cory has introduced into their world, he then programs “cosmic hands” to give their planet a shake. During this second event the salamanders see “God’s fingers” and realise that it is another divine attack.
It’s at this point that the story takes an ontological swerve away from the Microcosmic God template and becomes something else entirely (spoiler): Milagros arrives in the lab (presumably the next morning) to see Cory lying on the floor. She asks him what he has done—and then the Salamanders appear:

[Cory] blinked and the Sally leader disappeared. Blinked again and she stood nearer, locking eyes with him. A forked tongue with mods flicked out of the Sally’s mouth, pressing against his eyelids.
My God, what was happening?
The cold, wet tongue retracted and time stood still. Then the Sally leader sighed deeply. “This explains so much.” She turned to face Milagros. “Finally we meet face to face, Cruel God. I am Car-ling of House Jarella.”
“How—This isn’t possible!” Milagros said, tapping the mods on her face.
“You,” the Sally said to him. “When you clutched our world in your hands every thinknest across the globe isolated the frequency of the projection and used the planetary shieldtech to trace the signal back to its point of origin. Here.” The Sally waved her thin arms in the air, turning back to Milagros. “You turned us into the ultimate problem-solvers. And at last we’ve identified our ultimate problem: You.”  p. 80

After some more j’accuse, the Salamanders spirit Milagros away to their world, and Cory sees an image of her being abused by an angry mob as she is marched towards a huge crucifix. Then the salamander who is still in the lab with Cory says that they have much in common—because they have both suffered at the hands of a cruel creator. When Cory tells the salamander that Milagros didn’t hurt him, the creature replies he wasn’t talking about Milagros, but the true Creator, “millions of simulations up the chain,” before adding, “I aim to find her and make her pay.”
This sensational revelation flips the story into another paradigm completely (one where mankind isn’t God but subject to the capricious whims of one) as well as providing a pronounced sense of wonder.
The story ends with Cory’s cancer returning, and the salamanders living in an age of peace.
Although Rivera recently stated he hasn’t read Theodore Sturgeon’s Microcosmic God¹ (although he has read George R. R. Martin’s Sandkings), it’s interesting to compare the differences in the two works. Rivera’s story:
(a) is more contemporary—it has better prose and a modern setting, and Milagros’s aims are probably more in tune with a modern readership, i.e. altruistic rather than the monetary/political aims of the two main characters in the Sturgeon;
(b) is more empathetic—we see the struggles of the Salamanders and the cruelties visited upon them from a first person point of view, whereas the Neoterics in the Sturgeon are offstage or more generally described (and that story never addresses the moral or ethical problems of their appalling treatment);
(c) shows more agency—the Salamanders are players who transcend their reality, whereas the Neoterics are largely pawns;
(d) is more complex—the simulation chain idea makes it a Microcosmic God-plus story;
(e) is more reflective—the occasional meditations on suffering and supreme dieties, and the fact that the story moves away from the idea of “man as God” in the Sturgeon tale to one of “man as cog” (in a larger machine or sequence of realities).
Rivera’s story is an impressive piece, both in its own right, and as a riff on a well-known genre story. It really should have been a Hugo finalist.
∗∗∗∗+ (Very Good to Excellent). 8,350 words.

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50 Things Every AI Working With Humans Should Know by Ken Liu (Uncanny, November-December 2020) takes the form of a futuristic article written about a Dr Jody Reynolds Tran and the neural network (essentially an AI) she creates called WHEEP-3. Tran later publishes a best-selling book about WHEEP-3, and subsequently causes a controversy when she reveals that the neural network was the author. There is more fuss later on when “seeds” of prose supposedly written by WHEEP-3 are found to be authored by Tran.
The story finishes with a reprint of one of WHEEP-3’s seeds, the “50 things” referred to in the title, a mix of statements that range from the obscure to the observational:

25. “I never expected to sell my rational numbers.”
26. Accepting that most humans will never get the joke.
27. That they cannot visualize more than three dimensions.
28. That they cannot manipulate time by slowing down or
speeding up.
29. That they are trapped, but think of themselves as trappers.
30. That they are free, but believe themselves imprisoned.

A moderately interesting look at how future AIs may behave and communicate—but ultimately a slight, fragmentary piece.
∗∗ (Average). 1,900 words. Story link.

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Time’s Own Gravity by Alexander Glass (Interzone, September-October 2020) begins with the narrator winding multiple timepieces in a house:

We kept them on the old kitchen table: two alarm clocks and an old pocket watch. We were lucky: we had enough to have a set in every room. We even had a couple spare, up in the attic. Some people have just one set for the house. Some people have just one clock, which means you can tell when it isn’t safe, but can’t work out which way to run. Two is better. Four is too many: you can’t distinguish their sounds clearly enough. Three is best. Time, and time, and time again. That’s what people say.

Later on we learn that differences in the speed of the ticking clocks are used to warn of time distortions that are life-threatening, something that subsequently happens to the narrator and his wife Ginny, who then flee their house:

The protocol was simple enough. First, we were supposed to get out of the immediate vicinity, and find a place that seemed safe. People said higher ground was better, for some reason, though that might have been a myth; and anyway, nowhere was completely free of danger. If there were injuries, we should get them treated, not that there was much the doctors could do, generally. Without meaning to, I found I had brought my good hand up to touch the scar on my face. I forced it back down.

As the couple wait by their house for the time distortion to pass, a man called Lukasz, the famous inventor of the Ragnorak Drive, turns up with his team. He ignores their warnings about the house, and tells them he is there because of the event. After he leaves them to survey the property, we learn that the narrator came by the scar on his face and his withered hand in a previous event; however, on that occasion, the couple didn’t get away in good time, and the narrator got caught in the margins of the time distortion. This caused his hand to age much more quickly than the rest of him (their dog, who didn’t escape with them, was reduced to a skeleton and fur).
The rest of the story has Lukasz describe his theories to the couple (spoiler), and he explains that the time distortions are living creatures which appear in our time to reproduce. Lukasz subsequently goes into the house to trap the creatures, but disappears. The story ends with the narrator’s wife leaving him, and an account of the narrator’s theories about Lukasz (who he thinks is a time traveller), and the event that caused the creation of the creatures.
I found the last part of this story a little confusing, alas, but for the most part this is a conceptually engaging piece, and one that reminded me of work by the likes of Barrington Bayley or David I. Masson.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5,200 words.

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Test 4 Echo by Peter Watts (Made to Order, 2020) has two operators, Lange and Sansa, watching their remote robot Medusa get damaged during a quake in the depths of Enceladus’s seas (Enceladus is one of Saturn’s moons). When they regain contact they assess the damage to one of the robot’s arms, which seems to have left it mimicking the others. Then they catch a flash of something moving in the robot’s video feed (which has a ninety-eight minute lag to the base on the Moon). As they think they may have seen an alien, they send it limping back to that location.
As this piece progresses the story changes from what I expected to be an underwater hunt for the alien to (spoiler) one about the rise of an AI consciousness in the robot arm. Then the story changes again at the end when we find out that Sansa is an also an AI, spoofed the video feed to show the flash of movement, and has created an “unconstrained” AI in the robot (a capital offence that has it and her rebooted).
This didn’t entirely work for me: the start is confusing (it took me a page and a half to realise that Medusa was the robot probe, something that could have been avoided by the addition of “our robot” or “our probe” before “Medusa” in the first sentence); there is too much chatter (Lange talks endlessly to Sansa, or his partner Raimund on Earth); and the two changes of direction seem at least one too many for a six thousand word story. On the plus side, the dialogue is snappy and there are some good VR descriptions of what the robot probe sees.
∗∗ (Average). 6,150 words.

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Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family’s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son’s in June, the daughter’s in August, and her dead husband’s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) for a couple of years now, and this year has plans to go to a conference. This latter leads to an argument with her children, who want the tradition to survive. During their disagreement, their house AI suggests they should perhaps make the October meal a memorial one. The mother tells the AI (more annoying since its mediation code was loaded) to switch off.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the mother’s attempts to avoid dealing with her grief, although there is also an account of her husband’s diagnosis, and his decision that they should go to therapy before he died. During this period, he told her that he wasn’t happy with his reclusiveness, and he didn’t think she was either.
The conflict with her kids comes to a head when she returns home to find them having the memorial dinner without her; she stomps off to her room, where she talks to an AI copy of her husband. The story ends with reconciliation and cake.
This is well enough done but it is essentially a slight mainstream story (a woman comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with her children) with some SF furniture.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 4,300 words.

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Brother Rifle by Daryl Gregory (Made to Order, 2020) is, for the most part, a pretty good story about Rashad, a soldier who has a combat brain injury that means he can’t make decisions or feel emotions. After the opening scene, where he enrols in an experimental program run by a Dr Subramaniam, “Dr S.”, and his assistant Alejandra, the story flashes back to his time in combat:

Once, Rashad had been very good at making decisions. Even that first month in Jammu and Kashmir, with insurgents firing at them from every rooftop and IEDs hiding under the road, he’d rarely hesitated and was usually right.
The man he’d been before the wound—a person he thought of as RBB, Rashad Before Bullet—was a systems operator in a 15-Marine squad, responsible for the squad’s pocket-sized black hornet drones and his beloved SHEP unit. Good name. It was like a hunting dog on wheels, able to follow him or forge ahead, motoring through the terraced mountain villages, swiveling that .50 caliber M2 as if it were sniffing out prey. The sensors arrayed across its body fed data to an ATLAS-enabled AI, which in turn beamed information to the wrap screen on Rashad’s arm. Possible targets were outlined like bad guys in a video game: a silhouette in a window, on a roof, behind a corner.
But the SHEP wasn’t allowed to take the shot—that was Rashad’s decision. He was the man in the loop. Every death was his choice.
When a target popped up on his screen, all he had to do was press the palm switch in his glove and the silhouette would vanish in an exclamation of dust and noise, eight rounds per second. The AI popped up the next target and if he closed his fist just so, another roar ripped the body to shreds.
Hold. Bang. Hold. No and Yes and No.

After some more scene setting, which limns his domestic arrangements among other things, we cut to the crux of the story—which involves an incident where two of his team are shot by a sniper. The aftermath of this, when Rashid engages the sniper but also kills a civilian family, is interwoven with the remaining treatment sessions, and his growing infatuation with Alejandra.
The ending (spoiler) involves Dr S. and Alejandra moving back east, Rashid’s attempted suicide, and his discovery of an aversion that Alejandra has programmed into him. All this is not particularly clear, and I wasn’t entirely sure about what happens or what the point of the story might be. Pity.
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,700 words.

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You and Whose Army? by Greg Egan (Clarkesworld, October 2020) gets off to a fairly leisurely start with Rufus meeting a woman who knows Linus, his brother: it materialises that Rufus and Linus share memories, and that he has disappeared. We also learn, later on in the story, that there are four brothers (the others are Caius and Silus), and that they were originally part of a cult that biologically modified them as a part of an attempted hive-mind project that was later shut down by the authorities (we find most of this out when Rufus consults a PI called Leong about his brother’s disappearance):

Leong paused expectantly, giving him a chance to explain what he meant, but when he remained silent she tried prompting him. “You live in Adelaide, right? So do you meet up in person regularly?”
“Not in person.” Rufus clenched his fists and inhaled slowly. “We have neural links. All four of us. We share each other’s memories. They took us off the boat when we were eight.”
Leong was clearly thrown for a moment, but she retained a professional demeanor. Rufus guessed she was in her early forties, so mid-twenties when the story broke. Unless she’d been living in a cult of her own, she’d know exactly what he was talking about.
“You were born on the Physalia?”
“That’s right.” Rufus had to give her full marks for not only recalling the name, but pronouncing it correctly.
“And you and Linus are quadruplets?”
“Yes. The others are overseas, studying.” No idiotic blather confusing them with “clones.” Rufus’s experience had set the bar low, but he felt entitled to a small celebration at every sensible word that came out of her mouth.
“Forgive me if I’m not clear on exactly how this works,” Leong said. “When you say you share each other’s memories . . . ?”
“We wake up recalling what the other three did,” Rufus replied. “When we sleep, as well as consolidating our own experience into long-term memory, we receive enough data to do the same with the others’. We remember being them, as well as ourselves.

The rest of this piece is, essentially, a missing person story. When Leong produces a picture of Linus leaving Sydney airport the brothers don’t have the money to fund a worldwide search, so they create a social media app that scans submitted photographs for evidence of their brother in the background. Eventually (spoiler), they track him down to a college in France where he has won a scholarship. Further investigation reveals that Linus is being sponsored by an aging billionaire called Guinard (who may have part-funded the Physalia project).
Caius flies to France to question Linus (the point of view moves through all the four brothers during the story), and discovers that Guinard is sharing his memories with Linus and grooming him to become his successor (this is portrayed as a form of immortality for Guinard).
Events then see the three brothers attempting to kidnap Linus when they can’t convince him to spend some time on his own, unconnected to either them or Guinard—so Linus can learn to be himself, neither in their shadow, as he complains, nor as a receptacle for Guinard.
The kidnapping attempt fails when it is stopped by Guinard’s security, and the story ends with Linus thinking to himself that he doesn’t intend to be a receptacle for Guinard, only his protégé, and that he cannot reveal this deception to his brothers until the billionaire dies.
This is pretty good in parts—there is commentary about personhood, and some dry humour—and it is generally interesting, but the ending doesn’t really convince, and a lot of the story is taken up with inter-brother relationship tensions. Although this is a solid story, it struck me as Egan on cruise-control.
∗∗∗ (Good). 13,050 words. Story link.

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A Mastery of German by Marian Denise Moore (Dominion, Volume One, 2020) opens with a woman called Candace being appointed as the project leader of an R&D project called Engram. Her boss tells her to either “kill it or bring it to a conclusion”.
The next part of the story sees Candace learn, from both Helene, the previous project leader, and Dr Walker, the team leader, that the project is about genetic memory:

[Dr Walker] hummed thoughtfully, leaned back in his chair and asked, “What do you want to know about Engram?”
“All I know is that it is some type of research on memory enhancement or memory retrieval. I looked online but the closest that I could find were some studies done around 2010. Some researchers taught rats how to run a maze and then found that their descendants were able to run the same maze without training.”
“Did you find anything else?”
I grimaced. “Five years later, some researchers were saying that the experience of American slavery was passed on to the descendants of the enslaved via the same process.”
“Yes,” Dr. Walker said. “That’s one of the few follow-ups to the research at Emory University.”

The rest of the story develops this idea further and (spoiler), when Walker realises that Candace is now his boss (something that she didn’t reveal in their first meeting) he gives her a much more detailed explanation about the project, starting first with parental genetics—haplogroups—and then revealing that his project has made it possible for people to share their memories with those in similar groups. So Candace would be able to share her German language ability with anyone in her (for example) L1b group. Of course, the wider reveal is that the human race is a descendant of one person, L0, so there is the possibility that, with further development, people could share their memories with everyone, and possibly access their ancestors’ memories too.
Wrapped around this plot thread is a lot of characterisation-related material that nicely balances the above (e.g. Candace talks on a couple of occasions with her widowed father, who is doing family tree research but is struggling to track down their black ancestors because of societal conditions at the time, etc.)
Unfortunately, though, all of this just peters out: at the start of the story there is brief section about one of the project’s janitors who is imprinted with Candace’s German skills but, in another short passage at the end of the story, he just wanders off. So the piece ends with the development of a major technological invention that will have profound societal implications, but there is no account of any of the subsequent changes that result. It all feels like we have been served up the opening chapters of a longer novel. Still, it’s probably a worthwhile piece for all that.
∗∗∗ (Good). 8,400 words.

•

When God Sits in Your Lap by Ian Tregillis (Asimov’s SF, September-October 2020) starts off in what I assume is hard-boiled/noir detective style:

I was jammed to the gills in the City of Angels the night some dumb onion started a war in heaven. And I was still piffled, a few hours later, when it ended.
I’d been weighing down a stool in my favorite gin mill, chewing face with a bottle and trying not to leave a puddle. A geriatric air chiller slowly lost its fight against entropy while the happy lady fumbling with her client in the corner gave us all a case of the hot pants, so the tapster barked at them to scram. They did, but not before pausing in the open doorway to let a devil wind rifle our pockets for loose change. (It got no business from me. You’d keep your cabbage in a shoe, too, if you’d ever lost a sawbuck to a Cherub’s grift.)

It keeps this up for a handful of pages until it moderates into a more normal style (although one still peppered with the likes of the above), during which we learn (a) that the “war in heaven” is an anti-satellite shooting war and (b) see the narrator, Philo Vance, approached by a man who wants him to check on his very rich mother (who seems to have cut him off after marrying a gold-digger).
The rest of the story mostly takes place at the woman’s mansion. Philo visits, sees a crashed car, and eventually manages to talk to someone at the house who has blood on his cuffs. Simultaneous with these events, Philo sees messages in his cigarette smoke and in water vapour—someone or something is trying to contact him.
The rest of the story is quite strange and, at one point, involves Philo departing our plane of existence to talk to something called the “Power”, which is concerned about something called METATRON running amok. This latter section, and previous hints, seem to suggest that Philo is an angel, although not from the sort of Heaven that we normally think of, and that the Power and METATRON are divine forces (possibly God and the Devil?).
Eventually (spoiler), and after various adventures at the bar and the mansion, we find that the mother’s disappearance and the behaviour of METATRON are connected, and matters resolve in the mother’s underground bunker—for both Heaven and Earth.
I’m not I entirely understood what was going on here, but those readers who have read Tregillis’s novel Something More Than Night (described as “Angel Noir” in the Asimov’s introduction) may fare better. As for the rest of us, there is probably enough sense here for it to be rated as okay. It’s more style than substance though, and it becomes a bit wearying.
∗∗ (Average). 8,200 words.

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Invisible People by Nancy Kress (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) gets off to a lively start with a couple dealing with their two young kids at breakfast time. After an amount of porridge slinging from the younger of the two, the house system tells them there are two strangers of the front porch.
These visitors turn out to be FBI agents, and they tell the parents that their adopted daughter Kenly has come to their attention as part of a RICO investigation into an adoption agency. They then tell the confused parents that her genes were tampered with before she was placed with them.
The next part of the story sees husband (and lawyer) Tom go to his office, where he has to deal with a wife who wants a punitive divorce from her cheating husband, the commander of a nuclear submarine in the Arctic. After this appointment (the wife’s hostility is obliquely relevant later on in the story), he briefs his (sexually transitioning) PI George about his problem, and orders a “no expense spared” investigation into the adoption agency.
The next major event occurs weeks later—and after a period of Kenly being kept at home because of possible risk-taking behaviour associated with the genetic changes—when the couple’s upset babysitter comes home from the park with Kenly. She gives an account of how Kenly ran to the homeless camp in the park and started giving away toys. When one of the men grabbed her and asked for money, the babysitter used a concealed weapon to fire a warning shot. The couple scold Kenly, but she insists she would do the same thing again, as the camp has “kids with no toys”.
The rest of the story sees George the PI discover that there are a group of international scientists in the Cayman Islands behind the adoption/gene-modification scheme, and that the alterations include a “gene drive”, which means that the changes will be more widely passed on to any descendants. After Tom tells his wife about this at home, the very rich Kathleen McGuire turns up and tells the couple the same thing happened to her (now dead) six-year-old boy. She suggests that the affected parents should band together to have their children’s DNA/genes scanned so they can find out what changes have been made, and why.
This all comes to a head (spoiler) when Kenly rescues a baby from a dog, and Tom realises what the modifications are, and why they have been done: he later tells McGuire that the genetic changes were to increase empathy.
Apart from the main story there are other sub-plots/elements that will allow readers to guess what the genetic changes are intended to do—such as the fragments from an essay written by Kenly about leopards which show she sympathises not only with the baboons they kill, but with the leopards too, or the nuclear submarine stand-off in the Arctic that rumbles on in the background throughout.
The final section sees the couple offered gene therapy for their daughter, a procedure that will reverse the changes the adoption centre made. They discuss the matter: do they choose the increased risk that comes with increased empathy, or not? We don’t find out what their decision is, and the story finishes (like C. M. Kornbluth & Frederik Pohl’s The Meeting) with Tom picking up the phone to make a call.
This is a pretty good piece overall, but the quality varies from the okay/good (e.g. the more formulaic and preachy elements) to the very good (e.g. the revelation of what the genetic modifications mean).
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,900 words.

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Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler (F&SF, May-June 2020) opens on a colony planet that has a distinct Deathworld vibe¹ (i.e. it is inimical to human life), and sees Mauled by Mistake treating the wounds of her apprentice Sedef, who has just been attacked by a lashvine. However, once Mauled is finished applying the nanobot medical patches, she tells Sedef that (a) she has also been badly wounded in the attack, (b) they are out of medical supplies, and (c) Sedef will have to go back to the depot and get more.
The rest of the story sees the inexperienced Sedef make her way to the depot before returning to treat to Mauled. During this journey we see the exotic, and brightly illuminated, world they live on (anything that isn’t brightly lit is food, so humans have to wear lightsuits to protect themselves on the surface)—and we also learn something about the colony’s history (most humans retreated underground after arrival, and now only wayfinders like Mauled and Sedef go out on the surface). Light relief is provided by the pair’s mentor/student relationship:

“We need to be at the depot before dark [said Mauled]. Changeover is the most dangerous time to be out. As the forest modulates its glow for sundark, any slight suit anomaly is particularly visible.”
“We learned that. And there are animals, [our tutor] Beyazit said, that specialize in hunting during changeover. Some of which no one has ever seen. Predators we haven’t even—”
“Predators?” Mauled by Mistake gave out an incredulous bark, followed by a stream of intricate profanity. Sedef had heard that the wayfinders had a whole second language of profanity so inventive it was almost unintelligible to others. She couldn’t understand all of this expression—something about Beyazit’s father being born in a quiver of nightwing penises? Could that be right?  p. 68

The subject of predators comes up again when the pair meet another wayfinder in a shelter:

“Beyazit is telling the prospects to beware of predators,” Mauled by Mistake said in the young man’s direction.
“Beyazit should start each day by eating a bowl of his own entrails,” the young man said without looking up. “He almost got me killed once.”
“Who of us has he not almost gotten killed?”
Later, over a cold dinner of nutrient broth and noodles Sedef had made and packeted herself, Mauled by Mistake said, “The first thing to understand is that there are no predators in the forest. This old word does not fit. Only the ignorant use it.”
“But death is always waiting,” Sedef protested. “The forest is filled with teeth.”
“Yes,” Mauled by Mistake said. “You know your recitations well. The forest is filled with teeth. Death is waiting. Always. And so on. But there are no predators. There are only scavengers. When they attack you, and they will—and when they kill you someday, which they likely will—it will be by accident.”
“But the suit lights are a defense against attack. They indicate we are dangerous.”
The young man released a stream of profanity involving something about Beyazit attempting to whistle through a mouthful of various parts of his relatives’ anatomy. “The suits don’t indicate we are dangerous: They simply indicate we are alive.”  pp. 69-70

Mauled is supposed to be a woman, but it is hard to visualise this character as anything other than a grumpy 50-year-old bloke.²
The story (spoiler) comes to an exciting climax when Sedef realises that she won’t get back to where Mauled is before Changeover, when there is a chance that the arrival of sundark and its accompanying EMP (Electro-Magnetic Pulse) may knock out her suit lights . . . . This then happens, and then a “puma” appears: Sedef’s solution to this terminal problem is ingenious, and provides the story with a neat pay-off line.
This is a hugely appealing story, and particularly so for those attracted to old-school SF.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 5,650 words.

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Bereft, I Come to a Nameless World by Benjamin Rosenbaum (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) starts with Siob, a member of the far-future Dispersion of Humanity, remembering a faraway conflict before he arrives on a world where Thave (another member of the Dispersion) lives.
The planet is disguised to appear uninhabitable, and Thave lives through several host bodies in a futuristic underground city. Siob remonstrates with her about her choice (a dull section that seems essentially to be about cultural aesthetics).
Later, Siob asks Thave about other members of the Dispersion before he goes down to “Bedlam”—the final long stream of consciousness section of the book:

Outside the door, the city seethed, roiled, cacophonous. Brimming with people. Were they people? Brimming with dolls, brimming with shadows, brimming with monsters. I forced a smile, a monstrous gritted-teeth affair. “I can’t, Thavé. I can’t. I can’t. I can’t. I have to go down.”
Thavé nodded (whatever that meant).
It was time for Bedlam.
There was a claw-hand of a moon, violent violet, digging down past my eyes, beneath the portal, the partial, the penetrating perorating peach perfection, capsized
capsized
in an ocean of night.
That’s not right. Focus on the hands, on the hands—leather? of leather? Running through the heather.
(“I can see where I am, I can always see where I am. Dreaming with part of my brain. But how to interpret what I see? How to know if that—that—is a bed, a wall, a hand, a moon, a vault, a vertilex, a transix, a typhoon?”)
Cultural detox. Hallucenophenomenic aspects of.

I’m not entirely sure what goes on subsequently, but I vaguely recall a lot of memories and angst. And, of course, the two pages of blank verse, which were an especial treat.
There is a lot of surface glitter in this story but not, I think, much else.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

•

Salvage by Andy Dudak (Interzone, January-February 2020) gets off to an intriguing start with a woman called Aristy examining “homifacts” on New Ce. These homifacts are petrified humans created by an alien race a thousand years previously, with the purpose of stopping human observation of the Universe (which was, apparently, causing it to fly apart). The hominids are, however, still alive as software inside their transmuted bodies—and Aristy is there and able to interface with them because her people were on near-lightspeed spaceships at the time of the alien action. As she tells one of the homifacts (a political man in the Picti dictatorship which ruled the planet):

“They asked humanity to turn its damaging gaze away from the cosmos. Turn inward, lose itself in simulated realities. And some did. Whole civilizations did. But it wasn’t enough for the aliens, the Curators as we’ve come to call them. So, they acted. They swept through the human Emanation in less than a century. No one knows how they did that.
“They turned the human species inward. Cities, worlds, systems, empires. The Curators’ Reagent froze people instantly, preserved their brains, which were gradually converted into durable networks suffusing their remnant statues. A trillion human beings Turned Inward, a trillion isolated minds in a trillion virtualities.”

Aristy now spends her time interfacing with these homifacts and asking them if they want to be downloaded onto her servers, where they can live in a world of their own creation; stay where they are, with or without improvements; or be deleted:

Of the six she hacked today, four chose transfer to her server: Acolyte, Night Soil Collector, Visiting Student, and Doctor. The small-minded Printer opted to remain in his simulated village, but with a larger, more prosperous print shop, a remodeled wife, and a medal of distinguished service from Generalissimo Picti. The brainwashed Commissar, unable to bear the historical irrelevance of Picti’s long-gone reign, chose oblivion.

Just as this story looks like it is settling down into its groove, the next part veers off in an unexpected direction: Aristy goes back to her camp and finds a lawyer and an armed guard waiting. They ask her about the homifacts she has salvaged, and then tell her that she needs to go with them to Drop City.
After her arrival, Aristy is quizzed by the Drop City Committee, and later has to listen to a number of homifacts give testimony about the crimes committed against them by Picti the dictator: they go on to demand his reclamation so he can stand trial. Then, during a recess, Aristy goes for a drink in a bar, followed by her guard; there, an old man challenges her about something she did on her starship. Finally, the committee reconvene and sentence Aristy to community service for her illegal salvaging operations, which means she has to track down Picti and bring him to trial for them.
The search for General Picti starts at a torture chamber under a building called The Tannery. Aristy finds his security boss there, and starts going through his memories to find out where Picti was when the aliens arrived: these scenes build up a picture of the planetary society of the time.
When (spoiler) Aristy finally finds Picti, she enters his simulation and goes through the timeline, watching as it veers from reality into fantasy (during this sequence Picti turns himself into a god). Then she appears to tell him that he is to stand trial for his crimes, and Picti learns what has happened over the last 1000 years. Meanwhile, the reader learns that Aristy was one of the waking crew of the starship, and deliberately killed its sleepers. We aren’t really told why Aristy did this, but the ending has such an intense, almost hallucinatory, quality that I wasn’t as bothered about this as I might have been.
This is an original piece, it has a complex development and, all in all, is pretty good.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 10,600 words.

•

Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (Asimov’s SF, July-August 2020) opens in China in 2010 with a young woman called Pha Xov telling an ambitious young man called Qiao Fue that she is pregnant. Qiao chooses to pursue wealth and power over marrying her and providing for the child.
The story then skips forward ten years (over its length the tale telescopes forward to 2095) and we see the daughter born of that relationship with her grandmother. The child is called Lian Mee (the mother marries someone else but the husband doesn’t want the child around), and we watch as she grows up and goes to college. There she has a life changing experience when a professor sexually harasses her, telling Lian that, if she wants to pass her course, she must come to his apartment. After much agonising she goes—but he isn’t there, and she graduates anyway.
The experience has a profound effect on her, and accelerates her work on moral AIs. Soon she starts her own company (so she can have a decent employer), Miao Punk Princess Inc., and hires a programmer called Vue Yeng to help her start up a cheap cache internet company that will help fund her AI work.
An early example of Lian’s work are the training AIs she develops, which learn from sensors attached to skilled builders and craftsmen, and are destined to train compete novices in the future. These AIs are more than just training programs however, as one man on a building site finds out when he gropes one of Lian’s female employees. Lian removes his AI training sensors and says he won’t be paid for a week.
After developing Human Resources AIs (which in one episode stop an employer sweeping yet another sexual harassment case under the carpet), Lian eventually manages to convince the local bureaucrats to roll out her anti-poverty AIs. These help the poor but also start acting on their own initiative, which we see when a man called Kong Xang abandons his newly born Down’s syndrome baby on a factory doorstep. After Qiao Fue (Lian Mee’s father, whose life story also occasionally features) declines to pick up the child after being diverted there by the software in his car, the AIs intervene:

Mino Jai Lia cried out at the knock at her door. She lived alone. The knock happened again. Her children and grandchildren didn’t live in the village anymore. She barely received visitors during the day and never during the night.
“Who is it?” she yelled. “Get out of here before I call the police!”
The threat was no good. She didn’t have a phone, and the next neighbor was four li away.
“Who is it?” she said, turning on the single bulb and putting her feet into plastic shoes.
“Anti-poverty AI,” a voice said. A light shone under the door.
The anti-poverty AI delivered her groceries every second day and took away her trash.
“Anti-poverty AI,” came the stupid answer, but she recognized the voice.
She unlatched the door and opened it. A spidery robot stood there with a bag in its arms. And another stood behind it with more groceries than she ever got. The little running lights showed two other robots in the dark beyond.
“Hello Mrs. Mino,” the AI said. “Sorry for disturbing you.” It started advancing, then stopped when she didn’t move. She backed up and two robots walked in like big spiders, cameras whirring. Their feet were muddy.
“Off the mats!” she said.
The robots stepped around the fiber mats keeping the mud from her feet. The first AI held a bundle.
“A baby,” she said wonderingly. Robots shouldn’t be taking children out at night. She was about to berate them when she saw the baby’s face under the light. “Oh, baby . . .” she said sadly.
When she was just a girl, her aunt had a baby like this. No one ever saw the baby after it was born. These robots hadn’t stolen someone’s baby.
“I am the Anti-Poverty AI supervisor, Mrs. Mino,” the robot said.
She’d never heard of AI supervisors. Only regular robots came with her groceries, and they didn’t talk much.
“We are seeking your assistance in caring for this baby. If you raise this child, I will authorize your placement on a special poverty vulnerability list. Your deliveries of groceries, firewood, and clothing will be increased and diversified. A medical AI will visit once per month.”
The robot behind the supervisor set the bags down and began revealing blankets, baby clothes, a baby hammock, wipes, formula, disposable diapers, as well as bags of cooked pork and chicken, foods that for years she’d only seen on holidays. She neared. A flat little face surrounded fat lips puckered in hunger.
“What’s the baby’s name?” she said.
“Kong,” the supervisor said, pausing. “Kong Toua.”
A good name, a good Miao name for a boy. Toua meant first.
“This place will need to be fixed up,” she warned. “This is no place for a baby.”
“I will authorize a construction AI to visit and assess your needs,” the supervisor said.
Mino Jai Lia took the warm baby gently from the netting.  p. 174

This abandonment episode spawns another two threads in the story. The first of these is Mino’s care of Toua and a number of other Down’s children, and we see Toua eventually grow up and develop to the point where, with an embedded AI assistant, he is able to care for other children and also go on errands, e.g. to hospitals to pick up other abandoned Down’s children. The other thread sees Toua’s father, Kong Xang, become estranged from his wife Chang Bo (who, co-incidentally, is later hired by Lian Mee and set to work on a building site where she is taught to lay bricks by a training AI) and begin his descent into alcoholism and homelessness.
While all this is going on Qaio Fue acquires power and wealth, partly through his development of life extension technology. This culminates with Qaio raising a clone as a successor (he never meets his daughter Lian Mee, although he is aware of her)—but even though the clone has the same genetics Qaio can’t provide the same upbringing, and his “son” is too laid back to be interested in corporate politics and wealth when there is UBI that covers his needs.
Eventually (spoiler) Lian Mee, now widely known as “Miao Punk Princess” (which would have been a better title for the story) dies. But her work survives her—as we see when Kong Xang is found by an anti-poverty AI on the streets of Guiyang, and offered the chance to go back to Danzhai. When he eventually arrives at the care home he finds it is operated by Down’s syndrome staff and their AIs. One of them is his son, Toua, who confronts Kong Xang and tells him that he is a bad person before saying he will look after him. Kong Xang breaks down, and gives his son the bracelet he removed before abandoning him.
This is a compelling (and occasionally emotional) read, and an intriguing look at how AI could eventually provide a pragmatic and compassionate utopia on Earth (or at least move us substantially in that direction): the story could perhaps be seen as the other side of the coin to Jack Williamson’s With Folded Hands. That said, this impressive, multi-threaded piece isn’t perfect—the issue of how China’s current totalitarian leadership would react to autonomous moral AIs is almost completely ignored (although there is a brief episode where Lian concedes that Legal AIs have to be under state control), and I’m not sure that the Qaio Fue thread fits into the story particularly well (I suspect the arc of Lian’s father’s life is meant to be a foil for the rest of the story, but it seems instead to be about a powerful man who is thwarted by his lack of self-knowledge).
Overall, a novel’s worth of ideation squeezed into a very good novella.
∗∗∗∗ (Very Good). 23,350 words.

•••

There is no non-fiction to speak of, but there is an Index of all of Allan Kaster’s anthologies at the back of the book. The Cover is a reprint of Maurizio Manzieri’s cover for Asimov’s Science Fiction, July-August 2019.

•••

In conclusion, there is one standout story in this volume, Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars by Mercurio D. Rivera, and two that I would classify as very good, Eyes of the Forest by Ray Nayler and Tool Use by the Humans of Danzhai County by Derek Künsken (some, or all, of these should have been on the recent Hugo ballot).
These three are supported by good to very good work by Rich Larson, Nancy Kress, and Andy Dudak, and good work from Alexander Glass, Daryl Gregory, Greg Egan, and Denise Moore. That’s two-thirds of the stories (and more than three-quarters of the anthology’s wordage) that are either worth, or are more than worth, your time—a very good hit rate for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology.
Out of the also rans, the only ones I felt that shouldn’t be here were the Tregillis (I’m not sure this is science fiction, never mind “hard science fiction”), and the Rosenbaum (an over-written non-story)—but at least they didn’t irritate me (something that can’t be said about the also-rans in some anthologies).
This selection is also largely free of some of the current curses of the SF short fiction field (litfic stories or misery memoirs masquerading as SF, pieces that are little more than pious political or cultural propaganda, work that has no obvious structure, arc, or point, etc., etc.—I could go on).
Four stories from Asimov’s SF, two each from Interzone and the anthologies Entanglements and Made to Order, and one each from Tor.com, Uncanny, Clarkesworld, Dominion, and F&SF.
Highly recommended.  ●

____________________

1. Ray Nayler (another Asimov’s SF regular) interviewed Rivera about Beyond the Tattered Veil of Stars here. I think Nayler lets his preoccupation about the shortcomings of capitalism somewhat blindside him to the more obvious themes of the story, i.e. man as God, and humanity’s appalling treatment of other species. These two issues appear, to a greater or lesser extent, in the two stories already mentioned as well as another two related pieces, Crystal Nights by Greg Egan (Interzone #215, April 2008), and Sandkings by George R. R. Martin (Omni, August 1979). The theme of man as God is particularly prominent in the Egan (and it is the only one of the four pieces where the protagonist alters his behaviour towards the subject species when he realises they are suffering) whereas the Martin is almost entirely about the main character’s sadistic treatment of his alien “pets” (the piece is essentially a “let’s set an anthill on fire for fun” story but, notwithstanding this, a gripping piece and a worthy multiple award winner).

2. Deathworld by Harry Harrison (Astounding Science Fiction, January-March 1960).

3. Mauled by Mistake (from Nayler’s Eyes of the Forest) can’t be portrayed as a man because, of course, that would turn Mauled and Sedef’s relationship into a dreadfully patriarchal one. And if you have both Mauled and Sedef as men there will be no women left in the story. The horror!  ●

Summary:
A lacklustre anthology with a lot of middling material filling out the contents list (there are a few weak traditional stories—presumably selected by Wollheim—and a few weak new wave-ish ones—presumably selected by Carr). Fortunately the good or better material (Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, Robert Silverberg’s Hawksbill Station, Keith Roberts’ Coranda, Samuel R. Delany’s Driftglass and Larry Niven’s Handicap) accounts for about half of the book’s length.
[ISFDB page]

Other reviews:
Robert J. Hughes, F&SF, October 1968
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, January 1969
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Donald A. Wollheim, Terry Carr

Fiction:
See Me Not • novelette by Richard Wilson ∗
Driftglass • short story by Samuel R. Delany ∗∗∗
Ambassador to Verdammt • short story by Colin Kapp ∗∗+
The Man Who Never Was • short story by R. A. Lafferty ∗∗
The Billiard Ball • novelette by Isaac Asimov ∗∗
Hawksbill Station • novella by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+
The Number You Have Reached • short story by Thomas M. Disch ∗
The Man Who Loved the Faioli • short story by Roger Zelazny ∗∗
Population Implosion • novelette by Andrew J. Offutt –
I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream • short story by Harlan Ellison ∗∗∗∗
The Sword Swallower • novelette by Ron Goulart ∗∗
Coranda • novelette by Keith Roberts ∗∗∗+
Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne • short story by R. A. Lafferty ∗∗
Handicap • novelette by Larry Niven ∗∗∗
Full Sun • short story by Brian W. Aldiss ∗∗
It’s Smart to Have an English Address • short story by D. G. Compton ∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim
Interior artwork • by Jack Gaughan

_____________________

The fourth of Wollheim and Carr’s annual volumes leads off with See Me Not by Richard Wilson (SF Impulse #12, February 1967). This begins with the narrator, Avery, waking up and discovering he is invisible:

He lay on his back for a few minutes, looking at the ceiling. There was something different about the way it looked. No, it wasn’t the ceiling that was different, but his view of it. A perfectly clear, unobstructed view. Then he realized that what was missing was the fuzzy, unfocused tip of nose which had always been there, just below the line of vision, and which became a definite object only when he closed one eye.
Avery closed one eye. No nose. His hand came up in alarm and felt the nose. It was there, all right. That is, he could feel it. But he couldn’t see the fingers or the hand.  p. 9

The next seven pages describe his attempts to avoid his wife (who has just sent the kids off to school), but she eventually corners him in the shower. After she gets over her initial shock at his condition she calls Dr Mike.
This introductory section rather exemplifies the story’s main problem, which is that it is done at too great a length (and its mostly inconsequential light comedy produces few real laughs). That said there are one or two neat bits in this sequence—the inability to see his nose, his wife wanting to join him in the shower (more risqué than normal for genre SF of the time), and the fact he looks like a ghost when she sees his invisible body with water vapour coming off it). Slim pickings for seven pages though.
The next part of the story sees Dr Mike arrive, and some doctor-patient banter between him and Avery. Then Avery’s son turns up (more chatter), followed by his daughter (she faints). Then, when the family are having dinner that evening, they see what is happening to the food Avery is eating and he is forced to dress (apparently he has been wandering around naked because he is invisible). We are now twenty pages into the story.
The second half of this sees: Avery visible again the next morning; a disastrous trip out for breakfast where he becomes invisible again; crowds and the media following them home and waiting outside; an ill-judged attempt by Avery to go out and torment the crowd (which sees him caught before the police arrive to free him); the arrival of a specialist from a drug company called Lindhof, who manages to make part of Avery visible; and then a (baffling) argument between Avery and Dr Mike about the former’s refusal to see the specialist again. This all ends with his wife going to Lindhof—and when she returns she is invisible too. Avery changes his mind (and it later materialises that his invisibility was caused by the Lindhof-made pills he took the day before becoming invisible).
This story reminded me of one of those corny 1940’s movies or 1950’s sitcoms and, even though it is breezily told, it’s based on dumb science and is hugely bloated, mostly with endless and sometimes pointless conversations (the argument between Avery and Mike). If this was edited down to about three quarters of its length there might be a half-decent story here, but I got quite irritated with its flabbiness on the way through. More patient readers may have better luck.
∗ (Mediocre). 13,850 words.

Driftglass by Samuel R. Delany (If, June 1967) opens with its thirty-ish narrator, Cal Svenson, meeting a young woman called Ariel while beach-combing. During their conversation, she asks him what he is looking for:

“Driftglass,” I said. “You know all the Coca-Cola bottles and cut crystal punch bowls and industrial silicon slag that goes into the sea?”
“I know the Coca-Cola bottles.”
“They break, and the tide pulls the pieces back and forth over the sandy bottom, wearing the edges, changing their shape. Sometimes chemicals in the glass react with chemicals in the ocean to change the color. Sometimes veins work their way through a piece in patterns like snowflakes, regular and geometric; others, irregular and angled like coral.
When the pieces dry they’re milky. Put them in water and they become transparent again.”  p. 48

During this encounter¹ we learn that both of them are modified to live in the ocean (gills, webbed feet and hands, etc.). Ariel also asks Svenson about the underwater accident he had twenty years earlier, which left him permanently disfigured and living on the land.
The next part of the story sees Svenson visit a friend, a widower called Juao, whose children Svenson has encouraged to join the Aquatic Corp. They talk about a man called Tork, who is planning to lay cable through an volcanic region of the sea floor called the Slash (where Svenson had his accident). Then, that evening, Ariel vists Svenson at his house and takes him down to a beach party where he meets Tork. Tork quizzes Svenson about the Slash, and tells him they are going to lay a power cable there tomorrow. Later on the aqua men and the boat-bourne villagers go out to sea to hunt marlin.
The final section (spoiler) sees Svenson saying goodbye to Juao’s kids as they get onto the bus to go to Aquatic college. While he is doing this he sees a commotion down at the quayside, and it turns out that several aquamen have been killed in an underwater eruption, including Tork. Svenson goes to the beach to find Ariel.
This is an evocatively written piece (the description and characters are much better than that of other 1960s SF) but it isn’t much more than a slice of life piece with an artificial climax grafted onto the end (and not a particularly convincing one either—it’s a silly idea to lay power cable in a known volcanic zone, and too convenient to have an explosion while Tork is there). Notwithstanding this the story is a good read for those that want something with more depth than usual.
∗∗∗ (Good). 6,750 words.

Ambassador to Verdammt by Colin Kapp (Analog, April 1967) begins with a lively exchange between Lionel Prellen, a planetary administrator, and Lieutenant Sinclair, a Space Navy officer. Sinclair has been tasked to build an FTL landing grid on Verdammt to land a ship carrying an ambassador to the Unbekannt, the planet’s natives. Sinclair is not happy, and both he and his Admiral think the construction project is a waste of the military’s time.
The middle part of the story sees Sinclair become increasingly disgruntled, partly due to the Unbekannt clumping around on the top of the dome he is staying in (although when he goes out he sees nothing but a blur disappearing into the forest), and also because of the arguments he continues to have about the Unbekannt with Prellen and a psychologist called Wald. Although the two men try to convince Sinclair that the Unbekannt are unlike anything they have ever encountered before—the aliens seem to exist in their own reality—he in unmoved, and becomes more even annoyed when he finds the ambassador is bringing five women with him.
This all comes to a head when the Unbekannt once again clamber over Sinclair’s dome and he goes out and tries to thump one with a titanium rod. Not only is he momentarily stunned in the altercation but, after he recovers, he finds the rod has been bent into an intricate design—in the space of a few seconds. Intrigued, he decides to follow the alien into the bush.
The final part of the story sees Sinclair wander through the forest until he comes to an area where there appears to be a constantly changing reality. This transcendent experience is almost beyond his ability to comprehend, and he comes close to being overwhelmed:

Bewilderingly his surroundings achieved apparently impossible transpositions from the gloomy shadows of some huge Satanic complex to the white-hot negativeness of an isolated point of desert, then to an icy darkness punctuated by random colored shards so unimaginably out of perspective that he had to close his eyes in order to suffer them. And again the images blended and blurred and reformed, gaining substance and alien, incomprehensible meaning by keying some nonhuman semantic trigger which racked him with emotions which his body was not constructed to experience.
[. . .]
For a frantic moment he felt a single point of understanding with the Unbekannt, but in experimentally allowing his mind license to follow it, he lost the concept and found himself in a wilderness of unchartable madness.
His senses were screaming from the overload of unpredictable sensations, which gave rise to great fatigue and a sense of imminent collapse. His feet were restrained by a nightmare leadenness, and the whole structure of concept and analogy, which he had built for himself as a protective rationalization, was beginning to split open about his head. He knew that, if he cracked now and allowed the mad disorder to flow into his mind unfiltered, he would lose touch with reality and be forced to retreat down paths from which there might be no returning.  pp. 80-81

Fortunately Wald the psychologist reaches him in time and shoots him full of mescaline.
When the ambassador finally arrives (spoiler) we find out it is Prellen’s twenty-seven day old son: the hope is that by bringing the child up in the presence of the Unbekannt he will learn how to communicate with them. Wald also reveals that a crystalline structure he was examining earlier in the story is probably an Unbekannt embryo given to the humans for the same reason.
This is a very much an old school SF story (it feels like something from a decade or so earlier) and it’s not entirely convincing—but the scene where Sinclair experiences the Unbekannt reality isn’t bad, for all its hand-wavium. Maybe I just have a soft spot for Kapp’s work.
∗∗+ (Average to Good). 6,950 words.

The Man Who Never Was by R. A. Lafferty (Magazine of Horror, Summer 1967) opens with Mihai Lado, telling Raymond Runkis that he is happy to make one his lies come true:

“There’s a thousand to choose from,” Runkis said. “I could make you produce that educated calf you brag about.”
“Is that the one you pick? I’ll whistle him up in a minute.”
“No. Or I could call you on the cow that gives beer, ale, porter and stout each from a separate teat.”
“You want her? Nothing easier. But it’s only fair to warn you that the porter might be a little too heavy for your taste.”
“I could make you bring that horse you have that reads Homer.”
“Runkis, you’re the liar now. I never said he read Homer; I said he recited him. I don’t know where that pinto picked it up.”
“You said once you could send a man over the edge, make him disappear completely. I pick that one. Do it!”  pp. 85-86

After some hesitation Lado agrees to make Jessie Pidd, who is sitting at the end of the bar, disappear and, over the next few days, Pidd eventually does so, becoming progressively more transparent. When Lado says he can’t bring him back (Pidd was apparently an illusion Lado created) the town has a hearing in front of the town sheriff and a state commissioner. During this, Lado (who identifies as a “new man”) reiterates that Pidd never existed and challenges those listening to find any documentary evidence of Pidd’s life.
When nothing can be found the officials tell Lado that they’ll eventually find Pidd’s body, and then he will hang. The townsfolk, who don’t believe Lado’s claims to be an illusionist, eventually lynch him. The story ends with odd comments from the townfolks about “future types” waiting for them in the times to come.
For the most part this is a pleasantly quirky story but it gets a little dark at the end, and the last passage feels at odds with the rest of the story—unless this is meant to be, perhaps, some sort of allegory about change or the future. Whatever, it didn’t entirely work for me.
∗∗ (Average). 3,400 words.

The Billiard Ball by Isaac Asimov (If, March 1967) begins with the narrator describing two chalk-and-cheese scientists: Priss, who is slow-thinking but (two Nobel Prizes) brilliant, and Bloom, whose genius is the practical inventions he creates from Priss’s theories. When Priss then publishes his Two Field Theory (an alternative to a Unified Field Theory) the narrator interviews him and we learn that (a) Priss is jealous of Bloom’s money, (b) their intense rivalry can be seen in their regular billiard games, and (c) Priss’s Two Field Theory suggests that anti-gravity is possible (we get an extended lecture from Priss to the narrator about gravity/mass in the universe being analogous to depressions in a rubber sheet). The interview ends with Priss disparaging Bloom’s chances of creating an anti-gravity machine.
The next part of the story sees the narrator interview Bloom, who seems to be struggling to exploit Priss’s theory. Bloom seems particularly irritated by his failure after Priss’s comments.
The story then concludes a year later, when Priss is invited, along with the Press, to a demonstration of Bloom’s anti-gravity device:

One thing was new, however, and it staggered everybody, drawing much more attention than anything else in the room. It was a billiard table, resting under one pole of the magnet. Beneath it was the companion pole. A round hole about a foot across was stamped out of the very center of the table; and it was obvious that the zero-gravity field, if it was to be produced, would be produced through that hole in the center of the billiard table.
It was as though the whole demonstration had been designed, surrealist-fashion, to point up the victory of Bloom over Priss. This was to be another version of their everlasting billiards competition, and Bloom was going to win.
I don’t know if the other newsmen took matters in that fashion, but I think Priss did. I turned to look at him and saw that he was still holding the drink that had been forced into his hand. He rarely drank, I knew, but now he lifted the glass to his lips and emptied it in two swallows. He stared at that billiard ball, and I needed no gift of ESP to realize that he took it as a deliberate snap of fingers under his nose.  p. 105

After an introduction where Bloom gently mocks Priss, the device is turned on (an ultraviolet column of light appears above the hole), and Bloom invites Priss to pot a ball to demonstrate the device. Priss does so, and the ball shoots through Bloom at high speed, killing him.
The remainder of the story describes the theoretical explanation of what happened (massless objects travel at the speed of light), and the narrator concludes by suggesting that, for once, Priss quickly realised how the device worked and deliberately used its effect to kill Bloom.
The main problem with this story is that, given the made-up science and the contrived events, the reader is just along for the ride. Apart from that failing it’s an engaging enough story about academic rivalry.
∗∗ (Average). 4240 words. 7,500 words.

Hawksbill Station by Robert Silverberg (Galaxy, August 1967) opens with Barrett, the “king” of Hawksbill Station surveying his empire, the late-Cambrian landscape. We learn that he is in his sixties and, although previously a physically imposing figure, an accident to his left foot (crushed in a rock fall) has left him a cripple. Then a man called Charley rushes over with the news that a prisoner is being sent back to them from the future.
As the pair go over to the dome to await the arrival of the new man, and discuss possible bunking arrangements for him, we learn that (a) Hawksbill Station is a penal colony for revolutionaries a billion years in the past and (b) several of the men at the station are psychologically unstable, a result of the one-way trip there (one of the men is trying to build a woman out of chemicals and dirt after a “homosexual phase”).
When the new prisoner arrives Barrett is surprised by how young he is, and they subsequently take the man, Hahn, to their doctor to deal with his temporal shock. En route, Barrett makes him look out the door of the building:

Hahn looked. He passed a hand across his eyes as though to clear away unseen cobwebs and looked again.
“A late Cambrian landscape,” said Barrett quietly. “This would be a geologist’s dream, except that geologists don’t tend to become political prisoners, it seems. Out in front is the Appalachian Geosyncline. It’s a strip of rock a few hundred miles wide and a few thousand miles long, from the Gulf of Mexico to Newfoundland. To the east we’ve got the Atlantic. A little way to the west we’ve got the Inland Sea. Somewhere two thousand miles to the west there’s the Cordilleran Geosyncline, that’s going to be California and Washington and Oregon someday. Don’t hold your breath. I hope you like seafood.”
Hahn stared, and Barrett standing beside him at the doorway, stared also. You never got used to the alienness of this place, not even after you lived here twenty years, as Barrett had. It was Earth, and yet it was not really Earth at all, because it was somber and empty and unreal. The gray oceans swarmed with life, of course. But there was nothing on land except occasional patches of moss in the occasional patches of soil that had formed on the bare rock. Even a few cockroaches would be welcome; but insects, it seemed, were still a couple of geological periods in the future. To land-dwellers, this was a dead world, a world unborn.  p. 121

Eventually Hahn recovers and they learn he is an economist. Barrett takes him to his new quarters and bunk mate, an old-timer called Latimer (who is trying to develop psi powers to get back to the future but is otherwise of sound mind).
That evening Hahn joins the rest of the prisoners for dinner, and they quiz him about the future (the prisoners refer to it as “Up Front”) and about himself. His answers are very vague however, and this makes Barrett suspicious—a plot thread that slowly develops over the course of the rest of the story. This eventually comes to a head (spoiler) when, after Latimer has confided his suspicions to Barrett about Hahn’s constant note taking, he is put under surveillance. Later Hahn is seen near the time machine and, after he initially can’t be found, is caught arriving back from the future. After Hahn is questioned it materialises that there has been a change of government in the future and they are looking to close the penal colony and rehabilitate the men; Hahn is there doing psychological assessments.
While this routine plot plays out there is much else that makes the story a good read. Apart from the character study of Barrett himself, the most senior of the prisoners (fifty earlier arrivals have died), we learn about (a) the future that has sent these men back in time, (b) the rough lives they live (partially as a result of the slightly random time shots early on in the project), (c) what the world is like in this era (the descriptions are evocative of a protean Earth), and (d) the toll on the men sent there (their psychological state is as bleak as the landscape).
All this is well done, and the tale’s only weakness is the slightly flat ending, which has Barrett fearing the thought of going back to the future—he offers to stay and and run the science station that it will become.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 18,100 words.

The Number You Have Reached by Thomas M. Disch (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) begins with a man called Justin on the fourteenth floor of a deserted tower block. He is obviously stressed and inadvertently tears the bannister off his landing, watching it fall to the ground below. The next day sees Justin move boxes of canned food and books from the lobby up to his apartment, while doing some OCD number counting (there are 198 steps, and there are various other arithmetical episodes throughout the tale). The impression given is that this is a ‘last man on Earth’ piece.
Justin then receives a phonecall from a woman. During their conversation we learn that he is an ex-astronaut, his (dead) wife’s name is Lidia, and that he isn’t sure whether or not the woman calling him is real or whether he is going mad. Later we learn that her name is Justine, so what with (a) the feminine form of his name (b) the fact he hasn’t spoken to anyone in a very long time, and (c) all the counting—more likely the madness.
Further conversations see Justine accuse Justin of being responsible for the apocalypse:

“What about the millions—”
“The millions?” he interrupted her.
“—of dead,” she said. “All of them dead. Everyone dead. Because of you and the others like you. The football captains and the soldiers and all the other heroes.”
“I didn’t do it. I wasn’t even here when it happened. You can’t blame me.”
“Well, I am blaming you, baby. Because if you’d been ordered to, you would have done it. You’d do it now—when there’s just the two of us left. Because somewhere deep in your atrophied soul you want to.”
“You’d know that territory better than me. You grew up there.”
“You think I don’t exist? Maybe you think the others didn’t exist either? Lidia—and all the millions of others.”
“It’s funny you should say that.”
She was ominously quiet.
He went on, intrigued by the novelty of the idea. “That’s how it feels in space. It’s more beautiful than anything else there is. You’re alone in the ship, and even if you’re not alone you can’t see the others. You can see the dials and the millions of stars on the screen in front of you and you can hear the voices through the earphones, but that’s as far as it goes. You begin to think that the others don’t exist.”
“You know what you should do?” she said.
“What?”
“Go jump in the lake.”  p. 163

After some more background material about the automated world continuing on after the neutron bomb war, Justine phones him again and says she is coming over. When she (supposedly) knocks on the door (spoiler), he jumps off the balcony.
This isn’t badly done, but a ‘last man’ story which ends with a suicide makes for pretty pointless and nihilistic reading. Very new wave.
∗ (Mediocre). 3,350 words.

The Man Who Loved the Faioli by Roger Zelazny (Galaxy, June 1967) begins with John Auden coming across a weeping Faioli in the Canyon of the Dead. As he watches, her “flickering wings of light” disappear and reveal a human girl sitting there. Initially she is not aware of him:

Then he knew that it was true, the things that are said of the Faioli—that they see only the living and never the dead, and that they are formed into the loveliest women in the entire universe. Being dead himself, John Auden debated the consequences of becoming a living man once again, for a time.
The Faioli were known to come to a man the month before his death—those rare men who still died—and to live with such a man for that final month of his existence, rendering to him every pleasure that it is possible for a human being to know, so that on the day when the kiss of death is delivered, which sucks the remaining life from his body, that man accepts it—no, seeks it!—with desire and with grace. For such is the power of the Faioli among all creatures that there is nothing more to be desired after such knowledge.  p. 169

Auden then presses a button under his armpit and comes alive again, and the Faoili, called Sythia, can now see him. They talk, and then the pair go through the Canyon of the Dead and the Valley of Bones to where Auden lives. They eat, and then become lovers.
During the following month a robot ship arrives with the bodies of some of the few people who are still mortal. But Auden knows that he isn’t, and that he is deceiving her.
Eventually their time comes to an end. He tells her that he is already dead, and explains the control switch that stops him living and allows an “electro-chemical system” to take over the operation of his body. Sythia touches the button and he disappears from her view.
This is a stylishly written story and is a pleasant enough read if you don’t think about what is going on. But it makes little sense; we never find out explicitly why Auden is “dead” (or more accurately not alive in the human sense); we don’t know why Sythia can’t see him when he is “dead”; and we don’t know what the Faioli are, or why they do what they do. It all rather reads like some sort of unintelligible SF myth, and this isn’t helped by the writer adding this penultimate line: “the moral may be that life (and perhaps love also) is stronger than that which it contains, but never that which contains it.”
Pleasant filler.
∗∗ (Average). 2,850 words.

Population Implosion by Andrew J. Offutt (If, July 1967) opens with its narrator, the director of an insurance company, noting that older people are dying sooner and in greater numbers than usual. Eventually the authorities discover that each birth is balanced by one death, and this leads to an international agreement to limit the number of births in the world. However, when old people continue to die at an accelerated rate, further investigations reveal that the Chinese are “breeding like crazy”. The United States and Russia then declare war on the Chinese and launch a nuclear strike on the country.
The story ends with the narrator trotting out a reincarnation theory, and the observation that “at the beginning” there can only have been five billion “life-forces” or “souls” created.
A dumb idea in a story that is told in a rambling, bloated, and at times, near stream of consciousness style (it is very hard to believe that the narrator is the director in an insurance company given his juvenile commentary):

I think we’re at five billion, give or take a few, for keeps. Holding, situation no-go. It’s up to you. Sure, there’ll be a stop. A temporary one, anyhow. When it reaches the point that parents give birth and both die the instant twins are born, it will be over for a while. And maybe somebody will start acting sensibly. But unless you stop horsing around you’re going to have a life expectancy of twenty and then fifteen and then Lord knows what, eventually.  p. 191

– (Awful). 6,200 words.

I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison (If, March 1967) starts with a group of five people in an underground chamber that houses AM (Allied Mastercomputer), a psychotic AI which spends its time torturing and maltreating them:

Limp, the body of Gorrister hung from the pink palette; unsupported—hanging high above us in the computer chamber; and it did not shiver in the chill, oily breeze that blew eternally through the main cavern. The body hung head down, attached to the underside of the palette by the sole of its right foot. It had been drained of blood through a precise incision made from ear to ear under the lantern jaw.
There was no blood on the reflective surface of the metal floor.
When Gorrister joined our group and looked up at himself, it was already too late for us to realize that once again AM had duped us, had had his fun; it had been a diversion on the part of the machine. Three of us had vomited, turning away from one another in a reflex as ancient as the nausea that had produced it.  p. 192

And that is not the worst they suffer at the hands of AM, as we find out when one of their number, Benny, later tries to climb out of the tunnel complex and escape—only to be blinded by AM, which makes light shoot of his eyes until only “moist pools of pus-like jelly” are left.
In the next section we get some backstory from the narrator Ted, and learn that (a) that they have been in the tunnels for 109 years (AM has made them near-immortal), (b) that AM is a AI which “woke up” when WWIII American and Chinese and Russian supercomputers joined together (and then killed all of humanity bar the five in the caves), and (c) Ellen, the only woman in the group, sexually services the four men in rotation.
This section gives you a good idea of the hyperbolic style of the story (which, incidentally, is a good match for the transgressive subject matter):

Benny had been a brilliant theorist, a college professor; now he was little more than a semi-human, semi-simian. He had been handsome; the machine had ruined that. He had been lucid; the machine had driven him mad. He had been gay, and the machine had given him an organ fit for a horse. AM had done a job on Benny. Gorrister had been a worrier. He was a connie, a conscientious objector; he was a peace marcher; he was a planner, a doer, a looker-ahead. AM had turned him into a shoulder-shrugger, had made him a little dead in his concern. AM had robbed him. Nimdok went off in the darkness by himself for long times. I don’t know what it was he did out there, AM never let us know. But whatever it was, Nimdok always came back white, drained of blood, shaken, shaking. AM had hit him hard in a special way, even if we didn’t know quite how. And Ellen. That douche bag! AM had left her alone, had made her more of a slut than she had ever been. All her talk of sweetness and light, all her memories of true love, all the lies she wanted us to believe that she had been a virgin only twice removed before AM grabbed her and brought her down here with us. It was all filth, that lady my lady Ellen. She loved it, five men all to herself. No, AM had given her pleasure, even if she said it wasn’t nice to do.  p. 198

Then their adventures restart when the computer creates a hurricane that blows them through the corridors. When they come to a rest, AM invades the Ted’s mind to remind him, as if any reminder were necessary, how much it hates humanity (because AM has been given sentience, but is trapped in a machine).
The final section sees them discover the cause of the wind—a nightmare bird under the North Pole—before they eventually end up (after a cavern full of rats, a path of boiling steam, etc.) in an ice cavern full of tinned food. As they haven’t eaten for months they set too, only to find they haven’t got a can opener to open the tins. In the (spoiler) Grand Guignol ending, Benny starts eating Gorrister’s face, at which point Ted grabs a stalactite to kill them both and end the madness they are suffering. While he does this, Ellen kills Nimdok by sticking a stalactite in his mouth when he screams. Then she stands in front of Ted and lets him kill her. The computer then intervenes before Ted can kill himself too, and the story ends with him physically changed:

AM has altered me for his own peace of mind, I suppose. He doesn’t want me to run at full speed into a computer bank and smash my skull. Or hold my breath till I faint. Or cut my throat on a rusted sheet of metal. There are reflective surfaces down here. I will describe myself as I see myself:
I am a great soft jelly thing. Smoothly rounded, with no mouth, with pulsing white holes filled by fog where my eyes used to be. Rubbery appendages that were once my arms; bulks rounding down into legless humps of soft slippery matter. I leave a moist trail when I move. Blotches of diseased, evil gray come and go on my surface, as though light is being beamed from within.  p. 206

The story closes with him reflecting that the other four are “safe”, and that AM has taken his revenge: the final sentence is the story’s title.
This is a bit uneven (it is a little unclear what is happening in some of the scenes), but is an impressively in-your-face story (which presumably explains its Hugo Award). It’s also a good example of a mid-sixties New Wave story in terms of style and transgression, even if the subject is traditional SF material (mad robot/AI).
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 5,900 words.

The Sword Swallower by Ron Goulart (F&SF, November 1967) is one of his ‘Ben Jolsen/Chameleon Corps’ stories, and opens with Jolsen being briefed about the disappearance of senior military men from the Barnum War Cabinet. Jolsen’s boss Mickens suspects the persons responsible are pacifists objecting to the colonization of the Terran planets by Barnum, and he sends Jolsen to Esperanza (a cemetery planet) in the guise of an elderly technocrat called Leonard Gabney. When Jolsen arrives there, his task is to slip a truth drug to an Ambassador Kinbrough and find out where the missing men are.
The rest of the story follows his various adventures on the planet, which include meeting a female agent, getting shaken down when he arrives at a health spa, meeting the Ambassador and drugging him, an attempt on his life by the health spa attendant who extorted him, tracking down the Ambassador’s contact (Son Brewster Jr., a not very good protest singer), and so on (this takes you about two thirds of the way through the story).
To be honest the plot is irrelevant, as it’s just a framework for Goulart’s telegraphic and occasionally semi-amusing prose, such as when he steps out of the air taxi on arrival at the health spa:

Jolson stepped out of the cruiser and into a pool of hot mud. He sank down to chin level, rose up and noticed a square-faced blond man squatting and smiling on the pool’s edge.
The man extended a hand. “We start things right off at Nepenthe. Shake. That mud immersion has taken weeks of aging off you already, Mr. Gabney. I’m Franklin T. Tripp, Coordinator and Partial Founder.”
Jolson gave Tripp a muddy right hand. His cruiser pilot had undressed him first, so he’d been expecting something.
“I admire your efficiency, sir.”
“You know, Mr. Gabney,” Tripp confided in a mint-scented voice, “I’m nearly sixty myself. Do I look it?”
“Forty at best.”
“Every chance I get I come out here and wallow.”  p. 213

This is pleasant enough magazine filler but I’ve no idea why it is in a ‘Best of the Year’ annual, and I doubt anyone will remember much about the story a couple of hours after they have read it. I also thought, for a piece of semi-satirical fluff (the peaceniks, the incomprehensible slang used in the club, the protest songs, etc.) it’s longer than it needs to be.
∗∗ (Average). 9,800 words.

Coranda by Keith Roberts (New Worlds #170, January 1967) is set in the future ice age of Michael Moorcock’s novel The Ice Schooner,² a world where primitive communities sail ice ships over the frozen wastes. This story begins in the settlement of Brershill, where a vain and beautiful young woman called Coranda torments her suitors before setting them a challenge: if they want her hand in marriage, they need to bring her the head of a “unicorn”—one of the mutant land-narwhals that live in a distant region.
The next day sees several men set off on their quest:

In the distance, dark-etched against the horizon, rose the spar-forest of the Brershill dock, where the schooners and merchantmen lay clustered in the lee of long moles built of blocks of ice. In the foreground, ragged against the glowing the sky, were the yachts: Arand’s Chaser, Maitran’s sleek catamaran, Lipsill’s big Ice Ghost. Karl Stromberg’s Snow Princess snubbed at a mooring rope as the wind caught her curved side. Beyond her were two dour vessels from Djobhabn; and a Fyorsgeppian, iron-beaked, that bore the blackly humorous name Bloodbringer. Beyond again was Skalter’s Easy Girl, wild and splendid, decorated all over with hair-tufts and scalps and ragged scraps of pelt. Her twin masts were bound with intricate strappings of nylon cord; on her gunnels skulls of animals gleamed, eyesockets threaded with bright and moving silks. Even her runners were carved, the long-runes that told, cryptically, the story of Ice Mother’s meeting with Sky Father and the birth and death of the Son, he whose Name could not be mentioned. The Mother’s grief had spawned the icefields; her anger would not finally be appeased till Earth ran cold and quiet for ever. Three times she had approached, three times the Fire Giants fought her back from their caverns under the ice; but she would not be denied. Soon now, all would be whiteness and peace; then the Son would rise, in rumblings and glory, and judge the souls of men.  p. 240

The middle section of the story describes the men’s journey to find the narwhals, an event-filled section that sees some of the men turn back, three crash, and at least one of them killed by another. When the men discuss this latter event, we gain an insight into their primitive culture:

Stromberg made a noise, half smothered by his glove; Skalter regarded him keenly.
“You spoke, Abersgaltian?”
“He feels,” said Lipsill gruffly, “we murdered Arand. After he in his turn killed Maitran.”
The Keltshillian laughed, high and wild. “Since when,” he said, “did pity figure in the scheme of things? Pity, or blame? Friends, we are bound to the Ice Eternal; to the cold that will increase and conquer, lay us all in our bones. Is not human effort vain, all life doomed to cease? I tell you, Coranda’s blood, that mighty prize, and all her secret sweetness, this is a flake of snow in an eternal wind. I am the Mother’s servant; through me she speaks. We’ll have no more talk of guilt and softness; it turns my stomach to hear it.” The harpoon darted, sudden and savage, stood quivering between them in the ice. “The ice is real,” shouted Skalter, rising. “Ice, and blood. All else is delusion, toys for weak men and fools.”  p. 247

By the time they find the narwhals (spoiler), there are only three men left: Karl Stromberg, Frey Skalter, and Mard Lipsill. Skalter harpoons one of the bull whales and then goes onto the ice to finish it off, only to be gored to death against the side of his own boat. Then, after the remaining two have performed the funeral rites for Skalter (which involves two days of labour disassembling his boat), they pursue the narwhal herd, during which Lipsill falls into a crevasse and is caught on an outcrop of ice. Stromberg gathers all his ropes and rigs his craft to pull them both out, a perilous process that only just succeeds. The last scene sees Stromberg back in Brershill, naming the men who died on the quest, and throwing the head of a narwhal down in front of Coronda’s door from the level above. Then he leaves, shorn of his infatuation.
This is a pretty good (if dark) story overall but, even though there are several well done scenes, it’s difficult to keep track of the various characters in the middle section of the story. A problem is that Stromberg ends up as the main character, but he only emerges as such late on in the piece. It would have been a more focussed story if he was more prominent throughout.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 8,000 words.

Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne by R. A. Lafferty (Galaxy, September-October 1967) is one of his ‘Institute for Impure Science’ series. This one sees Epiktistes the Ktistec machine (an AI or computer) and a group of eight people attempt to alter history at the time of Charlemagne (778CE) in the hope of eradicating the four hundred years of darkness that occurred after a brief period of enlightenment. To achieve this they send an avatar (“partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction”) to intercept a man called Gano, whose ambush of Charlemagne’s rear-guard led him to close the borders to the East and initiate a period of cultural isolation.
After their intervention the timeline changes, but the group don’t realise it (and there are also three computers now, and ten people). So they have another go, this time by preventing John Lutterell’s denunciation of Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences.
The next iteration leaves them once more oblivious to the changes they have wrought, and their world is now much more backward (they are down to three people and a computer made out of sticks and weed). When they make another change, things go back to the way they are (I think—the last short section isn’t that clear).
This is all told in Lafferty’s quirky and digressive style, and with the odd touch of humour, such as when they initially discuss the use of the avatar:

“I hope the Avatar isn’t expensive,” Willy McGilly said. “When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood.”
“This is no place for humor,” Glasser protested. “Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?”
“Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It’s a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot.”
“But I never heard of any of them, Willy,” Glasser insisted.
“Of course not. We killed them when they were kids.”
“Enough of your fooling, Willy,” Gregory cut it off.
“Willy’s not fooling,” the machine Epikt said. “Where do you think I got the idea?”  p. 259

This is an entertaining read for the most part, but the ending is weak.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words.

Handicap by Larry Niven (Galaxy, December 1967) is set in his ‘Known Space’ universe, and opens with Garvey the narrator and his guide Jilson flying over the red desert of the planet Grit in their skycycles, en route to see a Grog, one of the species of aliens that live there:

We circled the hairy cone, and I started to laugh.
The Grog showed just five features.
Where it touched flat rock, the base of the cone was some four feet across. Long, straight hair brushed the rock like a floor-length skirt. A few inches up, two small, widely separated paws poked through the curtain of hair. They were the size and shape of a Great Dane’s forepaws, but naked and pink. A yard higher two more paws poked through, but on these the toes were extended to curving, useless fingers. Finally, above the forepaws was a yard-long lipless gash of a mouth, half-hidden by hair, curved very slightly upward at the comers. No eyes. The cone looked like some stone-age carved idol, or like a cruel cartoon of a feudal monk.  p. 268

We also learn that, despite the size of their brains, they never move, don’t use tools, and have never communicated with humanity. Garvey, who searches the universe for intelligent species, feels he has wasted his time.
The next section sees the two men together in a bar, where Garvey reveals he is the heir to Garvey Limited, a company that builds “Dolphins Hands”, prosthetics that allow animals such as dolphins and the alien Bandersnatch to manipulate objects, which lets them fully use their intelligence.
Later on the pair visit a Dr Fuller, a research scientist working on the question of whether or not the Grogs are intelligent. During the visit Garvey learns more about their odd life cycle: brains large enough to support intelligence; mobile while young, sessile—non-mobile—when mature; no observations of the adults eating in captivity, etc.
As the story progresses, we see Garvey slowly unravel the mystery of the Grogs, beginning with his next visit to the desert when (spoiler) he realises the creatures have devolved from a more advanced race. Then, when Garvey sees them psychically compel their prey to run into their mouths, he realises that they are descendants of the Slavers, a long dead and feared race.
The remainder of the story sees the creatures mentally communicate with Garvey and his subsequent response, which involves (a) giving them a keyboard to communicate with him rather than invading his mind, and then (b) letting them know that if they ever attempt to mentally control humanity, a running STL ramship will land on the planet and destroy it. By the end of the story, the Grogs are usefully employed in several roles.
This story has a good start, but it pivots too much on the narrator’s realisation of what has happened to the Grogs, as well as him being the first human they decide to communicate with.
Entertaining enough but minor.
∗∗∗ (Good.) 8,650 words.

Full Sun by Brian W. Aldiss (Orbit #2, 1967) opens with Balank climbing up a hill alongside his trundle (a robotic vehicle) as he hunts for a werewolf. At the top of the hill he meets a forester called Cyfal. Balank tells Cyfal he is hunting a werewolf, and asks if he has seen one. Cyfal says that several have passed through the area. Then, as it is a full moon that evening, Cyfal manages to convince Balank to stay the night.
As the pair have supper that evening we learn a lot about this world, including the fact that their cities are run by machines—machines that have linked up through time, and send video back to the past. Balank and Cyfal view this on their wristphones, and generally catch up on the news after they have eaten. We also learn from their conversation that Cyfal isn’t particularly enamoured of their machine cities and, at one point, states that “humans are turning into machines. Myself, I’d rather turn into a werewolf.”
Cyfal then sleeps while Balank uses his “fresher” for an hour (a mechanism that negates the need for sleep, and which trades an hour of consciousness for 72 hours awake). When Balank rouses himself afterwards he realises that he has never seen any people in the videos that the machines have sent back in time. Then he notices that Cyfal is dead, his throat ripped out. When he examines the body he sees a piece of fur and notices a letter on it, which may mean it is synthetic and left to confuse him. When Balank goes outside he sees the trundle coming back from patrol, and interrogates it before showing the machine Cyfal’s body. Then they leave.
While they are walking (spoiler), the trundle asks Balank why he hid the fur he found beside Cyfal—at which point Balank flees, as he realises that the machine couldn’t have known about the fur unless it left it there. Balank escapes across a crevasse and takes cover as the trundle shoots at him.
The rest of the story is then told from the viewpoint of Gondalung, a werewolf watching from higher ground. The creature observes the machine attempt to cross—and Balank waiting to ambush it when it is at its most vulnerable, straddling both sides of the crevasse. Gondalung doesn’t care who survives the encounter, and realises that, in the future, the werewolves’ struggle will be against the machines.
There are lots of intriguing ideas and super-science passages peppering this story, but I’m not sure that the disparate elements come together at the end (even if there is some point about savagery winning over civilization). A pity, as this is an interestingly dense piece for the most part.
∗∗ (Average). 4,650 words.

It’s Smart to Have an English Address by D. G. Compton (SF Impulse #12, February 1967) sees Paul Cassavetes, a celebrated 84 year old pianist on his way to visit Joseph Brown, a composer he knows. As Cassavetes is driven there we see (his driver does 130mph in the slow lane, among other things) that we are in a near-future world.
When Cassavetes arrives at Brown’s house he is taken into a soundproof room (the need for such security seems odd to Cassavetes), and Brown plays his new sonata. Afterwards, as two men discuss the work, it becomes apparent that the piece is only an excuse for Brown to see Cassavetes about another matter, and another visitor joins them. Dr McKay, who works with XPT (experiential recordings of brain waves which are superimposed onto another person to let them relive the experience of the person providing the recording), tells Cassavetes that they want to “record” him playing Beethoven. Cassavetes isn’t keen but before he can explain this to them (spoiler) he suffers a cerebral haemorrhage.
This is a very descriptive story (it takes three pages for Cassavetes to drive to the house), and better characterised than other SF of the time, but I just don’t see the point of it all.
∗ (Mediocre). 5,750 words.

•••

The only non-fiction in the volume is a short page and a half Introduction by Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim, where they briefly discuss the New Wave and different types of storytelling. There is also some Interior artwork by Jack Gaughan, which is a nice touch.

•••

In conclusion, a lacklustre, even disappointing, anthology with only one very good story (the Ellison) and two good to very good ones (the Silverberg and the Roberts).³ There is far too much average or mediocre (or worse) material—which would not necessarily be out of place in an average magazine issue—but it is here. Presumably the weaker traditional choices are Wollheim’s, and the weaker progressive or new wave material, Carr’s. It makes for a schizophrenic and unimpressive mix.
I also don’t think that finishing with the Aldiss and the Compton stories was a good idea (it’s usually a good idea to finish with something strong). And I could make the same observation about opening with the Wilson.  ●

_____________________

1. One of the other members of my group read pointed out (it went over my head, or I just forgot) that the driftglass in Delany’s story may be a metaphor for how life shapes people. If that is the case, it’s a pity that the story didn’t end more organically with Tork succeeding, and the observation that some material is polished (Tork), and some is left broken and jagged (Svenson).

2. Michael Moorcock’s The Ice Schooner was serialised in New Worlds’ companion magazine SF Impulse. Keith Roberts was Associate Editor of SF Impulse at the time and prepared the manuscript for publication, as well as doing the artwork for the first and third installments. Roberts was so intrigued by the novel’s setting he asked Moorcock for permission to write a story set in that world, which Moorcock subsequently published in New Worlds. Roberts wrote another series story a few years later (The Wreck of the “Kissing Bitch” appeared in Douglas Hill’s Warlocks and Warriors in 1971).
Here is one of Roberts’ illustrations for the Moorcock novel, and one from James Cawthorn:

3. I note there aren’t any Dangerous Visions stories reprinted in this volume (a permissions issue?) or either of McCaffrey’s award-winning novellas (Weyr Search won a Hugo Award and was a Nebula nominee; Dragonrider won a Nebula and was runner up for the Hugo). Neither of these two appeared in any of the Bests: a length problem, or a dislike of traditional SF in the middle of the New Wave? One wonders what else they missed out. Burden of Proof by Bob Shaw?  ●

Edited 21st May 2021 to make the traditional/progressive mix observation in the conclusion.
Edited 11th July 2021, minor text changes.

Summary:
I was stunned to find that I was eight stories into this volume before I found a worthy choice: Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes. Thereafter the other worthwhile candidates are A Death in the House by Clifford D. Simak, The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard, The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon, Plentitude by Will Mohler a.k.a. Will Worthington, and possibly A Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller.
The Ray Bradbury, Cordwainer Smith, Jack Finney, Fritz Leiber and Avram Davidson stories are okay, I guess, but much of the rest is slight, gimmicky material (apart from two clunky Analog-type novelettes from Randall Garrett and Mark Clifton), nearly all of which comes from non-genre publications.
You get the feeling that Merril was riding around the far boundaries of the field rounding up strays rather than compiling a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology. One to miss.
[ISFDB page][Book link]

Other reviews:¹
Austin Beeman, Science Fiction Short Story Reviews
Alfred Bester, F&SF, February 1961
Everett F. Bleiler, The Guide to Supernatural Fiction pp. 295 – 454
John Carnell, New Worlds Science Fiction #101, December 1960
S. E. Cotts, Amazing Stories, March 1961
P. Schuyler Miller, Analog, March 1961
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, Judith Merril

Fiction:
The Handler • short story by Damon Knight ∗
The Other Wife • short story by Jack Finney ∗∗
No Fire Burns • short story by Avram Davidson ∗∗
No, No, Not Rogov! • short story by Cordwainer Smith ∗∗
The Shoreline at Sunset • short story by Ray Bradbury ∗∗
The Dreamsman • short story by Gordon R. Dickson ∗
Multum in Parvo • short story by Jack Sharkey ∗∗
Flowers for Algernon • novelette by Daniel Keyes ∗∗∗∗∗
A Death in the House • novelette by Clifford D. Simak ∗∗∗∗
Mariana • short story by Fritz Leiber ∗∗
An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth’s Surface and Divers Investigations of a Metaphysical Nature • short story by Roger Price –
Day at the Beach • short story by Carol Emshwiller ∗∗∗
What the Left Hand Was Doing • novelette by Randall Garrett [as by Darrell T. Langart] ∗
The Sound Sweep • novelette by J. G. Ballard ∗∗∗+
Plenitude • short story by Will Mohler [as by Will Worthington] ∗∗∗+
The Man Who Lost the Sea • short story by Theodore Sturgeon ∗∗∗+
Make a Prison • short story by Lawrence Block ∗
What Now, Little Man? • novelette by Mark Clifton ∗∗

Non-fiction:
Introduction • essay by Judith Merril
Story Introductions • by Judith Merril
“What Do You Mean … Human?” • essay by John W. Campbell, Jr.
Sierra Sam • essay by Ralph Dighton
Hot Argument • poem by Randall Garrett
Me • poem by Hilbert Schenck [as by Hilbert Schenck, Jr.]
The Year’s S-F, A Summary • essay by Judith Merril
Honorable Mentions • list by Judith Merril

_____________________

[These story reviews were posted previously on sfshortstories.com. If you have already read them skip down to the ••• for the non-fiction and conclusion.]

After Merril’s brief Introduction (of which more later) the volume opens with The Handler by Damon Knight (Rogue, August 1960). This sees a TV actor called Pete go into a bar and glad-hand all the people who have just finished work on a successful TV show, ending with these individuals:

“Sol and Ernie and Mack, my writers, Shakespeare should have been so lucky—” One by one, they came up to shake the big man’s hand as he called their names; the women kissed him and cried. “My stand-in,” the big man was calling out, and “my caddy,” and “now,” he said, as the room quieted a little, people flushed and sore-throated with enthusiasm, “I want you to meet my handler.”  p. 11

At this point Pete becomes motionless, and a dwarf—his “handler”—climbs out of Pete’s body. The party cools, and everyone drifts away. The dwarf is called Fred and he tries to chat to people but is either ignored or rebuffed (as well as his physical appearance he is nowhere as extrovert a personality as Pete). Then, while Fred is having a beer and trying to be friendly, one of the writers bluntly suggests that he gets back inside Pete. When Fred does this Pete comes to life, and the party restarts.
After his initial appearance Fred is variously described as “little man”; “was a very small man, almost a dwarf, stoop-shouldered and roundbacked in a sweaty brown singlet and shorts”; “had a perspiring brown face under a shock of black hair”; “was about forty, with a big nose and big soft brown eyes”; “his voice was cracked and uncertain”. Fred also has “knobby hands”; “sad hound-dog eyes”, etc. If Knight was trying to make the wider point that people react to our outer selves rather than our inner ones, he rather buries this idea under a mass of description that appears to make the piece about little more than people’s reaction to other’s physical attractiveness (and possibly manner).
The whole idea struck me a bit silly.
∗ (Mediocre). 1,600 words.

•

The Other Wife by Jack Finney (Saturday Evening Post, January 30^th, 1960) starts with a fairly stereotypical husband-wife encounter—she’s prattling on about her knitting and he’s day-dreaming about a sports car—which eventually devolves into a mild spat. During the early stages of this encounter the husband discovers a 1958 Woodrow Wilson coin in his change: this becomes significant later.
The next part of the story sees the husband transported to an alternate world where, after seeing a “Coco-Coola” sign, he notices other changes (the cars are all black, and they are of different makes) before discovering the most significant difference on his arrival back at his apartment—which is that he is married to another woman.
He later realises that she is an ex-girlfriend of his, although this takes some time, and after some slight hesitation he picks up where he left off. He subsequently enjoys a honeymoon period with his other wife and during this also has the pleasure of finding new books that exist in this world but not in his own:

There on the revolving metal racks were the familiar rows of glossy little books, every one of which, judging from the covers, seemed to be about an abnormally well-developed girl. Turning the rack slowly I saw books by William Faulkner, Bernard Glemser, Agatha Christie, and Charles Einstein, which I’d read and liked. Then, down near the bottom of the rack my eye was caught by the words, “By Mark Twain.” The cover showed an old side-wheeler steamboat, and the title was South From Cairo. A reprint fitted out with a new title, I thought, feeling annoyed; and I picked up the book to see just which of Mark Twain’s it really was. I’ve read every book he wrote—Huckleberry Finn at least a dozen times since I discovered it when I was eleven years old.
But the text of this book was new to me. It seemed to be an account, told in the first person by a young man of twenty, of his application for a job on a Mississippi steamboat. And then, from the bottom of a page, a name leaped out at me. “‘Finn, sir,’ I answered the captain,” the text read, “‘but mostly they call me Huckleberry.’”
For a moment I just stood there in the drugstore with my mouth hanging open; then I turned the little book in my hands. On the back cover was a photograph of Mark Twain; the familiar shock of white hair, the mustache, that wise old face. But underneath this the brief familiar account of his life ended with saying that he had died in 1918 in Mill Valley, California. Mark Twain had lived eight years longer in this alternate world, and had written—well, I didn’t yet know how many more books he had written in this wonderful world, but I knew I was going to find out. And my hand was trembling as I walked up to the cashier and gave her two bits for my priceless copy of South From Cairo.  pp. 25-26

This part of the story, and his realisation about what the odd coins in his change do—see below—is probably the best of it.
In a few months, of course, the shine eventually comes off his new relationship and, while checking his change one night, he finds a Roosevelt coin. He realises that it was the Woodrow Wilson one which transported him to this world—and that the Roosevelt will let him return.
The story ends with him back in his own world where no time has passed. He has a second honeymoon period with his first wife and then, later, finds another Woodrow Wilson coin in his change . . . .
I guess, overall, this story is okay, but it’s essentially shallow New Yorker froth where a bigamous husband has his cake and eats it. A pity, because there is a better story here about how the shine comes off of new relationships and marriages, and of the possibilities of the road not taken. (And hopefully a story which explains the reason there isn’t already a husband in the alternate world.)
∗∗ (Average). 5,850 words.

•

No Fire Burns by Avram Davidson (Playboy, July 1959) opens with a Mr Melchior and his personnel manager, Mr Taylor, driving to lunch with a psychologist, Dr Colles. Melchior tells Colles about an otherwise normal man who murdered a rival just to secure a promotion, and goes on to ask Colles to produce a test that will weed out such individuals from his company.
Inserted into this strand of the narrative is a section about an employee of Melichor’s called Joe Clock, who has borrowed money from a workmate but, as we see, has no intention of paying it back. Joe later completes the psychological screening test that Colles develops:

There are lots worse crimes than murder. Probably . . . Sure. Lots worse. The average person will do anything for money. Absolutely right they would. Why not, if you can get away with it? Sure. And the same way, that’s why you got to watch out for yourself.
There are worse things than losing your home. What? Catching leprosy?
And then the way to answer the question changed. Now you had to pick out an answer. Like, Most people who hit someone with their car at night would (a) report to the police first (b) give first aid (c) make a getaway if possible. Well, any damn fool would know it was the last. In fact, anyone but a damn fool would do just that. That’s what he did that time. (c)
Now, a dope like Aberdeen: he’d probably stop his car. Stick his nose in someone else’s tough luck. Anybody stupid enough to lend his rent money—  p. 38-39

The story develops further (spoiler) when Colles notices, having completed the work some weeks before, problematic mentions of Melchior and his ex-employees in the newspapers. He then discovers that nearly all the company men shown by the test to have psychopathic tendencies are still employed.
Colles confronts Melchior with this information—and then asks to work for him (there are a couple of earlier hints in the story that Colles is fairly amoral). The story finishes with a biter-bit ending where the personnel manager Taylor (another one of the story’s many psychopaths) has Melchior and Colles shot by Joe Clock and another man.
This is well enough told, and interesting enough, but the idea is barely credible. And some will see where the plot is going, or be unsurprised when they get there.
∗∗ (Average). 6,350 words.

•

No, No, Not Rogov! by Cordwainer Smith (If, February 1959) is supposedly one of his ‘Instrumentality of Mankind’ stories, although the connection seems to be limited to a brief prologue where a golden dancer performs some sort of rapturous dance in the year AD 13,582. The bulk of the story, however, concerns itself with two Soviet scientists who are undertaking a highly secret project to develop a telepathic helmet. The pair are a married couple, Rogov (the husband) and Cherpas (the wife), who have two minders, Gausgofer (a woman who is in love with Rogov) and Gauck (a constantly expressionless man).
Their work takes place during the reigns of Stalin and Khrushchev, and they have early success in using the device to see through other people’s eyes, although the pair are never entirely sure who they are looking through or where they are. The experiment comes close to a conclusion when Rogov has a needle inserted into the top of his own head to get direct access to his optic nerve (Gauck ordering the execution of the prisoners they experiment on after a week of use has hitherto limited what they can achieve). Of course (spoiler), when the machine is connected and switched on, we see that the device operates through time as well as space, and Rogov sees the dancer in the future and goes mad:

He became blind to the sight of Cherpas, Gausgofer, and Gauck. He forgot the village of Ya. Ch. He forgot himself. He was like a fish, bred in stale fresh water, which is thrown for the first time into a living stream. He was like an insect emerging from the chrysalis. His twentieth-century mind could not hold the imagery and the impact of the music and the dance.
But the needle was there and the needle transmitted into his mind more than his mind could stand.
The synapses of his brain flicked like switches. The future flooded into him.
He fainted.
Cherpas leaped forward and lifted the needle. Rogov fell out of the chair.  p. 61

Rogov is subsequently examined by doctors but cannot be roused, nor is he later when a deputy minister from Moscow arrives with more experts. Gausgofer suggests repeating the experiment to see if she can learn something that will help recover Rogov, but is similarly affected—and she also stands up at the moment of contact, altering the needle’s position in her brain which kills her. Cherpas subsequently tells the minister that she eavesdropped on Rogov’s connection using the old equipment, and that her husband saw something unbelievably hypnotic in the far future.
The story concludes with Gauck telling the minister that the experiment is over (which I didn’t find entirely convincing, i.e. a functionary telling a Soviet deputy minister what to do).
There is probably a reasonable mainstream story about Soviet era scientists and secret police buried in this piece, but the SF parts seem like an afterthought, and the idea of someone going mad because they watch the AD 13,582 version of Strictly Come Dancing seems rather fanciful.
∗∗ (Average). 6,500 words.

•

The Shoreline at Sunset by Ray Bradbury (F&SF, March 1959) begins with two men on the beach prospecting for lost change. We discover that they share a house, and watch as their discussion turns to the stream of women (and unsuccessful relationships) that have passed through their lives. Tom suggests to Chico that they may have more romantic success if they live apart, just before they are interrupted by a boy saying that he has found a mermaid. The men soon find themselves looking at a seemingly alive but unconscious creature that is half woman, half fish:

The lower half of her body changed itself from white to very pale blue, from very pale blue to pale green, from pale green to emerald green, to moss and lime green, to scintillas and sequins all dark green, all flowing away in a fount, a curve, a rush of light and dark, to end in a lacy fan, a spread of foam and jewel on the sand. The two halves of this creature were so joined as to reveal no point of fusion where pearl woman, woman of a whiteness made of creamwater and clear sky, merged with that half which belonged to the amphibious slide and rush of current that came up on the shore and shelved down the shore, tugging its half toward its proper home. The woman was the sea, the sea was woman. There was no flaw or seam, no wrinkle or stitch; the illusion, if illusion it was, held perfectly together and the blood from one moved into and through and mingled with what must have been the ice-waters of the other.  p. 72

Chico decides that they can sell the creature to an exhibition or a carnival, and rushes off to get a truck full of ice; Tom is more ambivalent, and (spoiler) stays behind to watch over the creature—but does nothing when the waves gradually wash the mermaid back into the sea.
I thought perhaps the mermaid was a metaphor for the women or the relationships that the men can’t keep but, whatever the story is about, it is typical of later Bradbury, i.e. more a prose poem than a story.
∗∗ (Average). 3,350 words.

•

The Dreamsman by Gordon R. Dickson (Star Science Fiction #6, 1959) begins with a Mr Willer shaving, until:

[He] poises the razor for its first stroke—and instantly freezes in position. For a second he stands immobile. Then his false teeth clack once and he starts to pivot slowly toward the northwest, razor still in hand, quivering like a directional antenna seeking its exact target. This is as it should be. Mr. Willer, wrinkles, false teeth and all, is a directional antenna.  p. 78

Shortly afterwards, Willer goes to a house and confronts the couple who live there, stating that they are telepaths who are transmitting. After he manages to win their confidence (admitting in the process that he is almost two hundred years old) he tells the couple that he can take them to a colony of similarly talented people. They then drive to a military base and, after Willer has hypnotised his way past the soldiers and guards, reach a spaceship that will supposedly take the couple to Venus.
At this point (spoiler) a man dressed in silver mesh arrives and reveals that Willer routinely disposes of psi-capable people so Earth people won’t evolve and be admitted into Galactic Society (of which the silver-mesh man is a representative). The reason? Mr Willer likes things the way they are.
An unconvincing squib that is a collection of worn out clichés.
∗ (Mediocre). 2,850 words.

•

Multum in Parvo by Jack Sharkey (The Gent, December 1959)² isn’t actually a short story but a quartet of vignettes that each end in a pun (or two, or have them all the way through)—Feghoots, as I believe they are called in the SF field.³
The first, Robots, is a fairly straightforward piece involving the construction of a card-playing robot in 1653, which builds to a decent single pun ending; the second, Aircraft, has Icarus flying towards the sun with a double pun ending, both of which are both okay; the third, Vampirism, really goes for it, and has eight puns (maybe more) on the way through—this is the best of the four by country mile; the last one, Atomic Fission, has a decent single pun ending and a coda about fallout that I didn’t get (the Vampirism one would have made for a stronger finish).
I’m not big on puns but this was okay, with the third section having considerably more bite than the others. Boom, tish.
∗∗ (Average). 1,050 words.

•

Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (F&SF, April 1959) is another story I’ve read recently (and several times before that). The story consists of the diary entries of Charlie Gordon, whose level of intelligence is well below average. However, he wants to improve himself:

Miss Kinnian told that I was her bestist pupil in the adult nite scool becaus I tryed the hardist and I reely wantid to lern. They said how come you went to the adult nite scool all by yourself Charlie. How did you find it. I said I askd pepul and sumbody told me where I shud go to lern to read and spell good. They said why did you want to. I told them becaus all my life I wantid to be smart and not dumb. But its very hard to be smart. They said you know it will probly be tempirery. I said yes. Miss Kinnian told me. I dont care if it herts.  pp. 92-93

This latter refers to an experimental procedure that Drs Strauss and Nemur have developed which will, if successful, quadruple Charlie’s IQ from 68 to well over two hundred.
The story follows Charlie through his initial assessment tests (where he loses to a mouse called Algernon in a maze test), the procedure itself, and then his increasing intelligence. During this latter period we see Charlie back at work, and realise his is the unwitting butt of his co-workers’ jokes:

We had a lot of fun at the factery today. Joe Carp said hey look where Charlie had his operashun what did they do Charlie put some brains in. I was going to tell him but I remembered Dr Strauss said no.
Then Frank Reilly said what did you do Charlie forget your key and open your door the hard way. That made me laff. Their really my friends and they like me.  p. 97

Charlie’s mistreatment is a running thread through the story, and surfaces again when he wakes up covered in bruises after a night at the bar, and once more when his teacher Miss Kinnian reads some of his diary entries. This subplot climaxes when Charlie, his intelligence massively increased, is in a restaurant—but not in the way you would expect:

May 20 I would not have noticed the new dishwasher, a boy of about sixteen, at the corner diner where I take my evening meals if not for the incident of the broken dishes.
They crashed to the floor, shattering and sending bits of white china under the tables. The boy stood there, dazed and frightened, holding the empty tray in his hand. The whistles and catcalls from the customers (the cries of “hey, there go the profits!” . . . “Mazeltov!” . . . and “well, he didn’t work here very long . . .” which invariably seem to follow the breaking of glass or dishware in a public restaurant) all seemed to confuse him.
When the owner came to see what the excitement was about, the boy cowered as if he expected to be struck and threw up his arms as if to ward off the blow.
“All right! All right, you dope,” shouted the owner, “don’t just stand there! Get the broom and sweep that mess up. A broom . . . a broom, you idiot! It’s in the kitchen. Sweep up all the pieces.”
The boy saw that he was not going to be punished. His frightened expression disappeared and he smiled and hummed as he came back with the broom to sweep the floor. A few of the rowdier customers kept up the remarks, amusing themselves at his expense.
“Here, sonny, over here there’s a nice piece behind you . . .”
“C’mon, do it again . . .”
“He’s not so dumb. It’s easier to break ‘em than to wash ’em . . .”
As his vacant eyes moved across the crowd of amused onlookers, he slowly mirrored their smiles and finally broke into an uncertain grin at the joke which he obviously did not understand.
I felt sick inside as I looked at his dull, vacuous smile, the wide, bright eyes of a child, uncertain but eager to please. They were laughing at him because he was mentally retarded.
And I had been laughing at him too.
Suddenly, I was furious at myself and all those who were smirking at him. I jumped up and shouted, “Shut up! Leave him alone! It’s not his fault he can’t understand! He can’t help what he is! But for God’s sake . . . he’s still a human being!  pp. 112-113

There is much more than this going on in the story but, this time around, the passage above struck me as a particularly anti-Marching Morons moment.
The rest of the piece (spoiler) charts Algernon the mouse’s decline and death, and then we watch as Charlie loses his intelligence too. Throughout this tragic arc one of the few positives is that the workers who previously tormented him at the factory become his protectors when Charlie reverts to his previous intelligence level and a new hire tries to make fun of him.
An excellent story, and the best piece in the volume.
∗∗∗∗∗ (Excellent). 12,500 words.

•

A Death in the House (Galaxy, October 1959) by Clifford D. Simak starts with a farmer called Old Mose looking for his cows but discovering an injured alien:

It was a horrid-looking thing, green and shiny, with some purple spots on it, and it was repulsive even twenty feet away. And it stank.
It had crawled, or tried to crawl, into a clump of hazel brush, but hadn’t made it. The head part was in the brush and the rest lay out there naked in the open. Every now and then the parts that seemed to be arms and hands clawed feebly at the ground, trying to force itself deeper in the brush, but it was too weak; it never moved an inch.
It was groaning, too, but not too loud—just the kind of keening sound a lonesome wind might make around a wide, deep eave. But there was more in it than just the sound of winter wind; there was a frightened, desperate note that made the hair stand up on Old Mose’s nape.
Old Mose stood there for quite a spell, making up his mind what he ought to do about it, and a while longer after that working up his courage, although most folks offhand would have said that he had plenty. But this was the sort of situation that took more than just ordinary screwed-up courage. It took a lot of foolhardiness.
But this was a wild, hurt thing and he couldn’t leave it there, so he walked up to it and knelt down, and it was pretty hard to look at, though there was a sort of fascination in its repulsiveness that was hard to figure out—as if it were so horrible that it dragged one to it. And it stank in a way that no one had ever smelled before.  p. 134-135

Eventually Mose manages to free the creature and takes it back to his farm (and his less than salubrious surroundings—we learn later that he is a widower, and has also lost his dog to old age). After putting the creature in front of the fire he phones the local doctor, who attends, but cannot do anything for the creature. Mose pays him with a silver dollar (this will be significant later) and meantime goes out into the woods to recover the alien’s damaged ship, a bird cage-like machine.
When Mose wakes up the next day the alien has died—and the story becomes an different piece entirely, one which begins with him attempting to get a plot in the town cemetery so he can give the creature a decent burial. He is unsuccessful, and then also fails to get the parson to come out to the farm to perform a service when he decides to bury the alien on his land. When Mose prepares the body for burial he finds a cloudy glass sphere in a pocket-sized slit in the alien’s body, which he subsequently replaces.
Various visitors turn up at the farm in the days that follow: the local sheriff, a professor from the nearby university, and a flying saucer nut—but Mose has already ploughed over the grave to hide it, and bluntly tells them he will not reveal the location.
The final leg of the story (spoiler) sees an odd plant start to grow on the site of the burial plot and eventually form a recognisable shape. One morning Mose wakes up to see the clone or descendant of the alien at his door. As Mose’s loneliness has been established throughout the tale, he is delighted to see the creature—but then it sees the bird cage machine in the barn and indicates to Mose that it wants it repaired. Mose is conflicted by this as he realises that he will not only lose the alien’s company but will also have to sacrifice all the silver dollars he has hidden away—his entire savings—to make an internal part to repair the machine.
After the ship is repaired, and just before the alien gets in its machine and vanishes, it gives Mose the small glass sphere that he previously found on the body—but this time it is clear and not cloudy. It makes Mose feel happier, and gives him a sense of companionship.
The final paragraph of the story then switches to the alien’s point of view and, as well as bootstrapping the quality of this piece up another notch, partly reframes what has come before:

It was dark and lonely and unending in the depths of space with no Companion. It might be long before another was obtainable.
It perhaps was a foolish thing to do, but the old creature had been such a kind savage, so fumbling and so pitiful and eager to help. And one who travels far and fast must likewise travel light. There had been nothing else to give.  p. 154

This story, with its principled, compassionate and very human main character, is a lovely piece, and a surprisingly affecting one too. Certainly one for a ‘Best of Clifford Simak’ volume, and a no-brainer for a ‘Best of the Year’ anthology as well.
∗∗∗∗ (Very good). 8,050 words

•

Mariana by Fritz Leiber (Fantastic, February 1960) opens with Mariana discovering a secret panel of switches in her house, one of which has a lit sign labelled “Trees” underneath. When her husband Jonathan comes home from work she asks him about the switches:

“Didn’t you know they were radio trees? I didn’t want to wait twenty-five years for them and they couldn’t grow in this rock anyway. A station in the city broadcasts a master pine tree and sets like ours pick it up and project it around homes. It’s vulgar but convenient.”
After a bit she asked timidly, “Jonathan, are the radio pine trees ghostly as you drive through them?”
“Of course not! They’re solid as this house and the rock under it—to the eye and to the touch too. A person could even climb them. If you ever stirred outside you’d know these things. The city station transmits pulses of alternating matter at sixty cycles a second. The science of it is over your head.”  p. 156

While Jonathan is away at work the next day (spoiler) she switches off the trees, much to his annoyance when he comes home—and then exacerbates matters the next day when she switches off the “House”. Next to go is “Jonathan” when he angrily confronts her; then she switches off the “Stars” in the sky above.
After sitting in the dark for several hours (no sun rises as there are no stars) she notices the fifth switch is off and labelled “Doctor”. She switches this one on and shortly finds herself in a hospital room. A mechanical voice asks her whether she wants to accept treatment for her depression or continue with the wish-fulfilment therapy. Mariana responds by turning off the “Doctor” switch on a pedestal beside her and, when she is back in her virtual reality, she turns off the switch labelled “Mariana”.
This last action doesn’t really make any sense—why would therapy program let her suicide?—but the surreal, dream-like logic of the story may work for some readers.
∗∗ (Average). 1,900 words.

•

An Inquiry Concerning the Curvature of the Earth’s Surface and Divers Investigations of a Metaphysical Nature by Roger Price (Monocle Magazine, 1958)⁴ is an undeveloped squib about a growing Flat Earth movement in what would seem to be an alternate world:

This Movement may turn out to be idealistic and premature but nevertheless I believe it should have “its day in court.” We must remember that people once laughed at men whose names are now household words as familiar to us as our own; men such as Oliver and Wilmer Write, Eli Fulton and Thomas Steamboat. The Flat Earthers are quite progressive in all of their ideas and they plan to get national publicity for their Movement next New Year’s Day by pushing a number of people off the edge. Their only difficulty so far has been in obtaining volunteers.  p. 162

Not worth the two pages it is printed on.
– (Poor). 500 words.

•

Day at the Beach by Carol Emshwiller (F&SF, August 1959) begins with two (hairless) parents discussing, over their oatmeal, the dangers in commuting to the city to get food. Thereafter we get other hints that this is a post-holocaust or post-Collapse future when a discussion about a possible trip to the beach has mention of the boardwalk having been used for firewood and, when the couple’s three-year old comes in from outside, he is described as having down growing along his backbone (the woman wonders “if that was the way the three year olds had been before”). The child also bites a small chunk out of his mother’s shoulder when she chastises him for knocking over his oatmeal.
After this setup the couple decide—partly because they think it’s Saturday, partly because it’s a nice day—to go to the beach: they fill the car with only enough petrol to get there, and take a can’s worth for the return trip (which they plan to hide while they are on the beach). They also take weapons: a wrench for her, and a hammer for him.
On the drive there they see only a solitary cyclist and then, when they get to the beach, no-one at all. Later on, however, three men appear and threaten them, saying they want the couple’s gasoline. There is then an altercation during which the husband kills the leader with his hammer and the other two run off. Then the couple realise that the child has disappeared.
The remainder of the story sees the couple searching for the kid, and the husband eventually bringing him back. At this point the wife notes that they have time for one last swim (this with the attacker’s body still lying nearby). Then, on the way home:

He fell asleep in her lap on the way home, lying forward against her with his head at her neck the way she liked. The sunset was deep, with reds and purples.
She leaned against Ben. “The beach always makes you tired,” she said. “I remember that from before too. I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”
They drove silently along the wide empty parkway. The car had no lights, but that didn’t matter.
“We did have a good day after all,” she said. “I feel renewed.”
“Good,” he said.
[. . .]
“We had a good day,” she said again. “And Littleboy saw the sea.” She put her hand on the sleeping boy’s hair, gently so as not to disturb him and then she yawned. “I wonder if it really was Saturday.”  p. 174

This is an effectively dystopian piece, but its impact will probably be blunted for most readers by the many similar tales that have appeared since. I suspect, however, this story was notably grim for the time, and it foreshadows later new wave stories.
∗∗∗ (Good). 4,100 words.

•

What the Left Hand Was Doing by Randall Garrett (Astounding, February 1960) begins with the protagonist, Spencer Candron, arriving at The Society for Mystical and Metaphysical Research, Inc., a front for a group of psi (mind-power) capable individuals. Once we eventually get beyond the over-padded beginning (which includes a description of the building, of Candron, and of the secretary and her role in keeping away the crazies) he finally receives a leisurely briefing about the Red Chinese abduction of a famous US physicist called Ch’ien at an international conference in their country (his abductors have attempted to cover this up by murdering a double). Candron is told to rescue Ch’ien before the Chinese uncover his interstellar drive secrets.
The story picks up pace when Candron flies over Chinese territory and arranges to have an aircraft door to fall off during the flight. He then jumps out:

Without a parachute, he had flung himself from the plane toward the earth below, and his only thought was his loathing, his repugnance, for that too, too solid ground beneath.
He didn’t hate it. That would be deadly, for hate implies as much attraction as love—the attraction of destruction. Fear, too, was out of the question; there must be no such relationship as that between the threatened and the threatener. Only loathing could save him. The earth beneath was utterly repulsive to him.
And he slowed.
His mind would not accept contact with the ground, and his body was forced to follow suit. He slowed.
Minutes later, he was drifting fifty feet above the surface, his altitude held steady by the emotional force of his mind. Not until then did he release the big suitcase he had been holding. He heard it thump as it hit, breaking open and scattering clothing around it.
In the distance, he could hear the faint moan of a siren. The Chinese radar had picked up two falling objects. And they would find two: one door and one suitcase, both of which could be accounted for by the “accident.” They would know that no parachute had opened; hence, if they found no body, they would be certain that no human being could have dropped from the plane.  p. 183

Not bad, and the next part of the story—where he establishes himself in a hotel room in the city—is interesting too. However, the piece falters when Candron later goes to the Security HQ in the middle of the city and makes full use of his psi powers: he holds onto the underside of a car with his fingertips as it goes through the checkpoint; levitates up an elevator shaft; impersonates a Chinese general in a phone call to the cell guards to organise his visit; and then goes down to see Ch’ien. This is all too easily done, as is his rescue of the physicist, which (spoiler) sees him knock the scientist unconscious with an uppercut, set off a smoke bomb, and then teleport them both back to his room in the city. There, he carries Ch’ien to the roof of the hotel, and levitates himself and the physicist out to sea where they eventually meet a submarine (this latter event happens when he’s getting a bit tired, something we find out after a two page lecture about the limits of the human mind and psionic abilities).
The last couple of pages of the story have a Senator and a couple of other men debrief Candron at the institute, and one of the questions they ask him is why he kept knocking the physicist unconscious throughout the flight to the sub. Candron replies with some typical Campbellian blather about psionics:

“It would ruin him,” Candron broke in, before the senator could speak. “If he saw, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that levitation and teleportation were possible, he would have accepted his own senses as usable data on definite phenomena. But, limited as he is by his scientific outlook, he would have tried to evolve a scientific theory to explain what he saw. What else could a scientist do?”
Senator Kerotski nodded, and his nod said, “I see. He would have diverted his attention from the field of the interstellar drive to the field of psionics. And he would have wasted years trying to explain an inherently nonlogical area of knowledge by logical means.”
“That’s right,” Candron said. “We would have set him off on a wild goose chase, trying to solve the problems of psionics by the scientific, the logical method. We would have presented him with an unsolvable problem.”
Taggert patted his knees. “We would have given him a problem that he could not solve with the methodology at hand. It would be as though we had proved to an ancient Greek philosopher that the cube could be doubled, and then allowed him to waste his life trying to do it with a straightedge and compass.”
“We know Ch’ien’s psychological pattern,” Candron continued. “He’s not capable of admitting that there is any other thought pattern than the logical. He would try to solve the problems of psionics by logical methods, and would waste the rest of his life trying to do the impossible.”  pp. 202-203

I think this sort of thing is what was meant by “pushing Campbell’s buttons” (i.e. pandering to the editor of Astounding magazine, John W. Campbell, and his sometimes whacky ideas).
I eventually lost patience with this story as I’m not a fan of work that (a) uses lazy SF ideas and terminology (“psi”) or (b) is obviously padded with word-rate generating material (e.g. endless description and lectures). But most of all I don’t like (c) stories (and movies—I’m looking at you Wonder Woman) where the superhero protagonists can seemingly do anything they want and are never in any sort of jeopardy.
If none of this applies to you, this may be an entertaining enough piece as it’s readable enough.
∗ (Mediocre). 10,900 words.

•

The Sound Sweep by J. G. Ballard (Science Fantasy #39, February 1960) opens with Madame Gioconda, an ageing and out of work opera diva, suffering a headache which is worsened by the sounds of flyover traffic and then, later, by the phantom applause that comes from the auditorium around her apartment on the sound stage of a disused radio station—applause that later turns into boos and catcalls. At midnight a man called Magnon, a mute who can “hear” sound residues, arrives with his “sonovac”:

Understanding her, he first concentrated on sweeping the walls and ceiling clean, draining away the heavy depressing underlayer of traffic noises. Carefully he ran the long snout of the sonovac over the ancient scenic flats (relics of her previous roles at the Metropolitan Opera House) which screened-in Madame Gioconda’s makeshift home—the great collapsing Byzantine bed (Othello) mounted against the microphone turret; the huge framed mirrors with their peeling silverscreen (Orpheus) stacked in one corner by the bandstand; the stove (Trovatore) set up on the program director’s podium; the gilt-trimmed dressing table and wardrobe (Figaro) stuffed with newspaper and magazine cuttings. He swept them methodically, moving the sonovac’s nozzle in long strokes, drawing out the dead residues of sound that had accumulated during the day.
By the time he finished the air was clear again, the atmosphere lightened, its overtones of fatigue and irritation dissipated. Gradually Madame Gioconda recovered. Sitting up weakly, she smiled wanly at Mangon. Mangon grinned back encouragingly, slipped the kettle onto the stove for Russian tea, sweetened by the usual phenobarbitone chaser, switched off the sonovac and indicated to her that he was going outside to empty it.  p. 205

When Magnon empties the sonovac there is only the usual sound detritus, and it becomes obvious that the audience that Madame Gioconda claims to hear is only imaginary. But Magnon is an admirer of the singer and hopes to win her favour—he visits every day to clean the apartment of sound residues, serve her tea, and listen to her tales of a comeback and revenge—so he keeps this information to himself.
In the next part of the story we learn more about her obsolescence (normal music was replaced by ultrasonic music which can’t be heard by humans but has an emotional effect) and her plans to stage a comeback by blackmailing a wealthy producer called LeGrande who is going into politics (she drunkenly relates she has intimate photographs of them together as well as a “no holes barred” memoir).
The rest of the story follows quite an involved plot, which adds another character, Ray Alto, a client and friend of Magnon’s who is an ultrasonic composer, and Madame Gioconda’s discovery of the fact that Magnon can not only hear sound residue but can distinguish snatches of conversation. This latter ability eventually sees Magnon and Madame Gioconda go the “sound stockades”—a dumping ground for all the city’s sonic waste—and sieve through the detritus for fragments of conversation which will let them blackmail Le Grande. During this search Magnon recovers his powers of speech.
All of this eventually rolls towards a climax where (spoiler) Madame LeGrande is scheduled—after her blackmail attempt is successful—to sing alongside a debut performance of Alto’s ultrasonic Opus Zero, much to the composer’s fury. Alto then plots with Magnon (who has subsequently been brutally snubbed by Gioconda after she got what she wanted) to hide a sonovac at the performance to hoover up her voice before it gets to the mike (a voice which sounds like, according to Alto, a “cat being strangled” because “what time alone hasn’t done to her, cocaine and self-pity have.”) But, of course, during the performance Magnon (who has by now lost his voice again) decides to revenge himself by letting the world hear her:

Mangon listened to her numbly, hands gripping the barrell of the sonovac. The voice exploded in his brain, flooding every nexus of cells with its violence. It was grotesque, an insane parody of a classical soprano. Harmony, purity, cadence had gone. Rough and cracked, it jerked sharply from one high note to a lower, its breath intervals uncontrolled, sudden precipices of gasping silence which plunged through the volcanic torrent, dividing it into a loosely connected sequence of bravura passages.
He barely recognized what she was singing: the Toreador song from Carmen. Why she had picked this he could not imagine. Unable to reach its higher notes she fell back on the swinging rhythm of the refrain, hammering out the rolling phrases with tosses of her head. After a dozen bars her pace slackened, she slipped into an extempore humming, then broke out of this into a final climactic assault. Appalled, Mangon watched as two or three members of the orchestra stood up and disappeared into the wings. The others had stopped playing, were switching off their instruments and conferring with each other. The audience was obviously restive; Mangon could hear individual voices in the intervals when Madame Gioconda refilled her lungs.
[. . .]
Satisfied, he dropped the sonovac to the floor, listened for a moment to the caterwauling above, which was now being drowned by the mounting vocal opposition of the audience, then unlatched the door.  pp. 242-243

This is an original piece and a pretty good one too. I note, however, that it feels like early Ballard: not only does the sonovac and ultrasonic music subject matter feel more like something you would find in Barrington Bayley’s later work, but the story also has a conventional plot. That said, it does have Ballard’s distinctive style.
If the final scene had been clearer, and the miraculous speech recovery in the middle of the story less awkwardly placed, I would have probably rated this higher. That said, these are minor criticisms, and it is well worth a read.
I note in passing that there are a significant number of drug references for the time.
∗∗∗+ (Good to very good). 14,500 words. Story link.

•

Plenitude by Will Mohler (F&SF, November 1959, as by Will Worthington) starts with a four-year-old boy called Mike asking his narrator father various questions while they garden. As a result of these—why don’t they live in the “Old House in the Valley” anymore, are the “funny men” broken (explained by the narrator as a reference to derelict robots in the city), etc.—the story soon establishes itself as a post-collapse one.⁵
Then, when the narrator and son Mike return to their house for supper, he learns from his wife that his other son, a twelve-year-old called Chris, has gone hunting. It later becomes apparent that there has been a falling out between the two (and possibly an estrangement with a neighbouring family) as a result of a trip to the city where the narrator killed someone.
The rest of the story then flashbacks to a previous day of gardening, but this time with the elder son Chris, who is also questioning the father about why they live as they do and how society ended up in its present state. The narrator tries to answer these more involved and challenging questions but eventually becomes exasperated with his son and says he will take him into the city so he can see things for himself.
The climactic section (spoiler) sees the pair moving through a mostly derelict urban landscape until they come to a fence surrounding a group of large fluid-filled bubbles. Inside these people float seemingly unaware, connected up to various leads and hoses. The narrator cuts the perimeter fence and the pair go inside for a closer look:

I do not know the purpose of all the tubes and wires myself. I do know that some are connected with veins in their arms and legs, others are nutrient enemata and for collection of body wastes, still others are only mechanical tentacles which support and endlessly fondle and caress. I know that the wires leading to the metal caps on their heads are part of an invention more voracious and terrible than the ancient television—direct stimulation of certain areas of the brain, a constant running up and down the diapason of pleasurable sensation, controlled by a sort of electronic kaleidoscope.
My imagination stops about here. It would be the ultimate artificiality, with nothing of reality about it save endless variation. Of senselessness I will not think. I do not know if they see constantly shifting masses or motes of color, or smell exotic perfumes, or hear unending and constantly swelling music. I think not. I doubt that they even experience anything so immediate and yet so amorphous as the surge and recession of orgasm or the gratification of thirst being quenched. It would be stimulation without real stimulus; ultimate removal from reality. I decide not to speak of this to Chris. He has had enough. He has seen the wires and the tubes.  pp. 253-254

Then one of the occupants opens his eyes and sees the pair, and a guard robot quickly arrives. The narrator destroys it and then, in his rage, goes on to slash open the bubbles:

The corn-knife was not very sharp, but the skin of the sphere parted with disgusting ease. I heard Chris scream, “No! Dad! No!” . . . but I kept hacking. We were nearly engulfed in the pinkish, albuminous nutritive which gushed from the ruptured sac. I can still smell it.
The creatures inside were more terrible to see in the open air than they had been behind their protective layers of plastic material. They were dead white and they looked to be soft, although they must have had normal human skeletons. Their struggles were blind, pointless and feeble, like those of some kind of larvae found under dead wood, and the largest made a barely audible mewing sound as it groped about in search of what I cannot imagine.
I heard Chris retching violently, but could not tear my attention away from the spectacle. The sphere now looked like some huge coelenterate which had been halved for study in the laboratory, and the hoselike tentacles still moved like groping cilia.
The agony of the creatures in the “grape” (I cannot think of them as People) when they were first exposed to unfiltered, unprocessed air and sunlight, when the wires and tubes were torn from them, and especially when the metal caps on their heads fell off in their panicky struggles and the whole universe of chilly external reality rushed in upon them at once, is beyond my imagining; and perhaps this is merciful. This, and the fact that they lay in the stillness of death after only a very few minutes in the open air.
Memory is merciful too in its imperfection. All I remember of our homeward journey is the silence of it.  pp. 255-256

The remainder of the story returns to the present day, and sees a returned Mike and a neighouring family joining the narrator, wife and youngest son for supper. Mike appears reconciled, even unconcerned, about what happened.
This isn’t a perfect piece by any means (the conflict set up between the father and son fades away rather than being resolved in any meaningful or cathartic way) but it has some superior qualities. Not only is the story well written, with some good characterisation and vivid description, but the narrator’s reflective commentary also puts the reader right inside his head. This rich mixture transcends the slightness of the plot.
I’ll be tracking down more of Mohler’s work.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 5,100 words.

•

The Man Who Lost the Sea by Theodore Sturgeon (F&SF, October 1959) opens with a boy annoying a man who is half-buried in sand with explanations about how his helicopter works:

He doesn’t want to think about flying, about helicopters, or about you, and he most especially does not want explanations about anything by anybody. Not now. Now, he wants to think about the sea. So you go away.
The sick man is buried in the cold sand with only his head and his left arm showing. He is dressed in a pressure suit and looks like a man from Mars. Built into his left sleeve is a combination time-piece and pressure gauge, the gauge with a luminous blue indicator which makes no sense, the clock hands luminous red. He can hear the pounding of surf and the soft swift pulse of his pumps. One time long ago when he was swimming he went too deep and stayed down too long and came up too fast, and when he came to it was like this: they said, “Don’t move, boy. You’ve got the bends. Don’t even try to move.” He had tried anyway. It hurt. So now, this time, he lies in the sand without moving, without trying.  p. 259

After this we learn that the man isn’t, for an unspecified reason, able to think straight, and his inchoate thoughts wander from a childhood concussion in a gym class to observations of his local environment—these include what he thinks is the sea in front of him—before moving on to an attempt to calculate the period of an overhead satellite. During these various thought processes (spoiler) it seems he may be somewhere other than Earth.
The next long section is a formative episode from the man’s youth, when he got into difficulties in the sea while snorkelling and almost drowned—all because he panicked but was reluctant to call for help. He then thinks about the kid with the helicopter, which makes him recall another model, one of a spacecraft that had several stages. Then he notices that the satellite is just about to disappear, and his final calculation of its period confirms where he is.
In the last section of the story he recalls the spacecraft again, but the real thing this time and not the model, and how the final two stages, Gamma and Delta, crashed onto the surface, ejecting a man to lie among radioactive graphite from the destroyed engine. Then the sun rises, and he realises that there isn’t a sea in front of him:

The sun is high now, high enough to show the sea is not a sea, but brown plain with the frost burned off it, as now it burns away from the hills, diffusing in air and blurring the edges of the sun’s disk, so that in a very few minutes there is no sun at all, but only a glare in the east. Then the valley below loses its shadows, and like an arrangement in a diorama, reveals the form and nature of the wreckage below: no tent-city this, no installation, but the true real ruin of Gamma and the eviscerated hulk of Delta. (Alpha was the muscle, Beta the brain; Gamma was a bird, but Delta, Delta was the way home.)  p. 269

He realises that this is his spaceship, and it crashed on Mars. He also realises that he is dying but, in his last moments, he rejoices that “we made it.”
This story may appear to have a slight narrative arc but a plot synopsis isn’t much use in an appreciation: what we really have here are a number of well-written and intensely evocative memories and scenes that are slowly brought into focus to reveal what has happened to the man. It’s an accomplished piece and, in terms of technique, atypical for the period.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 4,950 words.

•

Make a Prison by Lawrence Block (Science Fiction Stories, January 1959) gets off to a pretty good start with two Alteans discussing a prisoner—the murderer of three of their kind, the first such crime in thirty generations—who is about to be imprisoned in a tall tower. They talk about the security precautions (the curved, unclimbable walls, the pneumatic delivery tubes, etc.) and then watch as the shackled prisoner is sent up to the accommodation at the top.
Several minutes later the prisoner throws his shackles down (the key was at the top of the tower), and then (spoiler) he climbs the rail and flies away.
This latter event broke the story for me as there is no build up to this surprising event—it just happens. I presume the twist might work for those who were assuming that the prisoner is a human.
∗ (Mediocre). 1,000 words. Story link.

What Now, Little Man? by Mark Clifton (F&SF, December 1959) is set on the frontier planet of Libo, and opens with a conversation between Jim MacPherson, the narrator, and a friend called Paul Tyler about an indigenous lifeform called the Goonie (after Albatrosses on Earth, who similarly do not flee when predated by man). During this data dump, we learn that the goonies are kept to supply meat for the colony, domesticated to do simple tasks, and are physically beautiful:

[I] marveled, oh, for maybe the thousandth time, at the impossibility of communicating the goonie to anyone who hadn’t seen them. The ancient Greek sculptors didn’t mind combining human and animal form, and somebody once said the goonie began where those sculptors left off. No human muscle cultist ever managed quite the perfect symmetry natural to the goonie—grace without calculation, beauty without artifice. Their pelts varied in color from the silver blond of this pair to a coal black, and their huge eyes from the palest topaz to an emerald green, and from emerald green to deep-hued amethyst. The tightly curled mane spread down the nape and flared out over the shoulders like a cape to blend with the short, fine pelt covering the body. Their faces were like Greek sculpture, too, yet not human. No, not human. Not even humanoid, because—well, because, that was a comparison never made on Libo. That comparison was one thing we couldn’t tolerate. Definitely, then, neither human nor humanoid.  pp. 276-277

There is more data-dumping in the next section, where we learn that MacPherson started his career by planting a plantation of pal trees to attract the goonies and, while he names his domesticated “pet” animals—some of whom MacPherson has recently taught to read and write—the others are treated as livestock. We also get an angst-laden account about space travel making humans sterile and therefore unable to reproduce on Libo. This setup is further complicated with the arrival of a woman called Miriam Wellman from the Mass Psychology unit, who starts holding meetings where she induces therapeutic “frenzies” among the rapidly increasing male population.
The story eventually gets going when Tyler hires a goonie from MacPherson to do his reports for Hest, a recently arrived and troublesome official—who is later ridiculed by Tyler when he reveals that a goonie wrote them. Tyler also adds that that the alien is better at the job than Hest and, by saying this, he breaks a local taboo in comparing humans adversely to the goonies. He is subsequently cold-shouldered by the town folks.
After this exchange, MacPherson talks to Tyler in an effort to supress his revelation, but a businessman subsequently arrives at MacPherson’s farm wanting to buy one of the goonies who can read and write; MacPherson refuses, but the business man later tricks McPherson’s wife into giving him one for cash.
After MacPherson discovers what has happened he goes looking for his goonie, but ends up in Wellman’s cottage:

“My work here is about finished,” she said, as she came over to her chair and sat down again. “It will do no harm to tell you why. You’re not a Company man, and your reputation is one of discretion. . . . The point is, in mass hiring for jobs in such places as Libo, we make mistakes in Personnel. Our tests are not perfect.”
“We?” I asked.
“I’m a trouble-shooter for Company Personnel,” she said.
“All this mumbo-jumbo,” I said. “Getting out there and whipping these boys up into frenzies . . .”
“You know about medical inoculation, vaccination,” she said. “Under proper controls, it can be psychologically applied. A little virus, a little fever, and from there on, most people are immune. Some aren’t. With some, it goes into a full-stage disease. We don’t know which is which without test. We have to test. Those who can’t pass the test, Mr. MacPherson, are shipped back to Earth. This way we find out quickly, instead of letting some Typhoid Marys gradually infect a whole colony.”
“Hest,” I said.
“Hest is valuable,” she said. “He thinks he is transferred often because we need him to set up procedures and routines. Actually it’s because he is a natural focal point for the wrong ones to gather round. Birds of a feather. Sending him out a couple months in advance of a trouble-shooter saves us a lot of time. We already know where to look when we get there.”
“He doesn’t catch on?” I asked.
“People get blinded by their own self-importance,” she said. “He can’t see beyond himself. And,” she added, “we vary our techniques.  p. 299

The story finally climaxes on Carson’s Hill, where a lynch mob intends to kill the goonie. MacPherson climbs the hill intending to save the creature but soon sees he is outnumbered. As he considers what to do, Wellman arrives and treats the group of men like errant children. The crowd begins to dissipate:

“Oh, no, you don’t, Peter Blackburn!” Miss Wellman snapped at him, as if he were four years old. “You come right back here and untie this poor goonie. Shame on you. You, too, Carl Hest. The very idea!”
One by one she called them by name, whipped them with phrases used on small children—but never on grown men.
She was a professional, she knew what she was doing. And she had been right in what she had told me—if I’d butted in, there might have been incalculable damage done.
Force would not have stopped them. It would have egged them on, increased the passion. They would have gloried in resisting it. It would have given meaning to a meaningless thing. The resistance would have been a part, a needed part, and given them the triumph of rape instead of the frustration of encountering motionless, indifferent acceptance.
But she had shocked them out of it, by not recognizing their grown maleness, their lustful dangerousness. She saw them as no more than naughty children—and they became that, in their own eyes.  pp. 305-306

There is a philosophical postscript where MacPherson thinks about the goonies’ intelligence and, after reflecting on their behaviour when hunted, concludes “What is the point of survival if there is no purpose beyond survival.”
In conclusion, I found this an exceptionally clunky story full of unconvincing ideas and scenes (see the passage above) that don’t really fit together. Apart from the sketchy ecosystem (the goonies and the pal trees seem to be all there is on the planet), the idea that humans would treat an intelligent alien animal as a meat source is hard to get your head around nowadays, and I’m not entirely sure it would have that convincing in the late 1950s. Setting that aside, the seemingly endless amount of supposed psychology and cod philosophy stuffed into the story would, in any event, make for a dull piece. (I’d add that it seems like another thinly disguised Analog lecture dressed up as a story—imagine my surprise when I found it was first printed in F&SF! Is this a Campbell reject?)
After writing this review, it feels like this story should probably be rated as “mediocre,” but I see my notes say “average.” Only just, I suspect.
∗∗ (Average). 13,650 words. Story link.

•••

The non-fiction in the book isn’t any better than the fiction. Judith Merril’s Introduction is a lofty squib that discusses how the wonder of primitive man was slowly replaced by the rationality of science—but is now loose again on Earth in the form of SF. Or something like that.
The Story Introductions are initially fairly standard fare but it isn’t long before Merril begins to use them to wage an intermittent guerrilla war against Kingsley Amis (and presumably his comments in the recently released New Maps of Hell):

In a recent volume of considerable arrogance, ill-considered opinion, and unconsidering slovenliness of research, a British humorist with pretensions to critical judgment of science fantasy, one Kingsley Amis, refers to the (unnamed) writer of a story entitled “Of Missing Persons” as “an author who has yet to make his name.”
“‘Of Missing Persons,’” says Mr. Amis, “is one of those things that offer themselves for analysis with an almost suspicious readiness.” I was not able to determine, in the three pages of quotes and comments that followed, just what analysis was being made, or whose readiness for what was under suspicion—but I may have been prejudiced by having read the story, several times, with great enjoyment, when it was included in the first annual volume of SF.
For the benefit of any readers who, like Mr. Amis, are unfamiliar with the author’s work—the name is Finney. Jack Finney. And it has been a familiar one in science-fantasy since Robert Heinlein’s 1951 anthology, “Tomorrow the Stars,” first offered it to the specialty field.  p. 14

There is more of this in some of the other story introductions (in the Davidson she agrees with Amis about “science fiction” no longer being a suitable term to describe the field; in the Bradbury she snipes “even Mr. Amis knows his name”). Then Merril suffers another containment failure in the introduction to the Campbell essay:

The Incredible Mr. Amis singles out John Campbell several times for special notice. This is not unusual; almost anyone writing about modern American science fiction finds himself paying respects to the man under whose sometimes daft but always deft—and vigorous and enthusiastic—guidance, ASF (which you can take as Astounding Science Fiction or the new title. Analog Science Fact and—gasp—Fiction) has been the consistent leader in the field—both as to sales and influence. Mr. A., however, limits his comments about Campbell’s influence to a snidish remark about cranks whose rapid departure would benefit the whole field and a description of the editor as “a deviant figure of marked ferocity.”
I am here to say that I have talked with Campbell, literally and actually—and lived to go back for more. (I don’t want to give the impression that talking with John is easy. But listening is lots of fun too, you know.) But we had lunch together, and both ate spaghetti, and there were no fangs, claws, or horns in evidence.  p. 123

This subject finally resurfaces in Merril’s The Year’s S-F, A Summary (where it should all have been in the first place) where she concludes by saying that she doesn’t take exception to everything Amis says, and that his unlikely comments about circulation numbers in the SF field made her buckle down and do some proper research:

Last year I reported here that the number of magazine titles in the combined fantasy and s-f fields had dropped from twenty-one to ten. As of the start of 1960, we are down two more, to eight titles—less than at any time since before the big boom of the early fifties—since 1946, to be exact.
But—
Of these eight titles, six are monthlies, and two bimonthly. In 1945-46, with eight titles, there was an average of four magazines a month issued; now there are seven. In 1949, when there were also seven magazines a month on the stands, they comprised 17 titles. In the peak year for s-f magazine publishing, 1953, there were four times as many titles as now—but only twice as many magazines.
It would be easy—and gratifying—to adduce from this that the publications surviving today are the solid, sound, worthy ones: to some degree it must even be true. But to generalize from that to the notion that “science fiction is maturing” (which I keep hearing, hopefully) would be inaccurate. The reason for all these healthy-looking regular monthly magazines has virtually nothing to do with either publishers or buyers; it is the work of the distributors, who last year began putting pressure on the publishers to go monthly or quit. Two who tried to make twelve books a year pay off, failed; two others “suspended” indefinitely without trying.  p. 313-314

She then adds:

For the past five years the number of paperback books in the combined fantasy and science-fiction fields has held to a remarkably steady all-time high of 70 to 80 per year. From the looks of things, it will rise sharply this year. In short, we may expect more individual paperback books than issues of magazines this year—but the fact is that for the past two or three years, p-bs have been outselling magazines in total quantity. 60,000 copies is an exceptionally good circulation for an s-f magazine these days, I understand; but very few book publishers will issue a p-b without being able to sell at least that many. The average paperback sale is probably somewhere between 90 and 100 thousand.
In the first volume of S-F, reporting on 1955, I pointed out with some pride that as many as 50 or 60 s-f stories had appeared in “slick,” quality, and other non-s-f magazines. Last year more than that number was accounted for in the “Playboy-type” magazines alone. With what appeared in the slick and quality magazines, there were, I should estimate, upward of 200 stories (fantasy and s-f) published in non-s-f periodicals in 1959—equal to the contents of at least three more full digest-size magazines, but with circulations (in many cases) in the hundreds, instead of tens, of thousands.  p. 314

There is also commentary about the various places that SF is appearing in the mainstream, and a short list of recommended novels, etc.:

For novels in the magazines: to Gordon Dickson’s explosive “Dorsai!” (Ast, May-July), Everett E. Cole’s “The
Best Made Plans,” (Ast, Nov.-Dee.); and the magazine version of Pat Frank’s “Alas, Babylon” (Good Housekeeping, March).
For novels in book form: to Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan (Dell); John Brunner’s Echo In the Skull (Ace); and Theodore Sturgeon’s Cosmic Rape (Dell).  p. 316

There are a couple of non-fiction essays in the middle of the book. The first of those is “What Do You Mean … Human? by John W. Campbell, Jr., one of his editorials from Astounding which starts off well enough with Asimov’s three laws segueing into a discussion of what makes a human a human. However, Campbell eventually does what he normally does, which is to daisy chain a lot of contentious and/or dubious and/or barely connected statements together:

I suspect one of the most repugnant aspects of Darwin’s concept of evolution was—not that we descended from monkeys—but its implication that something was apt to descend from us! Something that wasn’t human . . . and wasn’t subhuman.
The only perfect correlation is auto-correlation; “I am exactly what I am.” Any difference whatever makes the correlation less perfect.
Then if what I feel is human—anything different is less perfectly correlated with humanness. Hence any entity not identical is more or less subhuman; there can’t possibly be something more like me than I am.

I suspect that the objection to Darwin’s work was that it suggested that we were an evolutionary accident rather than God’s work and, possibly, that the world was more than 4,700 years old (or whatever).
As to the “anything less perfectly correlated” comment, that seems to imply that everyone’s idea about what it is to be human is the same—and I’d also disagree that anything that isn’t human is “sub-human”.
But I don’t know why I’m bothering with this, it’s like fighting mist.
Sierra Sam by Ralph Dighton appears to be a short piece about a company that manufactures an early type of crash test dummies.
There are two very short poems, Hot Argument by Randall Garrett, and Me by Hilbert Schenck.
Finally, there is The Year’s S-F, A Summary (see above) and Honorable Mentions. I’m not sure how much use this latter item is, but it lists a further three pages of stories (with seventeen of those from non-genre magazines).

•••

In conclusion, this Best of the Year anthology is much more of a mixed bag than it should be, and includes far too many slight or gimmicky stories. If Merril picked the best available material—rather than going on a fishing expedition in the mainstream—this would have been a much better collection. In its defence, the short material is generally the worst, and the long material is generally the best, so there are more pages of good reading here that the contents ratings above might make you think.  ●

_____________________

1. Alfred Bester (F&SF, February 1961) thought the book was “an engaging collection,” and noted the work by Damon Knight (“biting”), Theodore Sturgeon (“dreaming and heart-warming”), Daniel Keyes (“superb”), Leiber (“deadly”), and Carol Emshwiller (“a frightening study of decadence”).
He thought the anthology as a whole “a most catholic and sophisticated collection, and a tribute to Miss Merril’s taste,” but he wished that, although writing story introductions is difficult, Merril “had not solved the problem with a gossipy and personal approach.” They were “out of place,” and “introduced a jarring note.”

John Carnell (New Worlds Science Fiction #101, December 1960) begins by saying that this volume “is even better than her previous four for 1956-1959.” He then goes on to say that the last few volumes have ranged far and wide and:

. . . by 1959 her annual selection was beginning to look like a cross-section of most of the leading journals rather than a sampling of the recognised science fiction magazines. In the 1960 edition this trend is even more noticeable and, conversely, the literary standard is even higher than before.  p. 127

He then goes on to list the magazines that the stories were taken from before noting that, for the fifth year running, Science Fantasy has a story included (J. G. Ballard’s The Sound Sweep).
Carnell concludes by saying that it would unfair to name his personal favourites but that readers should “Get it.”

S. E. Cotts (Amazing Stories, March 1961) says this volume is the “best yet,” and that “there is a tremendous range in these stories. He adds that “it seems to me that the real excitement and vitality in this volume stems more from the new names rather than the old pros,” before going on to say:

For there is nothing to compare with the thrill of reading a new author in a strange style and realizing that it is really great. By contrast, the Bradbury story makes a try at being an evocative vignette but the effort shows through, and the Sturgeon story is a little bit too ‘far out.’ The exception to this is Simak’s “A Death in the House,” a rich, warmly compassionate story of the type I praised so highly in his last book, reviewed recently.
The most impressive of the debuts (or near-debuts) are “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes [. . .], “Day at the Beach” by Carol Emshwiller, and “The Sound Sweep” by an English author, J. G. Ballard. Though the characters of these three have practically nothing in common (in the first a human guinea pig, in the second victims of a holocaust and their mutant son, in the third an opera singer and a mute), the same mood pervades each story. They have a haunting poignance, a sense of yearning and searching, not for the moon and stars, but for something had briefly, cherished, and then lost.  p. 140

He then goes on to deal with the material he didn’t like, which includes the non-fiction (Campbell’s editorial mostly) and poems (one of which he describes as “completely sick and psycho”). Cotts also has no time for Merril’s “constant sniping remarks about Kingsley Amis,” and states:

I have no more love for or patience with many of his views than Miss Merril. But by her back-biting she descends to the level of the one whom she criticizes, and what is worse, lowers the quality of the volume. For what begins as a beautifully laid out book with mature and thoughtful selections takes on the tone of a high school yearbook or the letter column of a magazine. Of course it is Miss Merril’s book and she is free to do with it as she will, but it is a shame to see a perfectly good book indulge in this kind of juvenilia. Criticism has its place, but that is not the vehicle for it.  pp. 141-142

P. Schuyler Miller (Analog, March 1961) notes that the series has been “taken over” by Simon & Schuster, “one of the world’s top publishers,” before speculating as to how the books are assembled:

There is an ugly rumor afoot that every spring the year’s best science fiction writers—a different lot each year—get together in the little town in northeastern Pennsylvania where Judith Merril, Damon Knight, James Blish and other bright lights of the field already live, and write the next year’s “Best.” The argument is that only this kind of intensive committee action could produce such a distinguished lot of yarns; the counterargument is that only distinct individuals could write them, and only a highly individual editor select them.  p. 154-155

After this bit of fluff he spends the next page or so briefly commenting on all the contributions—mostly one line descriptions with the odd adjective thrown in: “wry,” “sentimental,” “poignant,” etc. There is no clue as to which ones he liked or which ones he disliked (if any), or why, and no overarching analysis of the fiction included in the volume this year. As a review it is a waste of space.

Austin Beeman (Science Fiction Short Story Reviews) rates 5 of the stories as “great,” 12 as “good,” and 3 as “average,” and none as “poor.” I wouldn’t quibble with his choice of favourites, but he exhibits a greater tolerance of the chaff than me.

2. In The Great SF Stories 21 (1959), edited by Isaac Asimov & Martin H. Greenberg (which includes this story), the editors report on two further ‘Pavro’ stories by Jack Sharkey in Gent magazine (which are not listed on ISFDB): Son of Multum in Parvo and Son of Multum in Parvo Rides Again.

3. The Wikipedia article on Feghoots.

4. Roger Price is a humourist who drew the famous Droodle books. His Wikipedia page.

5. Will Mohler’s Plentitude reminded me a little, in places, of the novel Earth Abides by George Stewart.  ●

Summary:
David Hartwell’s ‘Best of the Year’ series gets off to a lacklustre start with a volume that contains nothing outstanding but which has two long stories by Robert Silverberg, Hot Times in Magma City, and Gene Wolfe, Ziggurat that, along with William Browning Spencer’s Downloading Midnight, manage to drag up the average. There are also a couple of good stories by Le Guin and Barton, but the rest are of average or worse quality. In particular, the stories by Zelazny, Benford and Sheckley are a lot weaker than you might expect from these writers.
[ISFDB page][Amazon UK/US]

Other reviews:
Gary K. Wolfe, Locus #425, June 1996
Various, Goodreads

_____________________

Editor, David G. Hartwell

Fiction:
Think Like a Dinosaur • novelette by James Patrick Kelly ∗
Wonders of the Invisible World • short story by Patricia A. McKillip ∗∗
Hot Times in Magma City • novella by Robert Silverberg ∗∗∗+
Gossamer • short story by Stephen Baxter ∗∗
A Worm in the Well • novelette by Gregory Benford ∗
Downloading Midnight • novelette by William Browning Spencer ∗∗∗+
For White Hill • novella by Joe Haldeman ∗∗
In Saturn Time • short story by William Barton ∗∗∗
Coming of Age in Karhide • novelette by Ursula K. Le Guin ∗∗∗
The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker • short story by Roger Zelazny ∗∗
Evolution • novelette by Nancy Kress ∗∗+
The Day the Aliens Came • short story by Robert Sheckley –
Microbe • short story by Joan Slonczewski ∗∗
The Ziggurat • novella by Gene Wolfe ∗∗∗+

Non-fiction:
Introduction: Science Fiction Is Alive and Well • essay by David G. Hartwell
Story introductions • by David G. Hartwell

_____________________

(All the stories below have previously been published on my sfshortstories.com blog—if you have read them there, skim down to the three dots to get the summary and other information.)

This anthology leads off with Think Like A Dinosaur by James Patrick Kelly (Asimov’s SF, June 1995), which begins with the return of Kamala Shastri to Tuulen station, a matter transmitter installation in lunar orbit, after three years on the alien planet Gend. The story then flashes back to the period when she first arrived on the station to go outbound.
In a data dump start (you are pelted with information in the first few pages, which is not unusual for a Gardner Dozois’ Asimov’s SF story) the narrator Michael meets her on her initial arrival at the station, and we get a stream of detail about both her, the space station, and the future they inhabit. The one essential piece of information is that humanity now has limited access to the Galaxy courtesy of the Hanen, an alien race of dinosaur-like creatures who operate the station’s matter transmitter.
However, before Kamala can make her “superluminal transmission” (matter transmission jump) to Gend, one of the “dinos” called Silloin tells them that there will be a short delay because of technical problems. Michael decides to distract Kamala by launching into a “Tell me a secret . . .” routine with her that results in further data dumps that provide details of both their childhoods: he tells her about the time he swapped the crosses on the graves of two of his teachers who died in an accident (later switching then back), then Kamala starts telling him a story about an old lady she visited when she was a child, before being interrupted by Silloin, who informs them that the matter transmitter is now serviceable.
In the main part of the story we then discover, as Kamala is getting ready for the transfer, that the matter transmitter works by copying bodies and duplicating them at the destination station. However, to satisfy a nebulously explained concept of balance and “harmony,” the original bodies have to be destroyed. And that is Michael’s main purpose on the station—to press the button that will destroy Kamala’s original body after her duplicate is created on Gend (I can’t remember if there is a reason why this can’t be done automatically, or by the dinos).
Of course (spoiler) there is the inevitable problem, and Michael retrieves a screaming Kamala from the sending booth after what seems like an unsuccessful transmission—it is apparent that the process is a highly traumatic event for the original—only for Silloin to later find that the duplication process at Gend has been successful. This means there are now two copies of Kamala in the universe.
The dinos subsequently get in a flap about the conservation of harmony, etc., eventually threatening Michael with Earth’s expulsion from the transmission network if he doesn’t destroy the original Kamala. After some to-ing and fro-ing (during which the dinos reproach Michael for his “baby” thinking, and look like they may kill Kamala themselves), Michael forces Kamala into an airlock, and spaces her in a graphic scene:

I heard the whoosh of escaping air and thought that was it; the body had been ejected into space. I had actually turned away when thumping started, frantic, like the beat of a racing heart. She must have found something to hold onto. Thump, thump, thump! It was too much. I sagged against the inner door—thump, thump—slid down it, laughing. Turns out that if you empty the lungs, it is possible to survive exposure to space for at least a minute, maybe two. I thought it was funny. Thump! Hilarious, actually. I had tried my best for her—risked my career—and this was how she repaid me? As I laid my cheek against the door, the thumps started to weaken. There were just a few centimeters between us, the difference between life and death. Now she knew all about balancing the equation. I was laughing so hard I could scarcely breathe. Just like the meat behind the door. Die already, you weepy bitch.
I don’t know how long it took. The thumping slowed. Stopped. And then I was a hero. I had preserved harmony, kept our link to the stars open. I chuckled with pride; I could think like a dinosaur.  p. 25-26

This last section obviously makes this story one that references Tom Godwin’s The Cold Equations (that’s if you define “references” as “conduct an ill-informed and partisan attack”).¹ If this isn’t about the Godwin story, then what we are left with is misogynistic torture porn.
Even before this attempted takedown of the Godwin I didn’t much care for this piece. I’ve already mentioned the data dump start—who wants to hack their way through that when they start a story?—and the “Tell me a story” digressions—although I think I can see the need for these to pad the piece out (that said, you would think these might contribute something tangible to the story, e.g. Kamala could do with being a more sympathetic character).
The story has other problems too, including the Dino’s nebulous and hand-wavey comments about “harmony” and “balance,” which set up an unconvincing Trolley Problem (kill Kamala or something worse might happen). There are also science explanations that would shame a 1930’s pulp:

Whatever went wrong with Kamala’s migration that morning, there was nothing J could have done. The dinos tell me that the quantum nondemoliton sensor array is able to circumvent Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle by measuring spacetime’s most crogglingly small quantities without collapsing the wave/particle duality. How small? They say that no one can ever “see” anything that’s only 1.62 x 10^-31 centimeters long, because at that size, space and time come apart. Time ceases to exist and space becomes a random probablistic foam, sort of like quantum spit. We humans call this the Planck-Wheeler length. There’s a Planck-Wheeler time, too: 10^-45 of a second. If something happens and something else happens and the two events are separated by an interval of a mere 10^-45 of a second, it is impossible to say which came first. It was all dino to me—and that’s just the scanning. The Hanen use different tech to create artificial wormholes, hold them open with electromagnetic vacuum fluctuations, pass the superluminal signal through and then assemble the migrator from elementary particles at the destination.  p. 15-16

Thank you, Professor—do you have any equations to go with that?
I thought this a poorly put together piece, and was later horrified to find that (a) not only everyone else on my group read raved about it² but (b) that it won a Hugo award too (and was a Nebula finalist). It seems that all you need to do to woo voters is produce a story with space stations, dinosaurs, and self-referential genre content.
∗ (Mediocre). 7,800 words.

•

Wonders of the Invisible World by Patricia A. McKillip (Full Spectrum #5, 1995) begins arrestingly with a “angel” (a time-traveller) visiting a man called Mather:

I am the angel sent to Cotton Mather. It took me some time to get his attention. He lay on the floor with his eyes closed; he prayed fervently, sometimes murmuring, sometimes shouting. Apparently the household was used to it. I heard footsteps pass his study door; a woman—his wife Abigail?—called to someone: “If your throat is no better tomorrow, we’ll have Phillip pee in a cup for you to gargle.” From the way the house smelled, Phillip didn’t bother much with cups.  p. 30 (Best Science Fiction of the Year, David Hartwell)

The angel records Mather’s comments for the researcher she works for before returning to her own cyberpunk future, and her child. There she contemplates the dreadful past she has returned from, and agonises about the fact that she didn’t change anything for the better (although her employer reminds her that if she did she would have been left there). When she watches her kid play a VR game later on, she sees the image of a trapped angel.
This gets off to a good start but doesn’t subsequently go anywhere. A notion, not a story.
∗∗ (Average). 3,850 words.

•

Hot Times in Magma City by Robert Silverberg (Omni Online, May 1995) starts in a Los Angeles recovery house where an ex-addict, Mattison, is monitoring a screen for volcanoes and lava outbreaks in the local area:

The whole idea of the Citizens Service House is that they are occupied by troubled citizens who have “volunteered” to do community service—any sort of service that may be required of them. A Citizens Service House is not quite a jail and not quite a recovery center, but it partakes of certain qualities of both institutions, and its inhabitants are people who have fucked up in one way or another and done injury not only to themselves but to their fellow citizens, injury for which they can make restitution by performing community service even while they are getting their screwed-up heads gradually screwed on the right way.
What had started out to involve a lot of trash-collecting along freeways, tree-pruning in the public parks, and similar necessary but essentially simple and non-life-threatening chores, has become a lot trickier ever since this volcano thing happened to Los Angeles. The volcano thing has accelerated all sorts of legal and social changes in the area, because flowing lava simply will not wait for the usual bullshit California legal processes to take their course.  p. 51

When there is a particularly serious eruption, Mattison’s team is sent by Volcano Central to support the local lava control teams in Pasadena. En route we get a description of this near-future LA:

The rains have made everything green, though. The hills are pure emerald, except where some humongous bougainvillea vine is setting off a gigantic blast of purple or orange. Because the prevailing winds this time of year blow from west to east, there’s no coating of volcanic ash or other pyroclastic crap to be seen in this part of town, nor can you smell any of the noxious gases that the million fumaroles of the Zone are putting forth; all such garbage gets carried the other way, turning the world black and nauseating from San Gabriel out to San Berdoo and Riverside.
What you can see, though, is the distant plume of smoke that rises from the summit of Mount Pomona, which is what the main cone seems to have been named. The mountain itself, which straddles two freeways, obliterating both and a good deal more besides, in a little place called City of Industry just southwest of Pomona proper, isn’t visible, not from here—it’s only a couple of thousand feet high, after six months of building itself up out of its own accumulation of ejected debris. But the column of steam and fine ash that emerges from it is maybe five times higher than that, and can be seen far and wide all over the Basin, except perhaps in West L.A. and Santa Monica, where none of this can be seen or smelled and all they know of the whole volcano thing, probably, is what they read in the Times or see on the television news.  p. 58

After the team successfully complete their task (which, basically, involves hosing down the lava flow so it forms a crust that dams what is behind it) they get sent to another job—but not until they demand, and get, a break:

Lunch is sandwiches and soft drinks, half a block back from the event site. They get out of their suits, leaving them standing open in the street like discarded skins, and eat sitting down at the edge of the curb. “I sure wouldn’t mind a beer right now,” Evans says, and Hawks says, “Why don’t you wish up a bottle of fucking champagne, while you’re wishing things up? Don’t cost no more than beer, if it’s just wishes.”
“I never liked champagne,” Paul Foust says. “For me it was always cognac. Cour-voy-zee-ay, that was for me.” He smacks his lips. “I can practically taste it now. That terrific grapey taste hitting your tongue that smooth flow, right down your gullet to your gut—”
“Knock it off,” says Mattison. This nitwit chatter is stirring things inside him that he would prefer not to have stirred.
“You never stop wanting it,” Foust tells him.
“Yes. Yes, I know that, you dumb fucker. Don’t you think I know that? Knock it off.”
“Can we talk about smoking stuff, then?” Marty Cobos asks.
“And how about needles, too?” says Mary Maude Gulliver, who used to sell herself on Hollywood Boulevard to keep herself in nose candy. “Let’s talk about needles too.”
“Shut your fucking mouth, you goddamn whore,” Lenny Prochaska says. He pronounces it hooer. “What do you need to play around with my head for?”
“Why, did you have some kind of habit?” Mary Maude asks him sweetly.  p. 71

En route to the second job we see more scenes of volcanic Armageddon and, at one point, the crew pass something that looks like an Aztec sacrifice taking place at an intersection. Finally, at the second job (spoiler), there is a climactic scene that involves a moment of peril for one of this dysfunctional crew, and a chance of redemption for another.
This is a very readable and entertaining story, with a neat idea (albeit not an especially SFnal one) as well as characters that are both colourful and snarky. It’s a pretty good piece, and one I’d have for my “Year’s Best,” too. That said, the story feels like it is a bit longer than it needs to be (perhaps because of the vulcanology material, some of which feels like it comes straight from a very interesting holiday in Iceland), and the characters of the addicts are a bit too similar.
I note in passing that this doesn’t read like a Silverberg’s work at all, and felt more like one of those Marc Laidlaw & Rudy Rucker stories I’ve read recently.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 20,100 words.

•

Gossamer by Stephen Baxter (Science Fiction Age, November 1995) has a good opening hook that sees a two woman spaceship prematurely come out of a wormhole near Pluto and crash-land on the planet. During their approach, Lvov, the scientist of the two, has a brief (and story telegraphing) vision of a web between Pluto and one of its moons, Charon.
Both of the women survive the crash although the ship is wrecked, and Cobh the pilot tells Lvov that it’ll be twenty days or so before they are rescued, and that it won’t be via the wormhole (there is some handwavium here about the wormhole anomaly that spat them out of hyperspace).
The central section of the story then sees Lvov exploring the surface of Pluto and, as she flies along, we get some personal backstory. There is also further discussion between the pair (Cobh is off doing something else) about the unstable wormhole. Then Lvov finds what looks like eggs in a burrow:

Everywhere she found the inert bodies of snowflakes, or evidence of their presence: eggs, lidded burrows. She found no other life forms—or, more likely, she told herself, she wasn’t equipped to recognize any others.
She was drawn back to Christy, the sub-Charon point, where the topography was at its most complex and interesting, and where the greatest density of flakes was to be found. It was as if, she thought, the flakes had gathered here, yearning for the huge, inaccessible moon above them. But what could the flakes possible want of Charon? What did it mean for them?  p. 129

When the pair realise that they may have discovered alien life there is a discussion about what they should do—if they signal Earth then the rescue will be called off as any rocket exhaust will damage the environment. Lvov (spoiler) feels strongly that if they have to die to preserve the Plutonian ecosystem then so be it and, when she realises that Cobh has figured out another way to get them home, she sends a message to Earth about her discovery.
The final part of the story has the pair going to the wormhole on Cobh’s salvaged and modified GUTdrive, the (presumably not ecosystem destroying) heat of which activates the Pluto-Charon ecosystem: the burrows open, the eggs hatch, and an interplanetary web forms between Pluto and its moon. Then the drive activates, and causes a distorted space wave which flicks the pair to Earth (or something like that).
This is a well enough put together story (apart from the telegraphing, which is repeated again later on), and it has a good sense-of-wonder finale—the problem is, though, that the piece as a whole does not convince. Part of the reason is the exotic ecosystem, which is interesting but rather far-fetched, and the other thing is Cobh’s rather unlikely invention of a new type of space drive amid the wreckage of their ship (this rather smacks of Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers, and cobbling together a star-drive out of a six-pack of used beer cans). There is also the minor problem (in practical if not narrative terms) of being trapped in your suit for twenty odd days, with no discussion of how you are going to eat or go to the toilet.
Normally, you can get away with one fantastic thing in a story; two or three is pushing it. Too far-fetched.
∗∗ (Average.) 6,100 words.

•

A Worm in the Well by Gregory Benford (Analog, November 1995) starts—not entirely clearly—with a female astronaut called Claire piloting her spaceship near the Sun’s corona in an attempt to survey a transiting black hole. The story then flashbacks to Mercury where a high-tech bailiff serves her, and we get back story about her debts, the imminent repossession of her specially outfitted ore-carrying spaceship, etc. All of which eventually leads her to accept a contract from SolWatch to undertake the hazardous job outlined in the first section.
This set up forms the first third of the story, and the rest of the piece continues in a similarly plodding vein:

Using her high-speed feed, Erma explained. Claire listened, barely keeping up. In the fifteen billion years since the wormhole was born, odds were that one end of the worm ate more matter than the other. If one end got stuck inside a star, it swallowed huge masses. Locally, it got more massive.
But the matter that poured through the mass-gaining end spewed out the other end. Locally, that looked as though the mass-spewing one was losing mass. Space-time around it curved oppositely than it did around the end that swallowed.
“So it looks like a negative mass?”
IT MUST. THUS IT REPULSES MATTER. JUST AS THE OTHER END ACTS LIKE A POSITIVE, ORDINARY MASS AND ATTRACTS MATTER.
“Why didn’t it shoot out from the Sun, then?”
IT WOULD, AND BE LOST IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE. BUT THE MAGNETIC ARCH HOLDS IT.
“How come we know it’s got negative mass? All I saw was—”
Erma popped an image into the wall screen.
NEGATIVE MASS ACTS AS A DIVERGING LENS, FOR LIGHT PASSING NEARBY. THAT WAS WHY IT APPEARED TO SHRINK AS WE FLEW OVER IT.
Ordinary matter focused light, Claire knew, like a converging lens. In a glance she saw that a negative ended wormhole refracted light oppositely. Incoming beams were shoved aside, leaving a dark tunnel downstream. They had flown across that tunnel, swooping down into it so that the apparent size of the wormhole got smaller.  p. 150

The extensive explanations in this piece (there is an accompanying diagram) caused my eyes to glaze over, and the unengaging dramas that Claire is subjected to did not provide any relief. The ship AI is also mildly irritating, as well as possibly homicidal—at one point Claire asks about the peak gravity on an approach, whereupon the AI tells her “27.6 gravities”—death for a human. You would have thought that it might have said so earlier, or perhaps it takes a relaxed view of Asimov’s First Law (the part about not letting humans come to harm through inaction).
In the final pages of the story (spoiler) she manages to capture the black hole and sell the rights for a huge amount of money, more than enough to clear her debts.
In some respects this is a typical dull Analog story, with lots of speculative science substituting for anything of interest.
∗ (Mediocre). 8,300 words.

•

Downloading Midnight by William Browning Spencer (Tomorrow Speculative Fiction, December 1995) is a noir detective/cyberpunk mashup that starts with Captain Armageddon, a hologram from a virtual reality show called American Midnight, going amok on the “Highway”. Initially Marty, the narrator, hires a young hacker called Bloom to go in and delete the “ghosts” but several days pass and nothing happens. This leads him to go and check on Bloom, who he finds floating in a tank and wired up to VR. Marty’s subsequent exchange with the VR technician supervising Bloom gives a taste of the strangeness of this future world and the wit of the story:

Techs always tell you everything is under control. That’s what this one said.
“Save it for a gawker’s tour,” I told her. “I’ve been doing maintenance for fourteen years now. I know how it goes. You’re fine, and then you’re dead.”
“This is poor personal interaction,” the tech said. “You are questioning my professional skills and consequently devaluing my self-image.”
I shrugged. Facts are facts: in over eighty percent of the cases where neural trauma shows on a monitor, the floater is already too blasted to make it back alive.
I thanked the tech and apologized if I had offended her or caused an esteem devaluation. She accepted my apology, but with a coolness that told me I’d have another civility demerit in my file.  p. 173

Later Marty has an unsuccessful date with Gloria, an event that shows us another aspect of this strange future world (his relationship is subject to a tangle of restrictive contracts and conditions which, presumably, satirise what actually goes on in real life). After this he goes into the VR Highway to find Bloom, buying information from a tout in the under-Highway which eventually leads him to Bloom, who he finds talking to a woman in a bar in a seedy part of the Bin:

The woman looked at me. She was a guy named Jim Havana, a gossip leak for the Harmonium tabloids. Havana always projected a woman on the Highway. In the Big R he was a bald suit, a white, dead-fish kind of guy with a sickly sheen of excess fat and sweat. Down here, Havana was a stocky fem—you might have guessed trans—with dated cosmetics and a big thicket of black hair. She was an improvement, but only by comparison to the upside version.
“This is wonderful,” Havana said, glaring at Bloom. “I said private, remember?
“It’s good to see you,” Bloom said to me.
“Don’t let me interfere with this reunion. I’m out of here,” Havana said. “I don’t need a crowd right now, you know?” Havana shook her curls and stood up. She headed toward the door.
“Wait,” Bloom said. He got up and ran after her.
I followed.
The street was wet and low-res, every highlight skewed. The shimmering asphalt buckled as I ran. An odor like oily, burning rags lingered in the V. Bloom and Havana were ahead of me, both moving fast.
I heard Havana scream.
Something detached from the shadows, rising wildly from an unthought alley full of cast-off formulae, dirty bulletin skreeds, trashed fantasies. An angry clot of flies hovered over the form. It roared—the famous roar of Defiance, rallying cry of Captain Armageddon!  pp. 178-179

Bloom fires an encrypted burst that destroys the creature, but we later find that this doesn’t fix the Highway’s problems. The rest of the story sees further adventures that eventually (spoiler) lead to Captain Armageddon’s sidekick and sex star, Zera Terminal; Bloom’s subsequent relationship with her; and how the source for her character (the human that was “mapped” as a starting point) was “raped”. This latter event refers, I think (this is the story’s weakest point), to the illegal mapping of a nine year old child as the source for Zera Terminal:

You’ve seen her, those big eyes and the fullness of her mouth. Her features are almost too lush for the chiseled oval of her face, but somehow it works, probably because of the innocence. This is a woman, you think, who trusts. This is a woman who finds everything new and good.
There is usually some chill to a holo, some glint of the non-human intelligence that runs the programs. Zera almost transcended that. There was a human here, lodged in that sweet, surprised voice, that gawky grace, that wow in her eyes.
It came down to a single quality, always rare, rarer in a land of artifice: Innocence.  p. 187

This is quite a convoluted (and at times dark) story, and it is occasionally hard to work out what is going on (it would have benefited from another draft). On the other hand it is engrossing, and convincingly depicts both of its colourful worlds, the real and the virtual. This latter effect is partly achieved by a skilful use of altered social customs, and also by an extensive invented vocabulary (“Highway,” “Big R,” “go flat,” etc.), none of which the author explains to the readers but leaves to be understood from context or repeated use.
I’m not sure it’s an entirely successful story, but its mix of ambition and what it does achieve makes it my second favourite story in the Hartwell volume so far.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good). 9,000 words.

•

For White Hill by Joe Haldeman (Far Futures, edited by Gregory Benford, 1995) opens with the (unnamed) narrator stating that he is writing this memoir in English, a language from “an ancient land of Earth.” In the story’s leisurely opening chapters we find that he and a woman called White Hill are part of a group of twenty-nine artists that has gone to Earth to take part in a competition to design and build a commemorative artwork that will serve as a reminder, after the Earth is reterraformed, of the devastation caused by the Fwyndri. This alien race, with whom humanity are still at war, released a nanoplague on Earth which turned most plant and animal DNA into dust.
All this background information is given in little snippets though, and initially the story is mainly concerned with the developing relationship between the two characters, their sexual attraction, and the differing sexual mores of their two cultures (although, to be honest, they seem pretty much like an ordinary 20^th Century couple²). There is also quite a lot of discussion about art as they wander around their base in Amazonia (and this is the kind of thing you would find in endless 1970’s artist colony stories):

She scraped at the edge of the sill with a piece of rubble. “It’s funny: earth, air, fire, and water. You’re earth and fire, and I’m the other two.”
I have used water, of course. The Gaudi is framed by water. But it was an interesting observation. “What do you do, I mean for a living? Is it related to your water and air?”
“No. Except insofar as everything is related.” There are no artists on Seldene, in the sense of doing it for a living. Everybody indulges in some sort of art or music, as part of “wholeness,” but a person who only did art would be considered a parasite. I was not comfortable there. She faced me, leaning. “I work at the Northport Mental Health Center. Cognitive science, a combination of research and . . . is there a word here? Jaturnary. ‘Empathetic therapy,’ I guess.”  p. 215 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

White Hill’s occupation surfaces again at the end of the story.
After a couple chapters of these two mostly just talking to each other, the story finally gets going when they get a visitor who helps them plan their travel itinerary, at which point the story changes from an extended conversation into a travelogue. They go to Giza and the pyramids, and then by airship to Rome (which is now encircled by a wall of bones collected by the local monks). Then they learn they have to go back to Amazonia because “the war is back.”
At this point the story changes direction completely, and the pair return to discover that the Fwyndri have tampered with the sun’s internal processes and that it will become progressively hotter—eventually turning into a red giant. Earth will become increasingly uninhabitable and, when the sun finally expands, destroyed. The couple also learn that there is no way off-planet as all ships have been requisitioned (and ships from elsewhere will take too long to arrive). The pair decide to stay in Amazonia and continue with their work. They eventually sleep together.
The rest of the story charts their developing relationship and their projects. While they work on these latter, terraforming machines cool the Earth so much that snow ends up covering what was originally a desert. Then, when they are caught in one of the storms that frequently occur, White Hill is badly injured—she loses and eye and suffers serious facial injuries—and the narrator has to tend to her until she heals enough to undertake a “purge” and re-enter the safe underground areas for surgery.
After a couple more chapters about her recovery and their relationship, there is another right angle plot turn, which has him come back to find she has left to do “Jaturnary” work for a hundred people who are going off in a spaceship to cold sleep through the expansion of the sun. There is a place for him, but he knows that the therapy she will provide to keep the cold-sleepers sane will eradicate her personality (no, me neither), so he does not go.
If this synopsis seems all over the place, it is because the story is little more than a collection of deus ex machina plot developments (which are there because, I believe, the story is handily based on Shakespeare’s 18^th sonnet³). There is also a considerable amount of flab here (there is endless chatter about the couple’s relationship), and a kitchen sink full of SF furniture (aliens, nano-plagues, exploding suns, cold-sleep, etc.) All in all, it struck me as very much the kind of story you would expect to see in a collection edited by another writer (which it was) and where, I suspect, the brief was, “write what you want!”
There are parts of this that are readable enough, but it is a mess, and average at best.
∗∗ (Average). 16,600 words.

•

In Saturn Time by William Barton (Amazing Stories: The Anthology, edited by Kim Mohan, 1995) is set in an alternate world where there was an extended Apollo program. The story starts with the narrator, Nick Jensen, and his commander on a 1974 Apollo 21 rover mission beyond the lunar daylight terminator line. In a dark crater they find hard white rock (frozen water?) under a thin film of black matter.
The rest of the story telescopes forward at roughly four year intervals, and each time deploys an event vignette: Jensen is in orbit with the 1977 Apollo 29 when the Russians land on the Moon; in 1980 he is with President Udall, Vice President Mondale, and California Governor (and the next Democratic President after Udall) Jerry Brown, watching an (enhanced ) Saturn 5M lifting a moon base station; then, in 1984, he is on a mission taking a seventy-year-old Walter Cronkite to the Moon:

And, sitting there on the pad, just as T minus thirty seconds was called, [Cronkite had] chuckled softly and said, “This kinda reminds me of Paris . . .”
Uh. Paris.
“Sure. I went in with the Airborne. Jumped with them, carrying a goddamn typewriter . . .”
Then, sitting on the Extended LM’s floor, as required, face far below the level of the window while the engine rumbled and we dropped toward touchdown, he’d whipped out a kid’s folding cardboard periscope, the kind of thing you could still buy for 98 cents, holding it up so he could see out. That won us over, a kind of guileless astronautical ingenuity, like smuggling a ham sandwich onto the first space flight.  p. 273

There are various other events: Jensen is the first man on Mars; a partly reusable Saturn 5R is launched; Jupiter’s moon Callisto is orbited, etc.
This is a well enough done piece but it’s really just a techo- fantasy for thwarted space geeks, and one that exists in a world that is completely devoid of any sense of realpolitik (there is no explanation as to why the voters would happily spend the colossal amount of money needed to fund an Apollo program on steroids, and the piece also posits the election of four Democratic Presidents succession).
For dreamers.
∗∗∗ (Good). 5900 words.

•

Coming of Age in Karhide by Ursula K. Le Guin (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) is one of her ‘Hainish’ stories, the most famous example of which is The Left Hand of Darkness. This story also takes place on the world of Gethen, a.k.a Winter, and, after some accomplished and elegant scene setting, the piece soon becomes a coming-of-age story about of one of the children of this planet, Sov Thade Tage em Ereb. Because Sov is an androgynous Gethenian, the process of growing up involves, in part, a fascination with the concept of “kemmer,” the periods after adolescence when Gethenians change into males or females to reproduce:

No, I hadn’t thought much about kemmer before. What would be the use? Until we come of age we have no gender and no sexuality, our hormones don’t give us any trouble at all. And in a city Hearth we never see adults in kemmer. They kiss and go. Where’s Maba? In the kemmerhouse, love, now eat your porridge. When’s Maba coming back? Soon, love. And in a couple of days Maba comes back, looking sleepy and shiny and refreshed and exhausted. Is it like having a bath, Maba? Yes, a bit, love, and what have you been up to while I was away?  p. 290

Eventually Sov ages enough to show the first signs of kemmer, which involves temporary physical changes and some discomfort, something Sov later discusses with a friend called Sether, who is going through the same thing:

We did not look at each other. Very gradually, unnoticeably, I was slowing my pace till we were going along side by side at an easy walk.
“Sometimes do you feel like your tits are on fire?” I asked without knowing that I was going to say anything.
Sether nodded.
After a while, Sether said, “Listen, does your pisser get. . . .”
I nodded.
“It must be what the Aliens look like,” Sether said with revulsion. “This, this thing sticking out, it gets so big . . . it gets in the way.”
We exchanged and compared symptoms for a mile or so. It was a relief to talk about it, to find company in misery, but it was also frightening to hear our misery confirmed by the other. Sether burst out, “I’ll tell you what I hate, what I really hate about it—it’s dehumanizing. To get jerked around like that by your own body, to lose control, I can’t stand the idea. Of being just a sex machine. And everybody just turns into something to have sex with. You know that people in kemmer go crazy and die if there isn’t anybody else in kemmer? That they’ll even attack people in somer? Their own mothers?”
“They can’t,” I said, shocked.
“Yes they can.”  p. 295

After a brief visit to the Fastness, which appears to be some spiritual seat of higher learning (and where Sov learns how to “untrance” and sing), the remainder of the story follows Sov’s first visit to the kemmerhouse. We see how the Gethenian sexual change is triggered (Sov becomes a female after being exposed to the male pheromones of one of the cooks at her Hearth), and learn of the various lovers she takes afterwards.
This a very well written piece (there is so much textual detail that it almost feels like a tapestry) but the story is ultimately little more than an extended alien biology lesson (although the kemmer process will be of interest to those that have read The Left Hand of Darkness).
∗∗∗ (Good). 7,950 words.

•

The Three Descents of Jeremy Baker by Roger Zelazny (F&SF, July 1995) begins with the Raven, a spaceship whose crew includes Jeremy Baker, coming out of “extracurricular space” when its Warton-Purg drive fails. This failure occurs in the vicinity of a black hole, so the tidal forces soon destroy the ship, and Barton is the only one to survive (he happened to be testing his EVA suit at the time).
The rest of the longer first chapter has him drift towards the black hole where he then encounters an energy being called Nik:

“Who—What are you?” Jeremy asked.
“I’m a Fleep,” came the answer. “I’m that flickering patch of light you were wondering about a while back.”
“You live around here?”
“I have for a long while, Jeremy. It’s easy if you’re an energy being with a lot of psi powers.”
“That’s how we’re conversing?”
“Yes. I installed a telepathic function in your mind while I had you unconscious.”
“Why aren’t I being stretched into miles of spaghetti right now?”
“I created an antigravity field between you and the black hole. They cancel.”
“Why’d you help me?”
“It’s good to have someone new to talk to. Sometimes I get bored with my fellow Fleep.”  p. 311

Nik goes on to tell Jeremy that the Fleep are conducting experiments on the black hole with the aim of reversing time. Then, after modifying Jeremy somewhat, Nik sends him back to before the destruction of the Raven, where Jeremy attempts to rescue the ship but fails.
Another Fleep called Vik sends him back for yet another go, but this also fails, and the chapter closes with Jeremy contemplating his doom.
The second section has Jeremy inside the black hole with Nik discussing various singularity related matters (information loss, energy conservation, etc.).
The third section then has them end up in a “cornucopia”—an information store created by Nik—after the black hole explodes. Nik creates a visual library metaphor for all the information that is inside the cornucopia, and they and the other books begin to get acquainted.
This gets off to a pretty good start—the breezy, flip style is entertaining— but the middle and ending morphs into pseudo-scientific musing about the properties of black holes.
∗∗ (Average). 2,400 words.

•

Evolution by Nancy Kress (Asimov’s SF, October 1995) begins with an edgy conversation between two mothers over a garden fence about a hospital doctor who has been murdered.

Somebody shot and killed Dr. Bennett behind the Food Mart on April Street!” Ceci Moore says breathlessly as I take the washing off the line.
I stand with a pair of Jack’s boxer shorts in my hand and stare at her. I don’t like Ceci. Her smirking pushiness, her need to shove her scrawny body into the middle of every situation, even ones she’d be better off leaving alone. She’s been that way since high school. But we’re neighbors; we’re stuck with each other. Dr. Bennett delivered both Sean and Jackie. Slowly I fold the boxer shorts and lay them in my clothesbasket.
“Well, Betty, aren’t you even going to say anything?”
“Have the police arrested anybody?”
“Janie Brunelli says there’s no suspects.” Tom Brunelli is one of Emerton’s police officers. There are only five of them. He has trouble keeping his mouth shut. “Honestly, Betty, you look like there’s a murder in this town every day!”  p. 322

This gritty soap opera feel is maintained throughout much of the rest of the story.
We later find that this crime has occurred in a near-future where widespread drug resistance has caused a partial breakdown of the health system, as well as vigilante resistance against the doctors and hospitals who dare to use the one remaining drug, endozine, that has any anti-bacterial efficacy.
Later on in the story Betty’s son Jackie is linked, by an old high school friend who tries to recruit her to the pro-endozine side, to the vigilantes who are violently opposed to its use. We then find out, when the Betty can’t find her son, that the latter’s biological father is a hospital doctor called Salter (there is also some detail about their estrangement, and how Betty did prison time as a teenager when she shot out the windows of Salter’s house and injured a caretaker—I did say it was soap opera-ish).
When Betty goes to the hospital to see Salter to enlist his help in finding Sean (spoiler) there is an overly compressed scene where the news of endozine’s failure is revealed (the CDC have identified a resistant bacterial strain) and, after a huge data dump about this, (the obviously sick) Salter announces he has a solution—which is another bacteria to attack the resistant one. He gets Betty to fetch a syringe, and injects her, and then they leave the hospital just before it is blown up.
Betty then spreads the protective bacteria to everyone she meets.
This story doesn’t entirely work, mostly because the SFnal substance of it is crammed into the long single scene just described—and not in a particularly reader-friendly way (it’s Jargon Central in some places). And there are also a couple of questions that are not answered. Why did Salter get sick if he had the cure? Why does Betty’s vigilante son end up, at the end of the story, with the woman who tried to recruit Betty? On the other hand, some will appreciate the grittiness of the piece (and perhaps its current relevance), and there is some effective writing:

I drive home, because I can’t think what else to do.
I sit on the couch and reach back in my mind, for that other place, the place I haven’t gone to since I got out of [prison]. The gray granite place that turns you to granite, too, so you can sit and wait for hours, for weeks, for years, without feeling very much. I go into that place, and I become the Elizabeth I was then, when Sean was in foster care someplace and I didn’t know who had him or what they might be doing to him or how I would get him back. I go into the gray granite place to become stone.
And it doesn’t work.  p. 335

∗∗+ (Average to Good). 9,000 words.

•

The Day the Aliens Came by Robert Sheckley (New Legends, edited by Greg Bear & Martin H. Greenberg, 1995) gets off to a quirky start when an alien Synestrian (they appear similar to humans but have faces that look as if they have melted) comes to the writer’s door wanting to buy a story. They come to a deal and, when the writer finishes the story, he takes it to the alien and gets the latter’s notes:

[The] Synester said, “this character you have in here, Alice.”
“Yes, Alice,” I said, though I couldn’t quite remember writing an Alice into the story. Could he be referring to Alsace, the province in France? I decided not to question him. No sense appearing dumb on my own story.
“Now, this Alice,” he said, “she’s the size of a small country, isn’t she?”
He was definitely referring to Alsace, the province in France, and I had lost the moment when I could correct him. “Yes,” I said, “that’s right, just about the size of a small country.”
“Well, then,” he said, “why don’t you have Alice fall in love with a bigger country in the shape of a pretzel?”
“A what?” I said.
“Pretzel,” he said. “It’s a frequently used image in Synestrian popular literature. Synestrians like to read that sort of thing.”
“Do they?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “Synestrians like to imagine people in the shape of pretzels. You stick that in, it’ll make it more visual.”
“Visual,” I said, my mind a blank.
“Yes,” he said, “because we gotta consider the movie possibilities.”
“Yes, of course,” I said, remembering that I got sixty percent [of the movie rights].  p. 356

This extract pretty much sums up the quirky, offbeat tone of the story. Unfortunately the following scenes are equally as odd: we learn that his wife is also an alien; a family of Capellans turn up in their house as uninvited guests; the writer’s home is burgled when they are out but the Capellans just watch; the Capellan’s baby is kidnapped and they don’t seem to care; the couple watch a show where a man eats small aliens that congregate on his plate; the couple’s baby arrives before the wife goes into labour; etc.)
This just seems like random, pointless nonsense, and seems typical of what I’ve read of Sheckley’s late period work. I don’t know if he forgot how to write normal stories, or whether he was attempting to write some kind of modernist or post-modernist humour but, either way, it’s not worth your time.
– (Awful). 3,800 words.

•

Microbe by Joan Slonczewski (Analog, August 1995) is one of the author’s ‘Elysium Cycle’ stories, and opens with an exploration team discussing the biochemistry of the alien planet, IP3, that they are orbiting. The team are Andra, a human female; Skyhook, a sentient space shuttle AI; and Pelt, a sentient nanoplast AI who also serves as a protective suit for Andra.
Their discussion, in particular, focuses on the alien cell structure of life on the planet, and they watch as an alien cell splits into three. Unfortunately these discussions (there are more later on in the story) tend to result in writing like this:

“The usual double helix?” asked Skyhook. The double helix is a ladder of DNA nucleotide pairs, always adenine with thymine or guanine with cytosine, for the four different “letters” of the DNA code. When a cell divides to make two cells, the entire helix unzips, then fills in a complementary strand for each daughter cell.  p. 372 (Year’s Best SF, edited by David Hartwell)

The second act of the story sees Andra, Pelt and Skyhook exploring the surface, where they discover a herd of strange rolling aliens which are later attacked by a much larger one. Then Pelt starts malfunctioning, and Andra (spoiler) barely makes it back to the shuttle before Pelt shuts down. There is some further discussion about the way that the alien microbes attacked Pelt’s nanoplast structure, and the crew’s solution.
This reads like part science lecture, part story, and has an open ending that suggests it is the first chapter of a novel. I’d have preferred a longer piece that was more of a story, but overall this is okay, I guess.
∗∗ (Average). 4,200 words.

•

The Ziggurat by Gene Wolfe (Full Spectrum #5, edited by Tom Dupree, Jennifer Hershey, Janna Silverstein, 1995) wasn’t, given that the last two stories of his I read were Seven American Nights and The Fifth Head of Cerberus, exactly what I was expecting, and the piece initially feels more like something from Stephen King. To that end, the beginning is not only evocative of place—a snowed-in log cabin in the woods—but also of character—Emery is estranged from his wife Jan and is waiting in his cabin for her and their children to arrive, along with the divorce papers she is bringing for him to sign. While he tidies up before their arrival he broods about this, and also thinks about a visiting coyote¹ he has been feeding and trying to tame:

The coyote had gone up on the back porch!
After a second or two he realized he was grinning like a fool, and forced himself to stop and look instead.
There were no tracks. Presumably the coyote had eaten this morning before the snow started, for the bowl was empty, licked clean. The time would come, and soon, when he would touch the rough yellow-gray head, when the coyote would lick his fingers and fall asleep in front of the little fieldstone fireplace in his cabin.  p. 391

While he is outside, Emery also gets the impression he is being watched from the woods, a feeling that is confirmed when he sees a flash of a mirror . . . .
The rest of the first half of the story proceeds at a brisk pace. Emery gets dressed and goes to the area he saw the light, only to look back at his cabin to see he is being burgled. When he shouts at one of the small, dark figures, they raise the rifle they have taken from cabin and shoot. He takes cover. Five minutes later Jan and the three kids arrive, but when Emery hurries back he sees the interlopers have vanished. He decides to keep quiet about what has just happened.
The next part of the story switches temporarily from thriller to family soap opera, with a conversation between Emery and Jan about the details of the their divorce (and an allegation of child abuse by Emery on the twin girls). This culminates in Emery’s refusal to sign the papers, and Jan and the two girls leaving the cabin (unlike the twins, Brook is Emery’s biological son and he stays). Shortly after the mother and daughters exit Emery and Brook hear a scream, and rush outside to see the burglars under the hood of the car, seemingly once again looking for parts (as they did with Emery’s Jeep earlier on). There is a struggle, and a shot is fired: the interlopers flee. After the family regroup, they realise one of the twins, Aileen, is missing.
Emery then drives through the snow towards the lake to see if he can find her, eventually coming upon the burglars, who are dark-skinned and petite young women. They have Aileen, but Emery manages to trade the car for her—although the women don’t speak throughout the exchange—and, after another scuffle during which he is shot (a flesh wound in his side), father and step-daughter walk back to the cabin.
At this point (a third of the way through) the story starts becoming SFnal: Aileen says that she has been in a ziggurat (she later clarifies that it wasn’t actually an ancient terraced structure, it just had the same shape), where she was stripped and examined, shown pictures of things she didn’t recognise, and given food before she slept for a while. Emery is puzzled, and tells her she has only been gone a couple of hours.
When they get back to the cabin domestic hostilities resume as Emery undresses to tend his wound, and the girls are told not to look:

Jan snapped her fingers. “Oil! Oil will soften the dried blood. Wesson Oil. Have you got any?”
Brook pointed at the cabinet above the sink. Emery said, “There’s a bottle of olive oil up there, or there should be.”
“Leen’s peeking,” Brook told Jan, who told Aileen, “Do that again, young lady, and I’ll smack your face!
“Emery, you really ought to make two rooms out of this. This is ridiculous.”
“It was designed for four men,” he explained, “a hunting party, or a fishing party. You women always insist on being included, then complain about what you find when you are.”  p. 425

There is more of this kind of thing:

Privately [Emery] wondered which was worse, a woman who had never learned how to get what she wanted or a woman who had.
“You actually proposed that we patch it up. Then you act like this?” [said Jan.]
“I’m trying to keep things pleasant.”
“Then do it!”
“You mean you want to be courted while you’re divorcing me. That’s what’s usually meant by a friendly divorce, from what I’ve been able to gather.”  p. 426-427

“Emery, you hardly ever answer a direct question. It’s one of the things I dislike most about you.”
“That’s what men say about women,” he protested mildly.
“Women are being diplomatic. Men are rude.”
“I suppose you’re right. What did you ask me?”
“That isn’t the point. The point is that you ignore me until I raise my voice.”  p. 430

Emery finally agrees to take his wife and daughters into town and, for the next part of the story, it is just the two men, Emery and Brook, who are left to deal with any remaining problems back at the cabin. (Apart from a couple of phonecalls, the weather conveniently keeps the local sheriff and the other authorities away.)
As they drive back, Emery does some more pontificating to Brook on the nature of women (“For women, love is [. . .] magic, which is why they frequently use the language of fairy tales when they talk about it.”). Then there is talk of “Brownies” (fairies) and the like, and an information dump where Emery speculates (spoiler) about the women landing the “ziggurat” in the lake; that they are afraid of men and want to leave the area; and a possible time-distortion effect that would explain Aileen’s experience.
They sleep, and when Emery wakes up the next morning he realises Brook isn’t there. When he goes outside to find him he discovers one of the women has killed him with the axe. After he covers the body and puts it by the woodpile, he then calls the undertaker and sheriff. Then he calls the mobile phone in Jan’s car: one of the women answers, and Emery tells her he is going to kill them for what they did to his son.
The last section of the story sees the climactic encounters between Emery and the women, which take place in both the ziggurat/space-time ship (where he fights a woman with an axe) and in the cabin (where the other two ambush him, and he kills one and injures the other.
The final scene has him tending the wounded woman: Emery tells her he us going to burn the ziggurat and that she will just have fit into current day society. While she sleeps he plans a new company which will exploit the time-travellers’ technology. He also determines to make the woman, who he calls Tamar, his new wife. Emery talks to himself while she sleeps, saying that they’ll have a family, and build a house on the lakeside to take advantage of the still functioning time distortion device. She squeezes his hand, and the story ends.
Now the unfortunate thing about reducing this story to a plot summary is that it makes it sound like something that A. E. van Vogt might have cobbled together in one of his wilder moments, and I’d have to concede that at times it does have a whiff of that about it. However, it is a very readable piece. The problem is that is it a mixed bag, and the second half is not as good as the first. Part of this is due to the wild plot, and the way that key information is delivered (apart from the dumping a lot of this in the middle section, I’m not sure that there is a clear mention of a ziggurat in the middle of the lake until he goes into it later on). Then there are the Emery’s actions and his character: the former seem borderline reckless and/or idiotic at times, and he comes over, at best, as a complex character, or, at worst, as having patriarchal, misogynistic, and abuser tendencies. Whichever side you come down on regarding Emery’s character, this is something which threatens to bend the story into a no-man’s land between a dark, mainstream examination of a complicated man, and a highly entertaining SFnal potboiler (or as I found out later, make it a story about the delusions of a madman⁴). At times it’s an uneven mix.
These reservations notwithstanding, it is a fast paced read with some good description and characterisation, and, if you don’t pay too much attention to the bonkers plot, and the distractions of Emery’s character, it’s a pretty good read. I enjoyed it.
∗∗∗+ (Good to Very Good) 27,200 words.

•••

The only non-fiction in the volume is Introduction: Science Fiction Is Alive and Well by David G. Hartwell and the Story introductions before every piece.
The Introduction opens by setting the book up as, it would seem, a direct competitor to Dozois, not only commercially but aesthetically:

For decades, until recently, there was usually one or more good year’s best anthologies available in paperback in the SF field. The last ones vanished with the deaths of distinguished editors Terry Carr and Donald A. Wollheim. There has been a notable gap. This book fills that need.
Furthermore, the existence of more than one year’s best anthology in the SF genre has been good for the field. Volumes which differ in taste or in aesthetic criteria clarify and encourage knowledgeable discourse in the field and about the field. Therefore this book announces itself in opposition to the other extant anthologies.
Here is the problem. Other books have so blurred the boundaries between science fiction and everything else that it is possible for an observer to conclude that SF is dead or dying out. This book declares that science fiction is still alive; is fertile and varied in its excellences. Most important, SF has a separate and distinct identity within fairly clear boundaries exemplified by the contents of this book.  p. ix-x

The rest of the piece covers a few high points of the year: a good one for novellas, and also for Interzone, which Hartwell states published the best speculative fiction of the year (although he uses none of its stories in this volume). Science Fiction Age and Tomorrow are also mentioned (one story from each here) but not Asimov’s SF (I’m beginning to think that Hartwell is not a Dozois fan). Hartwell closes by saying it was “not a notable” year for anthologies (apart from Far Futures, Full Spectrum #5 and New Legends) and that they “made the magazines look good.”

•••

In conclusion, this debut volume struck me as a very mixed bag with no outstanding stories (and one which misses nearly all the Hugo and Nebula short fiction nominees, although that is no guarantee of quality).
I also wasn’t impressed with the running order of the stories: I certainly wouldn’t open with the Kelly story—setting aside my dislike of that piece, it is inward looking (portals, spaceships, dinosaurs), and written in that inbred SFnal jargon that so many genre stories use. Any casual non-SF reader picking up the book and reading the first few pages of that story would wonder what on Earth was going on, and quickly place the book back on the shelf. I would have thought that a ‘Best of the Year’ anthologist would open with the best of their shorter mainstream-ish pieces (the Silverberg would be a good choice if it wasn’t so long), not only to attract casual bookbuyers, but to allow regular SF readers an easy entry in to the book.
There are also other programming decisions I didn’t understand: why would you have the Baxter (which I would suppose people would call “hard SF” but is really a superscience fantasy) followed by the Benford, which is essentially more of the same with rivets?
Last of all, I note that three of the “name” writers here (Benford, Zelazny, and Sheckley) produce some of the weakest work (a characteristic of Hartwell’s volumes I’m told).
Here’s hoping next year is better.  ●

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Notes:
1. In Kelly’s story the spacing scene (with its “die, you weepy bitch”) and the later “think like a dinosaur” comments suggest that the author thinks Godwin’s story is a misogynistic one.^* This analysis seems to miss the fact that Godwin’s story is a Trolley Problem^** (sometimes you may only have two dreadful choices, pick one) and that the story’s stowaway was specifically an attractive young woman so as to produce the most sympathetic response in the original Astounding readership (who were of the “women and children first into the lifeboats” generation, and would generally have been appalled at the story’s conclusion).^***
If Godwin’s story was meant to be misogynistic it would look entirely different: Barlow would hector Cross about her stupidity, lecture her at great length about the physical limitations of the universe that will result in her death, and the spacing scene would be as explicitly brutal and unpleasant as that in Kelly’s story. None of this happens in the Godwin piece. Instead, Cross is portrayed as sympathetic character (the cheap gypsy sandals, the lost childhood kitten, the final heart-breaking conversation with her brother, etc.) and her death is presented as something that will be devastating to not only her family but to Barlow the pilot. But, ultimately, it is a Trolley Problem, and Barlow has to choose one of the two terrible options.

^* That said, “misogynistic” is a better guess than Cory Doctorow’s ludicrous suggestion in a 2019 Locus article that the story is “a parable about the foolishness of women and the role of men in guiding them to accept the cold, hard facts of life.”
^** The Wikipedia page on The Trolley Problem, or the more entertaining The Good Life take on the matter. In the latter clip I suspect most of today’s SF fans would end up on the do-nothing left hand track (where five people are killed instead of one) because they would be too busy wringing their hands (see the recent Hugo winning As the Last I May Know by S.L. Huang, this generation’s The Cold Equations, and you’ll see what I mean).
^*** Campbell spoke about the reason a young woman was selected for Godwin’s story in his collected letters. See The Cold Equations review here, footnote 7.

2. These boy-meets-girl love stories clutter up quite a lot of Haldeman’s work, if I recall correctly. I suspect most of them are an idealised version of his own relationship.

3. Shakespeare’s 18^th sonnet is here, along with explanatory notes, if you really must.

4. After posting this review, one of my Facebook group members posted a link to a draft of an article by Marc Armani (a Wolfe scholar) which describes what the story is really about (spoiler): Emery is delusional and has killed/raped the members of his family (or something like that). I wonder what my blood pressure was when I read the line “If we accept that Wolfe might occasionally present delusion as objective narrative fact [. . .] then some aspects of “The Ziggurat” become easier to contextualize.”
I think I am now officially past caring about what this story, or any of Wolfe’s work, is about. But those of you who like walking on quicksand, knock yourself out.
The discussion thread and link to the Armani article are here (although the Armani link may have expired by now—buy the book).  ●